Undone by the Sultan's Touch

by Caitlin Crews

  “Better the paparazzi than you.” She laughed, but it was an ugly sound. “But we both know you won’t follow me.”

  “Are you so certain of me, then?” he asked.

  Khaled didn’t know what that was that beat in him, demanding and primitive. He had never known himself less than he did in this moment. He felt precarious and wild, balanced on a cliff above a very deep abyss, and he didn’t want to let her go. Not like this.

  Not ever, that possessive part of him whispered.

  “I’m certain you don’t care enough about me to bother,” she said, and there was that note in her voice then that gave him pause. That sounded far too much like a weathered sort of grief, and he knew that sound. He knew how that felt, how it scraped inside. “This is your pride talking, Khaled.”

  “And what if you’re carrying my child?”

  She laughed softly, and it scraped in him, digging in deeper than it should have until it became gouges. Leaving ugly marks in its wake.

  “I’m not pregnant. I might have been a fool where you’re concerned, right from the very beginning, but I’m not an idiot.”

  “Cleo—”

  “Goodbye, Khaled,” she said, and there was a huskiness in her voice then that he wanted to mean something.

  But even if it did, she ended the call.

  And when Nasser—the only person Khaled could trust with this situation, with the truth about his wife’s unexpected disappearance from his side in the middle of their European tour—traced her mobile number, he tracked Cleo all the way to a hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa. Of all places.

  “Is there any sign of her?” Khaled asked, his own voice flat. He’d resigned himself to this, but he needed to know where she was. She was his wife no matter where she lived, and she would need his protection.

  He was back home in Jhurat, in his empty, echoing palace, made five times its size and ten times as barren by her absence. He was staring out through another window without her, and he told himself what he felt was relief.

  That this confusing interlude with her was over. That he could move on with his life according to his original plan.

  That he could give himself over to his country as he’d always planned.

  “I believe she left you a message, Your Excellency.” Nasser coughed. “I’ll send you a picture.”

  When the photo arrived on his mobile, Khaled stared, his pulse kicking in. Hard, as if he were running flat out into a desert storm.

  It was a picture of a completely unremarkable hotel bed, with Cleo’s mobile phone sitting in the center of the pristine, untouched bedspread. Next to it, she’d left an open package of what it took him long moments to comprehend were birth control pills.

  Her message to him, which better resembled a raised middle finger in the classic American style.

  Which was when Khaled understood that this wasn’t over.

  That he had no intention of letting her go.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “HELLO, CLEO.”

  Khaled’s voice was smooth and dark and deceptively casual. It exploded over Cleo in that split second before she saw him, ripping her open like a red-hot brand against her flesh.

  He stepped out from the shadows and back into her life with that same leashed intensity and hair-raising, ruthlessly controlled power of his that had haunted her day and night since she’d walked out on him six weeks ago.

  Cleo’s heart punched through her chest as she came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the uneven sidewalk on Saint Ann Street. Her stomach slammed to her feet and stayed there, making her feel empty and needy and something frighteningly close to lost.

  “It’s a nice night for a walk, isn’t it?” he asked, in that same mild way that made every single hair on her body prickle into uneasy awareness.

  New Orleans’s infamous French Quarter was mysterious in the sultry evening, as dark and seductive as the air was dangerous and close, from the cracks in the treacherous sidewalks to the beckoning music pouring out from every building on the tourist-packed streets, and Cleo wanted only to blend in. To disappear, the way she did every night, walking like a ghost in and out of the gritty exuberance all around her.

  And now, staring at the man who had reared up before her with a certain terrifying inevitability, his gray eyes a dark storm and a certain satisfaction stamped all over his fiercely beautiful face, she wanted to run.

  Again.

  You always run, a small voice inside her observed, making her frown. Besides, she had the sneaking suspicion that this time, he’d chase her down before she made it to the end of the block.

  “Have you taken to lurking about in alleyways?” she asked instead, and it was a struggle to adopt that cool, unbothered tone. It was a battle to simply stand there beneath the streetlamps while the French Quarter ebbed and swirled around her, as caught in Khaled’s grip again as if he held her in his fists—particularly when some rebellious part of her wished he would do just that. “That seems somewhat beneath your great, sultanic dignity, doesn’t it? You may have to brush up on your stalker skills. Find an approach that better suits your position.” She bowed her head slightly and wasn’t too sarcastic as she added, “Your Excellency.”

  Khaled only watched her, that gaze of his so intent it seemed to burn into her, through her. The corner of his mouth kicked up slightly, his only response, and Cleo was appalled—if not surprised—when she felt her own body tip over into that same familiar reaction she recognized from before, instant and treacherous.

  Damn it. She felt nervous and silly—and her body still longed for him, powerfully—when she should have felt scared. Intimidated. Angry.

  Anything but attracted. Anything but hungry.

  “What do you want?” she asked quietly, because she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of a stronger response. No matter what her traitorous body happened to be doing at the sight of him.

  “Guess,” he invited her. Less quietly.

  Cleo didn’t want to guess. She wanted to turn around and run all the way back to the lovely old mansion in the Garden District that Jessie’s friend had agreed to let Cleo stay in, far enough away from Jessie’s own condo on Canal Street that, they’d imagined, they’d have an extra roadblock in place should Khaled come looking for her.

  Cleo had assured Jessie that he wouldn’t.

  Yet now that he was standing in front of her, she understood that deep down, she’d known this was all on borrowed time. This small and cozy little life she’d built for herself in these past few weeks, her mornings sitting in a bustling, trendy café on Magazine Street pretending she fit into the life all around her, her afternoons and evenings spent taking long, brooding walks around the hectic, frantic, beating heart of this old, battered survivor of a city while she told herself she belonged here.

  Deep down, she’d been waiting for him, and she really didn’t want to face what that meant.

  And he was even better than she remembered, so overwhelmingly male, so ferocious, drenched in his absolute authority and that air of command he wore like his own skin. The punch of him against the sweet Southern night was almost too much to take in. He was dressed in dark trousers and one of those soft-as-a-caress shirts of his that managed to cling to every single muscle on his solid, lean chest, and he should have looked like one more tourist cluttering up the busy neighborhood, indistinguishable from the rest.

  But this was Khaled. He didn’t blend. His gray gaze was too direct, too commanding. Too knowing. Even the way he stood before her was a symphony of athletic grace and that carnal menace, like the ruler he was, well used to deference and respect. And obedience, that little voice inside of her reminded her. His dark brows rose as he studied her, as if he expected all of that from her, too. Now.

  He was in for a surprise, then.

  “It’s been a l
ong six weeks,” Cleo said, and she made no particular attempt to modify that edge in her voice.

  “It certainly has.”

  She ignored that, the silken ferocity of it, the hint of his harsh temper, barely restrained. “I’ve had a lot of time to get in touch with my anger.”

  “Your anger? Did someone leave you under cover of dark?”

  If she hadn’t been looking right at him, she might have believed that soft, polite tone of his. But she could see the flash of temper in those eyes of his, the way his hard mouth tightened.

  She told herself she didn’t care, because she shouldn’t.

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me,” he said, shifting slightly, so that his shoulders blocked out the whole of the street. Possibly the world.

  Cleo shrugged. “You strike me as the kind of man who doesn’t like it when his toys go missing, even if he’s sick of playing with them.” Her reward for that barb was the faint clenching of his jaw, the further narrowing of that implacable steel gaze. “Even if he has no intention of doing anything with those toys except locking them away somewhere. Barefoot and pregnant, if possible.”

  “Let’s step away from the toy box metaphor, shall we?” He used that mild tone that was Khaled at his most lethal, and his gaze was cold, to underscore it.

  “I wasn’t aware I was being metaphoric,” Cleo retorted as if she were unaffected by him. “But I’m not surprised you’re here. This feels so tediously inevitable it might as well be déjà vu.”

  She didn’t like the smile that moved over his hard mouth then, however briefly. Mostly because it rang in her like some kind of bell, and she despaired of herself.

  “You are the wife of the Sultan of Jhurat,” he observed. “Tediously inevitable though it may be.”

  “Technically,” she said thinly. “And temporarily.”

  His glare silenced her. “You are famous the world over, Cleo, as you are very well aware—so famous that magazines are sold on the barest speculation that a tight-fitting dress you wear to lunch might in fact be an indication of impending motherhood. Did you not tell me so yourself? There is no undoing it now.”

  He didn’t seem to require an answer and he moved then, prowling around her in a circle that probably appeared lazy but felt like a tightening noose, making her itch to break and face him while he did it—but Cleo made herself stand still. She waited.

  And she doubted very much that it was an accident that he was doing the very same thing he’d done to her the day they’d met on that side street in Jhurat.

  “And yet you wander a notoriously dangerous city in the dark of night, alone. Vulnerable. Wide open to any and all attacks. Advertising to all and sundry your isolation, whether they come at you with a camera or a fist. Almost as if you are deliberately tempting fate.”

  He completed his circuit and Cleo hated that as she stared back at him, filled with a bravado she hoped he couldn’t see beneath to that awful trembling within, she wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch him. To assure herself that this was real, that he was here, that this wasn’t that painful dream she had almost every night, swollen with regret and grief, longing and loss.

  And she still didn’t know when this had happened. She’d thought leaving him would set her free and instead she’d discovered that she’d left her heart behind in his keeping. It made her angry—and anger was good, she told herself. It hid all the pain and uncertainty beneath. It felt like action.

  “Come on, Khaled.” She hardly recognized her own voice, it was so mocking. As if she was someone else—someone as implacably fierce as he was. “Say your usual horrible things about what a disappointment I am and how I could never measure up to your exalted standards and impeccable breeding, or how will I recognize you?”

  She was sure she only imagined that flicker of something darker in his gaze, something shockingly like regret.

  “It is your reckless disregard for your own safety that concerns me.”

  “I was perfectly safe,” she informed him. “Until now.”

  “I am a danger to you, that is certain,” he agreed, all of that dark heat and hunger, temper and control in that low voice of his, and it made goose bumps prickle down the length of her arms. “But you are a beloved icon, whether you like it or not. Do you know what it would do to my people to lose you?”

  “Your people.” Of course. This wasn’t about him, her, them. It never was. “I didn’t ask to be an icon, Khaled.”

  “Didn’t you?” Silken threat, and something agonized beneath it that she didn’t want to acknowledge. “But this is about responsibilities, Cleo. Not our little fantasies of the lives we might have had were we different people.” He let out a sound that was not quite a laugh, and he never shifted that dark gaze from hers. “You wanted something bigger, did you not? You wanted something other than your small life. Guess what? Bigger lives go hand in hand with far bigger consequences.”

  For a moment, Cleo couldn’t breathe. She remembered sitting in that parlor with him, so long ago, but it was like remembering a movie. Of a very silly girl who should have known better than to think that the lion perched in the chair beside her would do anything but eat her whole.

  “I can see the virtue in a tiny little life these days,” she threw at him, her voice rougher than she would have liked, because it gave away too much. “I want one.”

  “And yet you have not returned to the one you left behind in Ohio,” he pointed out, the words like a series of blows she had to fight not to crumble beneath. “The one you told me was such a good life. Why not, Cleo? Why spend six weeks in purgatory instead? You could have the entire life you walked away from. You must know this. And yet you are here.”

  “You don’t know anything about my life in Ohio. I doubt you’ve ever been to Ohio.” She sounded too fast, too furious, as though he’d ripped her wide open—but of course he hadn’t. He didn’t know anything about a small, boring life. How could he? “And I’m not going back to Jhurat with you.”

  “You seem certain of that, as you are certain of so many things.” His gaze was hard and nearly silver in the darkness, and she still wanted to reach over and touch him. So much so, her hands ached with the struggle to keep them to herself. She was horrified with herself. “I am less certain.”

  “I want a divorce.”

  That corner of his mouth twitched, but only slightly. “You can’t have one.”

  “I wasn’t asking your permission,” she snapped at him. “I was announcing a plan of action that has nothing to do with you.”

  “And yet I regret to remind you that you require my permission to dissolve our marriage, Cleo,” he said as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. It burned in her like acid that she had no idea if it did. “We were married under the laws of the Sultanate of Jhurat. And guess who makes those laws?”

  Jessie had cautioned her that this might happen. That Khaled was the kind of man who didn’t like to lose. That there would be loopholes within loopholes, and none in her favor.

  “Then I hope you’re prepared for a very lengthy, very public, no doubt supremely embarrassing separation,” Cleo said. “Which will include me walking wherever I damn please. And without the assistance of one of your PR harpies like that Margery.”

  Khaled blew out a breath, turning his head away and then shoving his hands into his pockets. Hard, as though he’d wanted to do something else with them entirely. He said something she had to strain to hear—but then the thick, seductive darkness was split open by the bright clamor of a jazz trombone and an accompanying trumpet in the nearby intersection, the jaunty notes breaking through the night and echoing off the walls around them as the musicians whirled by in a cloud of vibrant noise.

  When they’d passed, when Cleo could breathe again, her heart was making its own kind of clatter and Khaled was watching her, something brooding a
nd yet much too inviting in his dark gray eyes.

  “Are your men surrounding me?” she asked, raising her chin as if she might try to fight them off herself. “Am I five seconds away from being thrown in the back of a dark-windowed SUV and smuggled out of the country against my will?”

  “It is, I think, high time you watched a better class of film.” Khaled’s voice was dry, and she didn’t want to feel that easing inside her at this unwelcome reminder that he wasn’t always so harsh. That he was sometimes even funny. “I have no intention of smuggling you anywhere. This is life, Cleo, not an American action hero franchise.” He studied her. “And besides, I think we both know there is no need for such theatrics when all I need to do is touch you and you’d follow me anywhere.”

  That he was probably right sat like a stone in her, but she scowled at him anyway and hoped he couldn’t see the flush of heat that enveloped her.

  “Yes, of course,” she said in a bored tone that hurt to produce. “Because I’m so stupid and inexperienced next to—” she waved her hand at him in a gesture that could only be deemed flippant “—all that. I don’t know that I’d brag about that if I were you, Khaled. But to each his own.”

  He looked incredulous and thunderous at once. But Cleo just wanted him gone. She wanted this over.

  Didn’t she?

  “I might have let you go,” he said softly, but with that dark steel beneath that seemed to slice right through her and lodge somewhere inside her at the same time. “It was what you wanted, what you went to great lengths to secure, and I was not, I am aware, at all the husband you fantasized I might be.”

  “It had nothing to do with fantasy!” That stung.

  “It had everything to do with fantasy,” he retorted, and there was a crack in that iron control of his. She could hear it in his voice and it shook her. “It was the easiest thing in the world to make you fall in love with me—you were halfway there already when I took you back to the palace.”