Nasser had warned him long ago that he would break her heart. He should have listened. He should have understood that in the end, if he wanted to protect this surprising woman who had lodged herself so unexpectedly inside his own chest, it would be his heart that shattered.
Especially when he saw her tears.
“Don’t,” he whispered, the sound very nearly broken, as if he could command her not to cry.
“Is that an order, Your Excellency?” she asked, bitterly, and when he kissed her again she tasted of salt and heat, and there was that hollow thing in him, loud and devastating.
“Cleo—” he began, and he didn’t know what he might have said.
But she didn’t let him continue. She wound her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips and he let her pull him down against her. So they could burn in this madness together. So they could forget.
So he could save her instead of himself.
He rocked his hips against hers, making her shudder in that instant, ecstatic response he couldn’t get enough of. He bent to her breasts and lavished them with his mouth, his hands, even his teeth. She writhed beneath him, arching toward his mouth, her cries growing more desperate the closer she came—
She groaned when he lifted his head. And her gaze was a dark storm of gold when she looked up at him, watching as he reached down between them to free himself from his exercise trousers.
Khaled thought he might die if he didn’t get inside her, now. He thought he might die anyway and somehow, tonight, he didn’t much care.
“And where does this fall within your chilly little concept of marriage?” she bit out, and he could see everything right there in her gaze, as open and as perfect as she was. The love he’d thrown back in her face, her deep hurt, and her own unmistakable need. Everything. “Or are you going to pretend this is nothing but procreation?”
He slicked himself through her heat and watched the burn of it shiver through her, fighting back his own shudder as the flames that licked between them stretched bright and high.
“Behave,” he gritted at her as if he was in control of this, of her, of his own wild response, “and this will be your reward. Disobey me, and this will be nothing but a memory.”
He toyed with her then, holding himself still at her entrance and ignoring her attempts to twist her hips, to take him inside her. Ignoring the nails she dug into his shoulders, the desperate way she groaned out his name.
Ignoring everything but her inevitable surrender.
Because there was no other way. No other choice. There never had been.
“I hate you,” she moaned at him, and it shouldn’t have hurt.
It was what he wanted. It was why he’d done this tonight, instead of following the more animal urge he’d had when he’d found her here. This was the easiest way to save her, and he knew it.
“Hate me if you must,” he urged her, hoarse and dark, and then he thrust into her with a hard, sure stroke that made her moan. He pulled her closer so his mouth was at her ear, and then he began to move, delighting in each and every exquisite sound she made, helpless and wild and his, even now. “I don’t care. But you will obey.”
* * *
And she did.
Again and again, until the light began to creep in through his windows. Until she was ruined and lost and completely destroyed. Until he seemed satisfied enough that she’d received his brutal message that he finally passed out beside her the way he hadn’t done since their time in the oasis.
Cleo didn’t sleep. She couldn’t. She lay by his side, beneath one heavy arm, pulled close up against him as if they fit.
She was wrung out. Her body still thrummed with everything they’d done, all the ways he’d taken her, all the things he’d done to demonstrate his power over her no matter what terrible things he said. She’d loved them all, and she hated herself for it.
And she knew one thing with perfect, resounding clarity: she couldn’t do this any longer. It was one thing to lose herself the way she’d done in all these strange months since he’d plucked her from the street. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever forgive herself for pursuing that fantasy of hers so single-mindedly she’d lost sight of reality, but at least it was only her in this. She’d chosen him.
But how could she possibly bring a child into this mess the way he seemed so determined to do? What would she teach a baby—that it was acceptable to live like this, so deeply controlled? Broken into pieces and ignored unless called for?
Khaled was like a drug. She wanted him, even now. Her heart ached for him, as if it didn’t care that he was the one who’d hammered it to pieces in the first place.
And she finally understood what she should have known from the start, what so many people had tried to tell her: that she couldn’t stay here. That this had been a terrible mistake.
She couldn’t do this. She had to go.
Before he figured out why she wasn’t getting pregnant the way he wanted. Before all of this got worse. Before she was trapped so securely and so completely in this web of his—sex and command and her broken little heart that wanted so desperately to find the good in him, any good in him, that believed in that fairy tale she’d spun around this empty life they led—that she forgot she’d ever been anything but his.
His possession. His pawn. Whatever he made her. Whatever he desired.
She had to leave him.
While she still could.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“YOUR WIFE IS ENCHANTING!” the Italian businessman cried, much too enthusiastically for Khaled’s liking, especially when he had his equally enthusiastic hands on Cleo while he was saying it.
But Khaled smiled because it was the expected thing and they were in the full glare of a very public gala, and restrained himself from knocking the man’s bristly mustache away from Cleo’s outstretched hands. Barely.
Mine, he thought, the way he always did, because even dressed in formal clothes and smiling politely for the cameras, Khaled was little more than a caveman where this woman was concerned. His woman.
It was the height of winter in Vienna and he was already weary of this nonsense. They’d been traveling for several weeks now, hitting one event after another across Europe so that Khaled could court captains of industry like the one currently slobbering over his wife. He was tired.
He was tired of touting his vision of a new Jhurat like a snake-oil salesman. He was tired of explaining all the reasons this or that industry should plant new roots in Jhuratan soil. He was tired of dancing and smiling and acting like one among the many over-titled idiots who cluttered up the European ballrooms, none of them with the slightest idea of what it meant to truly fight for anything.
And he was tired, so very tired, of the icy cold perfection of his wife.
He had to hand it to her, Khaled thought darkly as he watched her latest performance—making the besotted Italian man lapse into what sounded like poetry while never forgetting the equally smitten Swiss banker on her left. Cleo learned her lessons quickly. Especially the ones he’d taught her.
She was perfect tonight. She’d been perfect for weeks, come to that. She oozed aristocratic grace from every pore, a feat indeed, given that everyone who saw her knew who she was and that she hadn’t a drop of blue blood in her. Since that awful night in his bedchamber, she hadn’t so much as lifted a single silken brow against him. No hint of her charming defiance, no trace of that glorious smile of hers, no more attempts on her part to make him laugh. She’d woken up that following morning and she’d simply been...perfect.
Tonight she was holding court with an ease that suggested she’d spent her whole life preparing for this role, which Khaled had to remind himself was an illusion. She was a vision in a column of shimmering silver that both flattered her figure and preserved her modesty at once, as befitted a woman who
served as an advertisement for a conservative country.
She seemed as at ease in her fashionably high heels as she was to find herself surrounded by a pack of international philanthropists known as much for their ruthlessness as for their checkbooks. Her lovely hair—all those blondes and caramels and reds Khaled could never get his fill of—was swept back into an elegant twist and anointed with pearls and diamonds on delicate combs, and when he had walked into her dressing room to collect her she’d smiled at him as though he was anyone. Just another potential donor she needed to charm. Anonymous.
She’d been so bright and so beautiful—yet so remote—that he’d had no choice but to drop to his knees right there, pulling that gleaming silver fabric up to bare her soft thighs before he’d buried his face in that wild heat between her legs.
He’d made her sob out his name, her hands fisted against his shoulders. He’d made her break apart and shake, buck and shiver. And when she came back to herself she looked at him with that same damned smile and thanked him.
Like a perfectly polite stranger.
She was a dream come true. She was exactly what he’d told her, so cruelly, he wanted. She was absolutely perfect.
And he hated it. More with every passing day.
“Come,” he muttered when the poetic Italian finally took his leave, trailing a thousand bellissimas in his wake, and she turned her lovely, always composed, unreadable face to him. “Dance with me.”
Cleo smiled prettily—she always smiled so prettily now, she was so damned obedient, and he couldn’t stand how off balance that made him feel—and followed him out onto the dance floor. He took her in his arms and she gazed up at him, serene and lovely.
And he wanted to shove himself under her skin. Make her react.
He wanted the old Cleo back. His Cleo. That overawed girl who had danced with him in Paris so long ago and gazed at him as if he was the sun and she wanted nothing more than to burn alive in him. That astonishingly courageous backpacker who had stood up to him in a street, when she knew exactly who he was. That surprising, life-altering night she’d melted all over him in his own courtyard at so small a touch.
This is how it has to be, he told himself, the way he always did, though it felt emptier than usual tonight. Or he did. This is safer for her by far.
Khaled had never felt so hollow in his life.
“You’re scowling,” Cleo said now, entirely without inflection, because he had told her she was nothing and she’d taken him at his word. This was entirely his doing.
He should have rejoiced at his success. Instead, he felt nothing but grim. As though he’d blacked out his own sun.
“I find my patience for these events grows thinner all the time,” he said, prodded by something he didn’t understand to confide in her. The further he pushed her away, the further she disappeared behind that smooth mask of hers, the more he wanted her close. He couldn’t recall the last time they’d slept apart, and he’d been considering moving her permanently into his suite in the palace. Because he was a despicable man. The truth of that pressed into him, cold and inescapable. “I find it less and less unreasonable that my father locked himself away in Jhurat and closed off all the borders. It would be easier.”
Cleo was silent for a moment. She’d become even more slender in the past few months, and his hand spanned her waist in a way he didn’t entirely like. But still she moved with that beautiful elegance of hers, her dancing as exquisite as she was, and it wasn’t the first time Khaled wished—deeply and wildly—that he was a different man.
Or even that he’d found a better way to keep her at arm’s length.
“You are not your father,” she said, her tone measured, her golden gaze meeting his only briefly before sliding away in that deferential manner she’d adopted that made him clench his teeth. “You want more for Jhurat than he did.”
“That doesn’t mean I’ll get it. And I could do more harm than good.”
Because that was what he did, wasn’t it?
“At least you will have tried,” she said after a moment, and he wondered if they were thinking of the same night. The same vicious words he couldn’t take back. That he knew he shouldn’t want to take back. “That has to be better than hiding out and pretending nothing is happening, doesn’t it?”
Their gazes tangled then, and Khaled very nearly missed a step.
He didn’t know what surged in him then, making him feel broken open and singed black straight through to his core. He didn’t know why he could only look down at her, as shaken as he was cursed, and wonder who this smooth, perfect creature was, who spoke so softly and knew him so well and was lost to him forever.
When, of course, he knew. She was what he’d made her with his very own hands. She was what he’d demanded she’d become. She’d opened herself up wide and he’d smashed her flat.
The truth was, he hadn’t truly believed she’d obey him. No matter what he’d said. She never had before.
Cleo held his gaze as if she knew exactly what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and he didn’t know what might happen if she—
But she was too perfect. Too remote.
She only smiled at him again, and he hated it.
In bed she was still the Cleo he remembered. She was still his. The cooler and more distant she became while she was in public, the wilder and more raw she was in private. Anything but smooth. Anything but polished. He held on to that with more desperation than he cared to examine.
She hadn’t claimed to love him again. He’d broken her of that.
“When we return to Jhurat I want you to see the palace physician,” he told her abruptly, and she stiffened in his arms so briefly he almost thought he imagined it.
“Am I ill?”
It was an echo of the old Cleo, that soft yet faintly sharp question, and it went through him like a shot—but when she tilted her head back to look at him, he saw nothing but that blandness he’d come to despise.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Though it would explain a great deal. Do you feel ill?”
“Not in the way you mean.” She was insolent and it thrilled him—but then she blinked, that mask of perfection obscuring the Cleo he wanted to see. “Though I believe I ate far too much of that Sacher torte.”
She had done nothing but pick at the intensely chocolate cake, a Viennese specialty, that had been presented to them earlier. She had marveled over its richness to their hostess but consumed very little of it.
Not that Khaled had taken to monitoring her every movement like an obsessed fool.
“You’re still not pregnant.” It came out flat. Like an accusation.
Cleo tilted her head back slightly as if that had been a blow to her chin, and Khaled wished he knew the right words to say to make this better. All of this. But he’d been made from blood and sacrifice, desert justice and the stark, uncompromising Jhuratan sun. He could never spout poetry as that Italian had done. He wouldn’t know where to start, and even if he did, he thought he’d end up speaking of battles and losses. Duty and demand. Not the things that mattered here. To her.
But the words he needed tangled in his throat, and it seemed he could only scowl at her when it was the last thing he wanted to do.
“Not yet.” She eyed him. “Does that require an apology? I thought it took both of us to succeed or fail in getting pregnant, if I’m remembering my high school biology classes correctly.”
Did he imagine that edge to her voice then? That odd sheen in her golden gaze? Or was he merely desperate for any sign of a break in that wall—the wall he’d built himself? His hand tightened at her waist, and he knew he didn’t imagine her slight, sharp intake of breath.
“Cleo,” he began.
“I don’t mean to interrupt, of course,” she said, very calmly—as if she was as unmoved by him, by this, as he was
nearly unmanned by her. “But I believe those hoteliers you wanted to speak with have arrived.”
For a beat, Khaled couldn’t remember why he’d want to speak to anyone but Cleo. But then he turned to look and reality reasserted itself. He needed these people, these wealthy, pampered people who lived to throw their money around. That’s why he was here. Jhurat required as much foreign investment as possible, and Khaled’s role was to convince everyone he spoke to that the only thing medieval about his homeland was the architecture.
Not him. No matter how Cleo inspired him to behave.
“We must talk,” he told her, in that stilted, caveman way he couldn’t seem to stop. Why was it he could control an entire country and not his own wife?
“Of course,” Cleo agreed. He thought she’d say anything to push him even further away, and the fact that he should exult in that, that it indicated he’d succeeded with her, was but one more darkness inside of him to match the rest. One among so many. “Whatever you want.”
That was the trouble. Khaled knew what he wanted. What he’d wanted from almost the first moment he’d laid eyes on this woman.
And he still couldn’t have it.
It didn’t matter what he felt. It never had.
* * *
In the end, it was simple.
It had taken months of preparation, Jessie’s invaluable counsel in figuring out the best way to leave a man who would never permit it should she ask outright, and a willingness to look directly into that man’s face and tell a thousand lies of omission that Cleo still found so much harder than she should have—but that night, it was simple.
When they returned to their hotel suite, Khaled simply eyed her in that hungry, imperative way of his that made every nerve ending inside of her dance into awareness, shrugging out of his sleek formal jacket and yanking at his tie without ever breaking her gaze.
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