One Reckless Decision: Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past

But she couldn’t back down, though her knees felt like jelly and her lungs constricted painfully. She wouldn’t tell him anything.

The truth was, she hardly knew where to start.

She shook her head, too many emotions fighting for space inside of her, and all of them too messy, too complicated, too heavy.

“Jessa.” This time the anger was gone, and something far more like desperation colored his voice. “You must tell me what happened. You must.”

But she could not speak another word, and she could not bring herself to look at him. She had the sense that she had finally stopped running a very long, very arduous race, and the wind was knocked out of her.

She didn’t have the slightest idea what to do now. She had never so much as considered the possibility that Tariq might discover that he had fathered a child. The time for telling him had long since passed, and she knew that she had tried then, to no avail. She had never anticipated that he might return. She had stopped dreaming such foolish dreams long ago.

And now he stared at her in anguish, which she would give anything to fix and couldn’t. It wasn’t simply that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him what he wanted to know. She physically could not seem to form the words. She could not even think them. She could only lie and avoid and deflect. She could only make it worse.

“I will stop at nothing to locate a child of my blood,” Tariq said softly. There was a chilling finality to his words then, as if he was making a vow. He took a step toward her, and it took everything she had to stand her ground before him. “I have believed I am the last of my blood, my family, for five years, Jessa. The very last. If that is not so…”

He didn’t finish. But then, he did not have to finish.

Jessa still could not speak. It was as if everything inside her had shut down, turned off.

“You can only remain silent for so long,” he said. His voice was like a whip, cracking through the room hard enough to leave welts against her skin. “But do not doubt that there is only one outcome to this situation. I will find out. The only question is how much of your life I will destroy in the process.”

“Do not bully me!” she cried, surprising herself as well as him, the words ripping from her as if she had torn them from her heart.

“You think I am bullying you?” He was incredulous, pronouncing bullying as if he had never heard the term before.

“Threats, intimidation.” Jessa pressed one hand against her temple. “Is there another word for it?”

“I am not threatening you, Jessa,” he said matter-of-factly, with that ruthlessness underneath. “I am telling you exactly what will happen to you if you continue this. You have no right to keep the truth from me. These are promises.”

“What kind of man are you?” she whispered. She wasn’t sure why she said it. She wanted to sob, to scream, to somehow release the tension that felt as if it swelled up from inside her.

Their eyes locked across the few feet that separated them. He looked as if he had never seen her before, as if she was a perfect stranger who had wounded him. She realized in that moment that she never wanted to be responsible for his pain. That it hurt her, too. But understanding only made the riot inside swirl faster, swell harder, cause more damage. Jessa made herself hold his gaze, though it cost her.

Tariq looked away from her then, as if he had to collect himself before he did something he would regret.

“I suggest you rethink your position,” he said quietly.

Suddenly her tongue was loose. And foolish. “I suggest you—”

“Silence!” He slashed a hand through the air, and said something in what she assumed was Arabic. “I am done listening to you.”

He did not look at her again, but strode toward the bedroom door. Jessa could not believe it. Relief flooded through her. He was leaving? That was it? Could she really be that lucky?

And what was the part of her that yearned, despite everything, for him to stay?

“Where are you going?” she asked, because she wanted to confirm it.

“Shocking as it might seem to you, I have matters of state to attend to,” he growled at her. “Or do you think my kingdom should grind to a halt while you spin your little lies? You can consider this conversation postponed.”

“I am not going to sit around and calmly wait for you to come back and be even more horrible to me,” she told him fiercely. “I am going home.”

He turned when he reached the door to the rest of the suite, his eyes narrow and his mouth hard.

“By all means,” he said, his voice as dark as his gaze, and his warning clear, “go wherever you like. See what happens when you do.” Then he turned his back on her, seemingly still unconcerned with his nudity, and strode from the room.

His sudden absence left a black hole in the room that Jessa feared might suck her in, for a dizzy, irrational beat or two of her heart. For long moments, Jessa could not move. She told herself she was waiting to see if Tariq would return. She told herself she was merely being cautious. But the truth was that she could not have moved so much as an inch if her life depended upon it.

Eventually, when he did not come back, Jessa moved to the edge of the bed and sat down gingerly, carefully, unable to process what had just occurred. Unable to track the course of the past two days. She remembered going to work in the letting agency that morning, having no idea that her whole world would be turned on its ear. That normal, everyday morning felt as far away to her now as if it belonged to someone else, as if it were a part of some other woman’s life. She felt as if she’d just been tipped from a roller coaster at its height and sent tumbling to the earth. She raised a hand to her mouth, surprised to find her hand shook.

She almost let out a sob, but choked it back. She could not break down. She was not safe from Tariq or his questions simply because he had left her alone for the moment. He would be back. She knew that as surely as she knew the earth still turned beneath her feet. He was an implacable force, and she did not know how she had failed to recognize that five years ago. Hadn’t she known this would happen? Wasn’t this why she’d set upon this course in the first place, to divert his attention?

That is not the only reason… a traitorous voice whispered, but she couldn’t allow herself to listen to it. Nor could she savor the heated images of the night before. None of that mattered now.

Jeremy is his child too, the same treacherous voice whispered, and Jessa felt a wave of old grief rock through her then, nearly knocking her over with all the strength of what might have been. If he had been who he’d said he was. If she had been less infatuated and less silly. If his uncle had not died. If she had been able to care for her newborn child as he deserved to be cared for. If.

She balled her hands into fists and stood, ignoring her trembling knees, her shallow breaths, the insistent dampness in her eyes that she refused to let flow free. Tariq would be back, and she did not want to imagine what new ammunition he would bring with him. She was not at all sure she could survive another encounter like this one. In truth, she was not even certain she had survived. Not intact, anyway.

But she couldn’t think of that, of what more she might have lost. She told herself she had to think of Jeremy. She could take care of herself later.

She had to make certain that whenever Tariq returned, she was long gone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

IT WAS not until Jessa arrived at the Gare de Lyon railway station with every intention of escaping Tariq—and France—that she realized, with a shock, that she did not have any money with her.

Getting out of Tariq’s Parisian home had been, in retrospect, suspiciously easy. She had forced herself into action knowing that the alternative involved the fetal position and a very long cry, neither of which she could allow herself. So after she had taken a shower in the luxurious bathroom suite, scrubbing herself nearly raw in water almost too hot to bear, as if that would remove the feel of him from her skin, Jessa had pulled on one of the seductively comfortable robes set out by the unseen staff and tried to see if she could find something to wear. Her blue sheath dress from the night before had been a crumpled mess, and, in any case, she’d been unable to bring herself to wear it again—she couldn’t bear to remember how he had removed it. How she had wanted him to remove it.

She’d snuck down to the lower levels of the house, looking for the guest suites that she knew must be somewhere, because how could there fail to be guest rooms in such a house? The house was, as she had only noticed in passing awe the night before, magnificent. Glorious works of art by identifiably famous artists graced the walls, a Vermeer here, a Picasso there, though Jessa had not spared them more than a glance. A sculpture she was almost positive she’d seen a copy of in a London museum occupied an entire atrium all its own.

She’d wondered where Tariq’s offices were—purely because she’d wanted to avoid him, she told herself—and had frozen in place each time she’d heard a footfall or a low voice, or had eased open a new door to peer behind it. She’d finally found what she was looking for in a set of rooms hidden away in a closed-off wing on the second floor: a closet filled with women’s clothes in a variety of sizes.

She’d pulled on a pair of black wool trousers that were slightly too big, and the softest charcoal-gray linen button-down blouse she had ever worn, that was a bit tighter across the chest than she would have chosen on her own. Then she’d found a pair of black-and-brown ballet-style flats, only the tiniest bit too big for her feet. A black wool jacket completed the outfit and, once she smoothed her hair into some kind of order, had made Jessa look like someone far wealthier and much calmer.

It was remarkable, she’d thought, peering into the standing mirror in the corner of the dressing room, that she could look so pulled-together on the outside when she was still too afraid to look at the raw mess on the inside.

She had felt it, though. The sob that might take her at any moment, might suck her down into the heaving mass of emotion she could feel swirling inside, ready to spill over at the slightest provocation…

But there had been no time to think about such things. She had shaken the feelings off, reminding herself that there was only Jeremy to think about, only his welfare and nothing else. She had to get out of Tariq’s house, and as far away from him as possible, before she was tempted to share with him things she had never shared, not in their entirety, with anyone.

Jessa had expected it to be difficult to find her way out of the house—had expected, in fact, to be apprehended by Tariq or his staff or someone—and had found herself a curious mixture of disappointed and elated when she’d simply walked down the impressive marble stair and let herself out onto the elegant Paris street beyond.

It had been chillier outside than she’d expected, and wet. She hadn’t made it to the first corner before it had started to rain in earnest, and the clothes she’d liberated from the closet were little help. Her mind had raced with every step she took. She couldn’t go home to York, could she? It would be the obvious place for Tariq to look, and if he was as serious as she worried he must be about tearing into her life, he was much more likely to stumble upon something there than anywhere else. Jessa had walked until she hit a major boulevard, and then had looked at a map at one of the kiosks. She could hardly take in the fact that she was in Paris, one of the most celebrated cities in the world. She had been much too focused on Tariq and what he might do, and how he might do it.

While she walked, the perfect solution had come to her. Friends of hers from home had gone on a holiday last year, and had taken the train from Paris to Rome. Rome was even farther away from Jeremy. Should Tariq come after her as he’d threatened to do, she would be leading him away from his true quarry. So she’d found the train station on the map, happily located not too far away, and had walked.

She walked and walked, down streets she had only ever seen in photographs, the borrowed shoes rubbing at her cold toes and slapping the pavement beneath her feet. She walked past the soaring glory of the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Elysées, the wide boulevard glistening in the rain, achingly beautiful despite the overcast skies above. She walked in and out of puddles in the Jardin des Tuileries, still crowded with tourists under bright umbrellas, toward the iconic glass pyramid that heralded the entrance to the Louvre. She took shelter from the rain in the famed arcades that stretched beneath the great buildings along the Rue de Rivoli, filled with brightly lit shops and the bustling energy of city life.

And if tears fell from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks as she walked, tears for Tariq and for herself and for all the things she’d lost, they were indistinguishable from the rain.