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But first, these seven stolen days. To pretend he was a different man. To indulge his ravenous hunger for the pretty American with the wide honey eyes he’d made his wife. To watch her fall apart like that again, over and over, until he was glutted.
He’d been selfish enough to drag her into his world. He was selfish enough to taste her the way he wanted, to lose himself in her for a time, then return to reality and set the necessary boundaries.
But there was obviously some part of him that wondered.
“I shouldn’t take the whole week,” he’d muttered to Nasser after yet another conference call with a trio of big oil kingpins from Texas some weeks back, whose hearty twangs and ingrained dismissiveness had made Khaled feel murderous—not that it would prevent him from inviting each and every one of them to his pageant of a wedding anyway. “I can hardly spare a day.”
“What is that proverb?” Nasser had asked in his mild way. “‘Marriage is like a castle besieged—those who are on the outside wish to get in—’”
“‘And those who are on the inside wish to get out,’” Khaled had finished for him impatiently. “So you see my point.”
“I confess, Your Excellency, I was thinking of your long-suffering bride-to-be,” Nasser had replied, wisely keeping that smirk in his voice from his face.
Khaled knew he shouldn’t do this. He even knew that he was lying to himself. The astonishing truth was that his hunger for this woman, his ceaseless need, had reached the breaking point.
If he didn’t have her soon, he thought he might hurt someone.
But one week was all he’d allow himself.
One week to slake this consuming, destructive lust that had haunted him since the night she’d gone to pieces in his arms in the courtyard of his own palace, shocking him to the core and awakening that terrible need inside him that had only grown sharper since then. One week to get his fill of this woman he wanted more than was at all wise, so he could move on with his responsibilities without this hunger gnawing at him at the most inopportune moments.
One week to pretend he could let himself love her, when he knew he couldn’t. When he knew there was only duty. Only and ever his duty.
He’d given all of his Western allies ample reason to invest their resources in Jhurat by making his wedding the culmination of a thousand romantic fantasies, and his country now seemed accessible and desirable instead of exotic and frightening. He could get back to work on what mattered: saving Jhurat from itself. His duty was what mattered, not his marriage.
One week is all I need, he told himself fiercely as they climbed into the helicopter and set out into the beautiful twilight desolation of the desert, leaving the jutting spires of the capital city and the wild cheering from their wedding celebration behind, and I will conquer this thing that claws at me whenever I look at her.
It was only sex, he reasoned. The sex he’d deliberately withheld, because he’d hoped to control it. And her. It was only sex, he told himself now, because anything else was a danger to them both.
Sex and impossible chemistry and that polished gold gaze of hers that pricked at him, even when, like now, she wasn’t even looking at him. Sleep had claimed her as the helicopter raced over the great desert into the coming night, and Khaled assured himself it was the promise of sex alone that made his heart beat faster the closer they came to his family’s private oasis, hidden away in the golden, shifting, treacherous hills of sand that were his birthright.
It wasn’t her flawless skin, only partially concealed by the feminine, entrancing scarves she wore. It wasn’t the henna that marked her as surely as he wanted to mark her, claim her. It wasn’t that slender beauty of hers in the dress she wore, which he knew would grace the cover of a hundred magazines and still not quite capture what fascinated him most about her. Her clever gaze. That disrespectful scowl. Her soft mouth. The smoke and rasp of her surprisingly sensual laughter. The innate grace she’d had all along, hidden beneath her grubby Western clothes and tied-back hair, waiting only to be called forth. Celebrated.
Made his.
He gathered her in his arms when the helicopter landed, holding her high against his chest as he made his way to the large tent that had been prepared for them. He felt like a conqueror. Like a king. As if he’d won her in a long, pitched battle. She stirred as he strode through the camp, those eyes as golden as his desert blinking up at him, her pretty mouth curving into a smile as she recognized him.
It was as if she thought he was safe. Khaled wished that were true.
