His magnificent mouth, already close to cruel in its beauty, thinned. He watched her for a moment, his cool gaze like a fire inside her, turning her inside out.
That had to be panic, she told herself, but she knew better.
“What a vivid imagination you have, Miss Churchill.”
She didn’t want him to know her name. She didn’t want him to look at her like that, or at all. She wanted to run.
Except she really didn’t. She’d been running for six months. This was the first time she’d wanted to stand still instead. Cleo couldn’t let herself think too much about that. It made the heat in her burn hotter.
“Your sister didn’t tell me what she was running from,” she said, somehow sounding far cooler than she felt. And not because she couldn’t seem to do anything but obey him, no matter if the order he gave her was silent, conveyed by those smoky gray eyes that she found as unnerving as she did mesmerizing. “She jumped in the car, that’s all. And then you appeared before us like every horror-movie villain in the history of mankind. Only without an ax. Happily.”
Again, that arrested look. That slow blink, as if he couldn’t believe she’d said that. Neither could she.
“My sister is sixteen.” His voice was low. Measured. “She doesn’t wish to return to her boarding school. What you interrupted was a tantrum.”
“She asked for my help,” Cleo said staunchly, and found herself lifting up her chin in a defiance that had to mean she had some kind of death wish. “And I’m not going to apologize for helping her, no matter how ferocious you become.”
He studied her, cold and fierce and impassive. He is a sultan, her brain kept reminding her. This is deeply, deeply foolish. He could do as he liked with her, and they both knew it. Mouthing off to a man like this had to be right up there in the top two dumbest things she’d ever done, right next to trust Brian.
“You are fortunate, I think, that I don’t require your apologies,” he told her, and yet the way he said it made her feel anything but fortunate, despite that glowing knot of heat low in her belly. “But I’m afraid you must come with me anyway.”
* * *
Khaled bin Aziz, Sultan of Jhurat for the moment—assuming he could keep clinging to his country by his damned fingernails—stood outside the small private foyer in the old palace where his guards had sequestered the American girl, and considered his next move.
His sister had been taken to her rooms—where she would remain until morning, when his guards would personally transport her to her boarding school in the countryside and make sure her teachers there were prepared to monitor her movements more closely. He knew it wasn’t Amira’s fault that she acted this way, so heedless and irresponsible, kicking up the kind of trouble she couldn’t possibly understand had far-reaching consequences.
Khaled could remember being sixteen and angry at everything himself, but, of course, he hadn’t had the luxury of indulging either his youth or his temper. He’d been too busy bearing the brunt of his responsibilities as their father’s heir.
You do not matter, his father had told him when he was barely eight and then with great regularity thereafter. Only Jhurat matters. Accept this truth.
Nor could Khaled indulge his own temper now. There was too much at stake. Trade negotiations with Western powers who took such pleasure in believing him a barbarian for the kind of commerce that Jhurat very much needed to secure if it was going to escape the curse of endless poverty that had afflicted so many of its neighbors, and had nearly crippled it, too, beneath the weight of his father’s paranoia and attempts to alleviate his own guilt.
Open the borders and you open Pandora’s box, his father had predicted balefully in one of his coherent moments, but it wasn’t until now that Khaled had fully understood what he’d meant.
He didn’t blame Amira, but he could kill her all the same for throwing him neck-deep into problems he wished someone else could solve. But that was what happened upon inheriting a country far earlier than expected after its ruler, his father, had collapsed and had been declared incompetent: there was no one else. These problems were Khaled’s alone.
“She is no one of importance,” his head of security, Nasser, said quietly from beside him, his gaze on the sleek computer tablet in his hands. “Her family is unremarkable. Her father is an electrician and her mother works in a doctor’s office in a small town on the outskirts of what appears to be a very small city in the middle of the country. She has two sisters, one married to a mechanic and the other to a teacher. No ties to anyone with any sort of influence at all.”
“Ah,” Khaled said, more to himself than Nasser, “but that only means she is one of their ‘every women.’ I learned at Harvard that Americans love nothing more than to tell themselves fairy stories in which little brown mice become great and powerful through their own inner strength, or some such nonsense. It is part of their cultural DNA.”
Inside the room, his own little brown mouse sat on one of the settees, bent over at the waist, elbows on her knees and her forehead cradled in her hands. He thought she was simply breathing deeply, not weeping. Not this one, with her talk of villains and axes and her foolish courage. He’d seen the hint of fear in her eyes when he’d ordered her back to the palace. He’d scared her, he knew, and if he regretted that—if he regretted the necessity of squelching that spark of defiant fire that had transformed her from a mouse into something far more interesting out in that alley, if he regretted the man he’d become that he could do these things so cavalierly—he ignored it.
There was no place for regret. There never was. There was only Jhurat.
“She has been traveling, as she said,” Nasser continued after a moment, diplomatically opting not to comment on either fairy stories or mice, which was only one of the reasons he’d been Khaled’s right hand and best friend since they’d been boys. “She flew to Scotland six months ago and has been wandering since, following what appears to be a largely whimsical itinerary south and east. One of those gap-year journeys, it seems, though she finished her university studies some years back. Perhaps she is ‘finding herself’?”
Khaled snorted at his aide’s dry tone. “And instead she found me. Poor little mouse.”
“There is no need for you to deal with this situation any further if you don’t wish it,” the other man said then. “We can handle a girl. Especially one who cannot possibly cause a single ripple, no matter what becomes of her.”
“And can you handle our enemies, too? Who even now work to have me removed from the palace because of my tainted blood?” What they whispered was that Khaled’s line was weak, that the son would inherit his father’s dementia before his time. And who was to say they were wrong? He shoved that aside. “I am certain they have already leaked the fact that I have a young female American in custody to the papers. It is inevitable.”
“The papers can be dealt with.”
“Our papers, perhaps.” But that was how his father had done things, and look what it had wrought: this mess Khaled had to clean up, though he often doubted he could. He doubted anyone could, but it was his duty—his fate—to try anyway, no matter what happened. “But what happens when they take it to the international stage? Which they are certain to do.” Because it was what he would do, and Khaled had the peculiar pleasure of knowing his enemies well. “How will we look to the world when I am painted as some kind of monster who abducts fresh-faced young American girls from the streets?”
He already knew what it would do to the contracts they needed to lock down to bring commerce to the country. To say nothing of the much-needed influx of international wealth, which, with the increase in tourism since he’d opened the borders again, might tip the scales in Khaled’s favor. In Jhurat’s favor, at long last.
He couldn’t afford any backsliding. Not now.
“The people do not want to revert to the Stone Age,” Nasse
r said darkly. “They want their movies and their technology right along with their paychecks from all the new jobs. No matter what that fool may tell himself.”
“That fool” was Talaat, the leader of the resistance movement that opposed Khaled’s claim to the sultanate with the assertion that Khaled’s blood was tainted with the same infirmity of mind that had taken his father down. Can we risk the country? Talaat liked to ask on the news and all over the papers, so reasonably.
Talaat was also Khaled’s cousin on his mother’s side. They’d played together as small boys. It made a kind of poetic sense that his own cousin should have become the greatest thorn in his side, Khaled thought, since he couldn’t remember a single instance in which his blood had done anything but make his life harder, including Amira’s stunt today.
“Talaat does not care what the people want,” Khaled said shortly. “He cares about power.”
Nasser didn’t respond, because this was an unfortunate truth that might not matter in the least should Talaat’s seditious behavior gain footholds in the proper places, and Khaled’s mouth twisted in a wry sort of smile. It wouldn’t do to become the next internet sensation at a time like this. It would take very little to tip public sentiment against him, and Americans, with their Kickstarter campaigns and their internet apps that could make civil unrest in far-off places into one more video game they could play from their couches, loved nothing more than to cry out against countries like Jhurat at the slightest provocation.
Or no provocation at all.
But that meant he had to think very carefully about what to do about the photogenic American girl who should never have crossed paths with Amira. What stories would she tell if he set her free? Who would listen to her when she told them? How would his enemies spin this story if they got their hands on her—and they would. He knew they would. They always did.
Inside the parlor, the girl shifted in her seat, then sat up, and Khaled studied her, bracing himself for what he knew he had to do. Had known since he’d pulled her out of that car, and if he was honest, was more interested in doing now that she’d shown him that surprising—if misguided—strength of hers.
She was a gift. And he would take all the gifts he could get.
As gifts went, he had to admit, she was an excellent one. She was delicate, with her large eyes and remarkably fine features, her hair a collection of reds, browns and caramels twisted inexpertly and pinned to the back of her head.
Pretty, something inside him noted, in a way that made him shift on his feet, then frown. Too pretty.
Elegant and unforgettable, in fact, with that face of hers and the coltish lines of her figure—yet she was dressed like a tomboy. Her clothes were deliberately mannish and casual in that Western style he’d never really understood during his studies abroad in England and the States, and which he most certainly did not appreciate in a woman.
Khaled was a traditional man. He had always preferred women who understood their own uniquely feminine appeal. Who boasted womanly hips and generous breasts to cushion a man in softness, instead of a boyish figure and too many bones besides. Women who offered him shy gazes to make him feel strong and musical voices to soothe him when he felt anything but. Demure and modest women, traditional women.
Not Western girls like this one in her androgynous clothes, flat-chested and skinny-thighed, who had stared back at him directly in the street, dared to scowl at him, and hadn’t had the sense to beg for his mercy.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d found defiance anything but irritating.
And yet her eyes were extraordinary. More than extraordinary. They’d been filled with the setting sun out in that tiny little alleyway, and yet even when they weren’t they were a kind of bright, gleaming gold, like ancient treasure, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t get them out of his head.
Why it felt as if she haunted him, as if she had already worked her odd, scowling way into the heart of him when he should hardly have noticed her at all beyond her potential value to him. To his country.
Khaled told himself it was nothing more than strategy that made him walk inside that room then, whether he wanted to do it or not. Politics and power and the fate of his country besides.
Because it couldn’t be anything else. He knew better.
“I apologize,” he said, summoning up that charm of his that felt rusty from disuse, as though his smile was made from cut glass.
“And as it happens, I do require an apology,” she said drily. “I accept.”
But she stopped when her eyes met his, as if the sound of her own voice in the elegant room was alarming, somehow. Or he was.
“That regrettable scene in the street must have alarmed you, Miss Churchill.”
She stared up at him in that same bright, golden way she had before, direct and clever at once, and Khaled couldn’t name the thing that moved in him then, powerful and dark.
But he could use it. And he would. He would do anything for his country. Even this. Especially this, a rebellious little voice murmured deep inside him. Maybe she is your gift.
Khaled smiled wider and settled himself in the chair at an angle to the settee where she sat, looking delicate and amusingly put out against the bright cushions scattered around her—
Looking like the small, frightened mouse she is, he corrected himself. Caught between much larger and sharper claws than she could imagine. He leaned in closer, aware of the way her eyes widened slightly, the way her breath caught, and he knew it wasn’t fear.
She was aware of him as a man. Good.
He’d use that, too.
Something unexpectedly hot wound through him when she licked her lips, her eyes still fixed on him. And then she frowned at him, and he liked it. Far more than he should.
“I hope you’ll allow an overprotective brother to make it up to you as best he can,” Khaled said, his smile even brighter.
He was going to enjoy this.
CHAPTER TWO
THE MAN WHO walked into that parlor as if it, too, should cower before him as he moved was fearful and breathtaking, but he wasn’t quite the same one who had confronted Cleo in the street—and not only because he’d changed his clothes, she thought.
This version of the Sultan of Jhurat smiled as he sat down with her, something that altered that fierce face of his and made him nothing short of stunning.
Her heart pounded hard, like a fist against her ribs.
“Please,” he said in a pleasant tone of voice, lounging there in a sleek buttoned black shirt over a pair of loose black trousers, neither of which made him look any less dangerous than he had in that alley. It was as if he’d traded in a scimitar for a polished knife, but the sharp edge was still the same. She’d never in her life met anyone so male. “You must call me Khaled.”
As if they were friends. As if it was possible that one could be friends with a man like this. Cleo doubted it. He was far too intense, far too...colossal.
“Uh, okay. Khaled.”
He looked as if he could eat a thousand Brians for breakfast and still be hungry.
She looked at the room instead of at him, hoping that might ease the clench of that bright heat inside her. But it didn’t, no matter how many lovely silk pillows decorated the delicately pretty couches, or how much gold was on the ceiling and dripping down the walls into the exuberant sconces. No matter that smile on the sultan’s darkly ferocious face as he looked at her now.
“Does this mean you’re not planning to arrest me any longer?” she asked. Politely. And only then realized she was frowning.
He threw his head back and laughed. It was heart-stopping. Cleo felt as if she’d fallen down hard and knocked the breath straight out of her lungs.
“I’ll confess to overreacting,” he said, that astonishing laughter still rich in his dark voice. “It is an
older brother’s prerogative, surely.”
He nodded at some unseen servant—and this was the sort of over-the-top place, preening with dramatic chandeliers draped in crystals and entire gleaming ballrooms lined with complicated tapestries depicting epic historical events she couldn’t identify, that must have whole battalions of unseen servants, Cleo imagined—and sure enough, a tray appeared before them. Hot, fragrant tea and an array of treats, sweet and savory alike, as if he was trying to tempt her.
Or charm her.
And then the Sultan of Jhurat waved his servants away and poured tea for her, as if nothing in the world could be more normal than to serve her himself.
Her. Cleo Churchill from outside Columbus, Ohio, to whom absolutely nothing interesting had ever happened. Embarrassing and humiliating, sure. But a cheating fiancé wasn’t interesting. It was boring, run-of-the-mill, exactly as she’d concluded she must have been if a safe and supposedly good man like Brian had been driven to betray her so completely.
She was dreaming, clearly. She’d thought so repeatedly over the past few hours, and her thigh ached from all the times she’d pinched it. She thought she’d have a bruise by morning, and still she found herself lost in the way he moved, all of that leashed strength and easy power obvious even in his handling of a delicate china teacup.
Cleo swallowed, hard, as though that might clear the buzzing in her ears. Or wake her up.
“Tea?” he asked smoothly, as if it were the most natural thing imaginable for a man like him to wait on her, in any capacity, when she could see it wasn’t.
She could see the way he wore his command, so matter-of-factly. That it was a part of him. That the fierceness, the dark ruthlessness she’d seen in him before, was the truth of him. Not this creature, whoever he was, who smiled at her and made her blood heat.
Almost as if he meant to charm her... But that was absurd. She was far too practical to yearn for something so out of her reach. Wasn’t she?
She ignored that insane voice inside her that whispered that after suffering through Brian, she deserved something this impossible. This wild and beautiful.
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