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Cleo wanted him. And yet Brian loomed between them, soft and deceitful and ruinous.
“They told me to marry him anyway,” she told Khaled fiercely, as if it were a weapon. “That I was naive and silly to expect fidelity. That such romantic notions were unrealistic. The stuff of fantasy.”
“Don’t worry.” It occurred to her that his tone of voice was lethal, but he was still holding her chin and the heat of that felt like a drug, making her feel heavy and weightless at once. Trapped with no desire whatsoever to set herself free. “I prize that particular fantasy above all others. And I am the ruler here. If I deem something realistic, that’s what it is.”
Her mind was a riot of shoulds, and she heeded none of them. There was something harsh in his face, his gaze, something too close to broken, when he’d said similar things in the past with a laugh.
“But do you mean your fidelity or mine?” she whispered. “They’re not the same thing and some men, I’ve discovered, apply their double standards there more than anywhere else.”
Khaled muttered something that sounded like a curse but which she imagined was a little prayer instead. He let her go.
She wished he was touching her again immediately. She was a lunatic. But she could feel the imprint of his fingers on her chin as if he’d stamped her with his heat. And she throbbed everywhere else.
“You will be the death of me, little mouse,” he told her, so low and quiet she thought for a minute she’d heard him wrong.
“I’m not a mouse.” Something kicked in her. “The next time someone cheats on me, I’m drawing blood. Just so you know.”
For a moment he looked almost proud, as if he approved of her bloodthirstiness, but then another shadow claimed his face, and she couldn’t read him. Khaled stood then, and she felt as though the world was spinning all around him. He looked troubled, tortured. Like the stranger her heart no longer considered him.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice too rough. Too many emotions racking her within.
“Nothing at all,” he said, and she knew, somehow, that he lied. “Come.”
He offered her his arm and she rose to take it, incapable of defying him in that moment though there was that part of her that thought she should. That wanted her to fight, damn it—though she didn’t know what for. He led her back into the palace, then down the polished, gleaming halls toward her suite, and it took him a long time to look at her again.
Cleo felt the lack of his attention like a kind of grief. Harsh and heavy.
“This is ridiculous,” she said when they reached her door, her voice a prickle. A tight scratch against the heaviness between them. “You shouldn’t have asked the question if you didn’t want to hear the answer.”
“The only answer I really needed was the way you came under my tongue,” he said, but there was a distance in the way he said it. Something granite and unyielding beneath those words. “The rest was merely curiosity.”
Cleo faced him then, her back to her door, and tried to read his dark, fierce face.
“Then you really shouldn’t look so sad, should you?”
He laughed then, abruptly, and it wasn’t the laughter she’d heard from him at other times that had warmed her deep within. This was hollow. Dark. This hurt both of them, she thought, and she didn’t know why.
“Sadness is for men with choices,” he told her, very distinctly, as if it was critical she understand this. Him. “I have only duty. It governs everything I do. It always has and it always will.” His voice lowered. Roughened. “Remember that, Cleo. If nothing else.”
“That sounds remarkably dire.” And then, not knowing how she managed it, when he looked so grim and she simply hurt, she grinned at him. “It was only a kiss, Khaled. I think we’ll survive.”
He let out another one of those laughs that cut at her, even deeper this time.
“You don’t know your own doom when it stares you in the face.” He shook his head, and she didn’t understand why he sounded so agonized. “How can I protect you when you won’t protect yourself?”
Cleo didn’t know what madness moved in her then, but she reached over and slid her hand against his lean jaw, as though that might comfort him. As though she could soothe him.
As though he was hers.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered, though she didn’t even know what was wrong. “I promise.”
Khaled froze, his gray eyes like a thunder that rolled in her, too, a warning she knew she should heed, but that same electricity leaped between them again, searing her straight through as though it was brand-new.
He muttered something beneath his breath, and then he leaned in close and took her mouth with all the passion and ruthless command he’d shown in the courtyard, and she was lost.
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