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But that notion cae about this place or hiht, when his slate-gray eyes darkened

His nificent mouth, already close to cruel in its beauty, thinned He watched her for aher inside out

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

“What a vivid iination 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 tellfar cooler than she felt And not because she couldn’t seeave her was silent, conveyed by those s as she did“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 forup her chin in a defiance that had toto apologize for helping her, no matter how ferocious you become”

He studied her, cold and fierce and i her This is deeply, deeply foolish He could do as he liked with her, and they both knew it Mouthing off to a ht up there in the top two duht 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 itknot of heat low in her belly “But I’m afraid you must come with me anyway”

Khaled bin Aziz, Sultan of Jhurat for theto his country by his daernails—stood outside the suards had sequestered the Airl, and considered his next move

His sister had been taken to her roouards 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 kneasn’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 re hi either his youth or his te the brunt of his responsibilities as their father’s heir

You do not ht and then with great regularity thereafter Only Jhurat matters Accept this truth

Nor could Khaled indulge his own teotiations with Western poho took such pleasure in believing him a barbarian for the kind of co to escape the curse of endless poverty that had afflicted so hbors, and had nearly crippled it, too, beneath the weight of his father’s paranoia and atteuilt

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 bla him neck-deep into problems he wished someone else could solve But that hat 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 froaze 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”