“I can miss a dinner with my husband every now and again,” Cleo said, not sure why she suddenly felt gripped by something much too intense for a discussion about scheduling, especially when her dinners with Khaled had been so few and far between lately, and they always ended up naked and wild and not eating anyway, “but not every night. He wouldn’t like it.”
She hated that she felt compelled to use Khaled as a bargaining chip. That she felt compelled to bargain.
Margery didn’t look up from the folder she always held before her like a shield, forever making notes she didn’t share with Cleo.
“His Excellency approved your schedule personally,” Margery said coolly.
Cleo blinked at that unexpected slap, but by now she knew better than to betray her feelings any further than she already had. This new life of hers was divided into the very few private spaces where she could do and say and think as she liked, and everywhere else—and that division had never seemed so stark or unforgiving as it did now.
Margery, she understood suddenly, worked for the palace. For Khaled.
Not for her. How had she failed to notice that before now?
“What part of you is the sultan and which part of you is the man?” she’d asked Khaled while they were still in the oasis. They had been lying lazily in that tent near the sheer blue murmur of the pool, listening to the rustle of the palms and the whisper of the wind through the sands all around them. She had been on top of him, with him still deep inside her, their most recent storm just over.
The next one had been building, even then. It always was.
“They are the same thing,” he’d said, and she’d told herself that hadn’t been warning she heard in his voice. That he hadn’t sounded ravaged, merely intense. “Indistinguishable. The man makes no decisions that do not benefit the sultan.”
Cleo had traced the mesmerizing trail of dark hair that dusted his chest with her fingertips. “And is the sultan as concerned about the needs of the man?”
She’d been joking. But he’d jackknifed up and set her aside, and then wrapped one of the thick towels around him when he went to stand in the tent’s opening, the hot desert sun cascading over him, gilding him in all that gold. Making him that much more beautiful.
And tortured, too, she’d seen when he’d turned back to her.
“There is only the sultan, Cleo,” he’d said in a dark tone. “There is only Jhurat.”
“Was that Jhurat who just made me scream?” she’d asked lightly, certain she could tease him out of this mood. She’d been getting better at it every day. “For the third time today? I thought that was you.”
His mouth had twisted, his dark eyes had flashed and she’d thought he might unleash that temper of his—some part of her had welcomed it, for reasons she’d been unwilling to probe too deeply—but he’d only shaken his head.
“Remember that I warned you,” he’d said, too quietly. “Remember that I never pretended otherwise. Remember this, Cleo.”
But she’d forgotten it the moment he’d pulled her to her feet again, the way she always forgot everything when he touched her. That she hardly knew him. That she’d married the fantasy as much as she’d married him. He’d taken her mouth—and then the rest of her—with that barely restrained ferocity that made her feel more alive, more beautiful, more wild and more cherished than she’d ever been in her life.
She remembered it now, and something cold moved through her, oily and slippery, but she knew better than to show anything while she was under the watchful eye of her secretary.
“Very well, then, Margery,” she murmured instead, folding her hands and gazing out the window as if she was perfectly unbothered. “Thank you.”
It turned out Cleo was very good at acting perfectly composed and quietly confident. Or so the papers—which she couldn’t buy for herself when she was always under some kind of disapproving surveillance or another, yet supportive Jessie scanned and emailed her now and again anyway—claimed. Khaled’s “ordinary queen” was a cool and stylish newlywed, she read in all those articles that talked about her as if they knew her personally. Polite and calm no matter what, as if she’d been born to her brand-new station. Graceful and inscrutable.
It was all exactly how she’d wanted it, in the papers. She was Khaled’s queen, not a woman someone wholly unremarkable like Brian would throw over. She’d started over as if from scratch, completely erasing her entire previous life.
If only she felt she fit into her new one better.
Especially because, now that the wedding was over, what the papers speculated about was whether or not she was pregnant—and if that was the slightly less romantic, and certainly less flattering, reason for her breathlessly quick engagement to a man who had never looked even remotely inclined toward matrimony before. “Does the sultan have a baby on the way?” the headlines asked. “Is that a bump behind Cleo’s coat?” Was this all a game of smoke and mirrors from the start?
It occurred to her as the armored car navigated its way through the crowded center of the city that she had no idea what Khaled thought about having children. That there were any number of things she’d simply...neglected to ask him, so caught up had she been in the whirlwind of their engagement.
In her total commitment to living this fantasy to the fullest.
She’d never regretted that before. She found she did now. More deeply than she wanted to admit.
Margery droned on about the following day’s duties. Cleo tuned her out. Do you know Khaled at all? a dark little voice whispered inside her head. Do you want to?
Because the man she’d thought she’d married wouldn’t have signed off on an entire month of never seeing her without a single reservation. Without so much as discussing it with her first.
But then, there were a lot of things Khaled didn’t find it necessary to discuss with her.
Cleo had expected to move in to his bedroom—with him—when they’d returned from their week in the desert. She hadn’t been able to hide her stunned disappointment when he’d directed her to remain where she was instead, in her suite in a different wing of the palace from his as though she was still a guest instead of his wife.
“We won’t sleep in the same room?” she’d asked, astonished. She’d found herself powerfully addicted to his touch by then, after a week spent so close to him she knew how his skin tasted at different times of day, could feel the weight of his strong arms slung across her, holding her close, even when they weren’t touching. Which was seldom.
“I am thinking only of your comfort,” he’d told her smoothly—but even then, so sated and dazzled by him, she’d wondered if there was too much darkness in his gray gaze as he kept it level on hers. And he hadn’t been touching her then, had he? “I keep odd hours. I wouldn’t wish to disturb your sleep.”
“I like it when you disturb my sleep,” Cleo had replied, frowning at him. She’d been thinking of that very morning in their tent, sometime before dawn, when she’d woken to find him already moving into her, waking her and taking her in the same thrilling moment.
The beauty of it had still thrummed in her all those hours later, a live wire of sensation and desire. That perfect, glorious, dizzying fit that was only theirs, as if they’d been created for each other. How could he want to lose that?
Khaled’s mouth had crooked to one side, his gaze had gleamed in that way she’d discovered meant he wanted her, but he’d only shaken his head—the sultan once more, she’d thought, instead of her dark, passionate lover. “I suspect I will find ways to disturb you in that way more often that I should, no matter where we sleep.”
Later, she’d told herself there hadn’t been a raw note in his voice when he’d said that, very much as if he wished he could fight it. Fight her. She’d told herself she was simply overemotional after such an intense honeymoon, as anyone would be.
And besides, he came to her in the night, almost every night. He was a commanding force, tearing her into a thousand pieces again and again and then disappearing before sunrise.
“No one else will ever touch you,” he’d whispered to her hoarsely in the hot, slick dark, more than once. “I am not a civilized man, Cleo.”
“I don’t want civilized,” she’d whispered back, and when he drove into her with all that power and glory that only grew deeper every time they tested it, she hadn’t been sure she even knew what civilized was. She certainly hadn’t cared.
She’d thought that was passion. Need. Even love, raw and wild.
She’d thought it was enough.
The mornings were harder, because she woke alone. The desert sun rose hot and pitiless over the old city, and the moment Karima appeared in her bedroom to start her day, Cleo had to perform her brand-new role. The wife of the sultan never had days off.
This was the dream, she told herself. Her perfect fantasy. This was what she’d wanted.
The daily breakfasts had disappeared the moment they’d returned from the oasis. Their habitual dinners had stopped being nightly some time back, it was true—but there had always been reasonable excuses for that. Khaled ran a country, after all. He was legitimately busy. How could she possibly complain?
Missing a scheduled dinner, however, wasn’t the same as removing those dinners from the schedule altogether. Cleo mulled that over the rest of the day, as she tended to some official correspondence in the graceful office in the public wing of the palace that Margery had decorated and now ran and yet everyone called hers.
She turned it around and around in her head as she ate her dinner on a tray in her rooms, sitting out on the balcony that overlooked the courtyard and remembering that night out there with Khaled, when he’d first touched her and shattered her without even removing her clothes. Then proposed. How had they gone from that place to this?
How could she not know?
* * *
Late that night, Khaled lay sprawled next to her, his skin so hot against hers and his breath still ragged, and Cleo told herself that questioning him could wait. She wanted to enjoy him. This. She wanted to bask in him as if they had all the time in the world, the way they had at the oasis.
He’d walked into her room earlier without so much as a knock, the way he always did. He’d stood for a moment and stared at her as if she’d summoned him and he was powerless to resist her—and furious about it. He always did that, too. He’d pulled her up from where she’d been reading on the chaise near the windows with a simple curl of his hard hand around her neck, and then he’d been kissing her before she could draw breath. As fierce and as all-consuming as that first kiss. As every kiss. That fire between them blazing on, unchanged and untempered by the passage of time.
None of it was logical. None of it made sense. She’d had sex before and she’d believed it was good sex, but it had never been an inferno like this. It had never battered at her, changing everything, making her worry she might disappear into him forever and worse, that she might not care if she did.
And now they were lying there in the dim light of her bedroom, he was beside her, which was exactly where she wanted him most, and it would be childish to complain about not seeing more of him, wouldn’t it? The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was petulant—or that she couldn’t handle the realities of his life. This fantastical, fairy-tale life. Their life.
“The entire world thinks I’m pregnant,” she told him, blurting the words out recklessly before she was tempted to say something else that might ruin the moment. He stirred beside her, the hand that had been toying idly with her hair—now so long it reached the center of her back, the way he’d told her again and again he liked it—going still.
“Define ‘the entire world,’ please.”
She’d thought he would laugh, and now wished she’d stayed silent and enjoyed basking in him instead. “Perhaps not the whole world. Just its most appalling tabloid papers.”
“Did we not agree that you were not to read the papers? Unless your secretary presents specific articles to you for your review?”
He didn’t sound particularly annoyed, though her stomach was tight and His Excellency approved, Margery had said.
“We did not agree on that, in fact,” she replied with a flash of temper. “You advised me not to read them, and I took your opinion under due consideration.”
“‘Advised’ you?” Cleo didn’t trust that light tone he used, or the way he continued to hold himself so very still. “I was unaware that I operated in an advisory capacity.”
“Because you aren’t often asked for advice?”
“Because most of what I say becomes law even as I say it.” He shifted next to her, and if she was a better person, she thought then, she wouldn’t allow herself to get lost in the play of the muscles in his arms, across his chest. “I don’t allow that filth in the palace and you can hardly stop a motorcade at a news agent’s on the street without making the evening news. How could you possibly read the papers?”
“I didn’t realize that I was actually forbidden from reading anything I chose,” she said, trying to make her voice lighter. Breezier. Because he had to be joking. Didn’t he? “You should know, that makes me want to take out a subscription to a tacky tabloid newspaper immediately. In your name.”
“That friend of yours,” he muttered, which didn’t make any sense until Cleo saw the way he was looking at her, with that considering gleam in his gaze, as though he was puzzling her out. As though she was a puzzle herself. “The lawyer in New York.”
She opened her mouth to correct him, to remind him that Jessie lived in New Orleans, halfway across the country from New York—but didn’t.
“Don’t waste your time reading the papers, Cleo,” he said shortly. An order, not a request. “They’re not worth the paper they’re printed on and that goes double for the online versions.”
“I considered your advice then and now,” she told him after a moment, and her tone wasn’t light at all, that flare of temper inside her far more like a bonfire, and she was sure he could see it in the way she glared at him. “I believe I’ll have to reject it. But thank you.”
She regretted it when he rolled away from her, coming up to sit on the edge of her bed. He raked his hands through that thick, coffee-black hair that she loved to run through her own fingers, but he kept his back to her.
“It is of no matter,” he said, and she was glad she couldn’t see his face then. “You will be pregnant soon enough and the world can occupy itself with counting to nine months however it thinks best. No matter what you read.”
Cleo felt cold, though she couldn’t possibly be cold when she’d been overheated five seconds ago, and she pulled the flung-aside sheet over her as if she thought she might get a chill in the perfectly warm room.
“I’m not planning to get pregnant anytime soon, Khaled.” She didn’t know why her voice was so careful, as if there were imminent danger here. As if there were traps laid all over the floor, the bed, and the slightest sound might trigger them.
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course not.” She wished he would look at her, and then he did and she wished he’d spare her all that darkness and brooding power that made her shiver deep inside. “I’m only twenty-five.”
“You are a woman full grown,” he replied after a moment, that hard face unreadable. “And I require heirs.” A beat, as if he heard how clinical and medieval that sounded, how it ricocheted between them like a bullet. “I want children, Cleo. Our children.”
“But...” Cleo couldn’t understand why her chest felt so tight. When this was only logical, wasn’t it? That he should ask... But then, he wasn’t asking. “You don’t mean now?”
“Why not now?” Yet the smile he aimed at her didn’t quite meet his
eyes, and she pulled the sheet tighter to her.
Relax, she told herself. He can’t order you pregnant!
“This is probably something we should have talked about before we got married. Like so many other things, like sleeping arrangements and schedules.” She swallowed, eyeing him. “I don’t think straight when you touch me, I guess.”
His hard mouth softened a shade. “Nor do I.”
He sounded significantly more baleful than she had, but she was encouraged anyway.
“The good news,” she said calmly, a great deal more calmly than she actually felt, “is that we can take our time making this kind of decision.”
“Cleo.” He moved then, and while there was a ruthlessness in the way he came across the wide mattress until he leaned over her, she got caught in the poetry of it. The sheer athletic perfection of this man, the way she always did. The way she thought she always would, and for the first time, that inevitability felt hollow. “We haven’t taken any precautions. Ever. I assumed we were both on the same page. But let’s be clear. Do you want children? My children?”
“Yes.” But she couldn’t really imagine it, and she couldn’t have said why. “But not—”
Not now, she wanted to say, but couldn’t.
Not when he was so fierce, so close, so dangerous and compelling at once, and she thought she might die if he looked at her in disappointment. With pity. With the knowledge that she was as plain and pointless and frigid as Brian had decided she was. As she was still so afraid Khaled would realize she was, after all.
“That’s agreement enough,” he murmured when she didn’t continue.
He angled himself closer, and she had the barest shred of a moment to wonder if he did that deliberately, if he used that fire between them—
But no. That was crazy.
“A meeting of the minds, is it not?” he asked.
And he took her mouth again with all that consummate skill, that wondrous fire, and Cleo didn’t have the chance to tell him that she was still using the year’s worth of birth control pills she’d brought with her on her backpacking trip.
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