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“How many lovers have you had?” he asked, and she jolted as if he’d doused her with ice water.
“What?” But she thought only of Brian, who she’d rather die than claim as a lover. Especially now.
“How many?”
“I don’t want to answer that,” she said, slowly but distinctly. “Or think it’s any of your business. Why would you ask?”
Khaled only looked at her, for such a long time that she began to feel too aware of the cool air against her still-flushed skin again. So long that she crossed her arms over her chest and told herself the cold she felt came from the temperature of the night air, not from him.
And then, as her temper ebbed, she found herself answering him anyway.
“There’s no answer I can give to that question that will make this moment anything but awkward. More awkward, I mean,” she said, and his lips twitched, the way they did when she made him laugh.
“Luckily, awkwardness has yet to claim a single death, as far as I know.”
“How many lovers have you had?” she asked instead of answering him.
“I’ve had my share,” he replied, that strange intensity in his cool gaze. “But I’m afraid I cannot accept that answer from you, Cleo.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a nasty double standard,” she said, striving for a light tone. And failing.
He shrugged in that way of his that reminded her how powerful he was. “It is. But I have never claimed to be particularly liberated and I still wish to know.”
He said it as if knowing such personal details about her life were his right. And there was something about that air of authority, that tone of command in his cool voice, that made her long to do as he asked. Despite the huge part of her that didn’t want to do it.
“One,” Cleo said, grudgingly. “We met in college. We were supposed to get married.” She scowled at him. “We didn’t.”
“When?”
Cleo told herself she only imagined that tightness in his voice, that stillness in the way he sat there, watching her. Waiting for her answer.
She didn’t want to say another word. But it seemed that her mouth obeyed him all on its own.
“Six months ago.”
His dark eyes were hooded then, impossible to read. He reached over and tucked her hair behind her ear, and she had to fight off the urge to lean into his touch.
“Ah,” he said. “You wanted more than him.”
She was furious again, and she wasn’t sure why. “That, and I walked in on him with his girlfriend two weeks before our wedding.”
His brows rose in surprise and she was so furious it was dizzying. And ashamed. And something about that particular toxic combination made her pulse clatter through her, jittery and wild.
“In case you’re wondering why, don’t.” She wanted to get this over with, she realized suddenly. Make him pity her so she could stop pretending there was any other end to this magical interlude in her life. “He was quite clear that I’m frigid.”
Khaled’s expression shifted into something sad and dangerous at once, and he reached over and traced his fingertips down her cheek, slowly. She didn’t know why she imagined it was some kind of apology. Then he took her chin in his hand, holding her immobile before him.
“You are many things,” he said softly. Starkly. “But you are not, as we have demonstrated, even remotely frigid.”
She should pull away, she knew. She should do something—but the air between them was so taut, so tense, and she couldn’t read him. His gaze was too dark, his mouth too cruel, and she was dressed in clothes he’d given her, her body still trembling and tingling from his mouth, and the truth was that she didn’t want to pull away from him.
Cleo wanted him. And yet Brian loomed between them, soft and deceitful and ruinous.
“They told me to marry him anyway,” she told Khaled fiercely, as if it were a weapon. “That I was naive and silly to expect fidelity. That such romantic notions were unrealistic. The stuff of fantasy.”
“Don’t worry.” It occurred to her that his tone of voice was lethal, but he was still holding her chin and the heat of that felt like a drug, making her feel heavy and weightless at once. Trapped with no desire whatsoever to set herself free. “I prize that particular fantasy above all others. And I am the ruler here. If I deem something realistic, that’s what it is.”
Her mind was a riot of shoulds, and she heeded none of them. There was something harsh in his face, his gaze, something too close to broken, when he’d said similar things in the past with a laugh.
