And Cleo felt it as if she’d been dropped into a pit of flames, headfirst.
The way she always did. No matter what he said to her. No matter what he did.
No matter what she thought she ought to feel.
“Didn’t you want to talk about something?” she asked politely, and it was still so hard to keep her voice smooth. It was more difficult than it should have been to gaze straight back at him as if she was unmoved by him, so dark and imperious and still so damned gorgeous.
Nothing had changed, she reminded herself. Not Khaled, certainly, despite the way he watched her sometimes when he thought she wasn’t looking. And that meant her resolve couldn’t change, either.
Particularly if he wanted to “talk.” And then send her to a doctor, who, she felt certain, would be unlikely to uphold any kind of confidentiality about Cleo’s birth control choices when it pertained to the sultan’s desire for heirs.
“Tomorrow,” he muttered, watching her as if she were edible and small, a perfectly sized treat—and he was famished. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow works for me,” Cleo lied agreeably, and ignored the little shiver that snaked down her spine.
And then he was prowling toward her, that dark, sexy gleam in his gaze that still made her breath catch in delicious anticipation. Her heart didn’t know she hated him—or that she knew she should hate him. It only beat, slow and hard, the closer he came.
The hotel suite they stood in was a celebration of old-world opulence, a marvel of restoration and generations of money sunk into every detail, and still it faded next to the carnal menace of Khaled. He’d rid himself of his jacket and the shirt beneath it, and as he stalked toward her he was arresting and bold, all that golden skin and the mouthwatering display of his powerful muscles beneath.
If he was less beautiful, Cleo wondered, would that make this any easier? She couldn’t tell.
He stopped in front of her, his gray eyes too dark and his dangerous mouth in that grim line that worked through her like sadness.
“Kiss me,” he ordered her, and there was something in the way he said it. Something too much like despair. It made Cleo’s throat feel tight. It made her clench her whole body, even the soft, hot core of her, where he’d licked her to delirious insanity only a few hours before.
“Khaled...”
But she didn’t know what she meant to say. What she could say. He’d given her exactly one way to live in his world and she didn’t want to do it. She couldn’t do it.
“Cleo.” It was a whisper. Complicated and dark, and that aching in his gaze that made her tremble. His mouth crooked slightly to one side as he reached over and brushed her cheeks gently before holding her there, hands cupped around her face. “Obey me.”
Obey. That terrible word.
And yet it was the only thing she wanted to do, just then. So Cleo ignored everything inside her that railed against him, tilted her mouth toward his and kissed him.
With all of her pain, her regret. The dreams she’d entertained of the life they should have led, her confusion and her worry and that deep, rich vein of anger that ran beneath it. She kissed him for forgiveness and she kissed him in accusation, and he held her face in his hard, hard hands and kissed her back.
As if they had all the time in the world.
It was almost as if he knew this would be the last time. He sank his fingers into her hair, ignoring the combs that fell and the way it all toppled down, tugging her even closer to his heat. It was drugging and dark, utterly perfect, and Cleo couldn’t help herself.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on while he peeled the silver gown down, then kicked it aside when it was at her feet. And she gasped against that delectably hard line of his mouth when he hoisted her up against him, then pulled her legs around his waist.
He was so strong. Built like steel and all of his power focused so intently on her. On the wet heat of her, pressed so intimately against him. On kissing her, again and again, as if he would never tire of her taste.
His hands brushed that ruinous fire over her skin, his mouth against her neck made her cry out his name, and only when she was writhing out her pleasure against him—mindless and delirious and entirely his—did he carry her over to the sofa that stretched across the living area.
And then, when he was stretched out above her, Khaled stopped playing around.
He was relentless. He took her again and again, making her boneless and blissful against him, so gloriously wrung out she thought he must know what she had planned. That the dark, driving need that had ridden him all night must be suspicion—
But he only took her into the shower in his same grimly possessive way and washed her, treating her like a piece of delicate glass. Treating her like something precious—but that means nothing to him, she reminded herself sharply. I could as easily be a vase. He dried her slowly, using the great soft towel the way an artist might use paints, until Cleo was finding it hard to keep her eyes from overflowing with all the things she didn’t want to feel.
He couldn’t be tender. He couldn’t be affectionate. Because that was how she’d imagined him for so long in her mind, how she’d told herself he’d be if she only gave him time, and she knew better. Whatever this was, it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t.
She thought he’d reveal himself somehow when he ushered her back out into the bedroom, but he didn’t. Khaled simply lay down with her in the hotel bed, then curled around her the way he’d done more often than not in these last, confusing days, holding her close and tight.
As though he loved her, when she knew better.
He doesn’t know I’m leaving him, Cleo told herself. He can’t.
“Settle down,” he murmured, a low rumble against her ear, and it didn’t help anything to realize that this was probably the last time she’d hear him like this, so close to her he was setting her alight with the furnace of his body, so close she could feel the graze of his mouth against the shell of her ear. He shifted, running one big hand up to rest between her breasts. Holding her there. “Your heart is pounding.”
And in the dark, where he couldn’t see her, Cleo’s eyes filled with tears.
She waited. She kept herself from crying—which she was certain he would notice no matter how drowsy he was—by sheer force of will. The minutes ticked by, and Khaled drifted off to sleep. And soon enough the clock on the nightstand told her it was nearing three o’clock, which meant it was finally time.
This is it, she told herself, oddly paralyzed now that the moment had come. Now that this was actually happening. It’s now or never.
She told herself that the thing she felt, heavy and bristly and painful, was anything at all but grief.
He didn’t wake when she sat up. He didn’t even twitch, and still she had to order herself to climb out of the bed and do this.
She moved carefully across the floor and crept into the dressing room, closing the door behind her. In the corner stood a selection of wrapped gift boxes, which the odious Margery had selected and Cleo had announced she wanted to inspect personally before they handed them out to Khaled’s business associates on this trip. Playing the good wife all the way to the hilt. She’d swapped one of them for her own box back in Jhurat, and that was the one she opened now, expecting to feel nothing but sheer triumph when she pulled out her battered backpack.
Instead, she felt a rush of something far too bittersweet to name.
She shoved it aside and unzipped the pack, dressing quickly. Her favorite jeans, a bit baggier now then she remembered. A long-sleeved T-shirt she knew was comfortable for long trips and a zip-up hooded sweater over it for warmth. Her old Chuck Taylors.
All the emotion that Cleo was fighting so hard to keep at bay swamped her. She screwed her eyes shut, forced herself to breathe past the constriction in her throat, and then
she swung the backpack over her shoulders and moved back into the bedroom.
Carefully. Quietly.
Faint light from an outside streetlamp peeked through the drawn curtains, and Khaled lay sprawled in the center of the bed the way he always did, as impressive in sleep as he was awake and aware. As formidably, ruinously beautiful.
More so, perhaps, because it was only when he slept that she could look at him without any mask. Without having to play these terrible games. When she could simply admire him. When he looked softer, more approachable. More hers.
And standing there in the gloom of the late night, dressed like the backpacker nobody she’d been when he’d found her, Cleo stared at him for far too long and wished this wasn’t so hard. That it didn’t hurt.
How could she have fallen in love with this man?
And why, when he’d made it perfectly clear how little he felt for her and how pathetic her romantic dreams were, hadn’t it gone away by now?
He shifted in his sleep then and Cleo froze—certain that her hesitation had ruined everything.
But he didn’t wake, and this time, with her heart clattering against her ribs and holding her breath against the fear that she’d lost her only chance to do this, she started for the door and the private elevator that would whisk her away from him.
It was the longest walk of her life.
And when she reached the door, put her hand on the doorknob, she knew.
If she looked at him again, she’d stay. It was that helpless addiction that racked her to her bones. It was that need she couldn’t seem to banish, even now. If she looked at all at his fierce, proud beauty one more time she’d keep gambling that somehow she could break through to him—and that it was worth trying. She’d keep lying to herself about what this marriage was and lose herself completely in the role she’d taught herself to play for him.
How soon would it cease being an act? How soon would she simply become that perfect, empty shell with none of her inside?
Wanting him wasn’t enough. He was the Sultan of Jhurat, and he could replace her. She had no doubt at all that he would—he’d told her that himself. He’d been perfectly, hideously clear. It was long past time she took him at his word.
Cleo pulled in a very deep breath, then let it out slowly.
She ignored the wetness that spilled over from her eyes and down her cheeks, kept her blurry gaze straight ahead of her, and when she walked out on Khaled bin Aziz, Sultan of Jhurat, she didn’t let herself look back.
* * *
Khaled didn’t think anything of it when he woke to discover that Cleo had left their bed. She did that sometimes, didn’t she, he thought with more than a little irritation as he stood beneath the pounding heat of the shower. It was more of that slick, to-the-letter obedience of hers that rubbed like a hair shirt against his skin, leaving him nothing but raw and grim.
And he opted not to seek her out in whatever corner of the grand suite she’d claimed as her own, because he knew what would happen if he did. More of that distracting, opulent firestorm—need and passion and all that rich darkness beneath—that he was half-afraid might kill them both. More proof that all she had to do was touch him and he wasn’t in control at all.
Later, he thought as he left the suite. He would deal with the mess he’d made of things—of her, of this marriage, of all his plans—later.
He was finally finished with the last of his tedious series of sadly necessary morning meetings—the last with a smug and overly moisturized Manhattan financier he’d disliked on sight—when Nasser pulled him aside in the hotel lobby, his expression uncharacteristically dark, and told him something that should have been impossible.
Cleo was gone. Missing. No one had seen her all day.
“Has there been a ransom demand?” Khaled asked at once, already berating himself for failing to take Talaat’s multitude of threats more seriously. He kept his voice low, aware that he was standing where anyone could hear him in a hotel lobby mere steps from Vienna’s famous Opera House, and there was no need to involve the over-eager press.
“None.”
“Signs of a struggle?”
He didn’t want to imagine that. He didn’t want those harrowing visuals in his head. He didn’t know what he’d do if—
But Nasser shook his head. “Nothing like that, as far as we can tell. Her mobile phone and her laptop are the only things missing.”
It took a moment for that intense jolt of fear to dissipate. For Khaled to concentrate on what Nasser had said. And it was the laptop that gave Khaled pause. He blinked and considered.
The laptop, which was covered in old stickers for bands he’d never heard of and which she kept in a bright orange sleeve that was most assuredly not appropriate for the sorts of events Cleo appeared at these days. The laptop, which Cleo would have had absolutely no reason to take with her outside the hotel room—and never had, as far as he knew, unless she was taking the rest of her luggage as well. Which meant that any would-be kidnappers would have had to take Cleo and break into the hotel room to find that laptop while leaving everything else of value in that room behind—
Unlikely.
Khaled considered the scenario for a moment, looking at every angle, not wanting to admit the possibility that she could have played him. Tricked him. Impossible.
“Perhaps my wife has taken a day off.”
“From what, Your Excellency?” Nasser’s voice was mild, as ever. “Surely her life is an endless holiday.”
Khaled glared at him, and the other man had the grace—or the glimmer of self-preservation—to murmur an apology. Khaled moved away from him, pulling out his own mobile as he walked toward a secluded part of the lobby. Because the perfectly obedient creature he’d had at his side these past few months would never do such a thing.
But that wasn’t really Cleo, was it?
Her phone rang once. Then again.
The very notion that Cleo was this devious, this calculating—and this good at it, that she could have spent a night like last night with him and then sneaked out without his having the slightest clue—made his entire body tense in denial.
Denial and then, beneath it, a kick of dark, hot anticipation.
“Hello, Khaled,” she said, sounding as she usually did, calm and unruffled. Wherever she was, it was quiet.
“I’m assuming that you cannot have been abducted, then, if you’re answering your own phone. Much less killed.” He could hear her breathing, and he knew. As surely as if he’d packed her bag for her, hired her a taxi. He knew. He had to fight to keep his voice level. “Where are you, Cleo?”
“What does it matter?”
“I find it matters a great deal.”
“Then by all means,” she suggested, and she didn’t sound calm anymore, “replace me.”
Khaled let out a breath, not realizing he’d held it. He rubbed a hand over his face, unable to tell if he was furious or empty or some odd, painful combination of both. But all he could see was that smile of hers. The real one he’d missed these past few months. Wide and so bright, it had made him feel alive.
As though he could make choices the way anyone else could.
“Is that what this is?” he asked, amazed at how hard it was to keep his voice cool. “Petty revenge on your part because you didn’t care for something I said? I’d have thought that was beneath you.”
“This isn’t revenge, Khaled.” She laughed, and the sound made Khaled edgy. Like ground glass beneath his feet, in his gut. “That suggests you’d care one way or the other that I’ve left you. We both know you don’t.”
Every muscle in his body was tense. Too tense. He gripped his mobile so hard he thought he’d break it, and still, he couldn’t say the things he knew he should. The things that collided in the back of his throat, made him ache.
The things he couldn’t let himself say out loud, because he knew better. Because she deserved better, loath as he was to admit what that meant: that he should never have taken up with her in the first place. That if she wanted to leave him, no matter what rioted in him in opposition to that thought, he should let her go.
His eyes fell shut, and he hated himself. He hated Jhurat. He hated this mess he’d made with his own hands, his own greed for a woman he never should have met in the first place.
But he didn’t say a word.
Cleo was quiet for a moment, waiting, he knew, for him to contradict her. He heard a small sound when he didn’t, like her breath let out in a small, sad sigh, and he detested himself even further.
“I’m nothing but ordinary, Khaled.” His own words were like a spear straight through him. Gutting him, and the worst part was, she said it so mildly. Almost happily, he’d have thought, were it not for that sharp edge beneath. “You should have no trouble slotting a new one in. No one will notice a difference. Least of all you.”
Fury poured through him, black and focused, and that was better. That was familiar.
“If you want to fight with me, Cleo, at least do me the courtesy of doing it in person.”
“I tried.”
He didn’t shout, but it was a close call. “Once.”
“It left a lasting impression.”
Khaled realized he was making a fist, and he dragged his hand through his hair instead. But all he could see was Cleo, who wasn’t in front of him. Who wasn’t in Vienna at all, as far as he knew. Who had somehow lulled him—him—into a false sense of security and then crept out under his nose.
As if he was so uncivilized, so barbaric, that she felt she couldn’t tell him she was leaving to his face. He didn’t know what moved inside him then, a desperate howling through the emptiness, but he hated it.
“I don’t accept this,” he warned her, that fury shifting low, into darkness. Into intent.
“You don’t have a choice, Khaled. It’s not pleasant to discover that, is it?”
“I don’t think you’ve thought this through.” He found it difficult to control that bitterness in his voice. Or that dark thing inside him, inexorable as a rising tide. “The paparazzi will hound you. You won’t find a moment’s peace.”
Undone by the Sultan's Touch Page 12