or felt loud and garish, yet didn’t. Intricate lattice-worked shutters in dark woods graced the many windows and led out to a long balcony, stunning works of art hung on the walls, and complex mosaics were inlaid in the high ceilings and arches. All of that and a sitting room, a dressing room and a closet that rivaled the size of most apartments back home, and a gloriously decadent bath that Cleo could have swum laps in, had she wanted.
There was even a smiling, deferential maid named Karima who fluttered around Cleo as if she were some kind of princess, urging her into the bath that first night and then into a dress she’d never seen before when she got out.
“This isn’t mine,” Cleo protested, her fingers rough against the astonishing smoothness of the deep blue material, the prettiest thing she thought she’d ever felt, slippery and fine against her woefully neglected hands. “I can’t...”
“The sultan insists,” Karima replied, as if that ended the conversation.
As if that was the conversation.
If she was staying here, Cleo had decided during her long, luxurious soak, then she would have to make certain that Khaled realized it was her choice to do so, not his command.
But when she was led into the small private dining room later that evening, Cleo felt as if she’d been transformed into a dream version of herself, and it was hard to remember why there was something wrong about that.
The dress the sultan insisted she wear was long and more elegant than anything she’d ever worn in her life, bare about the shoulders and then swishing over her legs as she walked to make her feel almost shivery, while her feet felt naked in the sandals she’d been given. Her hair had been brushed out and left to swirl around her shoulders in a shining mass that flowed when she moved, and Karima had even slicked a gloss over her lips. It was all overwhelmingly sensual, somehow.
The sultan waited for her in the small dining room arranged around a gurgling fountain with windows that opened over a lush and fragrant interior courtyard, as if they weren’t in a desert at all. He was still dressed all in black, with a jacket over the shirt he’d worn earlier, which made him look as elegant as a hard man could.
And when he turned to greet her, Cleo froze. One of the benefits of never having tried to be the kind of sleek, elegant woman Brian had wanted was that she’d always imagined that if she’d wanted to, she could have transformed herself.
But this was as transformed as she’d ever be, and she knew it. And she felt more naked before this man than she ever had without her clothes.
His dark, cool gaze moved over her, taking in everything from the spill of blue fabric to the silver of the sandals she wore. This was torment, she thought. This was beyond embarrassing—
His gaze lifted to hers at last, and Cleo’s breath left her in a rush at the approval she saw gleaming there. The heat that roared in her in response. Relief and pleasure mixed into one, because if he believed in this version of her she thought she could, too.
Khaled wasn’t Brian. The notion was laughable. Khaled looked at her as though she was as beautiful as he was, not as if he were doing her a favor. How could she find that anything but intoxicating?
“Thank you for indulging me,” he said, as if he could see her uncertainty. As if he knew all that odd terror and tumult, pleasure and need, inside her. “I fear I am more traditional than is fashionable these days, but I find nothing so beautiful as a pretty woman in a lovely dress.”
Cleo smiled. How could she do anything but smile?
And when he held out his hand, a certain satisfaction in his cool gaze that she knew should probably have worried her, she ignored that little prickle of doubt—and took it.
* * *
“You can’t keep giving me things,” Cleo told him very seriously a few mornings into her stay, with another fierce and wholly inappropriate frown he found uncomfortably adorable.
Khaled had taken to having long, leisurely breakfasts with her, an indulgence he had no time for but allowed anyway. He liked to lounge there in the small nook he never normally used, strewn with pillows and streaming with sunlight, and watch her as she chased the sleep from those golden-hued eyes of hers with each sip of the strong coffee she liked.
Every day, he was more familiar with her. He touched her hand, her arm, her leg. He was intrigued by every caught breath, every shiver, that she worked so hard to hide from him. Today he reached over and tugged gently at the end of the ponytail she wore, until her honey gaze swung to his, all of that awareness simmering there, the way he wanted it.
He wanted a great deal more than he’d expected he would. He told himself that was no more than the lure of the chase, the excitement of this game. But that low, hard heat he couldn’t seem to dispel whispered otherwise.
“I prefer your hair down,” he said, his voice a low rumble, and he liked the flush that warmed her skin at the sound. Why was it so hard to maintain his control around this woman? He knew what the boundaries were. He knew he had to tempt her to fall, not push her over the edge. He knew what he was doing. “I like to see the light in it.”
“Khaled.” She had to struggle to keep her voice even, he could hear. It was more of a struggle every day, and he liked that, too. Her hands moved to her hair, then dropped to her lap. “You can’t.”
“This is Jhurat, is it not?” He was teasing her, and he liked the way she melted into it, as though she wanted to resist him, yet couldn’t.
“You know perfectly well it is.”
“And am I not the Sultan of Jhurat?”
“That’s the rumor,” she said drily, making him laugh. He hadn’t expected that she’d amuse him—and, he reminded himself, it didn’t matter if she did. It was beside the point.
Though it makes this that much sweeter, a traitorous little voice whispered, as if he was like other men. As if he had choices.
As if she did.
“Then I believe I can do as I like.” He shrugged. “It pleases me to give you things, Cleo.” This time when he reached out to her, he traced a gentle pattern from her temple to her cheek, something hot moving in him when she trembled. “Don’t you want to please me?” He didn’t wait for her answer, even though he knew what she’d say. It was too soon. “Be careful how you answer that. There are laws.”
She laughed, as he’d intended, and he liked that, too.
The American was his. As planned.
* * *
“You realize you will break her heart,” Nasser said one evening after being forced to interrupt one of the increasingly intimate dinners Khaled had insisted Cleo share with him.
Khaled shot him a cool look as they walked through the palace’s wide, ornate halls toward an impromptu meeting of his security council to focus on yet another one of Talaat’s attempts to stir up trouble in the provinces.
“I will note your concern for her,” he said as they went, his voice more clipped than it should have been. As if he cared, when he knew he couldn’t. “In the meantime you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that I know precisely how far I need to push her. And where I must stop.”
“I
