When they’d passed, when Cleo could breathe again, her heart was making its own kind of clatter and Khaled was watching her, something brooding and yet much too inviting in his dark gray eyes.
“Are your men surrounding me?” she asked, raising her chin as if she might try to fight them off herself. “Am I five seconds away from being thrown in the back of a dark-windowed SUV and smuggled out of the country against my will?”
“It is, I think, high time you watched a better class of film.” Khaled’s voice was dry, and she didn’t want to feel that easing inside her at this unwelcome reminder that he wasn’t always so harsh. That he was sometimes even funny. “I have no intention of smuggling you anywhere. This is life, Cleo, not an American action hero franchise.” He studied her. “And besides, I think we both know there is no need for such theatrics when all I need to do is touch you and you’d follow me anywhere.”
That he was probably right sat like a stone in her, but she scowled at him anyway and hoped he couldn’t see the flush of heat that enveloped her.
“Yes, of course,” she said in a bored tone that hurt to produce. “Because I’m so stupid and inexperienced next to—” she waved her hand at him in a gesture that could only be deemed flippant “—all that. I don’t know that I’d brag about that if I were you, Khaled. But to each his own.”
He looked incredulous and thunderous at once. But Cleo just wanted him gone. She wanted this over.
Didn’t she?
“I might have let you go,” he said softly, but with that dark steel beneath that seemed to slice right through her and lodge somewhere inside her at the same time. “It was what you wanted, what you went to great lengths to secure, and I was not, I am aware, at all the husband you fantasized I might be.”
“It had nothing to do with fantasy!” That stung.
“It had everything to do with fantasy,” he retorted, and there was a crack in that iron control of his. She could hear it in his voice and it shook her. “It was the easiest thing in the world to make you fall in love with me—you were halfway there already when I took you back to the palace.”
“You are a remarkably cruel man,” she said quietly, and somehow she knew it was a direct hit.
“That was a simple truth,” he said roughly. “Would you prefer I lie to you, Cleo? Even now?”
“Yes,” she lied. “You used to be much better at it.”
“Too bad.” He eyed her, and a different kind of heat twisted between them then, almost too painful to bear. Cleo didn’t know how she managed to hold his gaze. “What exactly did I do to you to make you run like that, as though I was some demon you were so desperate to leave that it required an escape plan?”
There was absolutely no reason at all that she should feel that bright curl of shame inside her then. She felt it hot and red at the tops of her ears, and the fire of it in her belly. As if she were the one who had wronged him.
“You know what you did.” Her own voice sounded distorted. Choked and strained by all the things she refused to let herself feel.
He was closer then. Too close, she realized, as she started to instinctively back away from him. Cleo forced herself to stand still, no matter how near that put her to that impossibly cut chest of his, that absurdly perfect body. No matter if she could feel the heat of him blasting through her, reminding her how cold it was without him, even here in the soft, warm South.
And no matter that only very dimwitted creatures stood so close to obvious predators like this one.
“And yet here you are,” Khaled murmured, a lilt in his voice that arrowed deep into her, making her melt, making another shiver of goose bumps scatter over her skin at the sound. “Happy to remain in the middle of a dark street exchanging barbs with me. Not the faintest shred of fear on your face.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she snapped, and the faint gleam in his eyes made her wish she’d curbed that too-revealing burst of temper. Then she thought about what he’d said and she scowled. “And if you were going to let me go, why did you change your mind? Let me guess—pride? Arrogance?”
“Yes.” That gleam in his gaze intensified, until she could feel it inside her, blazing through all her dark places. “Yours.”
She was breathless again, and there was nothing but Khaled, standing too close to her as if they were held in the same vicious grip. As if he knew her far better than she’d imagined he did, and she couldn’t believe how stripped naked that made her feel.