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“What do you suggest?” she asked in as quelling a tone as she could manage, folding her arms over her chest and hoping she looked tough rather than half-sick with desire and halfway to drunk on all the impossibly steamy images streaming through her head. “Drinking games on Bourbon Street? Truth or dare with all the other tourists who wander past? That sounds right up your alley. You can lecture everyone on your superiority while downing hurricanes and flashing people for Mardi Gras beads.”
“Or,” he suggested in that low, carelessly seductive way of his, as if he didn’t have to try to sound that way because he simply was that compelling, “you could take the night and do as you like. In private. As I offered.”
“You didn’t specify private. What you said was all night.” She tilted her head to one side. “The whole night?”
His eyes gleamed silver and Cleo’s mouth went dry when he inclined his head in that impossibly regal, enormously attractive way that meant nothing but bad things for her self-control.
“With me in total control,” she clarified, and he held her gaze for a long moment. It took her a beat to realize she was holding her breath.
Khaled nodded again.
“You can’t do it,” she breathed, but she was already wavering. Imagining.
Plotting.
And Khaled smiled, as if he knew it.
“I can handle it, Cleo. Can you?”
* * *
It wasn’t until they were both standing in the foyer of the house she’d been staying in, a typical Garden District remodel with its polished wood floors, abundant fireplaces and elegant Southern touches throughout, that it really hit Cleo.
What she was doing. What he was doing.
What could happen here, if he was truly willing to let it. If she was willing to accept that the things she felt for him weren’t going anywhere.
“And what happens if I simply use you and throw you out the door tomorrow morning?” she asked him, breaking that simmering silence that had been wrapped around them since they’d left the French Quarter. “Like any other regrettable one-night stand?”
He looked even more dangerous then, with that sizzling heat in his dark gaze and that faint ghost of a curve on his mouth. He loomed there in that foyer as if, were he to shrug, he might bust it wide open with the force he exuded from every pore. Every inch of him the sultan, no matter that they were discussing the terms of a surrender she still didn’t believe he could make.
But seeing him here was educational. He was made to rule over the desert he came from, truly built for it. He belonged there with every sinew and muscle and bone in his tall, commanding body. Those wide-open spaces. That lonely sky, crowded only at night with the faraway stars. Nothing else could possibly contain him.
Certainly not an overly fussy foyer in a small Southern mansion, filled with cut flowers and darling vases Khaled looked as though he could shatter with his thoughts alone.
“Ah, yes,” he murmured, snapping her back to this minefield they were standing in. “Your extensive knowledge and experience with one-night stands. It had somehow slipped my mind.”
“For all you know, I’ve had one every night since I left you.” He didn’t look particularly concerned with that possibility, which, perversely, Cleo found insulting. “I have you to thank for awakening me to the joys of insatiable desire, after all.” She smirked. “Thank you, Khaled.”
That dark, narrow gaze of his invited her to keep going, to push him further and who knew where they’d end up—and Cleo’s pulse went erratic and much too fast and she could have sworn he knew it.
“You’re welcome” was all he said.
“You could at least pretend to be outraged at the very idea. Break something in a jealous rage. Say something obnoxious and faintly medieval.”
It occurred to her after she stopped speaking that she’d as good as admitted she’d done nothing of the sort.
“I would be more than outraged if I thought it was possible,” he replied silkily. “I would long to tear every one of your lovers apart with my hands and take out my darker feelings on your sweet flesh. But you didn’t touch anyone.”
Cleo couldn’t tell if she was stung or touched by that. “You can’t possibly know if I did or didn’t.”
“I know you.” The way he looked at her then was more powerful than a touch. Darker and deeper. Searing straight through her. “And for better or worse, despite your own preference I expect, you see nothing but me.”
