“You are a remarkably cruel man,” she said quietly, and somehow she knew it was a direct hit.
“That was a simple truth,” he said roughly. “Would you prefer I lie to you, Cleo? Even now?”
“Yes,” she lied. “You used to be much better at it.”
“Too bad.” He eyed her, and a different kind of heat twisted between them then, almost too painful to bear. Cleo didn’t know how she managed to hold his gaze. “What exactly did I do to you to make you run like that, as though I was some demon you were so desperate to leave that it required an escape plan?”
There was absolutely no reason at all that she should feel that bright curl of shame inside her then. She felt it hot and red at the tops of her ears, and the fire of it in her belly. As if she were the one who had wronged him.
“You know what you did.” Her own voice sounded distorted. Choked and strained by all the things she refused to let herself feel.
He was closer then. Too close, she realized, as she started to instinctively back away from him. Cleo forced herself to stand still, no matter how near that put her to that impossibly cut chest of his, that absurdly perfect body. No matter if she could feel the heat of him blasting through her, reminding her how cold it was without him, even here in the soft, warm South.
And no matter that only very dimwitted creatures stood so close to obvious predators like this one.
“And yet here you are,” Khaled murmured, a lilt in his voice that arrowed deep into her, making her melt, making another shiver of goose bumps scatter over her skin at the sound. “Happy to remain in the middle of a dark street exchanging barbs with me. Not the faintest shred of fear on your face.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she snapped, and the faint gleam in his eyes made her wish she’d curbed that too-revealing burst of temper. Then she thought about what he’d said and she scowled. “And if you were going to let me go, why did you change your mind? Let me guess—pride? Arrogance?”
“Yes.” That gleam in his gaze intensified, until she could feel it inside her, blazing through all her dark places. “Yours.”
She was breathless again, and there was nothing but Khaled, standing too close to her as if they were held in the same vicious grip. As if he knew her far better than she’d imagined he did, and she couldn’t believe how stripped naked that made her feel.
“Mine?” she repeated, not sure she wanted to know. But like everything with Khaled, she couldn’t seem to stop. “That’s ridiculous.”
“The wild-goose chase to Johannesburg was entertaining, of course,” Khaled said, his gaze sharpening on hers. “But if you truly wanted to be rid of me, you should have enacted your daring escape without leaving behind that snide little taunt, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t taunt you.”
“Of course you did.”
He pulled his hands from his pockets and then he moved, and it was all too smooth, inexorable—and he was there, right there. She was up against the wall with his hands flattened on the battered bricks on either side of her head, his face level with hers. And his gray eyes were so dark, so serious, they looked blacker than the thick night surrounding them.
And saw everything.
Cleo shivered, deep inside.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
It was a question, soft against the night. It wasn’t an accusation.
She wished it had been. That might have been easier. And she didn’t pretend she didn’t know exactly what he meant.
“How could I?” she asked, hating that raggedness in her voice. That thickness. “I told you I wasn’t ready to have children and you ignored me.”
“I don’t think so.” He kept her pinned to that wall at her back with nothing more than that quiet, implacable stare of his. She was frozen solid, and he wasn’t even holding her still. “I tried to keep you in a box, but it never quite worked, did it? You didn’t want to tell me because you needed ammunition.”
“Ammunition?” Cleo was shaking, though, and she didn’t know why. There was something moving inside her, something she suspected he already knew was there, and she didn’t want this to happen. She wanted to run. She wanted to hide. But he was right there, he was watching her, and she couldn’t move at all. There was nowhere left to hide. “Ammunition for what?”
“Proof,” he said, in a tone she might have thought was gentle had she not seen that deadly serious look on his face. “How could you possibly stay with a brute like me, a man so controlling you had to sneak your own birth control pills?”
There was a cracking deep inside her, as if the earth were leaping beneath her feet and tearing her apart, and Cleo was lost in it. Torn asunder. A terrible need swept through her, harsh and riotous, and she was drowning in this, in him, in all the things she’d been holding on to all this time—
“That was what happened!” Her voice didn’t sound like hers at all, and she didn’t know she meant to move until she was slapping her palms against the solid, immovable wall of his chest.
“You hid those pills, Cleo,” he said in the exact same voice he’d used before, insidious and dangerous and wrong, damn him—he was wrong, “the same way you hid yourself in plain sight the moment I gave you the excuse. You flaunted your feigned obedience like the thrown gauntlet it was. Because I was your fantasy and you needed an exit strategy and a reason. And you know it.”
Cleo was shaking her head, or she was simply shaking, and she couldn’t tell which.
“No,” she gritted out, desperate and furious and panicked besides. “I loved you. I bent over backward for you. I became a different person for you. I would have done anything for you and you were horrible to me that night—”
“Yes,” he agreed, and there was that temper there, finally, in his dark, low voice, as if he was losing his own battle with his control. How could she feel that like a victory? “That one night you surprised me and I was mean. Very mean. And your response to that was to act like an ice queen for months and then abandon me without a word.” He stopped, as if to catch his breath, but his gaze slammed into her. Spearing through her as though he could hold her aloft with the weight of it alone, and she thought that he could. That he was. “I think perhaps you won that argument after all, Cleo. Given that your love is already in the past tense.”
And something inside Cleo simply...snapped. It was like a storm, finally breaking into thunder and frantic sheets of rain. It rolled through her and out of her, and she hardly knew what was left in its wake.
Tears poured down her face, she was sobbing and she found each of her clenched fists held firmly yet gently in his hard, capable hands with no memory of how they got there, his chest tipped against hers so she had no choice but to simply writhe, pinned between him and the wall and that raucous tumult that simply would not stop until it wrenched her apart—
“I hate you,” she whispered.
It took her a moment to realize that he was far closer to her than he’d been before, and that the insistent drumming she felt and heard wasn’t more New Orleans street music but her own pulse. And that it lit her up with every beat. With every breath.
With that look on his gorgeous face, not remote at all now.
“I hate you,” she said again, desperately.
Cleo had never wanted anything more than for that to be true.
Khaled’s beautiful mouth, so hard and so cruel, shifted into that tiny curl that she knew was only and ever hers, and this time she had no doubt that the dark thing she could see in his gray eyes and all across his ruthless face was regret.
Regret and grief and all the rest of the unwieldy things that were tearing her apart where she stood.
“I know you do,” he said, gravel and command, and then he leaned forward and claimed her mouth with his.
* * *
She was like lightning in his arms,
wild and raw and his, and she still tasted like fire.
Khaled angled his jaw for that perfect fit, hauling her closer to him, not caring that they were on a public street. Not caring if every last paparazzo found them there and plastered this nearly savage kiss all over the planet. Not caring if the entire world witnessed what happened here.
It was carnal, hot, perfect. Unmanageable. Untamable. Intense and insane.
It was something more than simply right.
He had planned his vengeance carefully. It had taken longer to locate her than it should have, and he’d found he admired her ingenuity when he wasn’t dreaming up ways to make her pay—and dearly—for her temerity.
But then Nasser had taken a harder look at the only friend of hers who could have helped her pull something like that escape off. It had taken them no time at all after that to finally locate Cleo herself in a questionable neighborhood in this ruined swamp of a city, made of equal parts jazz and folklore, poverty and grift. And Khaled had come to find her like a righteous thundercloud, prepared to drag her back with him by her hair if necessary.
Where he’d planned to make her pay for her desertion for a very long time to come, in as many highly imaginative ways as he could.
And then he’d seen her.
He’d watched her let herself out of the old house where she was staying, a stately monument to the genteel decay that so marked this humid, flowery place. He’d followed her as she’d walked all over the city with a certain aimlessness and lack of self-preservation that indicated she did it often. He’d noted the slope of her shoulders, the defeated gait in place of her customary grace, how skinny and tired she looked in the uniform of all the women her age in this dirty, grimy, oddly enchanting place: battered jeans and boots, and a flowing sort of sweater wrapped over a T-shirt the color of coffee.
She was his wife. His wife. And she looked as though she’d erased him and the life they’d led as easily as she’d left him in the first place.
And yet when he’d stepped out to confront her on this pretty little side street in the middle of the bustle and song of the French Quarter on another long and boisterous night, vengeance was the last thing on his mind.
So Khaled kissed her like the drowning man he was.
He kissed her again and again, sliding his hands around to hold her steady for all the ways he needed to taste her, learn her, have her. Remember her. She trembled and she shook, and then she pressed that lithe, amazingly responsive body against him and everything simply melted.
And for a long while there was nothing but that white-hot fire, eating them alive, and who cared what was left when it was done.
It was the loud burst of drunken laughter that reminded him where he was, the cackling of the women and loud shoes clomping against the concrete as a group of revelers wandered past. Khaled blinked down at Cleo, unable to believe how out of control things had become.
How out of control he had become.
His hands had slid down the back of her jeans and he was cupping that delicious bottom of hers as he held her against his hardness, her silken skin warm and soft against his palms. One of her hands was buried in his hair while the other slid over his naked chest—and he had no memory whatsoever of her unbuttoning his shirt.
He muttered a filthy curse in Arabic, and Cleo’s gold-soaked eyes rose to meet his.
“Let go of me,” she said, but it was the barest whisper, and he thought he recognized that look on her face then. Pure self-loathing.
“I don’t want to,” he muttered, but he pulled his hands away anyway.
“Of course you don’t,” she said, and there was a hard misery in her eyes. “Because you want control. That’s all you ever want. You use this thing that happens between us to make me crawl, to make me beg, to make me—” She cut herself off, as if she didn’t dare speak the words out loud. “On a public street!”
“This thing has as much power over me as it does over you,” he said through the sand in his throat, that furious clawing inside him again, as though it was new.
Her eyes flashed with disbelief. “I know why you’re here, Khaled. This isn’t about me. You want to avoid the scandal that happens when the world finds out the fairy-tale bride has left her fairy-tale prince.”
“Three seconds ago we were an inch away from having sex in front of the whole of the city of New Orleans. I obviously don’t care that much about a scandal.”
“You’re the one who built that fairy tale in the first place. Of course you care.”
“There’s a difference between a marketing campaign and my life,” he snapped, that iron control of his a distant memory. “Our life.”
“No.” Her voice was rough but her chin was high. “There isn’t. There never was.”
She shuddered, hard, as if she’d been sliced through with a cold wind, and then she shook her head, all that glorious hair of hers swinging slightly as she did, her mouth still slightly swollen from his, and he wanted her in his arms with a fierceness that bordered on sheer desperation.
“Tell me you didn’t come here to fetch your wayward wife and shuttle her back home to a life of quiet obedience in Jhurat,” she said then, those pretty eyes of serious and dark. “Tell me you came because you actually wanted to talk to me about the things that have happened between us. Tell me, Khaled. I’ll believe you.”
“Cleo.” Her name was like a prayer, and he had given up on praying a long time ago. But he couldn’t bring himself to lie to her. Even now.
She shook her head. “That’s what I thought.”
He wanted to hit something hard, like the wall or the whole damned city itself, but he only stood there before her instead. His shirt hung open, he was disheveled and unhappy, and she was still the only thing he could see. The only thing that mattered.
As though she was the only light in all of this, after all.
“When will you see what this really is?” he threw at her, not caring if he was too loud. Not caring if he knocked down those walls with the force of his voice. Not caring about anything but making sure that she understood this at last. Understood him.
“I know exactly what this is.”
“You don’t. You are the one thing—this—” and he moved his hand between them in an inadequate representation of that wildfire that still pulsed in him, in her, in the air around them, thicker and more dense than the Southern night “—is the only thing I can’t control.”
Khaled had spent six weeks without her, in the profoundly dark place she’d left in her wake. He didn’t want to do it again.
“You want control?” His voice was a torment, ripped from deep inside of him, and he couldn’t begin to imagine what expression he wore on his face when Cleo flinched. But she didn’t take her eyes off him.
And Khaled opened up his hands in a heretofore unknown gesture of supplication, and he offered himself to her, right there on a dirty American street surrounded by refuse and drunkards on all sides.
For the first time in his entire life, not the sultan but the man, and he couldn’t regret it. If anything, he exulted in it. “Then, by all means, take it. I’ll give you all night.”
CHAPTER NINE
FOR A MOMENT, CLEO didn’t understand him.
She was still fighting off the dizziness from that internal storm that had nearly swept her away, followed by that devastating kiss that had nearly gone too far. As a one-two punch went, it left her breathless and reeling. Wrecked.
But Khaled stood there, waiting. Watching her, as if he didn’t think she was wrecked at all.
“Exactly what do you mean?” she asked, because she couldn’t trust where her mind had gone. Because this was Khaled, who prized obedience above all things—
“Whatever you want,” he said, and her temper cracked inside her again, like a whip, lashing into her the way she wis
hed she could lash into him. Because none of this was what she wanted. She’d wanted happy. She’d wanted the whole damned fairy tale.
“I don’t want to play these games with you, Khaled. We both know you couldn’t last five minutes with someone else in control. You’d explode.”
“Try me.”
His gaze was dark and hard and very, very serious. Cleo’s pulse kicked into a higher gear. She ignored it.
“What do you suggest?” she asked in as quelling a tone as she could manage, folding her arms over her chest and hoping she looked tough rather than half-sick with desire and halfway to drunk on all the impossibly steamy images streaming through her head. “Drinking games on Bourbon Street? Truth or dare with all the other tourists who wander past? That sounds right up your alley. You can lecture everyone on your superiority while downing hurricanes and flashing people for Mardi Gras beads.”
“Or,” he suggested in that low, carelessly seductive way of his, as if he didn’t have to try to sound that way because he simply was that compelling, “you could take the night and do as you like. In private. As I offered.”
“You didn’t specify private. What you said was all night.” She tilted her head to one side. “The whole night?”
His eyes gleamed silver and Cleo’s mouth went dry when he inclined his head in that impossibly regal, enormously attractive way that meant nothing but bad things for her self-control.
“With me in total control,” she clarified, and he held her gaze for a long moment. It took her a beat to realize she was holding her breath.
Khaled nodded again.
“You can’t do it,” she breathed, but she was already wavering. Imagining.
Plotting.
And Khaled smiled, as if he knew it.
“I can handle it, Cleo. Can you?”
* * *
It wasn’t until they were both standing in the foyer of the house she’d been staying in, a typical Garden District remodel with its polished wood floors, abundant fireplaces and elegant Southern touches throughout, that it really hit Cleo.
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