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“Mine?” she repeated, not sure she wanted to know. But like everything with Khaled, she couldn’t seem to stop. “That’s ridiculous.”
“The wild-goose chase to Johannesburg was entertaining, of course,” Khaled said, his gaze sharpening on hers. “But if you truly wanted to be rid of me, you should have enacted your daring escape without leaving behind that snide little taunt, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t taunt you.”
“Of course you did.”
He pulled his hands from his pockets and then he moved, and it was all too smooth, inexorable—and he was there, right there. She was up against the wall with his hands flattened on the battered bricks on either side of her head, his face level with hers. And his gray eyes were so dark, so serious, they looked blacker than the thick night surrounding them.
And saw everything.
Cleo shivered, deep inside.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
It was a question, soft against the night. It wasn’t an accusation.
She wished it had been. That might have been easier. And she didn’t pretend she didn’t know exactly what he meant.
“How could I?” she asked, hating that raggedness in her voice. That thickness. “I told you I wasn’t ready to have children and you ignored me.”
“I don’t think so.” He kept her pinned to that wall at her back with nothing more than that quiet, implacable stare of his. She was frozen solid, and he wasn’t even holding her still. “I tried to keep you in a box, but it never quite worked, did it? You didn’t want to tell me because you needed ammunition.”
“Ammunition?” Cleo was shaking, though, and she didn’t know why. There was something moving inside her, something she suspected he already knew was there, and she didn’t want this to happen. She wanted to run. She wanted to hide. But he was right there, he was watching her, and she couldn’t move at all. There was nowhere left to hide. “Ammunition for what?”
“Proof,” he said, in a tone she might have thought was gentle had she not seen that deadly serious look on his face. “How could you possibly stay with a brute like me, a man so controlling you had to sneak your own birth control pills?”
There was a cracking deep inside her, as if the earth were leaping beneath her feet and tearing her apart, and Cleo was lost in it. Torn asunder. A terrible need swept through her, harsh and riotous, and she was drowning in this, in him, in all the things she’d been holding on to all this time—
“That was what happened!” Her voice didn’t sound like hers at all, and she didn’t know she meant to move until she was slapping her palms against the solid, immovable wall of his chest.
“You hid those pills, Cleo,” he said in the exact same voice he’d used before, insidious and dangerous and wrong, damn him—he was wrong, “the same way you hid yourself in plain sight the moment I gave you the excuse. You flaunted your feigned obedience like the thrown gauntlet it was. Because I was your fantasy and you needed an exit strategy and a reason. And you know it.”
Cleo was shaking her head, or she was simply shaking, and she couldn’t tell which.
“No,” she gritted out, desperate and furious and panicked besides. “I loved you. I bent over backward for you. I became a different person for you. I would have done anything for you and you were horrible to me that night—”
“Yes,” he agreed, and there was that temper there, finally, in his dark, low voice, as if he was losing his own battle with his control. How could she feel that like a victory? “That one night you surprised me and I was mean. Very mean. And your response to that was to act like an ice queen for months and then abandon me without a word.” He stopped, as if to catch his breath, but his gaze slammed into her. Spearing through her as though he could hold her aloft with the weight of it alone, and she thought that he could. That he was. “I think perhaps you won that argument after all, Cleo. Given that your love is already in the past tense.”
And something inside Cleo simply...snapped. It was like a storm, finally breaking into thunder and frantic sheets of rain. It rolled through her and out of her, and she hardly knew what was left in its wake.
Tears poured down her face, she was sobbing and she found each of her clenched fists held firmly yet gently in his hard, capable hands with no memory of how they got there, his chest tipped against hers so she had no choice but to simply writhe, pinned between him and the wall and that raucous tumult that simply would not stop until it wrenched her apart—
