Undone by the Sultan's Touch

Cleo had assured Jessie that he wouldn’t.

Yet now that he was standing in front of her, she understood that deep down, she’d known this was all on borrowed time. This small and cozy little life she’d built for herself in these past few weeks, her mornings sitting in a bustling, trendy café on Magazine Street pretending she fit into the life all around her, her afternoons and evenings spent taking long, brooding walks around the hectic, frantic, beating heart of this old, battered survivor of a city while she told herself she belonged here.

Deep down, she’d been waiting for him, and she really didn’t want to face what that meant.

And he was even better than she remembered, so overwhelmingly male, so ferocious, drenched in his absolute authority and that air of command he wore like his own skin. The punch of him against the sweet Southern night was almost too much to take in. He was dressed in dark trousers and one of those soft-as-a-caress shirts of his that managed to cling to every single muscle on his solid, lean chest, and he should have looked like one more tourist cluttering up the busy neighborhood, indistinguishable from the rest.

But this was Khaled. He didn’t blend. His gray gaze was too direct, too commanding. Too knowing. Even the way he stood before her was a symphony of athletic grace and that carnal menace, like the ruler he was, well used to deference and respect. And obedience, that little voice inside of her reminded her. His dark brows rose as he studied her, as if he expected all of that from her, too. Now.

He was in for a surprise, then.

“It’s been a long six weeks,” Cleo said, and she made no particular attempt to modify that edge in her voice.

“It certainly has.”

She ignored that, the silken ferocity of it, the hint of his harsh temper, barely restrained. “I’ve had a lot of time to get in touch with my anger.”

“Your anger? Did someone leave you under cover of dark?”

If she hadn’t been looking right at him, she might have believed that soft, polite tone of his. But she could see the flash of temper in those eyes of his, the way his hard mouth tightened.

She told herself she didn’t care, because she shouldn’t.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” he said, shifting slightly, so that his shoulders blocked out the whole of the street. Possibly the world.

Cleo shrugged. “You strike me as the kind of man who doesn’t like it when his toys go missing, even if he’s sick of playing with them.” Her reward for that barb was the faint clenching of his jaw, the further narrowing of that implacable steel gaze. “Even if he has no intention of doing anything with those toys except locking them away somewhere. Barefoot and pregnant, if possible.”

“Let’s step away from the toy box metaphor, shall we?” He used that mild tone that was Khaled at his most lethal, and his gaze was cold, to underscore it.

“I wasn’t aware I was being metaphoric,” Cleo retorted as if she were unaffected by him. “But I’m not surprised you’re here. This feels so tediously inevitable it might as well be déjà vu.”

She didn’t like the smile that moved over his hard mouth then, however briefly. Mostly because it rang in her like some kind of bell, and she despaired of herself.

“You are the wife of the Sultan of Jhurat,” he observed. “Tediously inevitable though it may be.”

“Technically,” she said thinly. “And temporarily.”

His glare silenced her. “You are famous the world over, Cleo, as you are very well aware—so famous that magazines are sold on the barest speculation that a tight-fitting dress you wear to lunch might in fact be an indication of impending motherhood. Did you not tell me so yourself? There is no undoing it now.”

He didn’t seem to require an answer and he moved then, prowling around her in a circle that probably appeared lazy but felt like a tightening noose, making her itch to break and face him while he did it—but Cleo made herself stand still. She waited.

And she doubted very much that it was an accident that he was doing the very same thing he’d done to her the day they’d met on that side street in Jhurat.

“And yet you wander a notoriously dangerous city in the dark of night, alone. Vulnerable. Wide open to any and all attacks. Advertising to all and sundry your isolation, whether they come at you with a camera or a fist. Almost as if you are deliberately tempting fate.”

He completed his circuit and Cleo hated that as she stared back at him, filled with a bravado she hoped he couldn’t see beneath to that awful trembling within, she wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch him. To assure herself that this was real, that he was here, that this wasn’t that painful dream she had almost every night, swollen with regret and grief, longing and loss.