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“Khaled—”
“I am a profoundly selfish man,” he gritted out. “Don’t you understand that by now? I don’t want to resist you. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.” His gaze searched hers, but that didn’t help. And he was hoarse from the battle inside him when he spoke again. “Let me do the right thing.”
“This is the right thing,” she said. She moved then, taking her hands from his and using them to reach up and cup his face. “We are right, Khaled. That’s why it hurts so much.”
“I think that rather proves the opposite.”
“All we’ve shown each other so far is how inflexible we are,” she said, and he felt as if all those dark things in him were filling up with her voice, with all that light she spilled all around her so effortlessly. Warmth. Peace. The sweetest honey. He was only a man. He could only take so much. “So now we know the worst. But what if we’re not your parents? What if we figure out how to bend instead of break?”
Bend, he thought. That was what was happening inside him now, what had been happening whether he liked it or not since the day they’d met. All of that blackness he’d carried inside him turning over into grays and blues. All of her light chasing out the shadows.
As though forever started right now, if they dared.
“I am the Sultan of Jhurat,” he told her, but he found he was smiling, and she was, too. “I do not bend.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “You are the great and terrible sultan. The world bends around you.”
“I don’t care about the world,” he told her gruffly, lifting her up against him and vowing then and there that he would never lose her again. Not ever. No matter what happened. No matter what it took, what beds he would be forced to let her tie him to, what bending would be required. “It’s you I want. I always have.”
“I’ll do my best to make sure you always will,” she told him fiercely.
“Be sure about this,” he told her, every inch of him the autocrat. “I won’t let you go this time. I really will detain you. Permanently.”
“I promise you, Khaled,” she whispered, a dark current of need, and that bright light besides, wrapped around him like joy, “I will never give you cause to doubt I love you again.”
And right then and there, on the great desk his grandfather had won in a war no one remembered, with Jhurat spread out before them like a stark and beautiful portrait, they started making good on all their promises.
* * *
Five years later Cleo lounged lazily in the cool tent at the side of the oasis’s crystal-blue waters, and thought they’d kept those promises well.
Khaled walked in from the bright afternoon, the sun seeming to cling to his perfect form an extra moment before her eyes adjusted. And then it was only his brilliance she saw, which he generated all on his own.
“Did it work?” she asked as he dropped down beside her and gathered her to him, kissing his way from her temple to the corner of her mouth.
It still made her shiver.
“It did,” he said. “It turns out, I am hypnotic, as I always believed. She dropped off to sleep by the second verse.”
He had been gone much longer than that, Cleo knew, tucking their two-year-old in for her afternoon nap.
“And then you watched to make certain she was breathing.”
“Of course,” he said, and smiled. “And to protect her against any nightmares that might arise. It is no more than my duty.”
They’d worked out their own compromises across the years. For every three months in the palace, Cleo insisted they spend a solid week alone in the oasis. She’d learned how not to run or hide. He’d learned how to delegate. They’d both learned how to bend. He had dismissed Margery and others like her and Cleo had made a point to spend more time with Amira who, as she’d once predicted, had left her attitude behind when she’d stopped being a teenage girl.
They tried. Every day, they tried.
And then, when they were both ready, had come their perfect daughter. Gorgeous Amala Faith with dark, flashing eyes like her father, who had wrapped the both of them firmly around her chubby little fists.
But that didn’t mean Cleo didn’t exult in her nap times, when it was only the two of them again.
“Did you wish to sleep the afternoon away, my love?” Khaled asked, with false sincerity, working his way down her neck until Cleo sighed happily and stretched against him, pressing herself into him in that way that never failed to make her breath catch, even all these years later. “Like our daughter will, God willing?”
