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But she didn’t let him continue. She wound her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips and he let her pull him down against her. So they could burn in this madness together. So they could forget.
So he could save her instead of himself.
He rocked his hips against hers, making her shudder in that instant, ecstatic response he couldn’t get enough of. He bent to her breasts and lavished them with his mouth, his hands, even his teeth. She writhed beneath him, arching toward his mouth, her cries growing more desperate the closer she came—
She groaned when he lifted his head. And her gaze was a dark storm of gold when she looked up at him, watching as he reached down between them to free himself from his exercise trousers.
Khaled thought he might die if he didn’t get inside her, now. He thought he might die anyway and somehow, tonight, he didn’t much care.
“And where does this fall within your chilly little concept of marriage?” she bit out, and he could see everything right there in her gaze, as open and as perfect as she was. The love he’d thrown back in her face, her deep hurt, and her own unmistakable need. Everything. “Or are you going to pretend this is nothing but procreation?”
He slicked himself through her heat and watched the burn of it shiver through her, fighting back his own shudder as the flames that licked between them stretched bright and high.
“Behave,” he gritted at her as if he was in control of this, of her, of his own wild response, “and this will be your reward. Disobey me, and this will be nothing but a memory.”
He toyed with her then, holding himself still at her entrance and ignoring her attempts to twist her hips, to take him inside her. Ignoring the nails she dug into his shoulders, the desperate way she groaned out his name.
Ignoring everything but her inevitable surrender.
Because there was no other way. No other choice. There never had been.
“I hate you,” she moaned at him, and it shouldn’t have hurt.
It was what he wanted. It was why he’d done this tonight, instead of following the more animal urge he’d had when he’d found her here. This was the easiest way to save her, and he knew it.
“Hate me if you must,” he urged her, hoarse and dark, and then he thrust into her with a hard, sure stroke that made her moan. He pulled her closer so his mouth was at her ear, and then he began to move, delighting in each and every exquisite sound she made, helpless and wild and his, even now. “I don’t care. But you will obey.”
* * *
And she did.
Again and again, until the light began to creep in through his windows. Until she was ruined and lost and completely destroyed. Until he seemed satisfied enough that she’d received his brutal message that he finally passed out beside her the way he hadn’t done since their time in the oasis.
Cleo didn’t sleep. She couldn’t. She lay by his side, beneath one heavy arm, pulled close up against him as if they fit.
She was wrung out. Her body still thrummed with everything they’d done, all the ways he’d taken her, all the things he’d done to demonstrate his power over her no matter what terrible things he said. She’d loved them all, and she hated herself for it.
And she knew one thing with perfect, resounding clarity: she couldn’t do this any longer. It was one thing to lose herself the way she’d done in all these strange months since he’d plucked her from the street. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever forgive herself for pursuing that fantasy of hers so single-mindedly she’d lost sight of reality, but at least it was only her in this. She’d chosen him.
But how could she possibly bring a child into this mess the way he seemed so determined to do? What would she teach a baby—that it was acceptable to live like this, so deeply controlled? Broken into pieces and ignored unless called for?
Khaled was like a drug. She wanted him, even now. Her heart ached for him, as if it didn’t care that he was the one who’d hammered it to pieces in the first place.
And she finally understood what she should have known from the start, what so many people had tried to tell her: that she couldn’t stay here. That this had been a terrible mistake.
She couldn’t do this. She had to go.
Before he figured out why she wasn’t getting pregnant the way he wanted. Before all of this got worse. Before she was trapped so securely and so completely in this web of his—sex and command and her broken little heart that wanted so desperately to find the good in him, any good in him, that believed in that fairy tale she’d spun around this empty life they led—that she forgot she’d ever been anything but his.
