Undone by the Sultan's Touch

“The papers can be dealt with.”

“Our papers, perhaps.” But that was how his father had done things, and look what it had wrought: this mess Khaled had to clean up, though he often doubted he could. He doubted anyone could, but it was his duty—his fate—to try anyway, no matter what happened. “But what happens when they take it to the international stage? Which they are certain to do.” Because it was what he would do, and Khaled had the peculiar pleasure of knowing his enemies well. “How will we look to the world when I am painted as some kind of monster who abducts fresh-faced young American girls from the streets?”

He already knew what it would do to the contracts they needed to lock down to bring commerce to the country. To say nothing of the much-needed influx of international wealth, which, with the increase in tourism since he’d opened the borders again, might tip the scales in Khaled’s favor. In Jhurat’s favor, at long last.

He couldn’t afford any backsliding. Not now.

“The people do not want to revert to the Stone Age,” Nasser said darkly. “They want their movies and their technology right along with their paychecks from all the new jobs. No matter what that fool may tell himself.”

“That fool” was Talaat, the leader of the resistance movement that opposed Khaled’s claim to the sultanate with the assertion that Khaled’s blood was tainted with the same infirmity of mind that had taken his father down. Can we risk the country? Talaat liked to ask on the news and all over the papers, so reasonably.

Talaat was also Khaled’s cousin on his mother’s side. They’d played together as small boys. It made a kind of poetic sense that his own cousin should have become the greatest thorn in his side, Khaled thought, since he couldn’t remember a single instance in which his blood had done anything but make his life harder, including Amira’s stunt today.

“Talaat does not care what the people want,” Khaled said shortly. “He cares about power.”

Nasser didn’t respond, because this was an unfortunate truth that might not matter in the least should Talaat’s seditious behavior gain footholds in the proper places, and Khaled’s mouth twisted in a wry sort of smile. It wouldn’t do to become the next internet sensation at a time like this. It would take very little to tip public sentiment against him, and Americans, with their Kickstarter campaigns and their internet apps that could make civil unrest in far-off places into one more video game they could play from their couches, loved nothing more than to cry out against countries like Jhurat at the slightest provocation.

Or no provocation at all.

But that meant he had to think very carefully about what to do about the photogenic American girl who should never have crossed paths with Amira. What stories would she tell if he set her free? Who would listen to her when she told them? How would his enemies spin this story if they got their hands on her—and they would. He knew they would. They always did.

Inside the parlor, the girl shifted in her seat, then sat up, and Khaled studied her, bracing himself for what he knew he had to do. Had known since he’d pulled her out of that car, and if he was honest, was more interested in doing now that she’d shown him that surprising—if misguided—strength of hers.

She was a gift. And he would take all the gifts he could get.

As gifts went, he had to admit, she was an excellent one. She was delicate, with her large eyes and remarkably fine features, her hair a collection of reds, browns and caramels twisted inexpertly and pinned to the back of her head.

Pretty, something inside him noted, in a way that made him shift on his feet, then frown. Too pretty.

Elegant and unforgettable, in fact, with that face of hers and the coltish lines of her figure—yet she was dressed like a tomboy. Her clothes were deliberately mannish and casual in that Western style he’d never really understood during his studies abroad in England and the States, and which he most certainly did not appreciate in a woman.

Khaled was a traditional man. He had always preferred women who understood their own uniquely feminine appeal. Who boasted womanly hips and generous breasts to cushion a man in softness, instead of a boyish figure and too many bones besides. Women who offered him shy gazes to make him feel strong and musical voices to soothe him when he felt anything but. Demure and modest women, traditional women.

Not Western girls like this one in her androgynous clothes, flat-chested and skinny-thighed, who had stared back at him directly in the street, dared to scowl at him, and hadn’t had the sense to beg for his mercy.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d found defiance anything but irritating.

And yet her eyes were extraordinary. More than extraordinary. They’d been filled with the setting sun out in that tiny little alleyway, and yet even when they weren’t they were a kind of bright, gleaming gold, like ancient treasure, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t get them out of his head.

Why it felt as if she haunted him, as if she had already worked her odd, scowling way into the heart of him when he should hardly have noticed her at all beyond her potential value to him. To his country.

Khaled told himself it was nothing more than strategy that made him walk inside that room then, whether he wanted to do it or not. Politics and power and the fate of his country besides.

Because it couldn’t be anything else. He knew better.

“I apologize,” he said, summoning up that charm of his that felt rusty from disuse, as though his smile was made from cut glass.

“And as it happens, I do require an apology,” she said drily. “I accept.”

But she stopped when her eyes met his, as if the sound of her own voice in the elegant room was alarming, somehow. Or he was.

“That regrettable scene in the street must have alarmed you, Miss Churchill.”

She stared up at him in that same bright, golden way she had before, direct and clever at once, and Khaled couldn’t name the thing that moved in him then, powerful and dark.

But he could use it. And he would. He would do anything for his country. Even this. Especially this, a rebellious little voice murmured deep inside him. Maybe she is your gift.

Khaled smiled wider and settled himself in the chair at an angle to the settee where she sat, looking delicate and amusingly put out against the bright cushions scattered around her—

Looking like the small, frightened mouse she is, he corrected himself. Caught between much larger and sharper claws than she could imagine. He leaned in closer, aware of the way her eyes widened slightly, the way her breath caught, and he knew it wasn’t fear.

She was aware of him as a man. Good.

He’d use that, too.

Something unexpectedly hot wound through him when she licked her lips, her eyes still fixed on him. And then she frowned at him, and he liked it. Far more than he should.

“I hope you’ll allow an overprotective brother to make it up to you as best he can,” Khaled said, his smile even brighter.

He was going to enjoy this.

CHAPTER TWO

THE MAN WHO walked into that parlor as if it, too, should cower before him as he moved was fearful and breathtaking, but he wasn’t quite the same one who had confronted Cleo in the street—and not only because he’d changed his clothes, she thought.

This version of the Sultan of Jhurat smiled as he sat down with her, something that altered that fierce face of his and made him nothing short of stunning.

Her heart pounded hard, like a fist against her ribs.

“Please,” he said in a pleasant tone of voice, lounging there in a sleek buttoned black shirt over a pair of loose black trousers, neither of which made him look any less dangerous than he had in that alley. It was as if he’d traded in a scimitar for a polished knife, but the sharp edge was still the same. She’d never in her life met anyone so male. “You must call me Khaled.”

As if they were friends. As if it was possible that one could be friends with a man like this. Cleo doubted it. He was far too intense, far too...colossal.

“Uh, okay. Khaled.”

He looked as if he could eat a thousand Brians for breakfast and still be hungry.

She looked at the room instead of at him, hoping that might ease the clench of that bright heat inside her. But it didn’t, no matter how many lovely silk pillows decorated the delicately pretty couches, or how much gold was on the ceiling and dripping down the walls into the exuberant sconces. No matter that smile on the sultan’s darkly ferocious face as he looked at her now.

“Does this mean you’re not planning to arrest me any longer?” she asked. Politely. And only then realized she was frowning.

He threw his head back and laughed. It was heart-stopping. Cleo felt as if she’d fallen down hard and knocked the breath straight out of her lungs.

“I’ll confess to overreacting,” he said, that astonishing laughter still rich in his dark voice. “It is an older brother’s prerogative, surely.”

He nodded at some unseen servant—and this was the sort of over-the-top place, preening with dramatic chandeliers draped in crystals and entire gleaming ballrooms lined with complicated tapestries depicting epic historical events she couldn’t identify, that must have whole battalions of unseen servants, Cleo imagined—and sure enough, a tray appeared before them. Hot, fragrant tea and an array of treats, sweet and savory alike, as if he was trying to tempt her.

Or charm her.

And then the Sultan of Jhurat waved his servants away and poured tea for her, as if nothing in the world could be more normal than to serve her himself.

Her. Cleo Churchill from outside Columbus, Ohio, to whom absolutely 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 one would cheat on this man. No one would dare.

“I had a decent job in a nice office doing human 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.