Undone by the Sultan's Touch

“This isn’t a debate, Khaled. Answer me.” She scowled at him in that way of hers that always undid him, with its total lack of the usual reverence he commanded. That he had missed so much more than he cared to acknowledge. “Or admit that you can’t keep your promise. That you can’t let anyone have control over you, ever.” She shrugged, and her voice was too casual when she continued. “Between you and me, I don’t think you can.”

Khaled had never before been so adroitly—or literally—hoisted by his own petard. He couldn’t decide if he hated it with every shred of his being or if he wanted nothing more than to throw himself at this woman’s feet and beg.

Not that he had the slightest idea how to beg, or what for.

This is madness, a voice inside him declared, but he didn’t care. He’d never been anything but desperate where Cleo was concerned. He’d lied to himself from the start—anything to have her, anything to keep her, anything.

Even this.

“My parents were madly in love,” he said after a moment, and he ordered himself to relax as he spoke. “My mother was a tremendous beauty—a great prize—and my father not only won her tribe’s traditional lands when he married her, but her heart in the bargain. It was, by all accounts, a tempestuous and passionate connection as well as a political one.”

“She wasn’t meek and biddable?” Cleo’s face was tellingly devoid of expression. Her arid tone, less so. “Quiet and obedient?”

“She was not.” Khaled never spoke of these things, and it took him another long moment to pull the different pieces together. To decide how best to tell this tale he didn’t wish to share in the first place. “But after she had me, they say, she was never quite the same. Or perhaps there was always that edge in her. It’s difficult to know. Her emotions became uncontrollable. Higher highs. Lower lows.”

“Did she get help?” Cleo asked in a whisper.

“No, of course not.” He eyed her derisively. “My father consigned her to a dungeon and married three younger, prettier wives in rapid succession, forgetting about her entirely in his haste to spread his vicious barbarian seed.”

Her scowl returned. Deepened. “A simple ‘yes, she got help’ would have sufficed.”

“And destroy all your dark fantasies about men like me and my father? I would hate to ruin these desperate imaginings for you, Cleo.”

“If you don’t want to tell me this story, then don’t.” The color was high on her soft cheeks, but that didn’t keep her from aiming that withering glare at him until he felt it like her hands against his skin. “But we’ll both know that you used a diversionary tactic to get out of keeping your promises. I’m all right with that if you are, Khaled. I expect that.”

“My father was in love with her,” Khaled said shortly. “He did everything he could. But he was also the sultan, and it was not a stable time in the region. In the end, he was neither the husband she wanted nor the leader the country deserved, and he has spent the bulk of his life torn between the two.”

“That’s why he shut down the borders,” Cleo said after a moment. “For her.”

“Yes.” Khaled shrugged. “To contain his responsibilities—to focus. But it didn’t work. My mother had Amira—and there are a hundred sad reasons why I am twenty years older than my sister, Cleo. My mother spent those years in varying degrees of despair.” He met her gaze then and didn’t try to hide the grief in his own. For the past, but also for the two of them. “And we all learned far too well that love does not solve anything. It makes things worse. It creates unrealistic expectations on all sides.”

Cleo didn’t speak. She reached out a hand and put it on his chest, like a boon. A gift. As if she wanted to share these grim memories with him, or help carry the load of them.

A simple little touch, and yet he felt it everywhere.

“After Amira was born, my mother no longer got out of her bed,” he continued, not recognizing himself in that moment, lost somewhere between these harsh truths and that warm, reassuring press of her hand against his flesh. “It took years, but she eventually died. The doctors called it a wasting disease, though they couldn’t determine any actual cause. But she told anyone who would listen that my father chose his country over his wife, and that was what destroyed her.”

Cleo let out a soft breath, and Khaled found he was even more tense than before.