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The man, not the sultan.
When of course he didn’t want that. He wanted a meek, biddable, obedient wife—the one he’d thought she was when he’d found her. Khaled shoved aside the small voice inside that whispered that he hadn’t found her to be anything of the sort. That he’d only taken her back to the palace in the first place because she’d refused to back down....
He had it all planned. Cleo would bear his heirs and take them to the summer palace near the sea as his own mother had done with him and Amira, where the air was better and the climate milder. Where they would grow up as unfettered as possible. Far away from here.
Leaving him free to lose himself in the endless siege of his responsibilities the way he always had before. The way his father and grandfather had done before him. The way he needed to do again, Khaled knew, lest he lose what he’d spent his entire adult life fighting for.
He wondered then, sitting back in his chair and making assenting noises into the phone even though he hardly knew what was under discussion, what it would be like if he stopped. Stopped trying to cage her, to keep her within the distinct lines he’d drawn for her. Stopped fighting himself and the man in him who wanted what he wanted. What if he indulged her—and himself in the process? Stopped trying to keep her as far away from him as he could?
He thought of that challenging light in her pretty gaze tonight when she’d told him she wanted to take out a subscription to a tabloid paper. In his name, no less. He thought of that frown of hers that had told him from the start she saw the man before the sultan, that she wasn’t blindly in awe of him like everyone else.
But this country was his life. It had ruined his father and it would ruin him, too, in his time. Just as it had destroyed his mother when he’d been twenty. He’d spent most of his life watching his mother fight for his father’s attention, so deliriously happy when she’d received it and then so destroyed when it was gone again. She’d retreated from life a long time before she had simply stopped fighting for the scraps of his father’s attention. Had it been disease that had taken her or her own broken heart?
And meanwhile, his father had tried to please both his woman and his people and had failed them both.
Jhurat had been exacting a terrible tithe from his family for five generations, one after the next down through the ages, and he didn’t imagine that would ever end. And despite everything, he loved this place as he loved his own blood. His own bones. Every time-worn rock that made it what it was, every sun-beaten border so many of his ancestors had bled over, every grain of sand in the great desert and the thick oil beneath.
It was who he was. It was all he was.
There was no space inside him for a woman with eyes as sweet as honey and a smile like the sun when there was Jhurat, its deserts and whitewashed cities, its citadels and spires, like scars carved directly on his heart. There was no room for this dangerous longing that kicked at him even now, when he’d spent another long night indulging himself in her delectable heat and should have been sated. When he should have forgotten her the moment he’d left that bedroom.
When he shouldn’t have gone to her in the first place.
Khaled couldn’t understand why he had. Why he always did. Why he no doubt would again, tonight and every night, like an obsessed, lovesick fool.
Cleo was a means to an end, nothing more. And she needed to get pregnant, and soon, so he could put some space between them. So he could stop going to her night after night and feeling these things he couldn’t allow himself to feel. So he could stop this madness, this lust, this need.
Because Khaled had never had the option to be that man only she seemed to call out in him. He never would.
* * *
“And how is life with my darling brother?” Amira asked at breakfast one morning, making no attempt to keep the lash from her voice.
She was home for her long winter break from her boarding school and Cleo didn’t want to admit how nice it was to eat with something other than her own thoughts. Even if that something was a snide teenager.
Not that she knew how to answer the question. It had been a few months since she’d lied by omission about her birth control pills, and nothing had changed. She saw Khaled even less by day, but he was far more intense when he appeared in her bedroom at night. More demanding. More powerfully raw.
And she’d become an expert at ignoring all the rest of the dark things she didn’t want to admit were there, simmering away beneath the surface of her pretty, perfect life. Her happily ever after in action.
