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What are you doing? she demanded. This is happily ever after. And when he touched her, she knew it was true. When he touched her, there was no room for anything but happily ever after in him.
“Come,” he said when he was before her, a wall of perfect masculinity. “There are better things to do tonight than pick fights from thin air, Cleo. Let me show you.”
She thought that was the kindest she’d ever seen him, and she didn’t know why it made her want to curl up in a ball and sob.
He reached down and scooped her up again, high against his chest again, and she found her face entirely too close to his. All that fire and awe mixed inside her, making her feel jittery. Making her want things she couldn’t even name.
“I can walk.”
“I don’t want you to walk or you would be walking.”
“And everything must be what you want or the world will fly apart at the seams?”
But that strange heaviness was already spiraling out of her as he held her against the furnacelike heat of his bare chest, and he only raised his brows as he gazed down at her.
“Of course,” he said mildly. “I am the sultan.”
She shouldn’t find his arrogance so comforting, Cleo thought. But she did. She slid an arm around his shoulders as he carried her out into the soft night again.
“Won’t someone see us?” she asked when they were out beneath the stars again, so many of them it was hard to look.
“And if they do?”
“You’re naked! I might as well be!”
“They are trained not to look when they know they shouldn’t,” he replied, amused. “Unlike you, Cleo, they prefer not to risk my wrath.”
When he set her down, it was in a three-sided tent at the edge of the gently murmuring pool of water in the center of the oasis. The tent was lit with more lanterns, piled high with comfortable lounging chairs, towels and pillows and rugs, and there were trays of food set out on low tables.
“Eat,” he ordered her. “Then you and I will swim beneath the moon. And I will make you scream my name into the night until you are hoarse.”
Khaled smiled then, glancing up at her as he threw himself down beside the table and stretched out, a vision of naked male perfection, proud and fierce and hers.
Hers, Cleo reminded herself. He was hers, even if that felt different in the execution than she’d expected it to in all these long months of daydreaming.
“And what if I want to make you scream?” she asked, but she moved to other side of the table and lowered herself down before the trays of food, pita breads and dipping things, fruits and salads and cuts of meats and cheeses, something baked to a deep golden crisp and smelling savory. She realized as she did that she was starving.
“You are welcome to try,” Khaled said, sounding amused as he fixed himself a plate. “But if it is some kind of competition, you should understand that I do not care to lose.”
Cleo took a big bite of pita bread, sighing at the airy, doughy taste. She dipped it into a bowl of handmade hummus, then popped a few olives into her mouth for good measure. Perfect, of course. As was everything that was his.
As this marriage would be. As it was already.
“Does that mean you don’t lose? Or that you’re a sore loser when you do?”
His smile took on that darker edge that made her heartbeat slow down and hit harder.
“Is this what I have to look forward to in my marriage?” he asked in a soft tone, but she heard the steel beneath. “A disrespectful wife who pokes at me at every opportunity?”
“Only when she’s hungry,” Cleo said, and smiled. Then let out a breath when his hard mouth curved slightly, as though she’d dodged something dangerous there in that otherwise cheerful tent.
She told herself it didn’t matter that they were still strangers in so many ways. They weren’t the first people in the world to marry without knowing each other’s every private thought and they wouldn’t be the last, either. And what good was it to know someone, anyway? They could be lying. She’d learned that firsthand. She’d thought she knew every last thing there was to know about Brian because she’d dated him for years, only to find out how wrong she was a mere two weeks before her wedding.
Thinking about Brian here, now, felt like an obscenity. Cleo shoved it away.
What mattered was this thing that wound between her and Khaled and around them, tying them together. She could feel it in the air. Lust and longing, recognition and discovery, and, yes, love, she thought, new and raw and different from anything she’d ever felt before. And she couldn’t think of a single reason he would have married her if he didn’t feel the same—though, she rationalized as they ate their meal in a silence she assured herself was companionable, he was a very closed-off man. A powerful man with tremendous responsibilities. She couldn’t expect him to be emotional and accessible.
