faint nod. “Give my man your keys.”
An implacable order delivered in perfect English, with a crisp British accent to boot. Cleo knew she should ask questions. Demand to know what was happening to her, what he planned to do next. Instead, she simply obeyed.
She opened her hand and the man beside her took the keys from her palm, and the whole time she was lost in the will of the powerful man whose face was still in shadows before her.
Why couldn’t she seem to breathe? Why did it feel as if the earth were buckling beneath her feet when she could see—because no one else was reacting to it, no one else was moving, the car was solid and unmoving beside her—that it was only happening inside of her?
Everything seemed to stretch out, slow and taut, but then the car engine turned over beside her, the men and the car and the angry girl disappeared after a brief consultation, and Cleo was standing alone in an alleyway in a foreign country with a man so great and powerful he held a title she’d half believed only existed in books.
He moved then, and she wished he hadn’t. He was like liquid, a threat wrapped in poetry, athletic and menacing at once. The knot inside her pulled taut, red and hot. Cleo stood still as he walked in a slow circle around her. He held something in his hands and she realized it was the wallet she’d left sitting in one of the cup holders in the car. One of his men must have—
“Eyes on me,” he ordered her, his voice a silken command.
And when she jerked her attention back up from her wallet to his face, she could see it, finally. Could see him.
Beautiful, something whispered inside her, though he wasn’t.
He was much too fierce. He reminded her of those remote villages she’d found in her travels, clinging to the sides of rugged mountains long days from anywhere, proud and breathtaking and unimaginably tough. He had thick dark hair and a poet’s face made shockingly masculine by a warrior’s cool, light gaze and the sort of tough jaw Cleo associated with soldiers and martial artists—and thugs. A blade of a nose. Faint lines around his eyes suggested he must have smiled at some point in his life, but she couldn’t imagine it. He seemed carved entirely from stone.
He looked so masculine and so inarguably fierce it was almost as if he and soft, round-faced, nice-looking Brian were of a different species. She told herself that was why her heart beat so fast. Because he was the not Brian.
And because he really was beautiful.
“You are American.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
His gaze moved over her and she had to fight not to squirm. She was wearing dark trousers and scuffed boots beneath a loose-fitting T-shirt, and a dark jacket as much to cover herself in this conservative part of the world as to block the faint chill in the air, hinting at the coming fall night. She’d twisted her long hair back, but the long day had coaxed some of it down again, strands falling forward messily and making her feel much younger than her twenty-five years.
Cleo didn’t want to ask herself why, exactly, she wished there was something more in his dark gaze then. Something to match that heat inside her.
He flipped open her wallet and looked inside. “You are a very long way from Ohio.”
“I’m traveling,” she said, and her voice sounded strange. Huskier than usual. Raw, somehow. “Backpacking.”
“Alone?”
She didn’t want to admit that, for some reason. For a hundred reasons. But he lifted his gaze from her wallet and the license he was presumably studying, and she felt hot. Caught.
“Yes,” she said, fighting to sound normal. “It’s been six months. I fly home in two weeks.”
And the truth was, she didn’t want to go back. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“Unless, of course, you find yourself detained,” he said, as if he could read her mind.
She frowned. “Why would I find myself detained?”
“A prison sentence would be considered a lenient penalty in this country for a foreign national caught in the act of kidnapping a member of the sultan’s family,” he said, almost casually.
It was undoubtedly suicidal to scowl at this man. But Cleo only thought about that after she did it.
“I didn’t kidnap anyone. Your sister ran in front of my car. Should I have flattened her beneath my tires?” She didn’t remember herself so much as see that incredulous expression on his face, and she coughed once. Delicately. “I thought I was helping. And also not committing vehicular manslaughter.”
The sultan stared at her for a moment, that incredulous expression shifting to something else. Something far more dangerous.
“What do you imagine my sister was running from?” he asked, and it occurred to her that his easy, casual tone was in truth neither of those things.
“Maybe you’re marrying her off? To some ally or other?”
But that notion came from novels she’d read, not any particular knowledge about this place or him, and he seemed to know that. Even to expect it, she thought, when his slate-gray eyes darkened.
His magnificent mouth, already close to cruel in its beauty, thinned. He watched her for a moment, his cool gaze like a fire inside her, turning her inside out.
That had to be panic, she told herself, but she knew better.
“What a vivid imagination you have, Miss Churchill.”
She didn’t want him to know her name. She didn’t want him to look at her like that, or at all. She wanted to run.
Except she really didn’t. She’d been running for six months. This was the first time she’d wanted to stand still instead. Cleo couldn’t let herself think too much about that. It made the heat in her burn hotter.
“Your sister didn’t tell me what she was running from,” she said, somehow sounding far cooler than she felt. And not because she couldn’t seem to do anything but obey him, no matter if the order he gave her was silent, conveyed by those smoky gray eyes that she found as unnerving as she did mesmerizing. “She jumped in the car, that’s all. And then you appeared before us like every horror-movie villain in the history of mankind. Only without an ax. Happily.”
Again, that arrested look. That slow blink, as if he couldn’t believe she’d said that. Neither could she.
“My sister is sixteen.” His voice was low. Measured. “She doesn’t wish to return to her boarding school. What you interrupted was a tantrum.”
“She asked for my help,” Cleo said staunchly, and found herself lifting up her chin in a defiance that had to mean she had some kind of death wish. “And I’m not going to apologize for helping her, no matter how ferocious you become.”
He studied her, cold and fierce and impassive. He is a sultan, her brain kept reminding her. This is deeply, deeply foolish. He could do as he liked with her, and they both knew it. Mouthing off to a man like this
