“But it’s all so invasive,” she’d said, frowning. “It makes me feel hunted—”
His gaze had been so intense. Very nearly ferocious.
“It is unfair, of course,” he’d said, and there’d been that harsh undertone to his voice then that she hadn’t understood. “But this obsession the world has with my bride—with you—benefits Jhurat. If you are our Grace Kelly, that makes us Monaco, and that is precisely what we need. You understand this, I hope?”
Duty governs everything I do, he’d told her once before, and that had hung between them then, sending a kind of chill straight down her spine.
“Of course,” she’d assured him. “Of course I understand.”
Because Cleo wanted this. She wanted the goddamned fantasy. She wanted sleek and elegant Cleo Churchill who’d bewitched a sultan—the woman she read about in the papers. She wanted happiness and fairy tales and unrealistic bliss. She deserved it.
“Don’t you look fancy!” Marnie had exclaimed when she’d seen the way Cleo dressed for dinner in Jhurat, and again, not in a way that was precisely complimentary.
“I’m marrying a sultan,” Cleo had bitten out, sharper and ruder than she’d meant to sound, trying hard not to fidget and pull at the chic dress she wore instead of the cargo pants and T-shirts she’d lived in at home. “I should look the part, don’t you think?”
It hadn’t been lost on her that Khaled wouldn’t permit her to let herself go, if only because he provided her with a wardrobe. Or that, because he told her she was beautiful, she wanted to be exactly that for him.
“You should look like you,” Charity had replied fiercely, but Cleo had tuned them both out.
She deserved this. All of it. And particularly Khaled.
She wanted to believe that most of all.
It had been no great hardship to listen to Margery, the social secretary Khaled had hired for her, who had ushered Cleo through all her interviews and had crafted her image—and her carefully edited story of who she was and how she’d come to attract the notice of her powerful fiancé in the first place—to her soon-to-be husband’s precise specifications.
The ravenous world—hungry for stories that ended happily ever after in castles with good-looking princes or kings or even sultans gazing adoringly at ordinary girls from next-door places like Ohio, just as everyone dreamed, Margery assured her—ate it all up with a spoon.
“You look so sophisticated!” Jessie had cried one night a few weeks before the wedding. They’d been on a Skype call after a charity ball in Paris that Khaled had wanted to attend for the press attention alone, and if her best friend’s expression wasn’t quite as thrilled as her tone of voice, Cleo told herself it was simply the computer connection. The long hours Jessie had been putting in at her law firm. Nothing more. “Like a movie star!”
“I’ve never felt more beautiful,” Cleo had told her, and it was true.
Because when she looked in the mirror, she was glowing. With happiness. With disbelief that this was happening to her. With excitement about the life that lay before her, gleaming as brightly as the jewels Khaled lavished upon her or the smiles he parceled out like rare and precious gifts.
With that happily ever after that the whole world was suddenly as invested in as she was. That she was certain she’d earned.
And she was the only one who knew that Khaled hadn’t touched her again as he had that night in his courtyard, or in that hall outside the suite of rooms she still inhabited.
“We will save something for the marriage bed, I think,” he’d told her when she’d tried to move their nightly kisses somewhere hotter that same night in Paris, after spending so much of the evening dancing in his arms in front of all the cameras.
“What if I don’t want to wait?” she’d asked, wild and very nearly furious with wanting him. Desperate with needing him.
He’d run his finger down her nose and smiled, though there was an edge in it.
“You will do it anyway,” he’d told her softly.
“Because you say so?”
“Because I wish it,” he’d replied, which she’d thought was pretty much the same thing. “Is that not enough?”
It had been an agonizing three months, Cleo thought now as the wedding feast roared on around her, but the waiting was over at last. Khaled might have been deep in conversation with emissaries from other countries, the dignitaries and financiers she understood he needed to lure to Jhurat and could in a different way than before, thanks to the worldwide interest their wedding had generated, but soon enough they would be on their own. He would take her from the palace and she would finally, finally be his in every possible way.
That same fire she’d tasted that night three months ago simmered in her at the thought, making her cheeks heat, making her stomach clench in delicious anticipation, making her feel hungry and wild despite all the eyes trained on her.
Almost as if he’d left them both unfulfilled deliberately.
“Where are we going?” she asked when Khaled finally took her by the hand and led her from the banquet to the sound of so many cheers, though the truth was she didn’t care at all as long as he was with her.
“You will see when we get there,” Khaled told her, and then he smiled down at her in a way that made her quiver deep inside, all that dark intent on his fierce face, all of his focus on her, at last. At last. “Though I must warn you, wife, that I doubt you will see much at all outside my bed.”
CHAPTER FOUR
KHALED WAS PREPARED to give in to this madness—this wild hunger he knew better than to indulge—for exactly one week.
“Take more time,” his father had told him in one of his lucid moments, so few and far between these days. “All marriages need time to recover from the onslaught of all that wedding nonsense. That takes more than a week.”
“I appreciate that, Father,” he’d said, though the old man’s gaze had already been losing focus as he’d spoken, and his father was possibly the last man on earth whose advice Khaled would ever take regarding such matters. “But a week is all the time I can allow.”
He had carved out seven days and decided that would be that.
Because the way to craft the kind of marriage he required could not involve this simmering heat that danced between them, making it harder to concentrate than it should have been. Making him question his own decisions. Making him feel things he didn’t want to feel. He had courted her deliberately, rushed her to the altar, made her the very picture of fairy-tale romance for all the world to sigh over—but now it was done and it was time to change direction. Reap the rewards of the attention their wedding had brought to Jhurat and distance himself from his too-tempting bride before he repeated the mistakes his own parents had made.
But first, these seven stolen days. To pretend he was a different man. To indulge his ravenous hunger for the pretty American with the wide honey eyes he’d made his wife. To watch her fall apart like that again, over and over, until he was glutted.
He’d been selfish enough to drag her into his world. He was selfish enough to taste her the way he wanted, to lose himself in her for a time, then return to reality and set the necessary boundaries.
But there was obviously some part of him that wondered.
“I shouldn’t take the whole week,” he’d muttered to Nasser after yet another conference call with a trio of big oil kingpins from Texas some weeks back, whose hearty twangs and ingrained dismissiveness had made Khaled feel murderous—not that it would prevent him from inviting each and every one of them to his pageant of a wedding anyway. “I can hardly spare a day.”
“What is that proverb?” Nasser had asked in his mild way. “‘Marriage is like a castle besieged—those who are on the outside wish to get in—’”
“‘And those who are on the inside wish to get out,’” Khaled ha
d finished for him impatiently. “So you see my point.”
“I confess, Your Excellency, I was thinking of your long-suffering bride-to-be,” Nasser had replied, wisely keeping that smirk in his voice from his face.
Khaled knew he shouldn’t do this. He even knew that he was lying to himself. The astonishing truth was that his hunger for this woman, his ceaseless need, had reached the breaking point.
If he didn’t have her soon, he thought he might hurt someone.
But one week was all he’d allow himself.
One week to slake this consuming, destructive lust that had haunted him since the night she’d gone to pieces in his arms in the courtyard of his own palace, shocking him to the core and awakening that terrible need inside him that had only grown sharper since then. One week to get his fill of this woman he wanted more than was at all wise, so he could move on with his responsibilities without this hunger gnawing at him at the most inopportune moments.
One week to pretend he could let himself love her, when he knew he couldn’t. When he knew there was only duty. Only and ever his duty.
He’d given all of his Western allies ample reason to invest their resources in Jhurat by making his wedding the culmination of a thousand romantic fantasies, and his country now seemed accessible and desirable instead of exotic and frightening. He could get back to work on what mattered: saving Jhurat from itself. His duty was what mattered, not his marriage.
One week is all I need, he told himself fiercely as they climbed into the helicopter and set out into the beautiful twilight desolation of the desert, leaving the jutting spires of the capital city and the wild cheering from their wedding celebration behind, and I will conquer this thing that claws at me whenever I look at her.
It was only sex, he reasoned. The sex he’d deliberately withheld, because he’d hoped to control it. And her. It was only sex, he told himself now, because anything else was a danger to them both.
Sex and impossible chemistry and that polished gold gaze of hers that pricked at him, even when, like now, she wasn’t even looking at him. Sleep had claimed her as the helicopter raced over the great desert into the coming night, and Khaled assured himself it was the promise of sex alone that made his heart beat faster the closer they came to his family’s private oasis, hidden away in the golden, shifting, treacherous hills of sand that were his birthright.
It wasn’t her flawless skin, only partially concealed by the feminine, entrancing scarves she wore. It wasn’t the henna that marked her as surely as he wanted to mark her, claim her. It wasn’t that slender beauty of hers in the dress she wore, which he knew would grace the cover of a hundred magazines and still not quite capture what fascinated him most about her. Her clever gaze. That disrespectful scowl. Her soft mouth. The smoke and rasp of her surprisingly sensual laughter. The innate grace she’d had all along, hidden beneath her grubby Western clothes and tied-back hair, waiting only to be called forth. Celebrated.
Made his.
He gathered her in his arms when the helicopter landed, holding her high against his chest as he made his way to the large tent that had been prepared for them. He felt like a conqueror. Like a king. As if he’d won her in a long, pitched battle. She stirred as he strode through the camp, those eyes as golden as his desert blinking up at him, her pretty mouth curving into a smile as she recognized him.
It was as if she thought he was safe. Khaled wished that were true.
But there would only be this week, and then they would play their appointed roles, and he knew it was the best way. The only way. Hadn’t he seen his parents try and fail to mix duty with desire? It caused nothing but destruction.
“Where are we?” she asked, her voice a rough little whisper that he felt like a caress.
“It is an oasis. It is much more private than the palace. We’ll have it to ourselves for the week.”
He didn’t try to contain the heat he felt at that idea, and he knew he needed to burn this all away. He needed to wrestle it into submission. He needed to be in control. Of it. Of her. Of all the things that had happened since his sister had jumped in front of her car.
Because he had nothing but this country, could want nothing but this country, could focus on nothing but this country. It was the only thing he allowed himself to love, and he knew too well what happened when men in his position tried to love anything else. He’d watched it play out in front of him throughout his childhood. He’d lived with the results. With his mother’s abandonment of him, of Amira, of the world, because she loved her own misery and broken heart more than her family—and what it had done to his father.
He would not let history repeat itself. He would take this week—and then he would put Cleo in her proper place and keep her there, no matter what happened. No matter how he felt.
Not that he felt anything, he told himself sternly. That was for lesser men.
“I’ve never seen an oasis before,” Cleo said after a moment, seemingly unaware of the wars he fought and wasn’t at all sure he won inside. “But this is exactly what I imagined one would look like.”
Khaled was too consumed with her to look around, and besides, he knew what he’d see. The layers of trees that ringed the soft aquamarine waters, date palms and peaches, olives and figs, lit up with a hundred lanterns tonight to greet the sultan and his new bride. The small collection of tents with the most sprawling in the center, marked with flaming torches at the entrance, which was where he headed now. And around them, nothing but the deep quiet of the desert sands and the riot of galaxies above them in the night sky.
As though they were all alone in the world. The whole universe.
That howled in him like power. Like thick, enduring need.
Khaled pushed through the tent’s heavy flap, and only when they were inside did he place Cleo on her feet. With a gentleness that spoke to a level of emotional attachment he refused to admit he felt. Because he couldn’t.
She swayed slightly, he reached out a hand to steady her, and then he watched her face intently as she looked around in undisguised wonder. Tapestries flowed from the high ceiling down to the ground, carpets stretched lush and deep across the ground and the tent was furnished with a seating area, two dressing areas and the wide, inviting bed that stood in the center.
She stared at it for a moment too long.
“This is beautiful,” she said in that same soft voice. “Like something in a dream.”
“It is basic,” Khaled said with a shrug. Humor lit her gaze when she looked at him again, and she smiled. He was surprised when he did, too.
“But then, you are His Excellency, the Sultan of Jhurat,” she said, that laughter that undid him thick in her voice, bright in her golden eyes, as sweet as honey from his own bees. “Accustomed to far greater luxuries than this.”
“Did you eat?” he asked coolly, trying to leash that animal in him that wanted nothing more than to throw her down and feast on her until it’d had its fill.
Your fill or one week, that treacherous voice inside him taunted him. I wonder which will come first?
“Eat?” she echoed, as if she’d never heard the word.
“I didn’t see you touch any of the food at the wedding feast,” he said gently, when he didn’t want gentle. When he wanted nothing at all but her. Hot and hard and his, irrevocably. “You must be hungry.”
“I’m not.”
“Cleo,” he said calmly. Deliberately. “Heed me, please. You will need your strength.”
He watched desire heat her cheeks, make her golden eyes gleam, and his smile turned darker. Harder.
“Maybe,” she said, as bold as she was nervous, and he thought she might kill him after all, this creature who shouldn’t have appealed to him at all. Who was so responsive to him that it very nearly hurt to remember it, and yet he was suddenly certain he’d thought of nothing else since. “But
I need you more.”
He reached over and pulled her scarves from her, one by one, unwrapping each layer of her like the gift she was, listening as her breath caught and then came faster, watching as her skin pinkened. Feeling it all like her delicate hands on his sex, making him so hard he ached.
There was no room left for teasing.
“Be careful,” he warned her quietly, the intensity of his hunger making his voice sound lethal in the quiet tent. “When I touch you this time, I won’t stop. I won’t even try.”
She swallowed hard. Her eyes were like the dizzying stars above, wide and bright. And he couldn’t think of a single thing he’d ever wanted more than her touch. Her taste. Her beautiful cries as she wrapped herself around him.
Her. His wife.
His in every way there was.
“Khaled,” she whispered as if she felt the same. Needy. Hungry. Near to insane with it. “If you don’t touch me right now I think I might kill you, and that would make this an embarrassingly short marriage.” Her mouth curved. “And I’d end up detained after all.”
He laughed. And then he stopped trying to pretend he was anything but wild where this woman was concerned. He stopped trying to cling to some notion of propriety. She was his, fierce and inappropriate and lovely beyond measure. It was time.
Khaled thought he might have growled when he pulled her close and set his mouth to hers, and he gloried in it.
He was claiming her at last.
* * *
Khaled’s mouth was hard and perfect on hers, hot and wild.
Like fate, Cleo thought; like he’s mine—and then she burst into a delirious fever of shuddering heat, and she met him.
This time, she expected the punch, the blast of flame and need. They’d kissed in these past three months, but it had never burst into that same bright white fire the way it had that first time. It had never gone supernova again, because Khaled had always, always, maintained his iron control. He’d always set her away from him far sooner than she’d wanted. He’d always pulled back, shut it down, told her he’d wanted them to wait.
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