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His possession. His pawn. Whatever he made her. Whatever he desired.
She had to leave him.
While she still could.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“YOUR WIFE IS ENCHANTING!” the Italian businessman cried, much too enthusiastically for Khaled’s liking, especially when he had his equally enthusiastic hands on Cleo while he was saying it.
But Khaled smiled because it was the expected thing and they were in the full glare of a very public gala, and restrained himself from knocking the man’s bristly mustache away from Cleo’s outstretched hands. Barely.
Mine, he thought, the way he always did, because even dressed in formal clothes and smiling politely for the cameras, Khaled was little more than a caveman where this woman was concerned. His woman.
It was the height of winter in Vienna and he was already weary of this nonsense. They’d been traveling for several weeks now, hitting one event after another across Europe so that Khaled could court captains of industry like the one currently slobbering over his wife. He was tired.
He was tired of touting his vision of a new Jhurat like a snake-oil salesman. He was tired of explaining all the reasons this or that industry should plant new roots in Jhuratan soil. He was tired of dancing and smiling and acting like one among the many over-titled idiots who cluttered up the European ballrooms, none of them with the slightest idea of what it meant to truly fight for anything.
And he was tired, so very tired, of the icy cold perfection of his wife.
He had to hand it to her, Khaled thought darkly as he watched her latest performance—making the besotted Italian man lapse into what sounded like poetry while never forgetting the equally smitten Swiss banker on her left. Cleo learned her lessons quickly. Especially the ones he’d taught her.
She was perfect tonight. She’d been perfect for weeks, come to that. She oozed aristocratic grace from every pore, a feat indeed, given that everyone who saw her knew who she was and that she hadn’t a drop of blue blood in her. Since that awful night in his bedchamber, she hadn’t so much as lifted a single silken brow against him. No hint of her charming defiance, no trace of that glorious smile of hers, no more attempts on her part to make him laugh. She’d woken up that following morning and she’d simply been...perfect.
Tonight she was holding court with an ease that suggested she’d spent her whole life preparing for this role, which Khaled had to remind himself was an illusion. She was a vision in a column of shimmering silver that both flattered her figure and preserved her modesty at once, as befitted a woman who served as an advertisement for a conservative country.
She seemed as at ease in her fashionably high heels as she was to find herself surrounded by a pack of international philanthropists known as much for their ruthlessness as for their checkbooks. Her lovely hair—all those blondes and caramels and reds Khaled could never get his fill of—was swept back into an elegant twist and anointed with pearls and diamonds on delicate combs, and when he had walked into her dressing room to collect her she’d smiled at him as though he was anyone. Just another potential donor she needed to charm. Anonymous.
She’d been so bright and so beautiful—yet so remote—that he’d had no choice but to drop to his knees right there, pulling that gleaming silver fabric up to bare her soft thighs before he’d buried his face in that wild heat between her legs.
He’d made her sob out his name, her hands fisted against his shoulders. He’d made her break apart and shake, buck and shiver. And when she came back to herself she looked at him with that same damned smile and thanked him.
Like a perfectly polite stranger.
She was a dream come true. She was exactly what he’d told her, so cruelly, he wanted. She was absolutely perfect.
And he hated it. More with every passing day.
“Come,” he muttered when the poetic Italian finally took his leave, trailing a thousand bellissimas in his wake, and she turned her lovely, always composed, unreadable face to him. “Dance with me.”
Cleo smiled prettily—she always smiled so prettily now, she was so damned obedient, and he couldn’t stand how off balance that made him feel—and followed him out onto the dance floor. He took her in his arms and she gazed up at him, serene and lovely.
And he wanted to shove himself under her skin. Make her react.
He wanted the old Cleo back. His Cleo. That overawed girl who had danced with him in Paris so long ago and gazed at him as if he was the sun and she wanted nothing more than to burn alive in him. That astonishingly courageous backpacker who had stood up to him in a street, when she knew exactly who he was. That surprising, life-altering night she’d melted all over him in his own courtyard at so small a touch.
