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“I love you,” he said, and it sounded as though it was ripped from him, a dark and troubled confession. “I can’t seem to stop, no matter what I do. You hate me when I try to protect you, and the more I’m with you, the less I want to try.” He advanced on her, and Cleo stood there and did nothing but watch him come. Helpless. Powerless. As caught by him as if she were still locked away in that bedroom he’d refused to share with her. “But I still must choose my country. I will always have to choose my country. I am my country—and we have already established that it will eat you alive.” He reached over and dragged a thumb over her mouth, tracing the shape of her lips. “It will drive you insane. And I can’t live with that, either, as much as I wish I could.”
“Khaled.”
He ignored her. And worse, he stepped back, a kind of fury and misery stamped on his fierce face that she felt inside her, a sharp, spiked belt of agony.
“So this? All of this? My love, such as it is?” He laughed, and it was a frozen, bitter sound. It seemed to take up all the air in the room. “It’s nothing but selfishness. If I knew what love was, Cleo, I would have let you go. I wouldn’t have followed you here. I wouldn’t have detained you in the first place, seduced you, married you. You’ve known that from the start.”
He backed away from her, and Cleo was trembling openly now, but Khaled only pressed his lips together in a firm line.
And when he spoke again, his voice was a harsh rasp. A stranger’s. Final. “So have I. And I still have to go. I always will.”
* * *
The heat was a living thing that slammed into Cleo when she stepped off the plane and onto the metal stairs that led down to the private airfield some thirty kilometers outside the old city. And the palace it had been built to contain.
She had to stop and catch her breath, it was so relentless, and then she made her way down to that sun-baked Jhuratan soil, amazed that she felt a solid thump of something like homecoming when her feet hit the ground.
But that was getting ahead of herself, and she knew it.
“My lady, it is a great pleasure indeed to welcome you,” said Khaled’s head of security from his place some three strides away, while an armored car and driver waited even farther behind him. Nasser inclined his head when she met his gaze.
This was it, Cleo told herself firmly. She was really doing this.
“Are you sure?” Jessie had asked, not making any attempt to hide the dubious note in her voice as she’d watched Cleo pack.
It had been three days after Khaled had left New Orleans. Three days while Cleo beat herself up in that perfectly manicured Garden District house that wasn’t in any way her home. Three days while Cleo had faced the unvarnished facts.
She hadn’t told a single person besides Jessie that she’d left Khaled in the six weeks she’d spent in New Orleans. Not her family. Not anyone. If she was honest with herself—finally—she knew it was because she’d been waiting for him to come after her.
Which meant that no matter how much she’d prefer to deny it, she was as manipulative as it sounded like his mother had been in her day. Staging dramatic scenes to force him to choose. Never taking responsibility for her own choices in return. The truth was, as he’d pointed out, she could have gone home to Ohio, but she hadn’t. When Cleo had left Brian, she’d never regretted it for an instant. She’d wondered how she’d been so blind, but she’d never wanted him back. She’d traveled for months, which was more or less the precise opposite of waiting.
When she’d left Khaled, she’d cried all the way to New Orleans and every night thereafter. She’d tortured herself with dreams of him. His perfect, scalding kiss. His smile. And the moment she decided to return to Jhurat and work on her marriage instead of running from it, she felt nothing but intense relief. She told herself that had to mean something.
“He never pretended to be anything but what and who he is,” she’d told Jessie while she zipped up her small suitcase. “I’m the one who wanted him to be some fantasy version of himself.”
The one who had been such a child, if she was honest. She’d wanted happy ever after above all things, no matter what. She hadn’t thought much about what it might take to get there, or even what that really meant. Such as, that it didn’t end at the great big fairy-tale wedding—that was where it started.
But in order to get there, she had to stop thinking about what she deserved and think a whole lot more about what she was willing to give instead.
