Undone by the Sultan's Touch

Cleo tilted her head back slightly as if that had been a blow to her chin, and Khaled wished he knew the right words to say to make this better. All of this. But he’d been made from blood and sacrifice, desert justice and the stark, uncompromising Jhuratan sun. He could never spout poetry as that Italian had done. He wouldn’t know where to start, and even if he did, he thought he’d end up speaking of battles and losses. Duty and demand. Not the things that mattered here. To her.

But the words he needed tangled in his throat, and it seemed he could only scowl at her when it was the last thing he wanted to do.

“Not yet.” She eyed him. “Does that require an apology? I thought it took both of us to succeed or fail in getting pregnant, if I’m remembering my high school biology classes correctly.”

Did he imagine that edge to her voice then? That odd sheen in her golden gaze? Or was he merely desperate for any sign of a break in that wall—the wall he’d built himself? His hand tightened at her waist, and he knew he didn’t imagine her slight, sharp intake of breath.

“Cleo,” he began.

“I don’t mean to interrupt, of course,” she said, very calmly—as if she was as unmoved by him, by this, as he was nearly unmanned by her. “But I believe those hoteliers you wanted to speak with have arrived.”

For a beat, Khaled couldn’t remember why he’d want to speak to anyone but Cleo. But then he turned to look and reality reasserted itself. He needed these people, these wealthy, pampered people who lived to throw their money around. That’s why he was here. Jhurat required as much foreign investment as possible, and Khaled’s role was to convince everyone he spoke to that the only thing medieval about his homeland was the architecture.

Not him. No matter how Cleo inspired him to behave.

“We must talk,” he told her, in that stilted, caveman way he couldn’t seem to stop. Why was it he could control an entire country and not his own wife?

“Of course,” Cleo agreed. He thought she’d say anything to push him even further away, and the fact that he should exult in that, that it indicated he’d succeeded with her, was but one more darkness inside of him to match the rest. One among so many. “Whatever you want.”

That was the trouble. Khaled knew what he wanted. What he’d wanted from almost the first moment he’d laid eyes on this woman.

And he still couldn’t have it.

It didn’t matter what he felt. It never had.

* * *

In the end, it was simple.

It had taken months of preparation, Jessie’s invaluable counsel in figuring out the best way to leave a man who would never permit it should she ask outright, and a willingness to look directly into that man’s face and tell a thousand lies of omission that Cleo still found so much harder than she should have—but that night, it was simple.

When they returned to their hotel suite, Khaled simply eyed her in that hungry, imperative way of his that made every nerve ending inside of her dance into awareness, shrugging out of his sleek formal jacket and yanking at his tie without ever breaking her gaze.

And Cleo felt it as if she’d been dropped into a pit of flames, headfirst.

The way she always did. No matter what he said to her. No matter what he did.

No matter what she thought she ought to feel.

“Didn’t you want to talk about something?” she asked politely, and it was still so hard to keep her voice smooth. It was more difficult than it should have been to gaze straight back at him as if she was unmoved by him, so dark and imperious and still so damned gorgeous.

Nothing had changed, she reminded herself. Not Khaled, certainly, despite the way he watched her sometimes when he thought she wasn’t looking. And that meant her resolve couldn’t change, either.

Particularly if he wanted to “talk.” And then send her to a doctor, who, she felt certain, would be unlikely to uphold any kind of confidentiality about Cleo’s birth control choices when it pertained to the sultan’s desire for heirs.

“Tomorrow,” he muttered, watching her as if she were edible and small, a perfectly sized treat—and he was famished. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow works for me,” Cleo lied agreeably, and ignored the little shiver that snaked down her spine.

And then he was prowling toward her, that dark, sexy gleam in his gaze that still made her breath catch in delicious anticipation. Her heart didn’t know she hated him—or that she knew she should hate him. It only beat, slow and hard, the closer he came.