nothing interesting had ever happened. Embarrassing and humiliating, sure. But a cheating fiancé wasn’t interesting. It was boring, run-of-the-mill, exactly as she’d concluded she must have been if a safe and supposedly good man like Brian had been driven to betray her so completely.
She was dreaming, clearly. She’d thought so repeatedly over the past few hours, and her thigh ached from all the times she’d pinched it. She thought she’d have a bruise by morning, and still she found herself lost in the way he moved, all of that leashed strength and easy power obvious even in his handling of a delicate china teacup.
Cleo swallowed, hard, as though that might clear the buzzing in her ears. Or wake her up.
“Tea?” he asked smoothly, as if it were the most natural thing imaginable for a man like him to wait on her, in any capacity, when she could see it wasn’t.
She could see the way he wore his command, so matter-of-factly. That it was a part of him. That the fierceness, the dark ruthlessness she’d seen in him before, was the truth of him. Not this creature, whoever he was, who smiled at her and made her blood heat.
Almost as if he meant to charm her... But that was absurd. She was far too practical to yearn for something so out of her reach. Wasn’t she?
She ignored that insane voice inside her that whispered that after suffering through Brian, she deserved something this impossible. This wild and beautiful.
“I don’t want to keep you,” she said, but she took the cup and saucer he offered her anyway, as if her hands wanted things she wouldn’t let herself wish for. Maybe that was why her voice came out so crisp when she spoke again, as though she was chastising him. “I’m sure you have any number of official duties to perform.”
“None so pressing I can’t take the time to correct a grave error,” he said, settling back against his seat and training that intense gaze of his on her, gleaming with what she didn’t think she dared call amusement. “I apologize for my sister, Miss Churchill. She dragged you into a family matter and put you in a terrible position. It’s unforgivable.”
“Cleo. If I’m to call you Khaled—” and there was something about his name that felt different against her tongue then, like a square of dark, almost-bitter chocolate, and a light flared briefly in his slate-gray gaze as though he tasted it, too “—you should certainly call me Cleo.”
“Is that short for Cleopatra?” he asked almost lazily, making her wish it was. Making her wish with a sudden deep fervor that she could transform herself into whatever might please him—and she didn’t know where that thought came from. Only that she felt it like her own too-warm blood, pounding through her, changing her where she sat.
But then, she’d been there, done that, with a man who could never dream of being Khaled’s equal. She wouldn’t do it again.
“No.” She set down the tea without tasting it, afraid she’d drop the whole of it on the undoubtedly priceless rug beneath her dusty feet. “My mother liked it.”
He studied her for a moment, until she realized she was holding her breath.
“I like it, too,” he said, and she didn’t understand the heat that blasted through her, confusing her even as it made her ache.
“You were talking about your sister,” she reminded him, somehow ignoring that thing that wound ever tighter deep inside her.
“Amira is my responsibility,” he said after a moment, that hard voice of his a shade warmer, though not at all soft. “Our mother died when she was quite small and I suppose I feel as much a parent to her as an older brother. And I regret I’ve not been there for her as I should have. My father’s health has declined quite seriously in the past year and my attention has been on the country. That is not an excuse and not something I could have changed, but it is a factor, I think, in her acting out.”
“I don’t know that it’s possible to really be there for a teenage girl,” she said after a moment, when she was reasonably certain her voice would come out even. “No matter who she is. Feeling abandoned and mistreated is par for the course, as I remember it, whether that’s true or not.”
“I can’t help thinking that she would do better with a female’s guidance. Someone to look up to who is not the autocratic brother who now makes all the decisions about her life that she doesn’t much like. I suspect she finds me as baffling as I find her.”
It took Cleo a moment to look up, because she’d been too busy staring at the frayed cuffs of the dark trousers she’d worn in too many countries to count and wondering with only the faintest little hint of despair why she was dressed like a teenage girl when she wasn’t one. Sitting here in this place—in this palace—she’d never been more aware of how far short she fell of any kind of womanly ideal.
She was a little bit of a mess, if she was honest. Ragged cuffs, torn-off fingernails, worn and battered clothes that she’d been wearing for six months straight and washing out in a hundred hostel sinks. Backpacker chic didn’t translate in a palace, she understood, especially when she was sitting in the presence of a man who made even what she assumed were his casual clothes look impossibly splendid.
You let yourself go, Cleo, Brian had said, as if that were a reasonable explanation for lying and cheating. And we’re not even married yet. I wanted someone who would never do that.
And I wanted someone who wouldn’t sleep with other people, Brian, so I guess my ratty jeans are my business, she’d snapped back at him.
And then what Khaled had said penetrated and she lifted her gaze to find him watching her much too intently, a thousand things she didn’t understand in those slate-gray eyes of his. It made her shiver. It made her wonder.
It made her understand her own insecurities.
Brian was a spoiled child but Khaled was very plainly a man—and a man used to the best of everything, surrounded by beauty on every side. Even his tea set shouted out its delicate, resolute prettiness. Was it insane that she wished she was as pretty, as lovely, as all these things he was used to having around him?
That he might look at her and find her beautiful, too?
Of course it’s insane, she scolded herself. If Brian thought you dressed as though you let yourself go, what must the Sultan of Jhurat think?
“The best cure for teenage girls is the passage of time,” Cleo said, curling her lamentable fingernails into her palms and out of sight. Time was also the best cure for embarrassment, she’d found, though there were new humiliations all the time, apparently. “I speak as someone who used to be one. The only way out is through, I promise you.”
She had Brian in her head again, and she hated it. He didn’t deserve to take up any space inside her. How had she ever believed otherwise?
“And is this why you have traveled so long and so far?” Khaled asked after a moment. “To give yourself this time?”
“I haven’t been a teenage girl in quite a while.” It was almost as if she wanted to make sure he knew she was a grown woman, and Cleo refused to analyze why on earth she should want that. She shifted in her seat, trying to ease that clenched, knotted thing inside her. “This was more to prove that I could.”
“Why was that something that required proof?” asked a man who, she imagined, wouldn’t have to prove himself. Ever.
No
