Undone by the Sultan's Touch

This was the dream, she told herself. Her perfect fantasy. This was what she’d wanted.

The daily breakfasts had disappeared the moment they’d returned from the oasis. Their habitual dinners had stopped being nightly some time back, it was true—but there had always been reasonable excuses for that. Khaled ran a country, after all. He was legitimately busy. How could she possibly complain?

Missing a scheduled dinner, however, wasn’t the same as removing those dinners from the schedule altogether. Cleo mulled that over the rest of the day, as she tended to some official correspondence in the graceful office in the public wing of the palace that Margery had decorated and now ran and yet everyone called hers.

She turned it around and around in her head as she ate her dinner on a tray in her rooms, sitting out on the balcony that overlooked the courtyard and remembering that night out there with Khaled, when he’d first touched her and shattered her without even removing her clothes. Then proposed. How had they gone from that place to this?

How could she not know?

* * *

Late that night, Khaled lay sprawled next to her, his skin so hot against hers and his breath still ragged, and Cleo told herself that questioning him could wait. She wanted to enjoy him. This. She wanted to bask in him as if they had all the time in the world, the way they had at the oasis.

He’d walked into her room earlier without so much as a knock, the way he always did. He’d stood for a moment and stared at her as if she’d summoned him and he was powerless to resist her—and furious about it. He always did that, too. He’d pulled her up from where she’d been reading on the chaise near the windows with a simple curl of his hard hand around her neck, and then he’d been kissing her before she could draw breath. As fierce and as all-consuming as that first kiss. As every kiss. That fire between them blazing on, unchanged and untempered by the passage of time.

None of it was logical. None of it made sense. She’d had sex before and she’d believed it was good sex, but it had never been an inferno like this. It had never battered at her, changing everything, making her worry she might disappear into him forever and worse, that she might not care if she did.

And now they were lying there in the dim light of her bedroom, he was beside her, which was exactly where she wanted him most, and it would be childish to complain about not seeing more of him, wouldn’t it? The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was petulant—or that she couldn’t handle the realities of his life. This fantastical, fairy-tale life. Their life.

“The entire world thinks I’m pregnant,” she told him, blurting the words out recklessly before she was tempted to say something else that might ruin the moment. He stirred beside her, the hand that had been toying idly with her hair—now so long it reached the center of her back, the way he’d told her again and again he liked it—going still.

“Define ‘the entire world,’ please.”

She’d thought he would laugh, and now wished she’d stayed silent and enjoyed basking in him instead. “Perhaps not the whole world. Just its most appalling tabloid papers.”

“Did we not agree that you were not to read the papers? Unless your secretary presents specific articles to you for your review?”

He didn’t sound particularly annoyed, though her stomach was tight and His Excellency approved, Margery had said.

“We did not agree on that, in fact,” she replied with a flash of temper. “You advised me not to read them, and I took your opinion under due consideration.”

“‘Advised’ you?” Cleo didn’t trust that light tone he used, or the way he continued to hold himself so very still. “I was unaware that I operated in an advisory capacity.”

“Because you aren’t often asked for advice?”

“Because most of what I say becomes law even as I say it.” He shifted next to her, and if she was a better person, she thought then, she wouldn’t allow herself to get lost in the play of the muscles in his arms, across his chest. “I don’t allow that filth in the palace and you can hardly stop a motorcade at a news agent’s on the street without making the evening news. How could you possibly read the papers?”

“I didn’t realize that I was actually forbidden from reading anything I chose,” she said, trying to make her voice lighter. Breezier. Because he had to be joking. Didn’t he? “You should know, that makes me want to take out a subscription to a tacky tabloid newspaper immediately. In your name.”