“Okay.” Jessie’s eyes had been so worried, and Cleo had known what she’d say. “But you wanted Brian, too.”
“Jessie,” Cleo had said fiercely, “I need you to support me. Please? Can you just support me?”
And her best friend had nodded jerkily, then smiled wide and had never mentioned waiting or Brian again.
But all of that was nothing once the media got hold of the story, and Cleo’s whirlwind romance in ancient Jhurat with its darkly handsome sultan claimed the imagination of people everywhere.
They combed through her life. They found embarrassing old pictures and splashed them online, on news shows, in those glossy magazines that made up things and printed them as breathless truth. They spoke to people who claimed to be old friends and talked about Cleo as if she were a vestal virgin claimed by a barbarian king. They made up stories and sassy nicknames, speculated, gossiped and called her the new Grace Kelly. The new Kate Middleton. The snider ones tutted and made dark predictions based as much on Jemima Khan’s divorce from Imran Khan as on that humiliating picture of Cleo in a slutty Halloween costume her sophomore year in college that she was positive Brian had released to the tabloids. Perhaps in revenge, as no one seemed to care too much about his regrettable chapter in Cleo’s life.
“This is awful,” she’d complained to Khaled one night at dinner, in a kind of wondering despair. “How do famous people bear it? How do you?”
“I didn’t dress myself in a catsuit and parade about my undergraduate university,” he’d said in that dry way that made her flush, that she wasn’t certain was either amused or disapproving. Or both.
“That was a private picture.” And she’d been hideously embarrassed that he’d seen it. That her parents had seen it. That the entire world had seen the effects of too much bravado and way too much beer. “But that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”
“No,” Khaled agreed. He’d taken her hand in his and played with it idly, as if he was unaware of the wildfire that even so innocuous a touch ignited within her when she knew very well he wasn’t. “Most famous people stop reading about themselves and the fantasy lives the papers concoct for them.” He’d met her gaze with that dark one of his as he lounged there across from her, so close and yet still so far out of reach that it made her stomach tighten. “I’d advise you to do the same.”
“But it’s all so invasive,” she’d said, frowning. “It makes me feel hunted—”
His gaze had been so intense. Very nearly ferocious.
“It is unfair, of course,” he’d said, and there’d been that harsh undertone to his voice then that she hadn’t understood. “But this obsession the world has with my bride—with you—benefits Jhurat. If you are our Grace Kelly, that makes us Monaco, and that is precisely what we need. You understand this, I hope?”
Duty governs everything I do, he’d told her once before, and that had hung between them then, sending a kind of chill straight down her spine.
“Of course,” she’d assured him. “Of course I understand.”
Because Cleo wanted this. She wanted the goddamned fantasy. She wanted sleek and elegant Cleo Churchill who’d bewitched a sultan—the woman she read about in the papers. She wanted happiness and fairy tales and unrealistic bliss. She deserved it.
“Don’t you look fancy!” Marnie had exclaimed when she’d seen the way Cleo dressed for dinner in Jhurat, and again, not in a way that was precisely complimentary.
“I’m marrying a sultan,” Cleo had bitten out, sharper and ruder than she’d meant to sound, trying hard not to fidget and pull at the chic dress she wore instead of the cargo pants and T-shirts she’d lived in at home. “I should look the part, don’t you think?”
It hadn’t been lost on her that Khaled wouldn’t permit her to let herself go, if only because he provided her with a wardrobe. Or that, because he told her she was beautiful, she wanted to be exactly that for him.
“You should look like you,” Charity had replied fiercely, but Cleo had tuned them both out.
She deserved this. All of it. And particularly Khaled.
She wanted to believe that most of all.
It had been no great hardship to listen to Margery, the social secretary Khaled had hired for her, who had ushered Cleo through all her interviews and had crafted her image—and her carefully edited story of who she was and how she’d come to attract the notice of her powerful fiancé in the first place—to her soon-to-be husband’s precise specifications.