Undone by the Sultan's Touch

Author:Caitlin Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

“YOUR WIFE IS ENCHANTING!” the Italian businessman cried, much too enthusiastically for Khaled’s liking, especially when he had his equally enthusiastic hands on Cleo while he was saying it.

But Khaled smiled because it was the expected thing and they were in the full glare of a very public gala, and restrained himself from knocking the man’s bristly mustache away from Cleo’s outstretched hands. Barely.

Mine, he thought, the way he always did, because even dressed in formal clothes and smiling politely for the cameras, Khaled was little more than a caveman where this woman was concerned. His woman.

It was the height of winter in Vienna and he was already weary of this nonsense. They’d been traveling for several weeks now, hitting one event after another across Europe so that Khaled could court captains of industry like the one currently slobbering over his wife. He was tired.

He was tired of touting his vision of a new Jhurat like a snake-oil salesman. He was tired of explaining all the reasons this or that industry should plant new roots in Jhuratan soil. He was tired of dancing and smiling and acting like one among the many over-titled idiots who cluttered up the European ballrooms, none of them with the slightest idea of what it meant to truly fight for anything.

And he was tired, so very tired, of the icy cold perfection of his wife.

He had to hand it to her, Khaled thought darkly as he watched her latest performance—making the besotted Italian man lapse into what sounded like poetry while never forgetting the equally smitten Swiss banker on her left. Cleo learned her lessons quickly. Especially the ones he’d taught her.

She was perfect tonight. She’d been perfect for weeks, come to that. She oozed aristocratic grace from every pore, a feat indeed, given that everyone who saw her knew who she was and that she hadn’t a drop of blue blood in her. Since that awful night in his bedchamber, she hadn’t so much as lifted a single silken brow against him. No hint of her charming defiance, no trace of that glorious smile of hers, no more attempts on her part to make him laugh. She’d woken up that following morning and she’d simply been...perfect.

Tonight she was holding court with an ease that suggested she’d spent her whole life preparing for this role, which Khaled had to remind himself was an illusion. She was a vision in a column of shimmering silver that both flattered her figure and preserved her modesty at once, as befitted a woman who served as an advertisement for a conservative country.

She seemed as at ease in her fashionably high heels as she was to find herself surrounded by a pack of international philanthropists known as much for their ruthlessness as for their checkbooks. Her lovely hair—all those blondes and caramels and reds Khaled could never get his fill of—was swept back into an elegant twist and anointed with pearls and diamonds on delicate combs, and

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