Uncovering Her Nine Month Secret(70)
“You are American.”
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.”