Undone by the Sultan's Touch

She had Brian in her head again, and she hated it. He didn’t deserve to take up any space inside her. How had she ever believed otherwise?

“And is this why you have traveled so long and so far?” Khaled asked after a moment. “To give yourself this time?”

“I haven’t been a teenage girl in quite a while.” It was almost as if she wanted to make sure he knew she was a grown woman, and Cleo refused to analyze why on earth she should want that. She shifted in her seat, trying to ease that clenched, knotted thing inside her. “This was more to prove that I could.”

“Why was that something that required proof?” asked a man who, she imagined, wouldn’t have to prove himself. Ever.

No one would cheat on this man. No one would dare.

“I had a decent job in a nice office doing human resources. Family and friends and a perfectly good routine. I was doing everything I was supposed to do,” she said, and it sounded mechanical. Or tasted that way in her mouth. She shrugged. “But in the end, I wanted more.”

“More?” he asked.

More than what waited for her in the wake of a broken engagement in a town full of pity and averted gazes. More than the weak man she had nearly tied herself to, so stupidly. More than Brian.

“It sounds silly,” she said.

There was no way that she could tell him the real reason she’d walked out of Brian’s condo and straight into a travel agency the next morning. There was no way she could admit how blind and foolish she’d been. Not to this man, who was looking at her as though she was neither of those things.

She never wanted to look at a man like this and see pity. She thought it might kill her.

Khaled smiled, and there was nothing like pity on his hard face. “I cannot tell if it does or does not, if you do not say it.”

“My entire life was laid out in front of me.” Brian hadn’t wanted to break up, after all. That had been all Cleo’s doing. And Brian hadn’t been the only one who’d thought her reaction to what he’d deemed his “minor indiscretion” was more than a little overdramatic. Life isn’t a fairy tale, her sister Marnie had said with a sniff. You might as well learn that now. Cleo forced a smile. “It’s a very nice life. I could probably have been content with it. Lots of people are. And I have deep roots in the place I came from, which means something.”

“Yet you were not happy.” He studied her for a moment, and she had to fight the urge to look away from that level stare lest he see all the things she didn’t want him to know. “You perhaps wanted wings instead of roots.”

It was such a simple flash of light, like joy, to be understood so matter-of-factly by a man like this, who was himself so far beyond her experience. But Cleo didn’t know what to do with it, so she pushed on.

“I decided I needed to do something big.” She’d wanted to disappear, in fact, and this was the next best thing. She lifted her hands, then remembered that she was hiding them and dropped them back in her lap. “And it’s a big world.”

“So we are told.”

Cleo almost thought he was laughing. She didn’t want to examine how very much she wished he was.

“I wanted more,” she said again, and there was that fierce note in her voice that she knew was as much bitterness as it was the bone-deep stubbornness that had had her on a plane out of Ohio barely forty-eight hours after walking in on Brian and his girlfriend. “Unfortunately, when you say something like that, the people who are content think that you’re saying their lives are small in comparison.”

“Most lives are small,” he said, this sultan, and Cleo forgot herself.

She laughed. “How would you know?”

Their eyes caught then, his gaze startled, and she didn’t know which one of them was more surprised.

But she refused to let herself apologize, the way some part of her wanted to do.

“You can laugh at yourself, you know,” she said without meaning to open her mouth again. “It won’t kill you.”

His dark gray eyes gleamed. Something Cleo couldn’t quite identify moved over his face, making her pulse and shiver low in her belly. “Are you quite certain?”

And somehow, she was wordless.

“In any event,” he said after a moment, still in that dry, amused tone she could scarcely believe, “you are not wrong. My life has been many things, but not, as you say, small.”

He waved a negligent hand, sultanlike if she’d had to define it, beckoning her to continue. And Cleo did, because at this point, what was there to lose? She had already taken that dive. Might as well swim.