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The hotel suite they stood in was a celebration of old-world opulence, a marvel of restoration and generations of money sunk into every detail, and still it faded next to the carnal menace of Khaled. He’d rid himself of his jacket and the shirt beneath it, and as he stalked toward her he was arresting and bold, all that golden skin and the mouthwatering display of his powerful muscles beneath.
If he was less beautiful, Cleo wondered, would that make this any easier? She couldn’t tell.
He stopped in front of her, his gray eyes too dark and his dangerous mouth in that grim line that worked through her like sadness.
“Kiss me,” he ordered her, and there was something in the way he said it. Something too much like despair. It made Cleo’s throat feel tight. It made her clench her whole body, even the soft, hot core of her, where he’d licked her to delirious insanity only a few hours before.
“Khaled...”
But she didn’t know what she meant to say. What she could say. He’d given her exactly one way to live in his world and she didn’t want to do it. She couldn’t do it.
“Cleo.” It was a whisper. Complicated and dark, and that aching in his gaze that made her tremble. His mouth crooked slightly to one side as he reached over and brushed her cheeks gently before holding her there, hands cupped around her face. “Obey me.”
Obey. That terrible word.
And yet it was the only thing she wanted to do, just then. So Cleo ignored everything inside her that railed against him, tilted her mouth toward his and kissed him.
With all of her pain, her regret. The dreams she’d entertained of the life they should have led, her confusion and her worry and that deep, rich vein of anger that ran beneath it. She kissed him for forgiveness and she kissed him in accusation, and he held her face in his hard, hard hands and kissed her back.
As if they had all the time in the world.
It was almost as if he knew this would be the last time. He sank his fingers into her hair, ignoring the combs that fell and the way it all toppled down, tugging her even closer to his heat. It was drugging and dark, utterly perfect, and Cleo couldn’t help herself.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on while he peeled the silver gown down, then kicked it aside when it was at her feet. And she gasped against that delectably hard line of his mouth when he hoisted her up against him, then pulled her legs around his waist.
He was so strong. Built like steel and all of his power focused so intently on her. On the wet heat of her, pressed so intimately against him. On kissing her, again and again, as if he would never tire of her taste.
His hands brushed that ruinous fire over her skin, his mouth against her neck made her cry out his name, and only when she was writhing out her pleasure against him—mindless and delirious and entirely his—did he carry her over to the sofa that stretched across the living area.
And then, when he was stretched out above her, Khaled stopped playing around.
He was relentless. He took her again and again, making her boneless and blissful against him, so gloriously wrung out she thought he must know what she had planned. That the dark, driving need that had ridden him all night must be suspicion—
But he only took her into the shower in his same grimly possessive way and washed her, treating her like a piece of delicate glass. Treating her like something precious—but that means nothing to him, she reminded herself sharply. I could as easily be a vase. He dried her slowly, using the great soft towel the way an artist might use paints, until Cleo was finding it hard to keep her eyes from overflowing with all the things she didn’t want to feel.
He couldn’t be tender. He couldn’t be affectionate. Because that was how she’d imagined him for so long in her mind, how she’d told herself he’d be if she only gave him time, and she knew better. Whatever this was, it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t.
She thought he’d reveal himself somehow when he ushered her back out into the bedroom, but he didn’t. Khaled simply lay down with her in the hotel bed, then curled around her the way he’d done more often than not in these last, confusing days, holding her close and tight.
As though he loved her, when she knew better.
He doesn’t know I’m leaving him, Cleo told herself. He can’t.
“Settle down,” he murmured, a low rumble against her ear, and it didn’t help anything to realize that this was probably the last time she’d hear him like this, so close to her he was setting her alight with the furnace of his body, so close she could feel the graze of his mouth against the shell of her ear. He shifted, running one big hand up to rest between her breasts. Holding her there. “Your heart is pounding.”
