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The man, not the sultan

When of course he didn’t want that He wanted a ht she hen he’d found her Khaled shoved aside the small voice inside that whispered that he hadn’t found her to be anything of the sort That he’d only taken her back to the palace in the first place because she’d refused to back down

He had it all planned Cleo would bear his heirs and take them to the summer palace near the sea as his own mother had done with him and Amira, where the air was better and the clirow up as unfettered as possible Far away from here

Leaving hie of his responsibilities the way he always had before The way his father and grandfather had done before hiain, Khaled knew, lest he lose what he’d spent his entire adult life fighting for

He wondered then, sitting back in his chair and h he hardly kneas under discussion, what it would be like if he stopped Stopped trying to cage her, to keep her within the distinct lines he’d drawn for her Stopped fighting himself and the ed her—and hi to keep her as far away from him as he could?

He thought of that challenging light in her pretty gaze tonight when she’d told him she wanted to take out a subscription to a tabloid paper In his naht of that frown of hers that had told him from the start she saw the man before the sultan, that she wasn’t blindly in awe of him like everyone else

But this country was his life It had ruined his father and it would ruin him, too, in his time Just as it had destroyed his mother when he’d been twenty He’d spent ht for his father’s attention, so deliriously happy when she’d received it and then so destroyed when it was gone again She’d retreated fro for the scraps of his father’s attention Had it been disease that had taken her or her own broken heart?

And meanwhile, his father had tried to please both his woman and his people and had failed them both

Jhurat had been exacting a terrible tithe froenerations, one after the next down through the ages, and he didn’t i, he loved this place as he loved his own blood His own bones Every time-worn rock that made it what it was, every sun-beaten border so rain of sand in the great desert and the thick oil beneath

It ho he was It was all he was

There was no space inside him for a woman with eyes as sweet as honey and a smile like the sun when there was Jhurat, its deserts and ashed cities, its citadels and spires, like scars carved directly on his heart There was no roo that kicked at hi himself in her delectable heat and should have been sated When he should have forgotten her the moment he’d left that bedroom

When he shouldn’t have gone to her in the first place

Khaled couldn’t understand why he had Why he always did Why he no doubt would again, tonight and every night, like an obsessed, lovesick fool

Cleo was a nant, and soon, so he could put soht after night and feeling these things he couldn’t allow himself to feel So he could stop this madness, this lust, this need

Because Khaled had never had the option to be that man only she seemed to call out in him He never would

“And how is life with ,no attempt to keep the lash from her voice

She was ho school and Cleo didn’t want to ad other than her own thoughts Even if that soer

Not that she kne to answer the question It had been a few months since she’d lied by oed She saw Khaled even less by day, but he was far ht More de More powerfully raw

And she’d becos she didn’t want to ad away beneath the surface of her pretty, perfect life Her happily ever after in action