He’d use that, too.
Something unexpectedly hot wound through him when she licked her lips, her eyes still fixed on him. And then she frowned at him, and he liked it. Far more than he should.
“I hope you’ll allow an overprotective brother to make it up to you as best he can,” Khaled said, his smile even brighter.
He was going to enjoy this.
THE MAN WHO walked into that parlor as if it, too, should cower before him as he moved was fearful and breathtaking, but he wasn’t quite the same one who had confronted Cleo in the street—and not only because he’d changed his clothes, she thought.
This version of the Sultan of Jhurat smiled as he sat down with her, something that altered that fierce face of his and made him nothing short of stunning.
Her heart pounded hard, like a fist against her ribs.
“Please,” he said in a pleasant tone of voice, lounging there in a sleek buttoned black shirt over a pair of loose black trousers, neither of which made him look any less dangerous than he had in that alley. It was as if he’d traded in a scimitar for a polished knife, but the sharp edge was still the same. She’d never in her life met anyone so male. “You must call me Khaled.”
As if they were friends. As if it was possible that one could be friends with a man like this. Cleo doubted it. He was far too intense, far too...colossal.
“Uh, okay. Khaled.”
He looked as if he could eat a thousand Brians for breakfast and still be hungry.
She looked at the room instead of at him, hoping that might ease the clench of that bright heat inside her. But it didn’t, no matter how many lovely silk pillows decorated the delicately pretty couches, or how much gold was on the ceiling and dripping down the walls into the exuberant sconces. No matter that smile on the sultan’s darkly ferocious face as he looked at her now.
“Does this mean you’re not planning to arrest me any longer?” she asked. Politely. And only then realized she was frowning.
He threw his head back and laughed. It was heart-stopping. Cleo felt as if she’d fallen down hard and knocked the breath straight out of her lungs.
“I’ll confess to overreacting,” he said, that astonishing laughter still rich in his dark voice. “It is an older brother’s prerogative, surely.”
He nodded at some unseen servant—and this was the sort of over-the-top place, preening with dramatic chandeliers draped in crystals and entire gleaming ballrooms lined with complicated tapestries depicting epic historical events she couldn’t identify, that must have whole battalions of unseen servants, Cleo imagined—and sure enough, a tray appeared before them. Hot, fragrant tea and an array of treats, sweet and savory alike, as if he was trying to tempt her.
Or charm her.
And then the Sultan of Jhurat waved his servants away and poured tea for her, as if nothing in the world could be more normal than to serve her himself.
Her. Cleo Churchill from outside Columbus, Ohio, to whom absolutely nothing interesting had ever happened. Embarrassing and humiliating, sure. But a cheating fiancé wasn’t interesting. It was boring, run-of-the-mill, exactly as she’d concluded she must have been if a safe and supposedly good man like Brian had been driven to betray her so completely.
She was dreaming, clearly. She’d thought so repeatedly over the past few hours, and her thigh ached from all the times she’d pinched it. She thought she’d have a bruise by morning, and still she found herself lost in the way he moved, all of that leashed strength and easy power obvious even in his handling of a delicate china teacup.
Cleo swallowed, hard, as though that might clear the buzzing in her ears. Or wake her up.
“Tea?” he asked smoothly, as if it were the most natural thing imaginable for a man like him to wait on her, in any capacity, when she could see it wasn’t.
She could see the way he wore his command, so matter-of-factly. That it was a part of him. That the fierceness, the dark ruthlessness she’d seen in him before, was the truth of him. Not this creature, whoever he was, who smiled at her and made her blood heat.
Almost as if he meant to charm her... But that was absurd. She was far too practical to yearn for something so out of her reach. Wasn’t she?
She ignored that insane voice inside her that whispered that after suffering through Brian, she deserved something this impossible. This wild and beautiful.
“I don’t want to keep you,” she said, but she took the cup and saucer he offered her anyway, as if her hands wanted things she wouldn’t let herself wish for. Maybe that was why her voice came out so crisp when she spoke again, as though she was chastising him. “I’m sure you have any number of official duties to perform.”
“None so pressing I can’t take the time to correct a grave error,” he said, settling back against his seat and training that intense gaze of his on her, gleaming with what she didn’t think she dared call amusement. “I apologize for my sister, Miss Churchill. She dragged you into a family matter and put you in a terrible position. It’s unforgivable.”
“Cleo. If I’m to call you Khaled—” and there was something about his name that felt different against her tongue then, like a square of dark, almost-bitter chocolate, and a light flared briefly in his slate-gray gaze as though he tasted it, too “—you should certainly call me Cleo.”
“Is that short for Cleopatra?” he asked almost lazily, making her wish it was. Making her wish with a sudden deep fervor that she could transform herself into whatever might please him—and she didn’t know where that thought came from. Only that she felt it like her own too-warm blood, pounding through her, changing her where she sat.
But then, she’d been there, done that, with a man who could never dream of being Khaled’s equal. She wouldn’t do it again.
“No.” She set down the tea without tasting it, afraid she’d drop the whole of it on the undoubtedly priceless rug beneath her dusty feet. “My mother liked it.”
He studied her for a moment, until she realized she was holding her breath.
“I like it, too,” he said, and she didn’t understand the heat that blasted through her, confusing her even as it made her ache.
“You were talking about your sister,” she reminded him, somehow ignoring that thing that wound ever tighter deep inside her.
“Amira is my responsibility,” he said after a moment, that hard voice of his a shade warmer, though not at all soft. “Our mother died when she was quite small and I suppose I feel as much a parent to her as an older brother. And I regret I’ve not been there for her as I should have. My father’s health has declined quite seriously in the past year and my attention has been on the country. That is not an excuse and not something I could have changed, but it is a factor, I think, in her acting out.”
“I don’t know that it’s possible to really be there for a teenage girl,” she said after a moment, when she was reasonably certain her voice would come out even. “No matter who she is. Feeling abandoned and mistreated is par for the course, as I remember it, whether that’s true or not.”
“I can’t help thinking that she would do better with a female’s guidance. Someone to look up to who is not the autocratic brother who now makes all the decisions about her life that she doesn’t much like. I suspect she finds me as baffling as I find her.”
It took Cleo a moment to look up, because she’d been too busy staring at the frayed cuffs of the dark trousers she’d worn in too many countries to count and wondering with only the faintest little hint of despair why she was dressed like a teenage girl when she wasn’t one. Sitting here in this place—in this palace—she’d