He wished he was another man. He wished he was anyone but who he was, chained to this palace, this country, this life he’d never chosen.
“It has only been a little while,” he told her, the bastard that he was, determined to stop her from going any further down this road. Saving her from her own doom, though the betrayed look on her lovely face, in her honey-colored eyes, told him she wouldn’t see it that way. “You will no doubt fall out of love as quickly.”
And then he moved the way he’d wanted to the moment he’d realized what that unusual shape was in the center of his bed. The moment he’d understood it was Cleo, his Cleo, her hair spread out around her and those marvelously responsive breasts bared to his view, arrayed before him like the perfect sacrifice to his own eternal need for her.
He wanted her. More than he wanted his next breath. And he couldn’t have that, so he had to do whatever he could to make her hate him. It was better that way. It was far safer for her, no matter how it felt to her—to him—now. It was his gift to her.
He should have given it to her far sooner, he knew.
Khaled came up and onto the bed until he was right there before her, too fast for her to do anything but watch him with that same stunned look on her face, as the latest horrible thing he’d thrown at her reverberated in the air between them. She pulled back, belatedly, and he simply took her chin in his hand to make her look at him.
She shuddered, but she didn’t knock his fingers away. She didn’t even try.
If you won’t protect yourself, he thought bitterly, that howling thing inside him gathering force and speed, punching out pieces of him as it went, then I must.
“What you love is sex,” he grated at her, and he saw it land. Hard. “You love what I can do to you with the faintest touch. No matter what I say to you or what I do, you still come when I command it.”
“No.” But it was only a whisper, and her eyes were dark and huge.
“You crave my touch,” he said in that same dark way, so low it was almost as if he was talking to himself. He wished he was. “Like there is nothing else on this earth that matters.”
And he proved it, reaching over with his other hand and cupping her breast, watching the way her nipple hardened at once. Watching the red flush high on her cheeks that he knew by now meant she melted for him below. Showing her all the ways she wanted him, even now.
“I love you,” she said again, and more fiercely.
But then, she didn’t know that he’d been broken long before he’d met her, and had accepted it. Embraced it. That he’d never imagined there would be any light at all in this dark and dutiful life of his. That he’d had no idea she would burn this bright, tempting him to ignore his blood, his duty, his country, the price he knew they’d both have to pay—anything to have her. Anything.
It would kill him. He was certain of it.
“Cleo, please.” His words were hard, his voice far colder than he felt. “You hardly know me. You’re an inexperienced woman who clearly hasn’t had anything like decent sex before. I don’t want you to know me. I don’t want you to do anything but what you’re told.”
“But I can’t—”
“You can.”
And then he kissed her like a starving man, with all the agony he couldn’t show her, all the things he wanted that he knew he couldn’t have. Love. A true marriage. Her. He kissed her as though he thought might never kiss her again.
That fire that always roared between them was much brighter tonight. Wilder. Or she was, burning as hot and as golden and as out of his reach as the moon.
Khaled took her over, kissing her again and again until she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back. Then he simply bore her back to the bed, settling himself between her thighs, hard where she was soft, and there was no pretending they weren’t both as desperate as they’d ever been.
Nasser had warned him long ago that he would break her heart. He should have listened. He should have understood that in the end, if he wanted to protect this surprising woman who had lodged herself so unexpectedly inside his own chest, it would be his heart that shattered.
Especially when he saw her tears.
“Don’t,” he whispered, the sound very nearly broken, as if he could command her not to cry.
“Is that an order, Your Excellency?” she asked, bitterly, and when he kissed her again she tasted of salt and heat, and there was that hollow thing in him, loud and devastating.
“Cleo—” he began, and he didn’t know what he might have said.