Undone by the Sultan's Touch

by Caitlin Crews

  Not then and not later, when he smiled down at her in that way that she knew meant he believed the matter was settled. Solved.

  She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t stopped taking those pills in these past months. That she’d taken one every morning when she brushed her teeth the way she always had at home, even during their week in the oasis. That it was one of the only routines she’d kept from her old life.

  She would tell him when they discussed this further, she assured herself. She wasn’t trying to deceive him, she was waiting to get to know him better. He would understand that. Cleo was sure he would.

  Which was why she also didn’t tell him that she had no intention of stopping them.

  * * *

  “Have you tired so quickly of the marital bed?”

  Khaled glared at the shadow that detached itself from the wall outside Cleo’s rooms so much later that night that it was well into morning and became Nasser.

  “You are the only man alive who would dare to say such a thing to my face,” he said in a low voice. “And the only man I will not kill for such temerity.”

  Nasser smiled, unperturbed. “And well do I know it.”

  Khaled started walking, smoothing an unnecessary hand over his shirt as he moved down the long hall that led toward his office. Always his office. Always something else to be done. Always another fire to put out.

  And never the fire he craved most.

  “My duties did not suddenly come to an end with a great feast and a brand-new wife,” he said darkly. “I must secure the future of Jhurat. You know this as well as I do. And there is one very easy way to do that.”

  “Ah.” His old friend was quiet for a moment. Then, “Babies. That would cement your line as Talaat has not, and secure your position in the eyes of the world nicely, wouldn’t it? Everyone loves a happy family.”

  “Fairy tales for all.” He hardly recognized his own voice.

  Yet not for him. Never for him.

  That week at the oasis, ripe with longing and yearning and shot through with glimpses of the man he’d never be, the life he’d never lead, had been a mistake.

  “A man who must do for duty what he would do anyway for love should look happier, Your Excellency,” Nasser murmured after a moment, when there was nothing in the grand hallway but the sound of their feet against the polished marble floor, bouncing back at them from the ornamental columns. “Should he not?”

  “This isn’t about happiness,” Khaled bit out, and he understood that he shouldn’t be so angry. That there was no need for this intensity. Worse, that Nasser saw all the things he didn’t wish to admit to himself. But he couldn’t seem to stop. “Or love, God forbid. This is about Jhurat.”

  “Of course,” Nasser said in his soft way, which meant he didn’t wish to argue further, not that he agreed.

  Later, Khaled sat at the ostentatious desk that his grandfather had claimed as a spoil of an old war and listened with only half his attention to the conference call with his ministers, most of them handpicked by his father and bristling with their own mortality. Their job was to be fatalistic, he knew, and they rose to the challenge this morning the way they always did.

  Talaat’s rebels were taking over the country while they did nothing! Talaat would foment civil war if they weren’t vigilant! Talaat would topple the government with a single meeting of his agitators in this or that village square—had already done so, if the reports were true!

  Khaled didn’t believe the situation was quite as dire as it seemed in the dark and ever-gloomy imaginings of old men, he was tired unto his own death of that pain in his ass, Talaat, and anyway, he could see only Cleo.

  His brown mouse of a wife, whom he hadn’t been able to banish from his thoughts as he’d planned, and whom he hadn’t thought of as a mouse in a disturbingly long while. If ever. His wife, who consumed him still and always, like an addiction. He didn’t understand it. Every night he promised himself he would break the cycle, and every night he betrayed himself and went to her anyway.

  Khaled couldn’t seem to get enough of her.

  She haunted him, and he hated it. Their week in the oasis had been meant to break this unreasonable hold she had on him—this need for her that was only getting worse. That roared into something darker and wilder when she stood up to him, almost as if he wanted her defiance, her strength, as much as he wanted her. As if it called to that part of him he’d been denying for so many years it was second nature to him now.

  The man, not the sultan.

  When of course he didn’t want that. He wanted a meek, biddable, obedient wife—the one he’d thought she was when he’d found her. Khaled shoved aside the small voice inside that whispered that he hadn’t found her to be anything of the sort. That he’d only taken her back to the palace in the first place because she’d refused to back down....

  He had it all planned. Cleo would bear his heirs and take them to the summer palace near the sea as his own mother had done with him and Amira, where the air was better and the climate milder. Where they would grow up as unfettered as possible. Far away from here.

  Leaving him free to lose himself in the endless siege of his responsibilities the way he always had before. The way his father and grandfather had done before him. The way he needed to do again, Khaled knew, lest he lose what he’d spent his entire adult life fighting for.

  He wondered then, sitting back in his chair and making assenting noises into the phone even though he hardly knew what was under discussion, what it would be like if he stopped. Stopped trying to cage her, to keep her within the distinct lines he’d drawn for her. Stopped fighting himself and the man in him who wanted what he wanted. What if he indulged her—and himself in the process? Stopped trying to keep her as far away from him as he could?

  He thought of that challenging light in her pretty gaze tonight when she’d told him she wanted to take out a subscription to a tabloid paper. In his name, no less. He thought of that frown of hers that had told him from the start she saw the man before the sultan, that she wasn’t blindly in awe of him like everyone else.

  But this country was his life. It had ruined his father and it would ruin him, too, in his time. Just as it had destroyed his mother when he’d been twenty. He’d spent most of his life watching his mother fight for his father’s attention, so deliriously happy when she’d received it and then so destroyed when it was gone again. She’d retreated from life a long time before she had simply stopped fighting for the scraps of his father’s attention. Had it been disease that had taken her or her own broken heart?

  And meanwhile, his father had tried to please both his woman and his people and had failed them both.

  Jhurat had been exacting a terrible tithe from his family for five generations, one after the next down through the ages, and he didn’t imagine that would ever end. And despite everything, he loved this place as he loved his own blood. His own bones. Every time-worn rock that made it what it was, every sun-beaten border so many of his ancestors had bled over, every grain of sand in the great desert and the thick oil beneath.

  It was who he was. It was all he was.

  There was no space inside him for a woman with eyes as sweet as honey and a smile like the sun when there was Jhurat, its deserts and whitewashed cities, its citadels and spires, like scars carved directly on his heart. There was no room for this dangerous longing that kicked at him even now, when he’d spent another long night indulging himself in her delectable heat and should have been sated. When he should have forgotten her the moment he’d left that bedroom.

  When he shouldn’t have gone to her in the first place.

  Khaled couldn’t understand why he had. Why he always did. Why he no doubt would again, tonight and every night, like an obsessed, lovesick fool.

  Cleo was a means to an end, nothing more. And she needed to get pregnant, a
nd soon, so he could put some space between them. So he could stop going to her night after night and feeling these things he couldn’t allow himself to feel. So he could stop this madness, this lust, this need.

  Because Khaled had never had the option to be that man only she seemed to call out in him. He never would.

  * * *

  “And how is life with my darling brother?” Amira asked at breakfast one morning, making no attempt to keep the lash from her voice.

  She was home for her long winter break from her boarding school and Cleo didn’t want to admit how nice it was to eat with something other than her own thoughts. Even if that something was a snide teenager.

  Not that she knew how to answer the question. It had been a few months since she’d lied by omission about her birth control pills, and nothing had changed. She saw Khaled even less by day, but he was far more intense when he appeared in her bedroom at night. More demanding. More powerfully raw.

  And she’d become an expert at ignoring all the rest of the dark things she didn’t want to admit were there, simmering away beneath the surface of her pretty, perfect life. Her happily ever after in action.

  “Wonderful,” she said, smiling benevolently at her sister-in-law, and possibly much too widely. She remembered that Khaled had once suggested that Amira needed feminine guidance, and tried to look like someone who might offer such a thing. “Everything is absolutely wonderful.”

  Amira sniffed. “That doesn’t sound much like the Khaled I know.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about that Khaled, then?” Cleo asked brightly. She assured herself that she was simply diverting her sister-in-law’s teenage spleen, not pathetically digging for scraps of information on a man she barely knew, yet happened to be married to anyway.

  “Khaled is the sultan,” Amira said bitterly. “The end.”

  “You understand that he has a tremendous amount of responsibility—”

  Amira blew out an aggrieved sigh, cutting Cleo off.

  “I understand that he will do anything for Jhurat. Do you think he would have married you if he didn’t get something from it? That’s the way he is. If you cease to be of use, you cease to exist. Trust me, Cleo. I know.”

  “There is more to life than responsibility,” Cleo said gently. “Even for a sultan.”

  Her sister-in-law looked scornful for a moment—then her expression shifted into something Cleo was terrified to identify, it looked so much like pity.

  “Not for Khaled,” she said, and her voice was almost kind. “He is Jhurat, and it will kill him, the same way it killed our mother. It took our father’s mind, turned cousin against cousin and caused our family endless misery. He is cursed. You should know that better than anyone, Cleo.”

  “Maybe you don’t know your brother as well as you think,” Cleo said staunchly, but her fingers gripped her fork too tightly, and her eggs had gone cold.

  “And maybe you don’t know him at all,” Amira replied, and the worst part was, there wasn’t a trace of her usual biting tone when she said it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SEVERAL EVENINGS LATER, Cleo finally had a night to herself. She left the judgmental Margery behind down in the office, made her serene way up to her suite and then locked herself away in the luxurious and sprawling rooms that were her only private space. There was no one to watch her smile and comment on its brightness here, or compare it to last week’s smiles and decide that any deviation meant she was carrying twins.

  Cleo didn’t feel much like smiling when she was finally alone. Even so, she refused to succumb to that rolling, twisting, terrible thing inside her, black like ink and covered in spikes. She wouldn’t listen to those voices in her head whispering that of course Amira had been right at breakfast the other day. That everyone had been right.

  That deny it all she might, she’d made a terrible mistake.

  You will not cry, she ordered herself harshly.

  Cleo stripped herself of her latest breathlessly chic clothes—all of which Margery had chosen and Karima had laid out for her without any input from Cleo—and pulled on the silk wrapper that she now wore in place of any comfortable lounging clothes. It took her a few moments and the use of a heavy footstool she had to drag in from the bedroom, but she managed to climb up to the farthest shelf in the large and airy adjoining room that was her closet and pull down her battered backpack from its hiding place.

  She let that black, spiked thing crash through her then, as she held the beat-up old pack to her like a security blanket. The sudden, deep heaviness almost knocked her from her feet, so hard and fast did it drop through her.

  But she was fiercely happy that she’d insisted Karima pack the bag away instead of getting rid of it altogether. She unzipped it now, pretending she didn’t notice how her heart was pounding, and smiled at all the too-familiar things packed inside. All her travel clothes. The clothes she’d bought while she was in the U.K., gradually phasing out all the things that reminded her of home and Brian and that whole part of her life and replacing them with things that had made her feel intrepid and brave. Like the world traveler she’d wanted to be, sophisticated and jaded and unlikely to be fooled by anyone ever again.

  The clothes she hadn’t worn since she’d come to Jhurat. When she’d traded one adventure for another, one identity for the next, with a whole new wardrobe to go with it.

  As though she was nothing but a chameleon. Like none of this was real—it was merely one more change of clothes.

  Cleo slung the pack into a corner even though she knew she’d have to put it back where she’d found it if she didn’t want Karima to notice what she’d been up to, but frowned when it thunked against the wall. She went over and crouched down, rifling through the pockets until she found what had made the noise.

  It was a mobile phone and a charger. Neither hers.

  She stared at both for a long time. And then she went back into the bedroom and fired up her laptop. It was only when she clicked on the Skype icon on her computer screen that it occurred to her how long it had been since she’d done it last. So long that she hesitated before she clicked on Jessie’s name—

  But she did it anyway. And Jessie answered at once, despite the fact that it was mid-morning in New Orleans and she was at work. That heavy thing inside of Cleo shifted in a drunken sort of tilt that made her stomach flip over, and it was hard to look at her oldest friend suddenly. At those warm brown eyes that saw too much, the strawberry-blond hair that had always been in complete disarray throughout their youth that Jessie wore in a sleek style befitting the high-powered attorney she was now, or the faint crease of concern in her friend’s brow.

  “I found the phone,” Cleo said, as much to start the conversation as to skip over the uncomfortable things she didn’t want to address, such as why she’d been out of touch for months despite all the emails Jessie had sent with those articles Cleo wasn’t supposed to read. “A wedding gift, I’m guessing?”

  “Are you mad at me?” Jessie leaned closer to her screen, a world away and yet it felt like she was right there with Cleo—and Cleo wanted that so much it made her eyes glaze over with emotion. “It was my attempt to re-create our youth.”

  “Did we have secret phones? I remember sneaking out to see that embarrassing concert and that boy you liked, but no secret phones.”

  “We had pretend secret phones,” Jessie said, and sighed as if she couldn’t believe Cleo didn’t remember that. “That made them particularly secret.”

  “Do you have a secret phone now, too?” Cleo asked. “Or is it only for me?”

  She’d meant that to come out light and easy, but it didn’t, and she felt a lump in her throat as Jessie studied her face through the screen.

  “I always like to have an escape hatch, Cleo,” she said softly, after a long moment. “You know that.”

  “That�
�s the lawyer in you, I guess.”

  “No, that’s what happens when you grow up with four brothers, all of whom think it’s hilarious to lock you in your room whenever they think you’re being annoying.” Jessie sat back in her seat and smiled brightly, and Cleo thought she’d never loved her more. “How’s my favorite newlywed?”

  And Cleo could have told her. Jessie was the only one she’d have considered telling, in fact, and who cared that it was all so twisted and tangled inside of her—but she opened her mouth and found she couldn’t do it.

  Because the things she felt for Khaled consumed her whole. Made her feel that there was something wrong with her that she could feel so much. That was the truth no matter how she fought against it.

  She might not know him, but she was pretty sure she loved him.

  Cleo had thought she loved Brian, and what she’d felt for him even in their happy beginning had been pale and silly compared to this. She wondered if he’d known that. If that had been why he’d done what he did. And how could she hold on to all that bitterness she’d been carrying around when the truth was, if Brian hadn’t cheated on her, Cleo would never be here? She’d never have met Khaled.

  And she couldn’t imagine that. She might not be as happy in her fantasy life as she’d assumed she would be, but she couldn’t imagine not being in it.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to separate the sultan from the man,” she admitted to Jessie in a rushed sort of whisper, and even that felt like a betrayal.

  Jessie met her gaze, her brown eyes uncompromising, as if she knew every last thing Cleo wasn’t saying.

  “Listen to me.” Jessie used her lawyer voice. “You’re the most fearless person I know. You didn’t accept what Brian did to you the way a lot of people would have, especially so close to the wedding. You walked away and wandered the world by yourself. You married a terrifying man who might as well be a freaking king. There isn’t a single thing you can’t do if you put your mind to it.”