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“This thing has as much power over me as it does over you,” he said through the sand in his throat, that furious clawing inside him again, as though it was new.
Her eyes flashed with disbelief. “I know why you’re here, Khaled. This isn’t about me. You want to avoid the scandal that happens when the world finds out the fairy-tale bride has left her fairy-tale prince.”
“Three seconds ago we were an inch away from having sex in front of the whole of the city of New Orleans. I obviously don’t care that much about a scandal.”
“You’re the one who built that fairy tale in the first place. Of course you care.”
“There’s a difference between a marketing campaign and my life,” he snapped, that iron control of his a distant memory. “Our life.”
“No.” Her voice was rough but her chin was high. “There isn’t. There never was.”
She shuddered, hard, as if she’d been sliced through with a cold wind, and then she shook her head, all that glorious hair of hers swinging slightly as she did, her mouth still slightly swollen from his, and he wanted her in his arms with a fierceness that bordered on sheer desperation.
“Tell me you didn’t come here to fetch your wayward wife and shuttle her back home to a life of quiet obedience in Jhurat,” she said then, those pretty eyes of serious and dark. “Tell me you came because you actually wanted to talk to me about the things that have happened between us. Tell me, Khaled. I’ll believe you.”
“Cleo.” Her name was like a prayer, and he had given up on praying a long time ago. But he couldn’t bring himself to lie to her. Even now.
She shook her head. “That’s what I thought.”
He wanted to hit something hard, like the wall or the whole damned city itself, but he only stood there before her instead. His shirt hung open, he was disheveled and unhappy, and she was still the only thing he could see. The only thing that mattered.
As though she was the only light in all of this, after all.
“When will you see what this really is?” he threw at her, not caring if he was too loud. Not caring if he knocked down those walls with the force of his voice. Not caring about anything but making sure that she understood this at last. Understood him.
“I know exactly what this is.”
“You don’t. You are the one thing—this—” and he moved his hand between them in an inadequate representation of that wildfire that still pulsed in him, in her, in the air around them, thicker and more dense than the Southern night “—is the only thing I can’t control.”
Khaled had spent six weeks without her, in the profoundly dark place she’d left in her wake. He didn’t want to do it again.
“You want control?” His voice was a torment, ripped from deep inside of him, and he couldn’t begin to imagine what expression he wore on his face when Cleo flinched. But she didn’t take her eyes off him.
And Khaled opened up his hands in a heretofore unknown gesture of supplication, and he offered himself to her, right there on a dirty American street surrounded by refuse and drunkards on all sides.
For the first time in his entire life, not the sultan but the man, and he couldn’t regret it. If anything, he exulted in it. “Then, by all means, take it. I’ll give you all night.”
CHAPTER NINE
FOR A MOMENT, CLEO didn’t understand him.
She was still fighting off the dizziness from that internal storm that had nearly swept her away, followed by that devastating kiss that had nearly gone too far. As a one-two punch went, it left her breathless and reeling. Wrecked.
But Khaled stood there, waiting. Watching her, as if he didn’t think she was wrecked at all.
“Exactly what do you mean?” she asked, because she couldn’t trust where her mind had gone. Because this was Khaled, who prized obedience above all things—
“Whatever you want,” he said, and her temper cracked inside her again, like a whip, lashing into her the way she wished she could lash into him. Because none of this was what she wanted. She’d wanted happy. She’d wanted the whole damned fairy tale.
“I don’t want to play these games with you, Khaled. We both know you couldn’t last five minutes with someone else in control. You’d explode.”
“Try me.”
His gaze was dark and hard and very, very serious. Cleo’s pulse kicked into a higher gear. She ignored it.
