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But there would only be this week, and then they would play their appointed roles, and he knew it was the best way. The only way. Hadn’t he seen his parents try and fail to mix duty with desire? It caused nothing but destruction.
“Where are we?” she asked, her voice a rough little whisper that he felt like a caress.
“It is an oasis. It is much more private than the palace. We’ll have it to ourselves for the week.”
He didn’t try to contain the heat he felt at that idea, and he knew he needed to burn this all away. He needed to wrestle it into submission. He needed to be in control. Of it. Of her. Of all the things that had happened since his sister had jumped in front of her car.
Because he had nothing but this country, could want nothing but this country, could focus on nothing but this country. It was the only thing he allowed himself to love, and he knew too well what happened when men in his position tried to love anything else. He’d watched it play out in front of him throughout his childhood. He’d lived with the results. With his mother’s abandonment of him, of Amira, of the world, because she loved her own misery and broken heart more than her family—and what it had done to his father.
He would not let history repeat itself. He would take this week—and then he would put Cleo in her proper place and keep her there, no matter what happened. No matter how he felt.
Not that he felt anything, he told himself sternly. That was for lesser men.
“I’ve never seen an oasis before,” Cleo said after a moment, seemingly unaware of the wars he fought and wasn’t at all sure he won inside. “But this is exactly what I imagined one would look like.”
Khaled was too consumed with her to look around, and besides, he knew what he’d see. The layers of trees that ringed the soft aquamarine waters, date palms and peaches, olives and figs, lit up with a hundred lanterns tonight to greet the sultan and his new bride. The small collection of tents with the most sprawling in the center, marked with flaming torches at the entrance, which was where he headed now. And around them, nothing but the deep quiet of the desert sands and the riot of galaxies above them in the night sky.
As though they were all alone in the world. The whole universe.
That howled in him like power. Like thick, enduring need.
Khaled pushed through the tent’s heavy flap, and only when they were inside did he place Cleo on her feet. With a gentleness that spoke to a level of emotional attachment he refused to admit he felt. Because he couldn’t.
She swayed slightly, he reached out a hand to steady her, and then he watched her face intently as she looked around in undisguised wonder. Tapestries flowed from the high ceiling down to the ground, carpets stretched lush and deep across the ground and the tent was furnished with a seating area, two dressing areas and the wide, inviting bed that stood in the center.
She stared at it for a moment too long.
“This is beautiful,” she said in that same soft voice. “Like something in a dream.”
“It is basic,” Khaled said with a shrug. Humor lit her gaze when she looked at him again, and she smiled. He was surprised when he did, too.
“But then, you are His Excellency, the Sultan of Jhurat,” she said, that laughter that undid him thick in her voice, bright in her golden eyes, as sweet as honey from his own bees. “Accustomed to far greater luxuries than this.”
“Did you eat?” he asked coolly, trying to leash that animal in him that wanted nothing more than to throw her down and feast on her until it’d had its fill.
Your fill or one week, that treacherous voice inside him taunted him. I wonder which will come first?
“Eat?” she echoed, as if she’d never heard the word.
“I didn’t see you touch any of the food at the wedding feast,” he said gently, when he didn’t want gentle. When he wanted nothing at all but her. Hot and hard and his, irrevocably. “You must be hungry.”
“I’m not.”
“Cleo,” he said calmly. Deliberately. “Heed me, please. You will need your strength.”
He watched desire heat her cheeks, make her golden eyes gleam, and his smile turned darker. Harder.
“Maybe,” she said, as bold as she was nervous, and he thought she might kill him after all, this creature who shouldn’t have appealed to him at all. Who was so responsive to him that it very nearly hurt to remember it, and yet he was suddenly certain he’d thought of nothing else since. “But I need you more.”
He reached over and pulled her scarves from her, one by one, unwrapping each layer of her like the gift she was, listening as her breath caught and then came faster, watching as her skin pinkened. Feeling it all like her delicate hands on his sex, making him so hard he ached.
