Undone by the Sultan's Touch

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

His gaze moved over her and she had to fight not to squirm. She was wearing dark trousers and scuffed boots beneath a loose-fitting T-shirt, and a dark jacket as much to cover herself in this conservative part of the world as to block the faint chill in the air, hinting at the coming fall night. She’d twisted her long hair back, but the long day had coaxed some of it down again, strands falling forward messily and making her feel much younger than her twenty-five years.

Cleo didn’t want to ask herself why, exactly, she wished there was something more in his dark gaze then. Something to match that heat inside her.

He flipped open her wallet and looked inside. “You are a very long way from Ohio.”

“I’m traveling,” she said, and her voice sounded strange. Huskier than usual. Raw, somehow. “Backpacking.”

“Alone?”

She didn’t want to admit that, for some reason. For a hundred reasons. But he lifted his gaze from her wallet and the license he was presumably studying, and she felt hot. Caught.

“Yes,” she said, fighting to sound normal. “It’s been six months. I fly home in two weeks.”

And the truth was, she didn’t want to go back. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

“Unless, of course, you find yourself detained,” he said, as if he could read her mind.

She frowned. “Why would I find myself detained?”

“A prison sentence would be considered a lenient penalty in this country for a foreign national caught in the act of kidnapping a member of the sultan’s family,” he said, almost casually.

It was undoubtedly suicidal to scowl at this man. But Cleo only thought about that after she did it.

“I didn’t kidnap anyone. Your sister ran in front of my car. Should I have flattened her beneath my tires?” She didn’t remember herself so much as see that incredulous expression on his face, and she coughed once. Delicately. “I thought I was helping. And also not committing vehicular manslaughter.”

The sultan stared at her for a moment, that incredulous expression shifting to something else. Something far more dangerous.

“What do you imagine my sister was running from?” he asked, and it occurred to her that his easy, casual tone was in truth neither of those things.

“Maybe you’re marrying her off? To some ally or other?”

But that notion came from novels she’d read, not any particular knowledge about this place or him, and he seemed to know that. Even to expect it, she thought, when his slate-gray eyes darkened.

His magnificent mouth, already close to cruel in its beauty, thinned. He watched her for a moment, his cool gaze like a fire inside her, turning her inside out.

That had to be panic, she told herself, but she knew better.

“What a vivid imagination you have, Miss Churchill.”

She didn’t want him to know her name. She didn’t want him to look at her like that, or at all. She wanted to run.

Except she really didn’t. She’d been running for six months. This was the first time she’d wanted to stand still instead. Cleo couldn’t let herself think too much about that. It made the heat in her burn hotter.

“Your sister didn’t tell me what she was running from,” she said, somehow sounding far cooler than she felt. And not because she couldn’t seem to do anything but obey him, no matter if the order he gave her was silent, conveyed by those smoky gray eyes that she found as unnerving as she did mesmerizing. “She jumped in the car, that’s all. And then you appeared before us like every horror-movie villain in the history of mankind. Only without an ax. Happily.”

Again, that arrested look. That slow blink, as if he couldn’t believe she’d said that. Neither could she.

“My sister is sixteen.” His voice was low. Measured. “She doesn’t wish to return to her boarding school. What you interrupted was a tantrum.”

“She asked for my help,” Cleo said staunchly, and found herself lifting up her chin in a defiance that had to mean she had some kind of death wish. “And I’m not going to apologize for helping her, no matter how ferocious you become.”

He studied her, cold and fierce and impassive. He is a sultan, her brain kept reminding her. This is deeply, deeply foolish. He could do as he liked with her, and they both knew it. Mouthing off to a man like this had to be right up there in the top two dumbest things she’d ever done, right next to trust Brian.

“You are fortunate, I think, that I don’t require your apologies,” he told her, and yet the way he said it made her feel anything but fortunate, despite that glowing knot of heat low in her belly. “But I’m afraid you must come with me anyway.”

* * *

Khaled bin Aziz, Sultan of Jhurat for the moment—assuming he could keep clinging to his country by his damned fingernails—stood outside the small private foyer in the old palace where his guards had sequestered the American girl, and considered his next move.

His sister had been taken to her rooms—where she would remain until morning, when his guards would personally transport her to her boarding school in the countryside and make sure her teachers there were prepared to monitor her movements more closely. He knew it wasn’t Amira’s fault that she acted this way, so heedless and irresponsible, kicking up the kind of trouble she couldn’t possibly understand had far-reaching consequences.

Khaled could remember being sixteen and angry at everything himself, but, of course, he hadn’t had the luxury of indulging either his youth or his temper. He’d been too busy bearing the brunt of his responsibilities as their father’s heir.

You do not matter, his father had told him when he was barely eight and then with great regularity thereafter. Only Jhurat matters. Accept this truth.

Nor could Khaled indulge his own temper now. There was too much at stake. Trade negotiations with Western powers who took such pleasure in believing him a barbarian for the kind of commerce that Jhurat very much needed to secure if it was going to escape the curse of endless poverty that had afflicted so many of its neighbors, and had nearly crippled it, too, beneath the weight of his father’s paranoia and attempts to alleviate his own guilt.

Open the borders and you open Pandora’s box, his father had predicted balefully in one of his coherent moments, but it wasn’t until now that Khaled had fully understood what he’d meant.

He didn’t blame Amira, but he could kill her all the same for throwing him neck-deep into problems he wished someone else could solve. But that was what happened upon inheriting a country far earlier than expected after its ruler, his father, had collapsed and had been declared incompetent: there was no one else. These problems were Khaled’s alone.

“She is no one of importance,” his head of security, Nasser, said quietly from beside him, his gaze on the sleek computer tablet in his hands. “Her family is unremarkable. Her father is an electrician and her mother works in a doctor’s office in a small town on the outskirts of what appears to be a very small city in the middle of the country. She has two sisters, one married to a mechanic and the other to a teacher. No ties to anyone with any sort of influence at all.”

“Ah,” Khaled said, more to himself than Nasser, “but that only means she is one of their ‘every women.’ I learned at Harvard that Americans love nothing more than to tell themselves fairy stories in which little brown mice become great and powerful through their own inner strength, or some such nonsense. It is part of their cultural DNA.”

Inside the room, his own little brown mouse sat on one of the settees, bent over at the waist, elbows on her knees and her forehead cradled in her hands. He thought she was simply breathing deeply, not weeping. Not this one, with her talk of villains and axes and her foolish courage. He’d seen the hint of fear in her eyes when he’d ordered her back to the palace. He’d scared her, he knew, and if he regretted that—if he regretted the necessity of squelching that spark of defiant fire that had transformed her from a mouse into something far more interesting out in that alley, if he regretted the man he’d become that he could do these things so cavalierly—he ignored it.

There was no place for regret. There never was. There was only Jhurat.

“She has been traveling, as she said,” Nasser continued after a moment, diplomatically opting not to comment on either fairy stories or mice, which was only one of the reasons he’d been Khaled’s right hand and best friend since they’d been boys. “She flew to Scotland six months ago and has been wandering since, following what appears to be a largely whimsical itinerary south and east. One of those gap-year journeys, it seems, though she finished her university studies some years back. Perhaps she is ‘finding herself’?”

Khaled snorted at his aide’s dry tone. “And instead she found me. Poor little mouse.”

“There is no need for you to deal with this situation any further if you don’t wish it,” the other man said then. “We can handle a girl. Especially one who cannot possibly cause a single ripple, no matter what becomes of her.”

“And can you handle our enemies, too? Who even now work to have me removed from the palace because of my tainted blood?” What they whispered was that Khaled’s line was weak, that the son would inherit his father’s dementia before his time. And who was to say they were wrong? He shoved that aside. “I am certain they have already leaked the fact that I have a young female American in custody to the papers. It is inevitable.”

“The papers can be dealt with.”

“Our papers, perhaps.” But that was how his father had done things, and look what it had wrought: this mess Khaled had to clean up, though he often doubted he could. He doubted anyone could, but it was his duty—his fate—to try anyway, no matter what happened. “But what happens when they take it to the international stage? Which they are certain to do.” Because it was what he would do, and Khaled had the peculiar pleasure of knowing his enemies well. “How will we look to the world when I am painted as some kind of monster who abducts fresh-faced young American girls from the streets?”

He already knew what it would do to the contracts they needed to lock down to bring commerce to the country. To say nothing of the much-needed influx of international wealth, which, with the increase in tourism since he’d opened the borders again, might tip the scales in Khaled’s favor. In Jhurat’s favor, at long last.

He couldn’t afford any backsliding. Not now.