“You know perfectly well it is.”
“And am I not the Sultan of Jhurat?”
“That’s the rumor,” she said drily, making him laugh. He hadn’t expected that she’d amuse him—and, he reminded himself, it didn’t matter if she did. It was beside the point.
Though it makes this that much sweeter, a traitorous little voice whispered, as if he was like other men. As if he had choices.
As if she did.
“Then I believe I can do as I like.” He shrugged. “It pleases me to give you things, Cleo.” This time when he reached out to her, he traced a gentle pattern from her temple to her cheek, something hot moving in him when she trembled. “Don’t you want to please me?” He didn’t wait for her answer, even though he knew what she’d say. It was too soon. “Be careful how you answer that. There are laws.”
She laughed, as he’d intended, and he liked that, too.
The American was his. As planned.
* * *
“You realize you will break her heart,” Nasser said one evening after being forced to interrupt one of the increasingly intimate dinners Khaled had insisted Cleo share with him.
Khaled shot him a cool look as they walked through the palace’s wide, ornate halls toward an impromptu meeting of his security council to focus on yet another one of Talaat’s attempts to stir up trouble in the provinces.
“I will note your concern for her,” he said as they went, his voice more clipped than it should have been. As if he cared, when he knew he couldn’t. “In the meantime you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that I know precisely how far I need to push her. And where I must stop.”
“I only wonder if it is necessary to go quite so far,” Nasser said in that same calm way of his. “Perhaps there is a kinder way to achieve your ends.”
“There is no power on this earth more motivating than falling in love,” Khaled said grimly, and told himself that he felt nothing. “It can make the most practical among us do precisely what we know we shouldn’t. And then, soon enough, it disappears when reality sets in. That is the time for kindness.”
You feel nothing, he barked at himself. No twist of regret, no sorrow for what might have been. No yearning for all the ways he could have lost himself in the glory of her instant, artless response to him, were he a different man.
Because the moment Cleo had let Amira into her car, she’d thrust herself into the middle of a chess game Khaled had no choice but to play—and play to win. And he would.
“The only greater power is that of love scorned,” was his friend’s reply. “As I think you know all too well.”
“Cleo is not my mother.” Khaled rubbed his hands over his face, annoyed that this was even a topic of conversation when the country hung in the balance, when he was only doing what he must in the most expedient manner possible. “My little mouse is not going to rise up one day and surprise us with her claws, then expedite her own destruction. That’s not who she is.”
Nasser inclined his head and moved to open the door to the briefing room.
“And more importantly, I am not my father,” Khaled found himself saying, dark and furious. Unbearably defensive. “I know what I’m doing.”
“As you say, Your Excellency,” Nasser murmured deferentially.
Which was, Khaled knew, no response at all.
But he had no choice.
And even if he’d had a choice, he knew he’d do this the exact same way. That was the thing that stuck in him, making Nasser’s words echo too loudly inside him, making him feel hollow. Because he was a selfish man, when all was said and done. Exactly as his father had been. When he was alone, when no one could see him or try to read the expressions on his face, he accepted that.
But it didn’t change a thing.
At least his father hadn’t meant to do what he’d done. Khaled would have no such excuse. He would protect Cleo from the worst of it, from his own mother’s fate—but he couldn’t bring himself to save her from himself.
Khaled knew what that made him. A monster of his own design.
Some nights later they strolled together through the moonlit courtyard. Cleo looked like quicksilver in the moonlight, very nearly ethereal, and when she smiled at him over her shoulder as she argued with him about some foolish book he’d told her was pointless, it clutched at him.
He’d made her inarguably beautiful with only a different wardrobe and two weeks. It was high time he made her his, no matter what kind of monster that made him.
She hadn’t put her hair up since the day he’d told her he liked it down. She’d stopped fighting the clothes he gave her, the trinkets he left for her to wear. And he found that the more he watched her and the more she bloomed from an awkward, androgynous Westerner into a woman possessed of the studied elegance he preferred, this delicate creature who frowned at him and talked back to him, the more he thought she was the perfect choice. The world would consider her a great beauty, he knew, with her natural slenderness and innate grace, and it would make them sigh over this romance he was shaping in precisely the way he wanted.
And he would always remember this. Here. Now. When she was half in love with him already. When she was lost in him and greedy for his touch. When she didn’t have the slightest idea what their future would look like.
It surprised him how very deep and powerful that pleasure ran, so atavistic, so rudimentary, it was almost indistinguishable from need. From the kind of hunger that he couldn’t indulge—the kind that would wreck not only the both of them, but all his carefully crafted plans besides.
He needed her to teeter on the edge, he reminded himself sternly. Not to fall.
“You aren’t listening to me,” she said then, rolling her eyes in a deeply disrespectful manner that should have offended him, yet didn’t. “That’s considered rude in both our cultures, I think you’ll find.”
You will break her heart, Nasser had warned him. But then, Khaled had never claimed to be a good man. Only a determined one.
And, oh, such a selfish one.
“Have you become so brave, then?” he asked into the silvery moonlight, lazy and flirtatious, ignoring the darkness beneath that he didn’t care to acknowledge. “That you would dare to scold a sultan?”
He reached over and took her hands in his, and that heat in him deepened, caught fire. He hadn’t expected to want her, particularly not with that jagged edge too much like raw need, but Khaled told himself that he could control it.
Because he had to control it. Because he was not his father.
“I dare,” she said, but her voice was little more than a shimmer in the dark, and he smiled.
“Come here,” he said, and tugged her to him.
She came easily, as he’d expected. Her breath came short and hard, as though she was running flat-out, and the moon made her eyes gleam, wide and filled with longing—and it wasn’t in him to resist her.
He didn’t try.
“Kiss me,” he said, a silken order against the night. “If you are so daring.”
He could feel her tremble against him, and he liked it. She tilted her head back, and he liked the fire in her golden gaze, and the hunger that very nearly matched his. He wanted to taste her, suddenly, as if he’d never wanted anything else.
As if he wasn’t as in control as he wanted to believe he was.
Cleo shifted up onto her toes, bracing herself against his chest, and he liked that too much to worry about control. She was feminine,