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Beside her, Margery projected an air of condescension with only the faintest lift of her brow, something Cleo had tolerated a great deal better before her wedding. Cleo didn’t much care for Margery, she realized then. Not that anyone had asked her.
“Your office—” by this Margery meant herself “—has already sent your gracious acceptance to all of the noted events, my lady. It would be considered curious, at best, to pull out now.”
Curious, Cleo had learned, was Margery’s code word for “completely unacceptable.” And “we won’t do it your way no matter who you’re married to.” It was a word she used a lot.
“I can miss a dinner with my husband every now and again,” Cleo said, not sure why she suddenly felt gripped by something much too intense for a discussion about scheduling, especially when her dinners with Khaled had been so few and far between lately, and they always ended up naked and wild and not eating anyway, “but not every night. He wouldn’t like it.”
She hated that she felt compelled to use Khaled as a bargaining chip. That she felt compelled to bargain.
Margery didn’t look up from the folder she always held before her like a shield, forever making notes she didn’t share with Cleo.
“His Excellency approved your schedule personally,” Margery said coolly.
Cleo blinked at that unexpected slap, but by now she knew better than to betray her feelings any further than she already had. This new life of hers was divided into the very few private spaces where she could do and say and think as she liked, and everywhere else—and that division had never seemed so stark or unforgiving as it did now.
Margery, she understood suddenly, worked for the palace. For Khaled.
Not for her. How had she failed to notice that before now?
“What part of you is the sultan and which part of you is the man?” she’d asked Khaled while they were still in the oasis. They had been lying lazily in that tent near the sheer blue murmur of the pool, listening to the rustle of the palms and the whisper of the wind through the sands all around them. She had been on top of him, with him still deep inside her, their most recent storm just over.
The next one had been building, even then. It always was.
“They are the same thing,” he’d said, and she’d told herself that hadn’t been warning she heard in his voice. That he hadn’t sounded ravaged, merely intense. “Indistinguishable. The man makes no decisions that do not benefit the sultan.”
Cleo had traced the mesmerizing trail of dark hair that dusted his chest with her fingertips. “And is the sultan as concerned about the needs of the man?”
She’d been joking. But he’d jackknifed up and set her aside, and then wrapped one of the thick towels around him when he went to stand in the tent’s opening, the hot desert sun cascading over him, gilding him in all that gold. Making him that much more beautiful.
And tortured, too, she’d seen when he’d turned back to her.
“There is only the sultan, Cleo,” he’d said in a dark tone. “There is only Jhurat.”
“Was that Jhurat who just made me scream?” she’d asked lightly, certain she could tease him out of this mood. She’d been getting better at it every day. “For the third time today? I thought that was you.”
His mouth had twisted, his dark eyes had flashed and she’d thought he might unleash that temper of his—some part of her had welcomed it, for reasons she’d been unwilling to probe too deeply—but he’d only shaken his head.
“Remember that I warned you,” he’d said, too quietly. “Remember that I never pretended otherwise. Remember this, Cleo.”
But she’d forgotten it the moment he’d pulled her to her feet again, the way she always forgot everything when he touched her. That she hardly knew him. That she’d married the fantasy as much as she’d married him. He’d taken her mouth—and then the rest of her—with that barely restrained ferocity that made her feel more alive, more beautiful, more wild and more cherished than she’d ever been in her life.
She remembered it now, and something cold moved through her, oily and slippery, but she knew better than to show anything while she was under the watchful eye of her secretary.
“Very well, then, Margery,” she murmured instead, folding her hands and gazing out the window as if she was perfectly unbothered. “Thank you.”
It turned out Cleo was very good at acting perfectly composed and quietly confident. Or so the papers—which she couldn’t buy for herself when she was always under some kind of disapproving surveillance or another, yet supportive Jessie scanned and emailed her now and again anyway—claimed. Khaled’s “ordinary queen” was a cool and stylish newlywed, she read in all those articles that talked about her as if they knew her personally. Polite and calm no matter what, as if she’d been born to her brand-new station. Graceful and inscrutable.
