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“I hate you,” she whispered.
It took her a moment to realize that he was far closer to her than he’d been before, and that the insistent drumming she felt and heard wasn’t more New Orleans street music but her own pulse. And that it lit her up with every beat. With every breath.
With that look on his gorgeous face, not remote at all now.
“I hate you,” she said again, desperately.
Cleo had never wanted anything more than for that to be true.
Khaled’s beautiful mouth, so hard and so cruel, shifted into that tiny curl that she knew was only and ever hers, and this time she had no doubt that the dark thing she could see in his gray eyes and all across his ruthless face was regret.
Regret and grief and all the rest of the unwieldy things that were tearing her apart where she stood.
“I know you do,” he said, gravel and command, and then he leaned forward and claimed her mouth with his.
* * *
She was like lightning in his arms, wild and raw and his, and she still tasted like fire.
Khaled angled his jaw for that perfect fit, hauling her closer to him, not caring that they were on a public street. Not caring if every last paparazzo found them there and plastered this nearly savage kiss all over the planet. Not caring if the entire world witnessed what happened here.
It was carnal, hot, perfect. Unmanageable. Untamable. Intense and insane.
It was something more than simply right.
He had planned his vengeance carefully. It had taken longer to locate her than it should have, and he’d found he admired her ingenuity when he wasn’t dreaming up ways to make her pay—and dearly—for her temerity.
But then Nasser had taken a harder look at the only friend of hers who could have helped her pull something like that escape off. It had taken them no time at all after that to finally locate Cleo herself in a questionable neighborhood in this ruined swamp of a city, made of equal parts jazz and folklore, poverty and grift. And Khaled had come to find her like a righteous thundercloud, prepared to drag her back with him by her hair if necessary.
Where he’d planned to make her pay for her desertion for a very long time to come, in as many highly imaginative ways as he could.
And then he’d seen her.
He’d watched her let herself out of the old house where she was staying, a stately monument to the genteel decay that so marked this humid, flowery place. He’d followed her as she’d walked all over the city with a certain aimlessness and lack of self-preservation that indicated she did it often. He’d noted the slope of her shoulders, the defeated gait in place of her customary grace, how skinny and tired she looked in the uniform of all the women her age in this dirty, grimy, oddly enchanting place: battered jeans and boots, and a flowing sort of sweater wrapped over a T-shirt the color of coffee.
She was his wife. His wife. And she looked as though she’d erased him and the life they’d led as easily as she’d left him in the first place.
And yet when he’d stepped out to confront her on this pretty little side street in the middle of the bustle and song of the French Quarter on another long and boisterous night, vengeance was the last thing on his mind.
So Khaled kissed her like the drowning man he was.
He kissed her again and again, sliding his hands around to hold her steady for all the ways he needed to taste her, learn her, have her. Remember her. She trembled and she shook, and then she pressed that lithe, amazingly responsive body against him and everything simply melted.
And for a long while there was nothing but that white-hot fire, eating them alive, and who cared what was left when it was done.
It was the loud burst of drunken laughter that reminded him where he was, the cackling of the women and loud shoes clomping against the concrete as a group of revelers wandered past. Khaled blinked down at Cleo, unable to believe how out of control things had become.
How out of control he had become.
His hands had slid down the back of her jeans and he was cupping that delicious bottom of hers as he held her against his hardness, her silken skin warm and soft against his palms. One of her hands was buried in his hair while the other slid over his naked chest—and he had no memory whatsoever of her unbuttoning his shirt.
He muttered a filthy curse in Arabic, and Cleo’s gold-soaked eyes rose to meet his.
“Let go of me,” she said, but it was the barest whisper, and he thought he recognized that look on her face then. Pure self-loathing.
“I don’t want to,” he muttered, but he pulled his hands away anyway.
“Of course you don’t,” she said, and there was a hard misery in her eyes. “Because you want control. That’s all you ever want. You use this thing that happens between us to make me crawl, to make me beg, to make me—” She cut herself off, as if she didn’t dare speak the words out loud. “On a public street!”
