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“If I wanted you,” he said, very distinctly, very coldly, “I would have come for you.”
It took her a moment to process that. One beat of her heart, then another—and that second one so hard it was jarring. It made her stomach drop. It made her go numb, then cold.
“What?”
“I see I didn’t make myself clear.” His tone was offhand, almost bored, but there was a storm in his gray eyes. A deep blackness, thick and harsh, as if he were tortured. She could see it. It pressed at her on all sides. “I don’t find this kind of thing appealing.”
Nothing he was saying made any sense. Cleo could only stare at him, frozen solid—and she remembered this feeling. She’d experienced it once before, when she’d used her key in Brian’s front door and walked inside, then stood there in the living room doorway, trying to make sense of what was happening right there on the floor in front of her.
This was worse.
“I’ve tried to make allowances for the differences in our ages. Our cultures.” Khaled’s voice was a terrible glide of sound, dark and cutting and still so smooth as it tore into her, ripping her into ragged little strips, one after the next. “The disparity in our breeding. But I’m afraid this is unacceptable.”
He sounded the way he had that first evening, out in the street, when he’d talked of detainment and kidnapping—except this time, she could see something bright and harsh behind his fierce expression, as if this was hurting him. Killing him.
As if he couldn’t stop.
But then what he’d said echoed inside of her, like the vicious backhanded slap it was. Cleo flushed, hot and awful. And then her temper swept in behind it, burning through her, and that, at least, felt like a reprieve.
“What did you just say to me?” she demanded.
“I am talking about this.” He nodded toward her, his eyes glittering hot though he didn’t move from where he stood in terrible judgment at the foot of the bed, not so much as an inch, as if he’d been hewn from granite. “I am talking about this display of yours.”
And then, finally, he looked at her the way she’d always known he would. The way she’d been expecting he would from the start. With nothing but pity.
“Perhaps it is common in Ohio to indulge in such vulgarity,” he said coolly, “but this is Jhurat and I expect far better from my wife.”
Cleo waited to feel decimated. Wiped out. Destroyed. But the only thing that hummed in her was temper, huge and encompassing, and she squared her shoulders as though she was warding off a blow.
“I expect better from you, Khaled. Much better.”
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?” Each word was black ice. Treacherous and frozen. “I am the Sultan of Jhurat. There is no better.”
“I thought you were a good man. An honorable one.”
He went so still it was as though he’d become the statue of himself that would one day grace some corner or another of the palace, and the tension in the room stretched so thin Cleo thought it might break her in half. She knelt there before him like the meek offering she suspected he wanted and she wondered, sickened, what she’d become without realizing it while she’d been chasing down fairy tales. But what truly galled her was that what bothered her most was that he was so upset. That he was so obviously hurt.
She had to fight against that trembling deep inside her that she didn’t want him to see. She had to struggle not to weep. And she wanted—suddenly and completely—to run away again, to leave Khaled behind like one more demon and find herself a different life somewhere new.
But she’d already done that, hadn’t she? And this certainly didn’t feel as if the geographic cure was working.
“Tell me what this is,” he urged her after a moment so long she’d thought he really had turned to stone. “I feel certain I’ve made clear to you what I think of disrespect.”
“Then respect me,” she blurted out, then wished at once she hadn’t, because he braced himself as if he was about to strike—
And then he did.
“Respect what?” he asked, almost conversationally, his gaze implacable and cruel as it bored into her. “The creature who stumbled across my sister on a city street, who would never have attracted my notice otherwise? Or the elegant bride I created out of the barest of raw materials to suit my purposes? Which of those are you, Cleo? Which version do you imagine I should respect?”
“Stop it.” It hurt to speak. To breathe. “I’m your wife.”
