Undone by the Sultan's Touch

“Wonderful,” she said, smiling benevolently at her sister-in-law, and possibly much too widely. She remembered that Khaled had once suggested that Amira needed feminine guidance, and tried to look like someone who might offer such a thing. “Everything is absolutely wonderful.”

Amira sniffed. “That doesn’t sound much like the Khaled I know.”

“Why don’t you tell me about that Khaled, then?” Cleo asked brightly. She assured herself that she was simply diverting her sister-in-law’s teenage spleen, not pathetically digging for scraps of information on a man she barely knew, yet happened to be married to anyway.

“Khaled is the sultan,” Amira said bitterly. “The end.”

“You understand that he has a tremendous amount of responsibility—”

Amira blew out an aggrieved sigh, cutting Cleo off.

“I understand that he will do anything for Jhurat. Do you think he would have married you if he didn’t get something from it? That’s the way he is. If you cease to be of use, you cease to exist. Trust me, Cleo. I know.”

“There is more to life than responsibility,” Cleo said gently. “Even for a sultan.”

Her sister-in-law looked scornful for a moment—then her expression shifted into something Cleo was terrified to identify, it looked so much like pity.

“Not for Khaled,” she said, and her voice was almost kind. “He is Jhurat, and it will kill him, the same way it killed our mother. It took our father’s mind, turned cousin against cousin and caused our family endless misery. He is cursed. You should know that better than anyone, Cleo.”

“Maybe you don’t know your brother as well as you think,” Cleo said staunchly, but her fingers gripped her fork too tightly, and her eggs had gone cold.

“And maybe you don’t know him at all,” Amira replied, and the worst part was, there wasn’t a trace of her usual biting tone when she said it.

CHAPTER SIX

SEVERAL EVENINGS LATER, Cleo finally had a night to herself. She left the judgmental Margery behind down in the office, made her serene way up to her suite and then locked herself away in the luxurious and sprawling rooms that were her only private space. There was no one to watch her smile and comment on its brightness here, or compare it to last week’s smiles and decide that any deviation meant she was carrying twins.

Cleo didn’t feel much like smiling when she was finally alone. Even so, she refused to succumb to that rolling, twisting, terrible thing inside her, black like ink and covered in spikes. She wouldn’t listen to those voices in her head whispering that of course Amira had been right at breakfast the other day. That everyone had been right.

That deny it all she might, she’d made a terrible mistake.

You will not cry, she ordered herself harshly.

Cleo stripped herself of her latest breathlessly chic clothes—all of which Margery had chosen and Karima had laid out for her without any input from Cleo—and pulled on the silk wrapper that she now wore in place of any comfortable lounging clothes. It took her a few moments and the use of a heavy footstool she had to drag in from the bedroom, but she managed to climb up to the farthest shelf in the large and airy adjoining room that was her closet and pull down her battered backpack from its hiding place.

She let that black, spiked thing crash through her then, as she held the beat-up old pack to her like a security blanket. The sudden, deep heaviness almost knocked her from her feet, so hard and fast did it drop through her.

But she was fiercely happy that she’d insisted Karima pack the bag away instead of getting rid of it altogether. She unzipped it now, pretending she didn’t notice how her heart was pounding, and smiled at all the too-familiar things packed inside. All her travel clothes. The clothes she’d bought while she was in the U.K., gradually phasing out all the things that reminded her of home and Brian and that whole part of her life and replacing them with things that had made her feel intrepid and brave. Like the world traveler she’d wanted to be, sophisticated and jaded and unlikely to be fooled by anyone ever again.

The clothes she hadn’t worn since she’d come to Jhurat. When she’d traded one adventure for another, one identity for the next, with a whole new wardrobe to go with it.

As though she was nothing but a chameleon. Like none of this was real—it was merely one more change of clothes.

Cleo slung the pack into a corner even though she knew she’d have to put it back where she’d found it if she didn’t want Karima to notice what she’d been up to, but frowned when it thunked against the wall. She went over and crouched down, rifling through the pockets until she found what had made the noise.