She was furious again, and she wasn’t sure why. “That, and I walked in on him with his girlfriend two weeks before our wedding.”
His brows rose in surprise and she was so furious it was dizzying. And ashamed. And something about that particular toxic combination made her pulse clatter through her, jittery and wild.
“In case you’re wondering why, don’t.” She wanted to get this over with, she realized suddenly. Make him pity her so she could stop pretending there was any other end to this magical interlude in her life. “He was quite clear that I’m frigid.”
Khaled’s expression shifted into something sad and dangerous at once, and he reached over and traced his fingertips down her cheek, slowly. She didn’t know why she imagined it was some kind of apology. Then he took her chin in his hand, holding her immobile before him.
“You are many things,” he said softly. Starkly. “But you are not, as we have demonstrated, even remotely frigid.”
She should pull away, she knew. She should do something—but the air between them was so taut, so tense, and she couldn’t read him. His gaze was too dark, his mouth too cruel, and she was dressed in clothes he’d given her, her body still trembling and tingling from his mouth, and the truth was that she didn’t want to pull away from him.
Cleo wanted him. And yet Brian loomed between them, soft and deceitful and ruinous.
“They told me to marry him anyway,” she told Khaled fiercely, as if it were a weapon. “That I was naive and silly to expect fidelity. That such romantic notions were unrealistic. The stuff of fantasy.”
“Don’t worry.” It occurred to her that his tone of voice was lethal, but he was still holding her chin and the heat of that felt like a drug, making her feel heavy and weightless at once. Trapped with no desire whatsoever to set herself free. “I prize that particular fantasy above all others. And I am the ruler here. If I deem something realistic, that’s what it is.”
Her mind was a riot of shoulds, and she heeded none of them. There was something harsh in his face, his gaze, something too close to broken, when he’d said similar things in the past with a laugh.
“But do you mean your fidelity or mine?” she whispered. “They’re not the same thing and some men, I’ve discovered, apply their double standards there more than anywhere else.”
Khaled muttered something that sounded like a curse but which she imagined was a little prayer instead. He let her go.
She wished he was touching her again immediately. She was a lunatic. But she could feel the imprint of his fingers on her chin as if he’d stamped her with his heat. And she throbbed everywhere else.
“You will be the death of me, little mouse,” he told her, so low and quiet she thought for a minute she’d heard him wrong.
“I’m not a mouse.” Something kicked in her. “The next time someone cheats on me, I’m drawing blood. Just so you know.”
For a moment he looked almost proud, as if he approved of her bloodthirstiness, but then another shadow claimed his face, and she couldn’t read him. Khaled stood then, and she felt as though the world was spinning all around him. He looked troubled, tortured. Like the stranger her heart no longer considered him.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice too rough. Too many emotions racking her within.
“Nothing at all,” he said, and she knew, somehow, that he lied. “Come.”
He offered her his arm and she rose to take it, incapable of defying him in that moment though there was that part of her that thought she should. That wanted her to fight, damn it—though she didn’t know what for. He led her back into the palace, then down the polished, gleaming halls toward her suite, and it took him a long time to look at her again.
Cleo felt the lack of his attention like a kind of grief. Harsh and heavy.
“This is ridiculous,” she said when they reached her door, her voice a prickle. A tight scratch against the heaviness between them. “You shouldn’t have asked the question if you didn’t want to hear the answer.”
“The only answer I really needed was the way you came under my tongue,” he said, but there was a distance in the way he said it. Something granite and unyielding beneath those words. “The rest was merely curiosity.”
Cleo faced him then, her back to her door, and tried to read his dark, fierce face.
“Then you really shouldn’t look so sad, should you?”
He laughed then, abruptly, and it wasn’t the laughter she’d heard from him at other times that had warmed her deep within. This was hollow. Dark. This hurt both of them, she thought, and she didn’t know why.
“Sadness is for men with choices,” he told her, very distinctly, as if it was critical she understand this. Him. “I have only duty. It governs everything I do. It always has and it always will.” His voice lowered. Roughened. “Remember that, Cleo. If nothing else.”
“That sounds remarkably dire.” And then, not knowing how she managed it, when he looked so grim and she simply hurt, she grinned at him. “It was only a kiss, Khaled. I think we’ll survive.”
He let out another one of those laughs that cut at her, even deeper this time.
“You don’t know your own doom when it stares you in the face.” He shook his head, and she didn’t understand why he sounded so agonized. “How can I protect you when you won’t protect yourself?”
Cleo didn’t know what madness moved in her then, but she reached over and slid her hand against his lean jaw, as though that might comfort him. As though she could soothe him.
As though he was hers.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered, though she didn’t even know what was wrong. “I promise.”
Khaled froze, his gray eyes like a thunder that rolled in her, too, a warning she knew she should heed, but that same electricity leaped between them again, searing her straight through as though it was brand-new.
He muttered something beneath his breath, and then he leaned in close and took her mouth with all the passion and ruthless command he’d shown in the courtyard, and she was lost.
He tasted like the night and all the tumultuous stars above. Like heat and dreams and that wildness inside her she’d never experienced before. Her hands moved against his chest, up into his thick, dark hair. He came even closer then, even more demanding, pulling her hands up to either side of her head and holding them there as he pressed her back against the door to her suite with the sweet, hot glory of his magnificent torso.
He was muttering in Arabic, low and intense, against her lips and then against her skin. It felt like licks of flame, enticing and delicious. Cleo curled her fingers around his, closed her eyes and fell off the edge of the world.
He was so hard against her, so big and beautiful, like a red-hot monolith. His shoulders were a wonder of lean, smooth muscle and then his hard thigh moved between her legs, until she was melting against him, her whole body shivering as if he could throw her straight over that cliff into bliss again. That easily.
She had no doubt he could, and it scared her—but she channeled it all into that delirious slide of lips and tongues, the rude and delicious rocking of his hard thigh directly against the aching heart of her need, the unmistakable sounds of his mastery and her own thrilling capitulation.
Nothing mattered but this. Nothing mattered but him.
The fire raged higher. Khaled simply stroked her, his tongue and his thigh in stunning, overwhelming concert, and she was already shuddering, so close, so close—
“Enough,” he grated out, as if it hurt him.
He released her and stepped back, and she nearly sank to the ground, unable to process the tornado of sensation swirling in her, much less the fact that he’d stopped. He reached over and held her upright, that big hand of his wrapped tightly around one arm while his dark gaze burned into her.
Cleo could only st
are at him, her breath coming too fast, her whole body in revolt, all that drugging, delicious passion still at a fever pitch inside her. She felt drugged. Altered and exposed, and the way he looked at her didn’t help.
“I will not take you up against the wall like some common whore,” he bit out, and it occurred to her to wonder if he wasn’t swept away in the same storm of insane lust that she was, despite the hectic glitter in his gaze. He scowled at her. “I am the Sultan of Jhurat, not a drunken sailor on his first shore leave in years.”
She didn’t know which felt like more of a slap, but the red flush that swallowed her whole then wasn’t passion any longer. It was shame. And then temper, like a vicious kick to her gut.
“You told me to kiss you out in the courtyard and just now you kissed me,” she threw at him, embarrassed and frustrated and utterly lost in this, whatever it was. “You can’t do that and then turn around and call me the whore unless you’re willing to call yourself the same!”
He blinked as if no one had ever shouted at him before. Perhaps no one had. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’re doing this, not me,” she told him, confusion and temper swamping her. “Gowns and jewels and all the rest of this. What happened in the courtyard. What happened right now. Fidelity and sworn duty and I don’t even know what this is.”
Khaled’s other hand moved, and he frowned as if he didn’t have control over it as he dragged his thumb over her faintly swollen lips. His own mouth was a straight line, and his gaze had gone dark and brooding, the gray of long Februaries and winters without end, and still beautiful. Always so beautiful.
“I know what this is,” he said, but if she’d thought he would expand on that, she was disappointed when he only shook his head as if to clear it and then looked away.
“I leave in three days.” The spike of temper had drained away and now Cleo felt exhausted and too tired, with a dangerous prick of heat at the back of her eyes that warned her she might cry at any moment. She couldn’t allow that. “I don’t know what you want, Khaled.”
A trace of that elusive humor on his hard face. “I think you do.”
“Only not in the hall like a drunken sailor,” she snapped, her chin rising with her temper. “And only after you decide whether or not I’ve slept with too many people.”
He looked amazed at her temerity and entirely too forbidding, but she didn’t care. Or back down.
“Put your claws away,” he ordered her. “I didn’t hurt you.”
He was wrong about that, but she didn’t want to enlighten him if he couldn’t see it himself. If it wasn’t obvious.
If there was any possibility at all that she could survive the rest of this with her dignity intact.
“Khaled.” His name in her mouth seemed to surprise them both, urgent and rough. “There’s no need to drag this out. You asked me to stay. If you want me to go, say so.”
He shook his head then, his mouth in a grimmer line, his gaze dark and serious, and she didn’t know why it made her ache like this. Why it hurt so much when he’d promised her nothing. He’d only treated her like that fantasy version of herself—the elegant, beautiful, beloved Cleo Churchill she’d never dared dream she could become, because she knew better.
Because Brian had taught her better, hadn’t he?
“No, Cleo, I don’t want you to go.” Khaled shoved his hands in his pockets as if he was afraid they might do something against his will, and that made her breath catch again though there was a storm she could see right there on his face, raging on despite the smooth silk of his voice. He shifted, yet never moved that gaze of his from hers, and she wanted that to matter. “I want you to marry me.”
* * *
Three months later, in the great hall of the palace in Jhurat that was seldom open to the public, ordinary Cleo Churchill married His Excellency, the Sultan, in a traditional ceremony witnessed by hundreds in person and far more than that via the television cameras placed strategically throughout.
In your face, Brian, she thought at one point, because she was a tiny, tiny person.
Her hands were covered in henna, she was draped in breathlessly lovely scarves that made her look mysterious even in her own mirror, and the truth was that she felt like a complete stranger to herself as the typical Jhuratan wedding feast began. But then, she hadn’t much liked the easily fooled, easily betrayed Cleo who’d stood there in such shock in Brian’s condo, had she?
Now she was Khaled’s wife. The chosen and beloved bride of a sultan, celebrated around the globe. Which meant she could never be that Cleo, pathetic and humiliated, again. That Cleo no longer existed. Only this one did.
“You must be having a laugh,” her brand-new sister-in-law, Amira, had said when they’d told her the news not long after Khaled’s proposal—not, Cleo reflected as she smiled politely at a cluster of wedding guests, that he had proposed so much as announced his intentions with every expectation of her obedience.
Amira’s mouth had moved into something sulky when Khaled had murmured a phrase or two in silken Arabic. “A thousand congratulations,” she’d said after a moment, her eyes so like her brother’s, more silver than gray then, and fixed on Cleo intently, her mouth a petulant curve despite her words. “I hope this brings you everything you want.”
Not exactly sincere happiness on her behalf, but then, that had been thin on the ground. Cleo’s family in Ohio had been baffled when she’d called to tell them the news and to invite them to come to Jhurat and meet the man who’d so enchanted her that she didn’t intend to move back home at all.
“Are you allowed to come home?” her middle sister, Charity, had asked in her melodramatic way when Cleo had gotten her on the phone. “I’ve seen a lot of movies about this kind of thing—”
“She saw one Lifetime movie,” Charity’s long-suffering husband, Benji, had said on the extension.
“I can go wherever I want,” Cleo had said, holding tight to her patience. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“It’s all a bit of a whirlwind, isn’t it?” her mother had asked after Khaled flew the whole family to Jhurat a month into their engagement, making Cleo tense even when her mother had smiled at her. “Like a fairy tale, with a palace and everything. Though it does seem a bit quick on the heels of all the unpleasantness last spring.”
“This is certainly a flamboyant way to show Brian what he’s missing,” her sister Marnie had chimed in, her eyebrows so high on her forehead she’d looked perpetually surprised ever since she’d stepped off Khaled’s private jet. “If you’re willing to pay that kind of price.”
“If you can’t be happy for me, can you at least try to be polite?” Cleo had demanded, feeling wronged and isolated and annoyed at herself that she’d been so desperate for them to be happy about this.
“If you’re happy, we’re happy,” her father had said then in his blustery way that had ended that topic of conversation, and the fact that he’d looked exactly the same as he always did—solid and decent and kind and real, even standing in a sumptuous palace a whole world away from home—had made Cleo something too close to teary.
“I think love at first sight is great,” her best friend, Jessie, whom Cleo had known since they were in preschool together, had said via Skype from New Orleans. “But does it have to be marriage at first sight, too? Why not wait a little bit? What’s the rush?”
“There’s no rush.”
“You hardly know him. I say that with love.”
“I want this,” she had gritted out, and it was a truth that echoed all the way down to her bones, making her hurt. “I want this more than I’ve ever wanted anything else.”
“Okay.” Jessie’s eyes had been so worried, and Cleo had known what she’d say. “But you wanted Brian, too.”
“Jessie,” Cleo had said fiercely, “I need you to support me. Please? Can you just su
pport me?”
And her best friend had nodded jerkily, then smiled wide and had never mentioned waiting or Brian again.
But all of that was nothing once the media got hold of the story, and Cleo’s whirlwind romance in ancient Jhurat with its darkly handsome sultan claimed the imagination of people everywhere.
They combed through her life. They found embarrassing old pictures and splashed them online, on news shows, in those glossy magazines that made up things and printed them as breathless truth. They spoke to people who claimed to be old friends and talked about Cleo as if she were a vestal virgin claimed by a barbarian king. They made up stories and sassy nicknames, speculated, gossiped and called her the new Grace Kelly. The new Kate Middleton. The snider ones tutted and made dark predictions based as much on Jemima Khan’s divorce from Imran Khan as on that humiliating picture of Cleo in a slutty Halloween costume her sophomore year in college that she was positive Brian had released to the tabloids. Perhaps in revenge, as no one seemed to care too much about his regrettable chapter in Cleo’s life.
“This is awful,” she’d complained to Khaled one night at dinner, in a kind of wondering despair. “How do famous people bear it? How do you?”
“I didn’t dress myself in a catsuit and parade about my undergraduate university,” he’d said in that dry way that made her flush, that she wasn’t certain was either amused or disapproving. Or both.
“That was a private picture.” And she’d been hideously embarrassed that he’d seen it. That her parents had seen it. That the entire world had seen the effects of too much bravado and way too much beer. “But that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”
“No,” Khaled agreed. He’d taken her hand in his and played with it idly, as if he was unaware of the wildfire that even so innocuous a touch ignited within her when she knew very well he wasn’t. “Most famous people stop reading about themselves and the fantasy lives the papers concoct for them.” He’d met her gaze with that dark one of his as he lounged there across from her, so close and yet still so far out of reach that it made her stomach tighten. “I’d advise you to do the same.”
Undone by the Sultan's Touch Page 5