Katie tried to seem engaging at dinner. She chimed in when she could and laughed at the jokes, but mostly, she spent the greater part of her energy trying not to stare at Khalid.

He sat next to her at dinner, and occasionally, their thighs would brush together. It was enough to make her heart beat erratically, but he didn’t do more than that.

To hide the trembling in her hands, she drank.

Too much.

By the end of dinner, her head was spinning.

Liyah had been watching her with concern. “Katie, of course we can have a driver take you home, but if you want to spend the night here at the palace, I can let you borrow some clothes.”

The last thing she wanted to do was spend the night at the palace. She didn’t think that she could make it through the night, knowing that Khalid was under the same roof. “No, that’s okay. But I appreciate the offer. Dinner was amazing, Amira. Thank you so much for the invitation.”

“We don’t see nearly enough of you,” Mila complained. “Khalid is a slave driver!”

Katie laughed. “He’s not, although the gallery does keep me busy. The truth is that I have met another friend, and I have dinner with her once or twice a week.”

Fatima called her frequently, sometimes several times a day, but she seemed more interested in Khalid than in Katie.

Katie was starting to feel uncomfortable having dinner with the woman, but it was the one time she could talk with someone who wasn’t directly related to Khalid. Although she hadn’t come out and told Fatima that she was sleeping with Khalid, she could vent about him without actually telling the whole truth.

It was almost cathartic.

“Well I demand that we do this once a week,” Amira declared. “I have far too much fun with you guys.”

“Me, too!” Smiling, Katie stood—but wobbled just a bit. “Okay, it is definitely time for me to go home. It was really good to see you guys. When the Greek collection is live, we’ll all have to go see it. It’s rather enticing.” She winked, and the table laughed.

She hoped that Khalid would walk her to the door, but it was Asad who offered. She wasn’t so drunk that she couldn’t walk down the hall, but she was pleasantly buzzed.

“You and your brothers are so interesting,” she murmured as he opened the door to the valet station for her.

“I assume you’re talking about Khalid,” Asad laughed. “He’s a good man. I just think that he’s not allowed to be himself.”

Turning her head, she stared at him. “Because he doesn’t paint?”

“A lot of things.” Asad bowed his head as the driver pulled up. “Have a good night, Katie.”

“You too, Asad.” On impulse, she hugged him before climbing into the car.

To her surprise, rather than taking her home, the driver simply drove around the block before heading back to the other side of the palace.

“What are you doing?”

“Following orders,” the driver said in a neutral tone. “Sheikh Khalid wanted me to drop you off at his door.”

“What? Why?” She glanced out the window and saw him standing outside the door, waiting for her.

Grumbling under her breath about his ridiculous controlling nature, she climbed out and marched toward him. “What do you think that you’re doing?”

“You’re spending the night with me,” he said shortly as he opened the door. “Come on.”

Narrowing her eyes, she crossed her arms over her chest. “You couldn’t be bothered to ask me rather than order me?”

“You’re a little drunk, Katie. Do you want to go home to Sahaar like that? I don’t plan on taking advantage of you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“No, I guess you had your fill last weekend,” she muttered in disgust. “If you wanted me to spend the night, why not say something at dinner? Why make the driver circle the palace and sneak me in as if I were some mistress of yours?”

“Katie . . .”

“Am I not good enough for your family?”

He sighed and shook his head. “I didn’t think that you’d want the girls to know that you’re sleeping with me like this. I felt that you’d want to tell them yourself.”

“Slept with,” she corrected before stomping inside.

His hand snuck out and grabbed her arm. “Just so we’re clear, Kadija, I have not had my fill of you. I’m not even sure that it’s possible.”

Jutting her chin out, she stared at him. “Then what have you been doing this week?”

“Following your lead. You seemed hell-bent on ignoring me, and I didn’t want to push you.”

Oh. “That’s oddly nice of you. Okay. I’ll stay here tonight. I should have borrowed something from Liyah, after all.”

Khalid chuckled as he followed her inside. “I may not be taking advantage of you, Katie, but that doesn’t mean you have to wear clothes to bed.”

She expected his suite to be cold and impersonal and was pleasantly surprised to find it covered in art. Paintings and murals hung on the walls, some contemporary and some prints from well-known masterpieces. At least, she assumed that they were prints. The originals were supposed to be hanging in museums. His shelves and bookcases were littered with pottery and small statues.

And some of the paintings . . .

“Those are mine,” he said roughly. “I went through a landscape period. Dubai was my muse.”

The barren scenery glowed under the moonlight. His strokes were bold and deliberate, and there was a haunting beauty to his work.

“They’re beautiful,” she whispered as she reached out a careful finger to the nearest, stopping short of touching the surface. “Why would you stop?”

He was silent for a moment before he opened the doors to the patio to let in the small breeze.

Curious, she followed him out and stared down at the city below.

He gripped the railing and smiled sadly at her. “My father is a traditional man. He’s relented quite a bit in the past few years, but when we were growing up, he had strict ideas about what he wanted from us. I always knew that I would disappoint him. I used to sneak away and paint at night so that I could be what he wanted me to be during the day and be what I wanted at night.”

Night and day.

“He found out?”

“He wasn’t angry. My mother encouraged me to paint, and he’d always assumed that it was a hobby, but when I failed to take an interest in the family’s various businesses, he grew alarmed. The gallery was a last-ditch effort on his part. We fought—argued,” he corrected as if feeling the shock radiating from her. His look grew far away as if the conversation had transported him to the past, and she saw the sadness in his eyes.

“He’s a businessman by nature,” she said gently to pull him back to the present. “It can be difficult when children are so unlike their parents.”

Khalid sighed and nodded. “He felt that I was never going to amount to anything, and I guess I was starting to feel that, too. He promised me the gallery, to do whatever I wanted with it, if I gave up painting.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Couple of years.” He shrugged slightly, not meeting her eyes. “I’m okay with it. I love the gallery.”

Tentatively, she touched his chest. “You can do both.”

“Maybe.” He grabbed her wrist and kissed her hand. “But I haven’t wanted to paint in a long time.”

His eyes darkened as she leaned up on her tiptoes and kissed him. “Maybe you just need the right person motivating you.”

His fingers stroked her cheek. “Why did you come here, Katie?”

“Your sister invited me.” Pulling back, she wrapped her arms around herself.

“Not here to the palace. Here to Dubai. You aren’t really here to find your mother’s roots, are you?”

“Yes.” Under his steady gaze, she sighed and bit her lower lip. “Sort of. It’s difficult to explain.”

“We have all night.” Moving closer, Khalid wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

“As long as it’s not about art?” Katie snorted.

He didn’t flinch or move away, and she sighed. “My parents’ marriage wasn’t a happy one. My mother was beautiful, and I think that’s all she was to my father. He never would have married her if it wasn’t for me. A brief affair that turned into a shotgun wedding.”

She laughed bitterly as she remembered the way that they used to fight. “He ordered her around like she was his slave, and she never stood up to him. I used to think that she died of a broken heart, but I don’t even know that she loved him.”

A lump formed in her throat, and she struggled not to cry. Khalid didn’t push her to continue, but his hold tightened gently, and he kept holding her, making her feel oddly secure in his arms, until she could keep going. “He used to tell me that I was going to be exactly like her. Pretty—and not worth anything. I did everything that he wanted. I was a good student. I kept to myself. I never partied or stayed out past curfew. I didn’t drink or do drugs. I went to the school that he wanted me to go to, and I picked the classes that he wanted me to take.”

“I take it that wasn’t art history?”

In spite of the pain, Katie laughed. “I signed up for summer school after freshman year so I wouldn’t have to go home. I was supposed to go to room 321, and instead, I stepped into 312. It was an upper-level art history class, and it focused on the transition of art between the Age of Reason and the Age of Imagination. I didn’t understand half of what was going on, but I was intrigued.”

A smile twisted on his face as he adjusted his grasp and pulled her under his arm. “Really? I figured you’d be the type to get up and immediately correct the mistake.”

“I did the good-girl thing and found the right class, but I skipped almost a third of my classes that semester to sneak back into art history. The pain . . . the love . . . the passion. It was everything I had yet to experience. I changed my degree at the end of that summer.” She snuggled against him and, despite the warm night, enjoyed the heat radiating from his body.

“Daddy didn’t like it?”

His arm tightened around her as she winced at the memory. It was painful to think about and even harder to voice. Her mouth was dry as she tried to push back the pain. “He screamed at me. He told me that when my looks faded, I’d have nothing if I didn’t go back to my business studies. He told me that I was just like my mother. Destined to use my sexuality like a weapon to get what I wanted. It was horrifying. He withdrew his financial support.”

She swallowed hard. “He withdrew his emotional support,” she went on numbly, “although that admittedly wasn’t much.” She took a deep breath and lifted her head higher, defiance creeping into her voice. “I graduated at the top of my class. I got a scholarship to get my master’s degree. I excelled in my internship, but knowing that my father hated me crushed me. The only other parent I had was dead.”

“So you hoped to find love here?” His tone was even, and she couldn’t help but search for some sign in those words, but he gave very little away.

Katie turned in his arms and pressed her head to his chest. She could feel the steady beat of his heart. “I just wanted to feel connected to something. I wanted to find myself outside of my father’s hatred and outside of my rebellion.”

“How’s that working out for you?” he asked dryly.

Poorly. Her connections had led her to love, but it was a love that would never be returned. “I’m still working on that.”

“Ah, sweetheart.” He kissed the top of her head and stroked the bare skin of her arms. “You’re strong. Independent. Frustratingly stubborn. I think you know exactly who you are.”

She wasn’t sure that she knew who she was, but she knew what she wanted. Slowly, she reached down and unzipped his pants.

“Katie,” he protested.

“I need you, Khalid. I wasn’t trying to push you away this week. I thought that you were pushing me away.”

His cock was rock hard when she fished him out and squeezed. As his eyes studied her, she slowly lowered herself to her knees.

“No,” he hissed as he stepped back.

“Seriously?” She frowned. “What man doesn’t love a blow job?”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m really not. I was a little buzzed, but my head is clear now. Give up some of that control, Khalid. Just enjoy.” Feeling empowered, she leaned forward and touched her tongue to the head of his cock.

It jumped, and he leaned against the railing. Immediately, she knew she had him.

Teasing him, she squeezed and swirled her tongue around him until his heavy breaths turned into a moan.

“Katie,” he grunted as he wrapped her hair around his fist.

Smiling, she ran her thumb under the base and looked at him. “Yes, Sheikh?”

“Minx,” he muttered. “Suck me, Katie. I want to feel your mouth around me. Please, baby.”

It was the closest she was ever going to get to hearing him beg.

Licking her lips, she opened up and took him deep.

He was gentle with her, small thrusts, loud moans. His legs shook, but when she thought she finally had him, he pulled away.

“Hey!” she protested, but she let him push her to the ground and unzip her jeans. She was already wet for him when he pulled up her knees and entered her.

She lost control, but she didn’t care.

He loved her right there on the patio, and it was all she could do not to admit that she needed more than just his body.

She needed his heart.