resources. Family and friends and a perfectly good routine. I was doing everything I was supposed to do,” she said, and it sounded mechanical. Or tasted that way in her mouth. She shrugged. “But in the end, I wanted more.”
“More?” he asked.
More than what waited for her in the wake of a broken engagement in a town full of pity and averted gazes. More than the weak man she had nearly tied herself to, so stupidly. More than Brian.
“It sounds silly,” she said.
There was no way that she could tell him the real reason she’d walked out of Brian’s condo and straight into a travel agency the next morning. There was no way she could admit how blind and foolish she’d been. Not to this man, who was looking at her as though she was neither of those things.
She never wanted to look at a man like this and see pity. She thought it might kill her.
Khaled smiled, and there was nothing like pity on his hard face. “I cannot tell if it does or does not, if you do not say it.”
“My entire life was laid out in front of me.” Brian hadn’t wanted to break up, after all. That had been all Cleo’s doing. And Brian hadn’t been the only one who’d thought her reaction to what he’d deemed his “minor indiscretion” was more than a little overdramatic. Life isn’t a fairy tale, her sister Marnie had said with a sniff. You might as well learn that now. Cleo forced a smile. “It’s a very nice life. I could probably have been content with it. Lots of people are. And I have deep roots in the place I came from, which means something.”
“Yet you were not happy.” He studied her for a moment, and she had to fight the urge to look away from that level stare lest he see all the things she didn’t want him to know. “You perhaps wanted wings instead of roots.”
It was such a simple flash of light, like joy, to be understood so matter-of-factly by a man like this, who was himself so far beyond her experience. But Cleo didn’t know what to do with it, so she pushed on.
“I decided I needed to do something big.” She’d wanted to disappear, in fact, and this was the next best thing. She lifted her hands, then remembered that she was hiding them and dropped them back in her lap. “And it’s a big world.”
“So we are told.”
Cleo almost thought he was laughing. She didn’t want to examine how very much she wished he was.
“I wanted more,” she said again, and there was that fierce note in her voice that she knew was as much bitterness as it was the bone-deep stubbornness that had had her on a plane out of Ohio barely forty-eight hours after walking in on Brian and his girlfriend. “Unfortunately, when you say something like that, the people who are content think that you’re saying their lives are small in comparison.”
“Most lives are small,” he said, this sultan, and Cleo forgot herself.
She laughed. “How would you know?”
Their eyes caught then, his gaze startled, and she didn’t know which one of them was more surprised.
But she refused to let herself apologize, the way some part of her wanted to do.
“You can laugh at yourself, you know,” she said without meaning to open her mouth again. “It won’t kill you.”
His dark gray eyes gleamed. Something Cleo couldn’t quite identify moved over his face, making her pulse and shiver low in her belly. “Are you quite certain?”
And somehow, she was wordless.
“In any event,” he said after a moment, still in that dry, amused tone she could scarcely believe, “you are not wrong. My life has been many things, but not, as you say, small.”
He waved a negligent hand, sultanlike if she’d had to define it, beckoning her to continue. And Cleo did, because at this point, what was there to lose? She had already taken that dive. Might as well swim.
“When I bought my plane tickets, things got a bit tense.” That was as true as the rest, if not quite the full story. But she wasn’t going to tell this man about the accusations she’d fielded. That she was harsh and cold and unrealistic, that she was frigid besides, that she was the problem—because six months later she still didn’t know if any of it was true. And what if Khaled agreed with Brian’s assessment of her? She found she was scowling at him again, but she didn’t care. “But I don’t believe that anyone should have to settle for someone. Or something. Or anything. I think that’s what people tell themselves to make themselves feel better about choices they can’t take back. And I don’t want to settle. I won’t.”
Khaled was definitely smiling then, an indulgent curve to those warrior’s lips, and it made her stomach flip over. Then again. As if she’d been spouting poetry instead of ranting a bit too intensely.
“You are not an ordinary girl,” he said, and Cleo should have found that patronizing. She should have been insulted. Instead she felt molten and consumed, somehow, by that intent gleam in his dark gaze. Or the fact that she thought she’d do anything to keep him looking at her like that. As if he thought she might be marvelous. “In fact, I think you are quite a fascinating woman, aren’t you, Cleo?”
And she wanted him to think so. She wanted that more than she wanted to admit, even to herself. She could have sworn he knew that, too. That it was obvious to him, and reflected in that crook of his hard mouth.
“You’re very kind,” she said.
“You told me before that you have only two weeks left in this trip of yours.” She was stunned that he remembered anything about her and found herself nodding, her eyes fixed on him, burned and breathless at once. “I have a suggestion, Cleo, and I hope you’ll consider it.”
“Of course.” She told herself her voice wasn’t gauzy, insubstantial. That she was simply speaking softly for a change.
“Stay here for your last two weeks,” he urged her.
He leaned forward then and her heart nearly somersaulted from her chest when he reached over and took her hand in his, enveloping her in a wallop of heat. All of that heat and strength and power from his simple touch like a drug inside her, making her heavy and giddy. Dizzy and drunk.
Captured more surely than if he’d locked her up in a cell after all.
His gaze met hers, and she might have been crazy but she could have sworn that all the things she was feeling, all that wildness and fire, he felt, too.
For a moment, there was nothing at all but the two of them.
“Stay with me,” he said softly, and it didn’t occur to her to do anything at all but agree.
* * *
Cleo’s battered blue backpack waited for her in the rooms she’d been told were hers for the rest of her stay, a little touch of reality in the midst of what felt like fantasy on top of fantasy. Because what Khaled had casually referred to as her rooms were in fact part of a luxurious, palatial bedroom suite straight out of those fairy tales her sister sniffed at.
Rich reds decked the high walls, the vast, deep bed was piled deep with pillows in various jewel shades, and the whole of it was shaded by a gloriously sheer canopy that
