“You’re right,” Cleo said, as though it came from somewhere deep in her gut. “I did.”
That was why, when she and Jessie had finished catching up and vowing to stay in better touch this time, when she’d had her dinner on a tray again, she decided she was going to do something about all of this. Because she’d grown too quiet since the oasis. She’d become too worried about being the perfect sultan’s wife when what she should have been worrying about was how to be herself.
She needed to make her life, her man, her marriage, hers. Because she refused to accept that this was a mistake. Amira and Margery and her sisters—they didn’t know the truth of things between Cleo and Khaled. She could have married Brian. Everyone had urged her to forgive him, and the wedding had already been planned and paid for. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to simply surrender herself to his promises and apologies, but she hadn’t done it.
She’d wanted more. She’d wanted better. She’d wanted the damned fairy tale everyone told her didn’t exist, and she’d found it. She’d found Khaled.
She could fight for him, too.
Cleo waited until it was late. She sneaked down the back hall over to the sultan’s private wing of the palace, then in through the antechamber where—she’d learned in her history lessons—ancient Jhuratan sultans had held court with their most trusted advisers beneath the frescoed ceilings. It was more beautiful than she’d anticipated, more hauntingly evocative than the photographs and more intimidating, too. But she forced herself forward despite the trickle of unease that moved in her. She cracked open the towering door that led to Khaled’s bedroom and crept inside.
Walked inside, she corrected herself, and lifted her head up high while she did it.
She had every right to be here. This was her marriage, too.
The room looked exactly like a sultan’s inner sanctum should, she thought, pausing to take in the glory of the bedchamber as it soared all around her. It was vast and lush as befitted a desert ruler with an ancient title. Dark crimsons and black woods, heavily masculine furniture and ornate details clearly dating back centuries, all competing and dominating and somehow working together with a monolithic bed that looked more like an imposing stage set high up on a raised dais.
That was where she waited for her husband. Because she was fearless and intrepid, damn it, and this was her happy ever after.
But she was naked when she slipped between his whisper-soft sheets. Just to make sure.
* * *
“What are you doing here?”
Khaled’s voice was low, but the dark thunder in it jolted Cleo awake.
For a moment she didn’t know where she was, and then it came back to her: she was in Khaled’s bedroom. In his bed.
And, she remembered as she shifted and the silken sheets caressed her, she was naked.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” she told him, and that was when the way he was standing there at the foot of the bed, watching her with an alarming stillness, registered. Her heart gave a great kick.
He looked dangerous and impossibly remote at once, and that was only the way his too-gray eyes glittered in the soft light.
Khaled was dressed in clothes she’d never seen him wear before—a dark black T-shirt that clung to his muscular shoulders and a pair of exercise trousers that made his legs look even more powerful—with his arms crossed over his flat chest. And he was scowling at her, every inch of him the sultan she’d seen first on that street, mighty and powerful and great beyond measure. Her throat went dry.
“You go to the gym?” It was the first thing she could think of, and it was better than addressing the gnawing thing that made her feel scooped hollow behind her breastbone. “I guess that explains...” She shifted to sitting position, letting the sheets fall away, but he didn’t react the way she’d expected he would. She nodded in his direction, at all that hard-packed, lean muscle, from his shoulders to that ridged wonder of an abdomen. “...that.”
“Cleo.”
She didn’t like the clipped way he said that, to say nothing of the dark way he was looking at her, as if she had trespassed. As if she’d ruined something by her presence here—but no. She couldn’t let herself think like that.
“I will ask you again. Why are you here?”
“Khaled.”
She tried to make her own voice soft. Encouraging. Inviting. She arched her back slightly and presented herself to him the way she knew he liked, the way that often made him growl deep in his throat like some kind of panther. She wanted that. She wanted him.
“I’m your wife. I’m in your bed. Why do you think I’m here?”
His gaze moved from hers to trace over her, making her nipples prickle in instant awareness, making her stomach pull taut, making her feel almost proud of the wild heat that sparked in the air between them. Uncontrollable. Unmistakable. Making her wish she had the nerve to simply crawl toward him and take what she wanted, what she knew he wanted, because this was where they came together best. This fire. This sweet, intoxicating burn. This was their communion. She thought she understood it now.
“If I wanted you,” he said, very distinctly, very coldly, “I would have come for you.”
It took her a moment to process that. One beat of her heart, then another—and that second one so hard it was jarring. It made her stomach drop. It made her go numb, then cold.
“What?”
“I see I didn’t make myself clear.” His tone was offhand, almost bored, but there was a storm in his gray eyes. A deep blackness, thick and harsh, as if he were tortured. She could see it. It pressed at her on all sides. “I don’t find this kind of thing appealing.”
Nothing he was saying made any sense. Cleo could only stare at him, frozen solid—and she remembered this feeling. She’d experienced it once before, when she’d used her key in Brian’s front door and walked inside, then stood there in the living room doorway, trying to make sense of what was happening right there on the floor in front of her.
This was worse.
“I’ve tried to make allowances for the differences in our ages. Our cultures.” Khaled’s voice was a terrible glide of sound, dark and cutting and still so smooth as it tore into her, ripping her into ragged little strips, one after the next. “The disparity in our breeding. But I’m afraid this is unacceptable.”
He sounded the way he had that first evening, out in the street, when he’d talked of detainment and kidnapping—except this time, she could see something bright and harsh behind his fierce expression, as if this was hurting him. Killing him.
As if he couldn’t stop.
But then what he’d said echoed inside of her, like the vicious backhanded slap it was. Cleo flushed, hot and awful. And then her temper swept in behind it, burning through her, and that, at least, felt like a reprieve.
“What did you just say to me?” she demanded.
“I am talking about this.” He nodded toward her, his eyes glittering hot though he didn’t move from where he stood in terrible judgment at the foot of the bed, not so much as an inch, as if he’d been hewn from granite. “I am talking about this display of yours.”
And then, finally, he looked at her the way she’d always known he would. The way she’d been expecting he would from the start. With nothing but pity.
“Perhaps it is common in Ohio to indulge in such vulgarity,” he said coolly, “but this is Jhurat and I expect far better from my wife.”
Cleo waited to feel decimated. Wiped out. Destroyed. But the only thing that hummed in her was temper, huge and encompassing, and she squared her shoulders as though she was warding off a blow.
“I expect better from you, Khaled. Much better.”
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?” Each word was black ice. Treacherous and frozen. “I am the Sultan of Jhurat. There is no better.”
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“I thought you were a good man. An honorable one.”
He went so still it was as though he’d become the statue of himself that would one day grace some corner or another of the palace, and the tension in the room stretched so thin Cleo thought it might break her in half. She knelt there before him like the meek offering she suspected he wanted and she wondered, sickened, what she’d become without realizing it while she’d been chasing down fairy tales. But what truly galled her was that what bothered her most was that he was so upset. That he was so obviously hurt.
She had to fight against that trembling deep inside her that she didn’t want him to see. She had to struggle not to weep. And she wanted—suddenly and completely—to run away again, to leave Khaled behind like one more demon and find herself a different life somewhere new.
But she’d already done that, hadn’t she? And this certainly didn’t feel as if the geographic cure was working.
“Tell me what this is,” he urged her after a moment so long she’d thought he really had turned to stone. “I feel certain I’ve made clear to you what I think of disrespect.”
“Then respect me,” she blurted out, then wished at once she hadn’t, because he braced himself as if he was about to strike—
And then he did.
“Respect what?” he asked, almost conversationally, his gaze implacable and cruel as it bored into her. “The creature who stumbled across my sister on a city street, who would never have attracted my notice otherwise? Or the elegant bride I created out of the barest of raw materials to suit my purposes? Which of those are you, Cleo? Which version do you imagine I should respect?”
“Stop it.” It hurt to speak. To breathe. “I’m your wife.”
“You seem to be laboring under some misconceptions concerning that role.” He was still speaking in that calm, viciously casual tone with the jagged edge beneath it, aware—she could tell from that broken thing in his gaze that looked like suffering but couldn’t be—that every word was pummeling her. That every word was cracking her apart, tearing strips from her, and he had no intention of stopping it. That he wanted this, no matter how badly it hurt her. Or him. “You are a pawn.”
“Khaled—”
“My country kept the outside world at bay for so long that we came to be seen as nothing but barbarians. It is my job—my sworn duty—to change that perception and our fortunes along with it, but how? And then you stumbled into my life. The standard-issue American nobody.”
She thought she said his name again, but her throat was too tight, she felt too raw and she understood she didn’t make a sound. And that on some level, she’d been waiting for him to say something like this since he’d poured her tea.
His cruel mouth looked surprisingly vulnerable for a moment, his gray gaze stark and hollow, but then it was gone. Cleo knew she must have imagined it.
“There isn’t a single thing about you that is anything but ordinary, Cleo, and that is precisely why I wanted you. It is the only reason I wanted you. I spun you into a princess from a handful of straw.”
She thought she was numb—but surely it would hurt less if she was? He leaned closer, his gray gaze nearly silver with temper and that dark thing beneath it that made her stomach knot. And Cleo had always been a fighter. She had always stood up for herself, eventually. How many times had she proved that? And yet here, tonight, when it would never matter more, she couldn’t seem to do anything but wait for the next blow.
“And look how beautifully you have served your purpose,” Khaled continued, cruel and remote, like the god she’d imagined him so many times before but this time, he was anything but benevolent. “But I cannot have you getting ideas above your station. You are my wife, yes, but the only thing that means to me is that sooner or later, you will provide me with children.”
“To do what?” she heard herself say in an awful voice, thick with all the things she couldn’t seem to say, couldn’t let herself feel for fear it would destroy her even more than he already had, couldn’t even process while she still sat there before him and was skewered. Over and over again. “Obey more of your commands? So you can have a whole collection of helpless, servile creatures to do your bidding?”
He smiled, and it sliced through her. “If you do not obey me, Cleo, I will simply replace you.”
She didn’t know what it said about her that even now, even after what had transpired between them this night, she couldn’t believe he’d said that. That she could feel still more pain. That she could feel shattered all over again.
“Khaled.” Where did that voice come from? So quiet and broken, but still hers—as if it was pushed out from the very heart of her. She lifted her hands up and held them out in supplication, and she couldn’t even hate herself for it. She understood, somehow, that it was strength, not surrender. “This is getting out of control. I don’t want to challenge you. I only want to be with you. I want a partner, a true marriage—”
“I don’t.”
Stark and flat. Matter-of-fact.
The end, that voice within her stated.
Cleo’s mouth dropped open, and it was only when she shut it with an audible snap and happened to look down that she realized she was clenching her hands so hard she’d broken the skin on her own palms with her fingernails.
“But...”
She didn’t know why she was still talking. As if he hadn’t laid her out flat, and if the expression on his face was anything to go by, deliberately. As if there was anything left to talk about with a man who thought so little of her.
Then again, there was one thing. One truth, however tiny it seemed here. One small point of light that somehow, she wanted to believe was worth the darkness.
She swallowed, and then she said it. “I love you.”
* * *
It went through him like electricity—a long charge, harsh and bright. Khaled stiffened, those three words pounding into him like enemy gunfire, lighting him up.
Filling him with fury and grief.
You have no choice, he reminded himself, and her words proved it. They were exactly what he’d wanted to avoid. They were her future disaster in the making, her own ruin lying there before him, as naked and as vulnerable as she was.
He wished he was another man. He wished he was anyone but who he was, chained to this palace, this country, this life he’d never chosen.
“It has only been a little while,” he told her, the bastard that he was, determined to stop her from going any further down this road. Saving her from her own doom, though the betrayed look on her lovely face, in her honey-colored eyes, told him she wouldn’t see it that way. “You will no doubt fall out of love as quickly.”
And then he moved the way he’d wanted to the moment he’d realized what that unusual shape was in the center of his bed. The moment he’d understood it was Cleo, his Cleo, her hair spread out around her and those marvelously responsive breasts bared to his view, arrayed before him like the perfect sacrifice to his own eternal need for her.
He wanted her. More than he wanted his next breath. And he couldn’t have that, so he had to do whatever he could to make her hate him. It was better that way. It was far safer for her, no matter how it felt to her—to him—now. It was his gift to her.
He should have given it to her far sooner, he knew.
Khaled came up and onto the bed until he was right there before her, too fast for her to do anything but watch him with that same stunned look on her face, as the latest horrible thing he’d thrown at her reverberated in the air between them. She pulled back, belatedly, and he simply took her chin in his hand to make her look at him.
She shuddered, but she didn’t knock his fingers away. She didn’t even try.
If you won’t protect yourself, he thought bitterly, that howling thing inside him gathering force and speed, punching out pieces of him as
it went, then I must.
“What you love is sex,” he grated at her, and he saw it land. Hard. “You love what I can do to you with the faintest touch. No matter what I say to you or what I do, you still come when I command it.”
“No.” But it was only a whisper, and her eyes were dark and huge.
“You crave my touch,” he said in that same dark way, so low it was almost as if he was talking to himself. He wished he was. “Like there is nothing else on this earth that matters.”
And he proved it, reaching over with his other hand and cupping her breast, watching the way her nipple hardened at once. Watching the red flush high on her cheeks that he knew by now meant she melted for him below. Showing her all the ways she wanted him, even now.
“I love you,” she said again, and more fiercely.
But then, she didn’t know that he’d been broken long before he’d met her, and had accepted it. Embraced it. That he’d never imagined there would be any light at all in this dark and dutiful life of his. That he’d had no idea she would burn this bright, tempting him to ignore his blood, his duty, his country, the price he knew they’d both have to pay—anything to have her. Anything.
It would kill him. He was certain of it.
“Cleo, please.” His words were hard, his voice far colder than he felt. “You hardly know me. You’re an inexperienced woman who clearly hasn’t had anything like decent sex before. I don’t want you to know me. I don’t want you to do anything but what you’re told.”
“But I can’t—”
“You can.”
And then he kissed her like a starving man, with all the agony he couldn’t show her, all the things he wanted that he knew he couldn’t have. Love. A true marriage. Her. He kissed her as though he thought might never kiss her again.
That fire that always roared between them was much brighter tonight. Wilder. Or she was, burning as hot and as golden and as out of his reach as the moon.
Khaled took her over, kissing her again and again until she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back. Then he simply bore her back to the bed, settling himself between her thighs, hard where she was soft, and there was no pretending they weren’t both as desperate as they’d ever been.
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