Undone by the Sultan's Touch

“No, Cleo, I don’t want you to go.” Khaled shoved his hands in his pockets as if he was afraid they might do something against his will, and that made her breath catch again though there was a storm she could see right there on his face, raging on despite the smooth silk of his voice. He shifted, yet never moved that gaze of his from hers, and she wanted that to matter. “I want you to marry me.”

* * *

Three months later, in the great hall of the palace in Jhurat that was seldom open to the public, ordinary Cleo Churchill married His Excellency, the Sultan, in a traditional ceremony witnessed by hundreds in person and far more than that via the television cameras placed strategically throughout.

In your face, Brian, she thought at one point, because she was a tiny, tiny person.

Her hands were covered in henna, she was draped in breathlessly lovely scarves that made her look mysterious even in her own mirror, and the truth was that she felt like a complete stranger to herself as the typical Jhuratan wedding feast began. But then, she hadn’t much liked the easily fooled, easily betrayed Cleo who’d stood there in such shock in Brian’s condo, had she?

Now she was Khaled’s wife. The chosen and beloved bride of a sultan, celebrated around the globe. Which meant she could never be that Cleo, pathetic and humiliated, again. That Cleo no longer existed. Only this one did.

“You must be having a laugh,” her brand-new sister-in-law, Amira, had said when they’d told her the news not long after Khaled’s proposal—not, Cleo reflected as she smiled politely at a cluster of wedding guests, that he had proposed so much as announced his intentions with every expectation of her obedience.

Amira’s mouth had moved into something sulky when Khaled had murmured a phrase or two in silken Arabic. “A thousand congratulations,” she’d said after a moment, her eyes so like her brother’s, more silver than gray then, and fixed on Cleo intently, her mouth a petulant curve despite her words. “I hope this brings you everything you want.”

Not exactly sincere happiness on her behalf, but then, that had been thin on the ground. Cleo’s family in Ohio had been baffled when she’d called to tell them the news and to invite them to come to Jhurat and meet the man who’d so enchanted her that she didn’t intend to move back home at all.

“Are you allowed to come home?” her middle sister, Charity, had asked in her melodramatic way when Cleo had gotten her on the phone. “I’ve seen a lot of movies about this kind of thing—”

“She saw one Lifetime movie,” Charity’s long-suffering husband, Benji, had said on the extension.

“I can go wherever I want,” Cleo had said, holding tight to her patience. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“It’s all a bit of a whirlwind, isn’t it?” her mother had asked after Khaled flew the whole family to Jhurat a month into their engagement, making Cleo tense even when her mother had smiled at her. “Like a fairy tale, with a palace and everything. Though it does seem a bit quick on the heels of all the unpleasantness last spring.”

“This is certainly a flamboyant way to show Brian what he’s missing,” her sister Marnie had chimed in, her eyebrows so high on her forehead she’d looked perpetually surprised ever since she’d stepped off Khaled’s private jet. “If you’re willing to pay that kind of price.”

“If you can’t be happy for me, can you at least try to be polite?” Cleo had demanded, feeling wronged and isolated and annoyed at herself that she’d been so desperate for them to be happy about this.

“If you’re happy, we’re happy,” her father had said then in his blustery way that had ended that topic of conversation, and the fact that he’d looked exactly the same as he always did—solid and decent and kind and real, even standing in a sumptuous palace a whole world away from home—had made Cleo something too close to teary.

“I think love at first sight is great,” her best friend, Jessie, whom Cleo had known since they were in preschool together, had said via Skype from New Orleans. “But does it have to be marriage at first sight, too? Why not wait a little bit? What’s the rush?”

“There’s no rush.”

“You hardly know him. I say that with love.”

“I want this,” she had gritted out, and it was a truth that echoed all the way down to her bones, making her hurt. “I want this more than I’ve ever wanted anything else.”