The ravenous world—hungry for stories that ended happily ever after in castles with good-looking princes or kings or even sultans gazing adoringly at ordinary girls from next-door places like Ohio, just as everyone dreamed, Margery assured her—ate it all up with a spoon.
“You look so sophisticated!” Jessie had cried one night a few weeks before the wedding. They’d been on a Skype call after a charity ball in Paris that Khaled had wanted to attend for the press attention alone, and if her best friend’s expression wasn’t quite as thrilled as her tone of voice, Cleo told herself it was simply the computer connection. The long hours Jessie had been putting in at her law firm. Nothing more. “Like a movie star!”
“I’ve never felt more beautiful,” Cleo had told her, and it was true.
Because when she looked in the mirror, she was glowing. With happiness. With disbelief that this was happening to her. With excitement about the life that lay before her, gleaming as brightly as the jewels Khaled lavished upon her or the smiles he parceled out like rare and precious gifts.
With that happily ever after that the whole world was suddenly as invested in as she was. That she was certain she’d earned.
And she was the only one who knew that Khaled hadn’t touched her again as he had that night in his courtyard, or in that hall outside the suite of rooms she still inhabited.
“We will save something for the marriage bed, I think,” he’d told her when she’d tried to move their nightly kisses somewhere hotter that same night in Paris, after spending so much of the evening dancing in his arms in front of all the cameras.
“What if I don’t want to wait?” she’d asked, wild and very nearly furious with wanting him. Desperate with needing him.
He’d run his finger down her nose and smiled, though there was an edge in it.
“You will do it anyway,” he’d told her softly.
“Because you say so?”
“Because I wish it,” he’d replied, which she’d thought was pretty much the same thing. “Is that not enough?”
It had been an agonizing three months, Cleo thought now as the wedding feast roared on around her, but the waiting was over at last. Khaled might have been deep in conversation with emissaries from other countries, the dignitaries and financiers she understood he needed to lure to Jhurat and could in a different way than before, thanks to the worldwide interest their wedding had generated, but soon enough they would be on their own. He would take her from the palace and she would finally, finally be his in every possible way.
That same fire she’d tasted that night three months ago simmered in her at the thought, making her cheeks heat, making her stomach clench in delicious anticipation, making her feel hungry and wild despite all the eyes trained on her.
Almost as if he’d left them both unfulfilled deliberately.
“Where are we going?” she asked when Khaled finally took her by the hand and led her from the banquet to the sound of so many cheers, though the truth was she didn’t care at all as long as he was with her.
“You will see when we get there,” Khaled told her, and then he smiled down at her in a way that made her quiver deep inside, all that dark intent on his fierce face, all of his focus on her, at last. At last. “Though I must warn you, wife, that I doubt you will see much at all outside my bed.”
CHAPTER FOUR
KHALED WAS PREPARED to give in to this madness—this wild hunger he knew better than to indulge—for exactly one week.
“Take more time,” his father had told him in one of his lucid moments, so few and far between these days. “All marriages need time to recover from the onslaught of all that wedding nonsense. That takes more than a week.”
“I appreciate that, Father,” he’d said, though the old man’s gaze had already been losing focus as he’d spoken, and his father was possibly the last man on earth whose advice Khaled would ever take regarding such matters. “But a week is all the time I can allow.”
He had carved out seven days and decided that would be that.
Because the way to craft the kind of marriage he required could not involve this simmering heat that danced between them, making it harder to concentrate than it should have been. Making him question his own decisions. Making him feel things he didn’t want to feel. He had courted her deliberately, rushed her to the altar, made her the very picture of fairy-tale romance for all the world to sigh over—but now it was done and it was time to change direction. Reap the rewards of the attention their wedding had brought to Jhurat and distance himself from his too-tempting bride before he repeated the mistakes his own parents had made.