directly into the car’s path, as if daring Cleo to run straight into him. She heard herself gasp out a curse, but her eyes were fixed on him as surely as if he’d demanded it.
He was tall and fierce, forbidding and uncompromising in the loose robes that marked him a local—a wealthy local—and did nothing at all to conceal his markedly powerful form. The sun was behind him and hid his face, but Cleo could still feel the weight of his stare. Like an impossible knot in her own chest.
He stood there in the center of the road, imperious and bold. He crossed his arms over his broad chest and waited—and it wasn’t until she realized he wasn’t moving that she also realized she wasn’t, either. That she’d stopped the car directly in front of him as if he’d held up his hands like a police officer and commanded it.
When all he’d done was stare.
Despite herself, Cleo shivered. Foreboding. Fear.
And something else, maybe, beneath it, that she’d never felt before.
He bit out something ferocious in Arabic that made the girl beside her jerk in her seat as if he’d slapped her, and Cleo’s stomach twisted.
This is not good, she thought.
“Get out of the car,” he said then, his voice deep and autocratic, and it took a long, shuddering moment for Cleo to realize that this time, he was speaking directly to her. Issuing an implacable order in a language she could understand, right through the glass. “Now.”
“Who is that?” she whispered, still unable to pull her gaze away from him. He was simply too mesmerizing. Too powerful.
The girl beside her let out a sound that was something like a sob, but far angrier. When Cleo finally managed to yank her attention away from the dark and dangerous man taking over the road before them, the girl’s jaw was set in a stubborn line, and her mouth trembled. Making her look even younger than Cleo had originally thought she was.
“That,” the girl said bitterly, staring out the front window at the man who still stood there, not moving an inch, as if he expected it to be nothing but a matter of moments before he was obeyed, “is His Excellency, the Sultan of Jhurat.”
This was, Cleo realized dimly then, a great deal worse than not good.
“What?” she asked weakly, that thudding panic hitting harder, sending out shock waves. He didn’t look like a sultan. He looked like some kind of warrior angel, sent down to smite and awe. She felt both smitten and awed, the sensations too hot and almost painful inside of her. “Why would a sultan—the sultan—chase you down an alley?”
“Because he is a demon from hell.” The girl’s mouth twisted. “He is also my brother.”
Cleo swallowed, hard.
He stood there, waiting. And now she understood what that proud ruthlessness meant. What that thing was that emanated from him like a force field, rendering the whole city small and inconsequential beside him.
Cleo’s mind raced, and for some reason, she thought of Brian then. Weak, lying Brian. Brian, who had humiliated her. Brian, who had said he loved her but couldn’t possibly have meant it, could he? Brian, who she’d believed so completely when he’d never had even a shred of the intensity or authority the man before her simply...oozed.
The sultan jerked his head in a silent yet remarkably eloquent command to exit the vehicle.
Immediately.
And Cleo forgot about stupid, cheating Brian and the girlfriend he’d kept on the side for almost the entirety of their doomed engagement.
This was exactly the kind of thing she’d promised her parents back in Ohio would never happen to her, because she’d imagined she was too smart, or too cynical, to fall prey to scenarios like this. This was exactly what her mother and her hysterical aunts had predicted would happen if she did something so radical as explore the world by herself. She could practically hear the doom-and-gloom predictions they’d all shared with her whether she’d wanted them to or not, like a going-away present, as if they were whispering it in her ear from across the planet.
They’d begged her not to do this. They’d told her running away from her problems was only running straight into new ones. And now look what had happened.
The sultan waited. Less patient by the moment.
“Just drive over him,” the girl beside her demanded. “Mow him down where he stands.”
“I can’t,” Cleo said, except she found she was whispering. “I can’t do that.”
And everything seemed to slow down, as though the air was made of syrup and there was nothing but him. That man. The sultan. She shifted the car into Park. Beside her, the girl let out a frustrated noise, but Cleo’s attention was riveted on the man at the end of her bumper.
Still. Watchful. Ferocious.
Her neck prickled with a deep foreboding. With anxiety. With the sense of immensity, as if what she was about to do was already sealed in stone, as ancient and unmoving and inevitable as the venerable city around her, as the old streets beneath her.
As the man before her. The sultan of all he surveyed.
Who couldn’t be weak, she knew somehow, if he tried.
Cleo turned off the rental car’s ignition with a decisive click and then opened her door, ignoring the girl in the passenger seat as she got out and stood there.
The sultan moved then. He nodded at someone behind her and men in military uniforms appeared as if from thin air, surrounding the rental car, all wearing machine guns that dwarfed their bodies.
Cleo didn’t understand a single word of the rapid-fire Arabic, all shouted back and forth in so many harsh and loud male voices, and yet somehow she couldn’t bring herself to look away from the sultan as he continued to stand there staring back at her.
One of his men appeared beside her and held out his hand, making Cleo flinch. She glanced at him, then back at the sultan, aware then of how fragile she was. She felt it in ways she never had before. Fragile and exposed and frighteningly vulnerable.
And it was still better than how Brian had made her feel, two weeks before their wedding, when she’d come home early from work and found him on the living room floor of his condo with that woman.
The sultan said something, and she realized it wasn’t the first time.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” she said, and she hardly sounded like herself.
He paused, and she wished she had something more than this shadowy impression of his face. That the sun would hide behind the buildings at last so she could look at him without her eyes watering. So she could convince herself that he was neither as cruel nor as inhuman as he appeared while backlit like a god.
So she could tell herself that the twisting heat that knotted her belly, low and hot, was based on something more than the intuition she’d learned better than to trust.
But his voice, when it came, was as calm as it was deep, despite the tension she could hear beneath it, and for no reason at all, it eased her. Even as it set her on fire.
“Do
