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She needed to make her life, her man, her marriage, hers. Because she refused to accept that this was a mistake. Amira and Margery and her sisters—they didn’t know the truth of things between Cleo and Khaled. She could have married Brian. Everyone had urged her to forgive him, and the wedding had already been planned and paid for. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to simply surrender herself to his promises and apologies, but she hadn’t done it.
She’d wanted more. She’d wanted better. She’d wanted the damned fairy tale everyone told her didn’t exist, and she’d found it. She’d found Khaled.
She could fight for him, too.
Cleo waited until it was late. She sneaked down the back hall over to the sultan’s private wing of the palace, then in through the antechamber where—she’d learned in her history lessons—ancient Jhuratan sultans had held court with their most trusted advisers beneath the frescoed ceilings. It was more beautiful than she’d anticipated, more hauntingly evocative than the photographs and more intimidating, too. But she forced herself forward despite the trickle of unease that moved in her. She cracked open the towering door that led to Khaled’s bedroom and crept inside.
Walked inside, she corrected herself, and lifted her head up high while she did it.
She had every right to be here. This was her marriage, too.
The room looked exactly like a sultan’s inner sanctum should, she thought, pausing to take in the glory of the bedchamber as it soared all around her. It was vast and lush as befitted a desert ruler with an ancient title. Dark crimsons and black woods, heavily masculine furniture and ornate details clearly dating back centuries, all competing and dominating and somehow working together with a monolithic bed that looked more like an imposing stage set high up on a raised dais.
That was where she waited for her husband. Because she was fearless and intrepid, damn it, and this was her happy ever after.
But she was naked when she slipped between his whisper-soft sheets. Just to make sure.
* * *
“What are you doing here?”
Khaled’s voice was low, but the dark thunder in it jolted Cleo awake.
For a moment she didn’t know where she was, and then it came back to her: she was in Khaled’s bedroom. In his bed.
And, she remembered as she shifted and the silken sheets caressed her, she was naked.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” she told him, and that was when the way he was standing there at the foot of the bed, watching her with an alarming stillness, registered. Her heart gave a great kick.
He looked dangerous and impossibly remote at once, and that was only the way his too-gray eyes glittered in the soft light.
Khaled was dressed in clothes she’d never seen him wear before—a dark black T-shirt that clung to his muscular shoulders and a pair of exercise trousers that made his legs look even more powerful—with his arms crossed over his flat chest. And he was scowling at her, every inch of him the sultan she’d seen first on that street, mighty and powerful and great beyond measure. Her throat went dry.
“You go to the gym?” It was the first thing she could think of, and it was better than addressing the gnawing thing that made her feel scooped hollow behind her breastbone. “I guess that explains...” She shifted to sitting position, letting the sheets fall away, but he didn’t react the way she’d expected he would. She nodded in his direction, at all that hard-packed, lean muscle, from his shoulders to that ridged wonder of an abdomen. “...that.”
“Cleo.”
She didn’t like the clipped way he said that, to say nothing of the dark way he was looking at her, as if she had trespassed. As if she’d ruined something by her presence here—but no. She couldn’t let herself think like that.
“I will ask you again. Why are you here?”
“Khaled.”
She tried to make her own voice soft. Encouraging. Inviting. She arched her back slightly and presented herself to him the way she knew he liked, the way that often made him growl deep in his throat like some kind of panther. She wanted that. She wanted him.
“I’m your wife. I’m in your bed. Why do you think I’m here?”
His gaze moved from hers to trace over her, making her nipples prickle in instant awareness, making her stomach pull taut, making her feel almost proud of the wild heat that sparked in the air between them. Uncontrollable. Unmistakable. Making her wish she had the nerve to simply crawl toward him and take what she wanted, what she knew he wanted, because this was where they came together best. This fire. This sweet, intoxicating burn. This was their communion . She thought she understood it now.
