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“No. They didn’t.”
“Thank you.”
“Why did you...”
“I simply want to know what I’m bringing her into.”
There was a long pause. “What is your relationship to her, Cairo?”
“That is absolutely none of your business,” he said.
He hung up abruptly, her words echoing in his ears, the softness of her kiss impressed upon his mouth.
They had not brought women to his brother while he was in the dungeon. That meant... Unless he’d supplied himself with lovers since he had been released...
It was possible, but unlikely that he would have heard. If his brother had begun bringing a parade of sex workers into the house, it was quite likely that Brianna would have mentioned it. Likely that it would have signified.
And he worried about what it might mean for Ariel. If Riyaz would have any idea how to please a woman.
Do you worry how you just hate the idea of any other man’s hands on her?
It did not matter what he liked or didn’t like. She belonged to Riyaz. He had made a promise. And he had to keep it.
No matter how enticing she was.
No matter that he had given in to temptation in a way that he had not done even when he’d been a boy.
But his chest still felt like it was full of glass. And he did not know what could be done about it.
CHAPTER NINE
HERLIPSSTILLfelt swollen the next morning. She touched them before she moved. She was lying cocooned in the large bed in her room, covered by velvet blankets. The desert sun had risen, the open windows allowing the light to pour in. But it might as well have been night, out in the garden, for all that her body still burned with Cairo’s touch. She didn’t understand how he affected her so. And she could not...
She was all bound up in this. In this confusion. In the desire to touch him again, kiss him again. In the knowledge that he was sending her off to marry his brother in spite of this connection between them.
And somewhere in all of that was her freedom, a distant, hazy memory.
Her life in Paris before Cairo had taken her. Before he had stormed back into her life. Why did she feel more free in his arms than she ever had at any other time in her life? She wasn’t free. She was a prisoner. She was being forced to live this life. Being forced to...
Her heart was pounding hard. She got out of bed and opened up her closet, looked inside of it. She took out another white shirt, and a pair of khaki high waist pants. She’d gone for that specific Katherine Hepburn look yesterday, and she was happy to repeat it today. The sensuality of the dress from the night before... Yeah. She didn’t want that feeling. Not again.
She carried the clothes into the bathroom with her and filled the tub. She looked out on the desert, naked. And the same sensual promise that she felt the first time whispered over her skin.
The thing that scared her the most was that even if she were to escape now... What was there to go back to? A career, yes. Though, Cairo had made it sound as if it was all right for her to carry on her career even as the sheikha. But she wasn’t sure that she was the same person. When Cairo had so abruptly disappeared out of her life it was like a thread had been cut. And she had been set on a new path, the severing of that past connection painful and abrupt. And now it was as if she had gotten a chance to pick that thread up again, golden and beautiful, and see who she might have been if she had kept moving along it. Except... It wouldn’t have been Cairo that she kissed. She would have married Riyaz. A man she couldn’t even picture now. She wondered what the face of that taciturn boy looked like now that he was a man. A man that had spent the last sixteen years in a cage.
But Cairo was all she could see. Cairo was all she could want. Her heart throbbed.
Was he her enemy anymore? She wasn’t sure. He wanted something for her that she didn’t want for herself. But within that, he wanted her.
And that was something she simply didn’t know what to do with.
She bathed herself, her skin perfumed by oils in the water. And then she got dressed, putting her hair in a low bun before heading down to breakfast. He wasn’t there. She sat at the table by herself and wondered if they actually would have a lesson today, or if he would avoid her after the kiss.
The kiss. It had scalded her from the inside out.
She ate quickly, and caffeinated, and then went into the room where they had said those vows yesterday. And there he was. Standing with his back to her, looking out of the window. An echo of what she had just done upstairs. An echo that made her body tremble.
“And what is the lesson today?”
