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“Did he?” she asked, as he supposed he knew she would, her gaze never wavering from his.
“How can I answer that?” His voice was huskier than it should have been, and there was too much in the air between them. Too much, too tight, too complicated. “He never had any choice but to rule. What should he have done? Thrown the country into the hands of the wicked or the greedy so he could be at his wife’s beck and call as she wanted him to do? What kind of man would that have made him?”
“There are compromises, Khaled. There are always compromises.”
Her eyes were wide and slicked with emotion and neither one of them was pretending that this conversation was about the past.
“Is this evidence of compromise?” he demanded then. “You running away from me in the middle of the night, then tying me to a bed so you can pry into my history? Where is the compromise in that?”
“Your mother sounds like she was unwell,” Cleo said, though her voice was rough and there was that bright gleam in her gaze that spoke of tears unshed. That heavy, aching thing that he felt, too.
“There are words for it these days,” Khaled said quietly, as if that might stem the rising tide in him. As if anything could. “But all I saw were two parents who used love as their primary weapon against each other. As a battering ram, Cleo. Neither one of them could stop. And they ended up hating each other.”
She was silent for a long while. So long he realized he could hear the hum of air-conditioning units from somewhere outside, and the dappled, happy burble of what must have been a nearby fountain. All of that and his own heart, pounding too hard. Reminding him why he never, ever discussed this.
Tearing him apart with every jarring thud.
“So this is what you took from that story?” she asked, when he had begun to think she might not speak again.
“Not ‘that story.’” His tone was curt. “My life.”
“That the mistake—the tragedy—was your parents’ loving each other. That’s what you decided.”
He might have gone scathing then, but she sounded so much more tentative than she had before, as though she was trying her hardest to figure him out. Khaled thought he should have told her not to bother with such a fool’s errand, but he couldn’t deny that he liked it, all the same. It made him soften slightly.
“I decided that no wife I ever took would mistake the matter,” he told her, far more gently than he might have. “That there would never be any doubt. I am the sultan and I, too, must rule Jhurat whether I like it or not.”
She didn’t look away. Her chin rose. “You’re trying very hard not to say that you will always choose your country first.”
He was. Damn her.
“It’s not that simple.” But he couldn’t lie to her. It occurred to him then that he’d never been able to lie to her—and all of this would have been so much easier if he could have. He shoved that odd notion aside. “But yes. I will always choose Jhurat. I must. And yet, Cleo, here I lie. Lashed ineptly to an iron bed a planet away from where I should be tonight. So perhaps none of these choices are as black-and-white as you’d like to believe.”
“But it’s more than that.” She shifted, and as she sat back he found he could only marvel at how pretty she was. That it broke through all the rest of this like the sun on an overcast day, and he had no idea how he’d become so weak where she was concerned. So enamored. Or why he missed the soft weight of her hand so terribly it made him tense with the loss. “You told me I had to adhere to a very strict role. That I had to obey.”
“I was trying to protect you,” he grated at her, only dimly aware that he’d clenched his bound hands into fists. “My mother spent her life feeling abandoned and discarded and alone. If you never expected anything of me, how could you feel those things?”
Her face registered astonishment. “Are you— You’re saying that was for my own good? You can’t be.”
“I wanted to protect you.”
“By humiliating me as I knelt before you, naked.” He’d never heard a tone quite so withering. “By keeping me at arm’s length by day and only coming to me at night, as if there was something wrong with me.”
Khaled glared at her. “I wanted you to fall, but not that far. I wanted to keep you safe.”
“Then why did you work so hard to make me fall in love with you?” She shook her head when he started to protest. “You know you did. Why did you spend that week with me in the oasis? How was that anything but...too many expectations?”
