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And when he touched her, it was magic.
Did there have to be more than that?
Later, they floated in the silky dark water with the moon bright and full above them. He trapped her near one of the edges and took her mouth with that same restrained ferocity that made every part of her skin prickle in delight. They were both naked and sleek in the night, the water only a degree or two cooler than the embrace of the night all around them, and he simply lifted her up and slid inside her, making her gasp.
This time, he wasn’t slow. He took her hard and deep, with a possessiveness and dark need, and she reveled in it. His arms were like bands around her, the hard length of him a deep and wondrous fire within her.
He laughed when she moaned, and then he bent her backward, making Cleo feel as graceful as a dancer in the water and beneath the moon—then he found her breast with his hot, dangerous mouth, and her moan turned into something much needier. Sensation streaked through her, from the tight peak he teased with his lips and his teeth and his tongue to the place where they were joined, where he filled her again and again and tore her apart with every sweet, sure thrust.
“I can’t...” she gritted out.
“My name,” he ordered her, and bit gently on her nipple, and she shuddered around him, a kind of wild, red joy wrapping around her and pulling her taut. “Say it, Cleo. Scream it if you must.”
And she couldn’t keep herself from obeying him then. She didn’t want to do anything but obey him. His name was like a cry, like a prayer, to the moon and the water and the oasis around them. To the desert.
To this man who was her husband. Whom she suspected she loved already and recklessly, far more than was safe. Much less wise. Whom she thought she’d loved almost from the first moment she’d seen him, striding before her like a fierce god in the street.
But when she came back to earth, he was waiting, still so hot and hard inside her, and the look on his beautiful face was stark with passion. His gray eyes gleamed with that edgy need that still raced through her.
“Again, I think,” he said. “I don’t believe that was quite loud enough. The trees still stand, do they not?”
“I don’t like to scream,” she whispered.
“You will,” he promised her, lust and amusement and the whole world in his dark gaze.
“I don’t know how.”
His mouth curved, and he began to move again, slow this time. Sweet and lethal and perfect, and her eyes drifted closed.
“Practice makes perfect,” he said.
And then he showed her what he meant.
CHAPTER FIVE
BACK IN THE palace, Cleo’s days as the sultan’s wife were full.
She took lessons in Arabic, Jhuratan history, formal protocol and etiquette for part of each day, then spent the rest involved with the many charity organizations that clamored for the attention of the sultan’s brand-new bride. There were the endless wardrobe fittings, scrupulously polite meetings with the wives of visiting dignitaries and visit after visit to all the places that the sultan deemed worthy of his notice and patronage.
This was what the good life looked like, she told herself. This was her unrealistic fairy tale, and she had every intention of excelling at the duties that came along with it.
“You are very popular with the people,” Khaled had told her when she’d indicated, long weeks after their magical time in the oasis, that she wasn’t exactly thrilled with her role as no more than his distant appendage. He’d studied her as if she was as much a mystery to him as he was still to her—and then he’d pulled her close to taste her mouth, making a sound as if he’d meant to resist her, but couldn’t. “And it costs so little to smile and wave, Cleo. Does it not?”
Khaled believed she could do it—and because he did, so did she.
This particular afternoon she’d toured a home for abandoned children, had tried out her halting Arabic while cutting a ribbon outside a newly constructed school and was now frowning down at the schedule for her next month of duties. Margery, her starchy social secretary, had handed it to her in the backseat of the armored car that whisked them back toward the palace.
“I can’t do all of these benefits.” Cleo glared at the blocks of time in the grid, all the entries filled in with Margery’s pinched block letters, which infuriated her in ways she’d spent a long time these past weeks cautioning herself not to indulge, because she was happy. Ever freaking after. As planned. “There’s something almost every single night.”
