“I don’t want to keep you,” she said, but she took the cup and saucer he offered her anyway, as if her hands wanted things she wouldn’t let herself wish for. Maybe that was why her voice came out so crisp when she spoke again, as though she was chastising him. “I’m sure you have any number of official duties to perform.”
“None so pressing I can’t take the time to correct a grave error,” he said, settling back against his seat and training that intense gaze of his on her, gleaming with what she didn’t think she dared call amusement. “I apologize for my sister, Miss Churchill. She dragged you into a family matter and put you in a terrible position. It’s unforgivable.”
“Cleo. If I’m to call you Khaled—” and there was something about his name that felt different against her tongue then, like a square of dark, almost-bitter chocolate, and a light flared briefly in his slate-gray gaze as though he tasted it, too “—you should certainly call me Cleo.”
“Is that short for Cleopatra?” he asked almost lazily, making her wish it was. Making her wish with a sudden deep fervor that she could transform herself into whatever might please him—and she didn’t know where that thought came from. Only that she felt it like her own too-warm blood, pounding through her, changing her where she sat.
But then, she’d been there, done that, with a man who could never dream of being Khaled’s equal. She wouldn’t do it again.
“No.” She set down the tea without tasting it, afraid she’d drop the whole of it on the undoubtedly priceless rug beneath her dusty feet. “My mother liked it.”
He studied her for a moment, until she realized she was holding her breath.
“I like it, too,” he said, and she didn’t understand the heat that blasted through her, confusing her even as it made her ache.
“You were talking about your sister,” she reminded him, somehow ignoring that thing that wound ever tighter deep inside her.
“Amira is my responsibility,” he said after a moment, that hard voice of his a shade warmer, though not at all soft. “Our mother died when she was quite small and I suppose I feel as much a parent to her as an older brother. And I regret I’ve not been there for her as I should have. My father’s health has declined quite seriously in the past year and my attention has been on the country. That is not an excuse and not something I could have changed, but it is a factor, I think, in her acting out.”
“I don’t know that it’s possible to really be there for a teenage girl,” she said after a moment, when she was reasonably certain her voice would come out even. “No matter who she is. Feeling abandoned and mistreated is par for the course, as I remember it, whether that’s true or not.”
“I can’t help thinking that she would do better with a female’s guidance. Someone to look up to who is not the autocratic brother who now makes all the decisions about her life that she doesn’t much like. I suspect she finds me as baffling as I find her.”
It took Cleo a moment to look up, because she’d been too busy staring at the frayed cuffs of the dark trousers she’d worn in too many countries to count and wondering with only the faintest little hint of despair why she was dressed like a teenage girl when she wasn’t one. Sitting here in this place—in this palace—she’d never been more aware of how far short she fell of any kind of womanly ideal.
She was a little bit of a mess, if she was honest. Ragged cuffs, torn-off fingernails, worn and battered clothes that she’d been wearing for six months straight and washing out in a hundred hostel sinks. Backpacker chic didn’t translate in a palace, she understood, especially when she was sitting in the presence of a man who made even what she assumed were his casual clothes look impossibly splendid.
You let yourself go, Cleo, Brian had said, as if that were a reasonable explanation for lying and cheating. And we’re not even married yet. I wanted someone who would never do that.
And I wanted someone who wouldn’t sleep with other people, Brian, so I guess my ratty jeans are my business, she’d snapped back at him.
And then what Khaled had said penetrated and she lifted her gaze to find him watching her much too intently, a thousand things she didn’t understand in those slate-gray eyes of his. It made her shiver. It made her wonder.
It made her understand her own insecurities.
Brian was a spoiled child but Khaled was very plainly a man—and a man used to the best of everything, surrounded by beauty on every side. Even his tea set shouted out its delicate, resolute prettiness. Was it insane that she wished she was as pretty, as lovely, as all these things he was used to having around him?
That he might look at her and find her beautiful, too?
Of course it’s insane, she scolded herself. If Brian thought you dressed as though you let yourself go, what must the Sultan of Jhurat think?
“The best cure for teenage girls is the passage of time,” Cleo said, curling her lamentable fingernails into her palms and out of sight. Time was also the best cure for embarrassment, she’d found, though there were new humiliations all the time, apparently. “I speak as someone who used to be one. The only way out is through, I promise you.”
She had Brian in her head again, and she hated it. He didn’t deserve to take up any space inside her. How had she ever believed otherwise?
“And is this why you have traveled so long and so far?” Khaled asked after a moment. “To give yourself this time?”
“I haven’t been a teenage girl in quite a while.” It was almost as if she wanted to make sure he knew she was a grown woman, and Cleo refused to analyze why on earth she should want that. She shifted in her seat, trying to ease that clenched, knotted thing inside her. “This was more to prove that I could.”
“Why was that something that required proof?” asked a man who, she imagined, wouldn’t have to prove himself. Ever.
No one would cheat on this man. No one would dare.
“I had a decent job in a nice office doing human resources. Family and friends and a perfectly good routine. I was doing everything I was supposed to do,” she said, and it sounded mechanical. Or tasted that way in her mouth. She shrugged. “But in the end, I wanted more.”
“More?” he asked.
More than what waited for her in the wake of a broken engagement in a town full of pity and averted gazes. More than the weak man she had nearly tied herself to, so stupidly. More than Brian.
“It sounds silly,” she said.
There was no way that she could tell him the real reason she’d walked out of Brian’s condo and straight into a travel agency the next morning. There was no way she could admit how blind and foolish she’d been. Not to this man, who was looking at her as though she was neither of those things.
She never wanted to look at a man like this and see pity. She thought it might kill her.
Khaled smiled, and there was nothing like pity on his hard face. “I cannot tell if it does or does not, if you do not say it.”
“My entire life was laid out in front of me.” Brian hadn’t wanted to break up, after all. That had been all Cleo’s doing. And Brian hadn’t been the only one who’d thought her reaction to what he’d deemed his “minor indiscretion” was more than a little overdramatic. Life isn’t a fairy tale, her sister Marnie had said with a sniff. You might as well learn that now. Cleo forced a smile. “It’s a very nice life. I could probably have been content with it. Lots of people are. And I have deep roots in the place I came from, which means something.”
“Yet you were not happy.” He studied her for a moment, and she had to fight the urge to look away from that level stare lest he see all the things she didn’t want him to know. “You perhaps wanted wings instead of roots.”
It was such a simple flash of light, like joy, to be understood so matter-of-factly by a man like this, who was himself so far beyond her experience. But Cleo didn’t know what to do with it, so sh
e pushed on.
“I decided I needed to do something big.” She’d wanted to disappear, in fact, and this was the next best thing. She lifted her hands, then remembered that she was hiding them and dropped them back in her lap. “And it’s a big world.”
“So we are told.”
Cleo almost thought he was laughing. She didn’t want to examine how very much she wished he was.
“I wanted more,” she said again, and there was that fierce note in her voice that she knew was as much bitterness as it was the bone-deep stubbornness that had had her on a plane out of Ohio barely forty-eight hours after walking in on Brian and his girlfriend. “Unfortunately, when you say something like that, the people who are content think that you’re saying their lives are small in comparison.”
“Most lives are small,” he said, this sultan, and Cleo forgot herself.
She laughed. “How would you know?”
Their eyes caught then, his gaze startled, and she didn’t know which one of them was more surprised.
But she refused to let herself apologize, the way some part of her wanted to do.
“You can laugh at yourself, you know,” she said without meaning to open her mouth again. “It won’t kill you.”
His dark gray eyes gleamed. Something Cleo couldn’t quite identify moved over his face, making her pulse and shiver low in her belly. “Are you quite certain?”
And somehow, she was wordless.
“In any event,” he said after a moment, still in that dry, amused tone she could scarcely believe, “you are not wrong. My life has been many things, but not, as you say, small.”
He waved a negligent hand, sultanlike if she’d had to define it, beckoning her to continue. And Cleo did, because at this point, what was there to lose? She had already taken that dive. Might as well swim.
“When I bought my plane tickets, things got a bit tense.” That was as true as the rest, if not quite the full story. But she wasn’t going to tell this man about the accusations she’d fielded. That she was harsh and cold and unrealistic, that she was frigid besides, that she was the problem—because six months later she still didn’t know if any of it was true. And what if Khaled agreed with Brian’s assessment of her? She found she was scowling at him again, but she didn’t care. “But I don’t believe that anyone should have to settle for someone. Or something. Or anything. I think that’s what people tell themselves to make themselves feel better about choices they can’t take back. And I don’t want to settle. I won’t.”
Khaled was definitely smiling then, an indulgent curve to those warrior’s lips, and it made her stomach flip over. Then again. As if she’d been spouting poetry instead of ranting a bit too intensely.
“You are not an ordinary girl,” he said, and Cleo should have found that patronizing. She should have been insulted. Instead she felt molten and consumed, somehow, by that intent gleam in his dark gaze. Or the fact that she thought she’d do anything to keep him looking at her like that. As if he thought she might be marvelous. “In fact, I think you are quite a fascinating woman, aren’t you, Cleo?”
And she wanted him to think so. She wanted that more than she wanted to admit, even to herself. She could have sworn he knew that, too. That it was obvious to him, and reflected in that crook of his hard mouth.
“You’re very kind,” she said.
“You told me before that you have only two weeks left in this trip of yours.” She was stunned that he remembered anything about her and found herself nodding, her eyes fixed on him, burned and breathless at once. “I have a suggestion, Cleo, and I hope you’ll consider it.”
“Of course.” She told herself her voice wasn’t gauzy, insubstantial. That she was simply speaking softly for a change.
“Stay here for your last two weeks,” he urged her.
He leaned forward then and her heart nearly somersaulted from her chest when he reached over and took her hand in his, enveloping her in a wallop of heat. All of that heat and strength and power from his simple touch like a drug inside her, making her heavy and giddy. Dizzy and drunk.
Captured more surely than if he’d locked her up in a cell after all.
His gaze met hers, and she might have been crazy but she could have sworn that all the things she was feeling, all that wildness and fire, he felt, too.
For a moment, there was nothing at all but the two of them.
“Stay with me,” he said softly, and it didn’t occur to her to do anything at all but agree.
* * *
Cleo’s battered blue backpack waited for her in the rooms she’d been told were hers for the rest of her stay, a little touch of reality in the midst of what felt like fantasy on top of fantasy. Because what Khaled had casually referred to as her rooms were in fact part of a luxurious, palatial bedroom suite straight out of those fairy tales her sister sniffed at.
Rich reds decked the high walls, the vast, deep bed was piled deep with pillows in various jewel shades, and the whole of it was shaded by a gloriously sheer canopy that floated above like a dream. Sumptuous rugs were thrown across every inch of the floor in riots of complicated patterns and colors that should have clashed or felt loud and garish, yet didn’t. Intricate lattice-worked shutters in dark woods graced the many windows and led out to a long balcony, stunning works of art hung on the walls, and complex mosaics were inlaid in the high ceilings and arches. All of that and a sitting room, a dressing room and a closet that rivaled the size of most apartments back home, and a gloriously decadent bath that Cleo could have swum laps in, had she wanted.
There was even a smiling, deferential maid named Karima who fluttered around Cleo as if she were some kind of princess, urging her into the bath that first night and then into a dress she’d never seen before when she got out.
“This isn’t mine,” Cleo protested, her fingers rough against the astonishing smoothness of the deep blue material, the prettiest thing she thought she’d ever felt, slippery and fine against her woefully neglected hands. “I can’t...”
“The sultan insists,” Karima replied, as if that ended the conversation.
As if that was the conversation.
If she was staying here, Cleo had decided during her long, luxurious soak, then she would have to make certain that Khaled realized it was her choice to do so, not his command.
But when she was led into the small private dining room later that evening, Cleo felt as if she’d been transformed into a dream version of herself, and it was hard to remember why there was something wrong about that.
The dress the sultan insisted she wear was long and more elegant than anything she’d ever worn in her life, bare about the shoulders and then swishing over her legs as she walked to make her feel almost shivery, while her feet felt naked in the sandals she’d been given. Her hair had been brushed out and left to swirl around her shoulders in a shining mass that flowed when she moved, and Karima had even slicked a gloss over her lips. It was all overwhelmingly sensual, somehow.
The sultan waited for her in the small dining room arranged around a gurgling fountain with windows that opened over a lush and fragrant interior courtyard, as if they weren’t in a desert at all. He was still dressed all in black, with a jacket over the shirt he’d worn earlier, which made him look as elegant as a hard man could.
And when he turned to greet her, Cleo froze. One of the benefits of never having tried to be the kind of sleek, elegant woman Brian had wanted was that she’d always imagined that if she’d wanted to, she could have transformed herself.
But this was as transformed as she’d ever be, and she knew it. And she felt more naked before this man than she ever had without her clothes.
His dark, cool gaze moved over her, taking in everything from the spill of blue fabric to the silver of the sandals she wore. This was torment, she thought. This was beyond embarrassing—
&n
bsp; His gaze lifted to hers at last, and Cleo’s breath left her in a rush at the approval she saw gleaming there. The heat that roared in her in response. Relief and pleasure mixed into one, because if he believed in this version of her she thought she could, too.
Khaled wasn’t Brian. The notion was laughable. Khaled looked at her as though she was as beautiful as he was, not as if he were doing her a favor. How could she find that anything but intoxicating?
“Thank you for indulging me,” he said, as if he could see her uncertainty. As if he knew all that odd terror and tumult, pleasure and need, inside her. “I fear I am more traditional than is fashionable these days, but I find nothing so beautiful as a pretty woman in a lovely dress.”
Cleo smiled. How could she do anything but smile?
And when he held out his hand, a certain satisfaction in his cool gaze that she knew should probably have worried her, she ignored that little prickle of doubt—and took it.
* * *
“You can’t keep giving me things,” Cleo told him very seriously a few mornings into her stay, with another fierce and wholly inappropriate frown he found uncomfortably adorable.
Khaled had taken to having long, leisurely breakfasts with her, an indulgence he had no time for but allowed anyway. He liked to lounge there in the small nook he never normally used, strewn with pillows and streaming with sunlight, and watch her as she chased the sleep from those golden-hued eyes of hers with each sip of the strong coffee she liked.
Every day, he was more familiar with her. He touched her hand, her arm, her leg. He was intrigued by every caught breath, every shiver, that she worked so hard to hide from him. Today he reached over and tugged gently at the end of the ponytail she wore, until her honey gaze swung to his, all of that awareness simmering there, the way he wanted it.
He wanted a great deal more than he’d expected he would. He told himself that was no more than the lure of the chase, the excitement of this game. But that low, hard heat he couldn’t seem to dispel whispered otherwise.
Undone by the Sultan's Touch Page 3