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

Tariq expelled a long breath and rubbed at his temples with his fingers. When he spoke, he hardly recognized his own voice.

“You must understand that when I say I am the last of my bloodline, I am not only talking about lines of succession and historical footnotes that will be recorded when I am gone,” he said, not knowing what he meant to say. Not recognizing the gruffness in his own voice. “I was orphaned when I was still a child, Jessa. I was not yet three. I don’t know if the little I remember of my parents is real or if I have internalized photographs and stories told to me by others.”

“Tariq.” She said his name on a sigh, almost as if she hurt for him.

“My uncle’s family was the only family I ever knew,” he said, with an urgency he didn’t entirely understand. She bit her lower lip and worried it between her teeth. “I thought I was the only one left. Until today.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she whispered, her voice thick.

“Do I have a child?” he asked her, appalled at the uncertainty he could hear in his own voice. He didn’t know what he would do if she threw it back at him as he knew she could. “Is my family more than simply me?”

Her eyes squeezed shut, and she made a sound that was much like a sob, though she covered her mouth with her hand. For a long moment they sat in silence, the only sound the watery swish of traffic outside the car, and her ragged breathing. He thought she would not answer. He felt a new bleakness settle upon him. Would he never know what had happened? Would he be condemned to wonder? Was it no more than he deserved for the way he had behaved in his former life, the way he had treated her, the way he had treated himself and his family, his many squandered gifts?

But she turned her head to look at him, her cinnamon eyes bright with a pain he didn’t fully understand.

“I don’t know that I can make you feel any better about this,” she said, her voice thick and rough. “But I will tell you what I know.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

JESSA didn’t know why she had said anything, why his obvious pain had moved her so much that she broke her silence so suddenly. She hadn’t meant to say a word. And then she’d heard the raw agony in his voice and something inside had snapped. Or loosened. She had thought she might cry. Instead, she had spoken words she’d never meant to speak aloud and certainly not to him.

But the truth was, he hadn’t meant to leave her, had he? His uncle had died—his whole family had died. What was he supposed to have done? It had occurred to her, somewhere out in all the cold and wet of the Paris streets, that somewhere along the line it had become important for her to keep blaming him for leaving her because it kept the attention away from what had happened after he left. From the decisions she had made that he had had no part in. Was that what she had been hiding from?

Tariq said nothing. He only looked at her for a long moment, his gaze fathomless, and then nodded once. Definitively. She expected him to demand she tell him everything she could at once, but instead he remained silent for the rest of their short journey to his grand house. Once there, he ushered her back to the suite of rooms on the top floor that she had run from earlier. Was it to be her prison? Jessa felt too raw, too exposed, to give that question the thought she knew she should.

No sign of their long, passionate night remained in the exquisite room. The great bed was returned to its ivory-and-gold splendor, and warm lights glowed from sconces in the wall, setting off the fine moldings and Impressionist art that graced the walls. Jessa stood in the center of the room, deliberately not looking at the bed, deliberately not remembering, and swallowed. Hard.

“You will wish to clean up, I think,” Tariq said, an odd politeness in his tone as if they did not know each other. And yet, he anticipated her needs. He gestured toward the spacious dressing room that was adjacent to the palatial bathroom. “I have taken the liberty of having clothes laid out for you that will, I hope, fit.”

Jessa looked down at the sodden mess of the clothes she wore, and swallowed again, not sure she could speak. She didn’t know how to process his thoughtfulness. Perhaps he was simply tired of looking at her in such a bedraggled state. She was tired of it herself—her shoes so soaked that she could hear her toes squelch into them each time she moved. The room, for all it was large and elegant beyond imagining, seemed too close, too hushed around them. She was afraid to meet his gaze. Afraid she had opened herself up too far, and he would see too much.

Afraid that once she bared herself to him again, he would break her heart as surely and as completely as he had done before.

“There are matters that require my attention,” he said after a long moment, still in that stiff way. As if he was as nervous as she was. “I cannot put them off.”

“I understand,” she managed to say, frowning fiercely at her wet, cold shoes.

“I will return as soon as I can.” He sighed slightly and she risked looking at him. “You will wait here?”

Not run away, he meant. Not continue to keep her secrets. Stay and tell him what she’d said she would.

Share with him what should never have been a secret, what should have been theirs. Together.

“I will.” It was like a vow.

They stared at each other for a long, fraught moment. Jessa could feel her pulse beat in her ears, her throat.

He nodded to her, so stiff and formal it was like a bow, and strode from the room.

It was already evening when a diffident maid in a pressed black uniform led Jessa through the maze of the house to find Tariq. He waited for her in a cozy, richly appointed room that featured a crackling fire in a stone fireplace, walls of books and deep leather couches. Tariq stood with his back to the door, his stance wide and his hands clasped behind him, staring out the French doors at the wet blue dusk beyond.

Jessa stood in the doorway for a moment, filled with a confusing mix of panic, uncertainty and something else she did not wish to examine—something that felt like a hollow space in her chest as she looked at him, his face remote in profile, his strong back stiff, as if he expected nothing from her but further pain. She shook the thought away, suddenly deeply afraid in a way she had not been before—a way that had nothing to do with Jeremy and everything to do with her traitorous, susceptible heart. She smoothed her palms along the fine wool of the trousers she wore, pretending she was concerned about wrinkles when she knew, deep down, that was not true. And that it was far too late to worry.

Tariq had been as good as his word. When Jessa emerged from her second hot shower of the day, she had found an entire wardrobe laid out for her in the dressing room, complete with more grooming products than she had at her own home in York. All of it, from the clothes to the hair bands and perfumes, had been specifically chosen with her tastes in mind. It was as if Tariq knew her better than she knew herself, a line of thought she preferred not to examine more closely. Not knowing what the night held, and not wanting to send the wrong message or make herself more vulnerable than she felt already, Jessa had dressed for this conversation in tailored chocolate wool trousers and a simple white silk blouse. Over that, she’d wrapped a sky-blue cashmere concoction that was softer than anything she had ever touched before. Now she tightened the wrap around her middle, as if it alone could hold her together. She’d even smoothed her heavy mass of hair back into a high ponytail, hoping it might broadcast a certain calm strength her curls would not.

“I trust everything fits well,” Tariq said in a low voice, still staring out through the French doors. Jessa started slightly, not realizing he’d known she was there.

“Perfectly,” she said, and then coughed to clear the thickness from her throat.

He turned then, and Jessa was lost suddenly in the bleakness she saw on his face. It made his harsh features seem even more unapproachable and distant. She wanted to go to him, to soothe it away somehow, and then wondered who she’d confused him for, who she thought she was facing. This was still Tariq bin Khaled Al-Nur. He was more dangerous to her now, she thought, than he had ever been before. She would be wise to remember that. Oh, it was not as if she had anything to fear from him—it was her own heart she feared. Perhaps it had always been her own surrender she feared more than anything else.

“Tell me,” Tariq said, and she did not mistake his meaning.

She took a deep breath. Stalling for time, she crossed the room and perched on the edge of the buttery-soft leather sofa, but did not allow herself to relax back into it. She could not look at him, so she looked instead into the fire, into the relative safety of the dancing, shimmering flames.

There would be no going back from this conversation. She was honest with herself about that, at least.

“It was a boy,” she said, her head spinning, because she could not believe she was telling him this after so long. A sense of unreality gripped her as if she was dreaming all of it—the luxurious clothes, the fire, the impossibly forbidding man who stood close and yet worlds away. “I called him Jeremy.”

She could feel Tariq’s eyes on her then, though she dared not look at him to see what expression he wore as he digested this news. That he was, biologically, a father. Swallowing carefully, she put her hands into her lap, stared fixedly into the fire and continued.

“I found out I was pregnant when I went to the doctor’s that day.” She sighed, summoning up those dark days in her memory. “You had been so careful never to mention the future, never to hint—” But she couldn’t blame him, not entirely. “I didn’t know if it meant I would lose you, or if you would be happy. I didn’t know if I was happy!” She shook her head and frowned at the flames dancing before her, heedless of the emotional turmoil just outside the stone fireplace. “That was where I went. I stopped at a friend’s flat in Brighton. I…tried to work out what to do.”

“Those days you went missing,” Tariq said in a quiet voice. Jessa couldn’t look at him. “You hadn’t left, then, after all.”

“It’s so ironic that you thought so,” Jessa said with a hollow laugh. “As that was my biggest fear at first—that you would leave. Once you knew.” She laughed again in the same flat way. “Only when I returned to London, you had already gone. And when I saw who you really were and what you had to do, I knew that you were never coming back.”

Jessa took a deep breath, feeling it saw into her lungs. It would get no easier if she put it off, she thought. It might never get easier at all. She blew the breath out and forced herself to continue.

“I was such a mess,” she said. “I was sacked in short order, of course. I tried to get another job in the city, not realizing that I’d been effectively blackballed. My sister wanted me to move back home to York, but that seemed such an admission of failure. I…I so wanted everything to simply go on as if nothing had ever happened. As if you had never happened.”

She heard a faint sound like an exhalation or a muttered curse, but she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t bear to see what he thought of her. She was too afraid she would never tell the story if she didn’t tell him now. From the corner of her eye, she saw him move and begin to prowl around the room as if he could not bear to stand still.

“But I was pregnant, and…” How to tell him what that had felt like? The terror mixed in equal part with fierce, incomparable joy? Her hand crept over her abdomen as if she could remember by touch. As if the memory of Jeremy still kicked there, so insistent and demanding.

“You must have been quite upset,” Tariq said quietly. Too quietly. Jessa stared down at her lap, threading her hands together.

“At you, perhaps. Or the situation,” she said softly. “But not at the baby. I realized quickly that I wanted the baby, no matter what.” She sucked in a breath. “And so I had him. He was perfect.”

Her emotions were too close to the surface. Too raw, still. Or perhaps it was because she was finally sharing the story with Tariq, who should have been there five years ago. She had almost felt as if he was there in the delivery room. She had sobbed as much for the man who was not her partner and was not with her as she had for the pain she was in as each contraction twisted and ripped through her. Now she pressed her lips together to keep herself from sobbing anew, and breathed through her nose until she was sure she wouldn’t cry. This was about the facts. She could give him the facts.

“I had a hard labor,” she said. “There were…some complications. I was depressed, scared.” She had had postpartum depression on top of her physical ailments, of course, but it had not seemed, at the time, like something she could ever come out of whole. She snuck a look at him then. He had found his way to the couch opposite, but he did not look at her as he sat there, sprawled out before the fire. He aimed his deep frown toward the dark red Persian carpet at his feet.

Jessa wondered what he was thinking. Did this seem unreal to him? Impossible? That they could be sitting in a Parisian room, so many miles and years away from the heartache that they had caused together? It boggled the mind. It made her feel dizzy.

“I had no job, and no idea where I might go to get one,” Jessa continued, ignoring the thickness in her voice, the twist in her belly. “I had this perfect baby boy, the son of a king, and I couldn’t give him the life that he needed. That he deserved.” Her voice cracked, and she sighed, then cleared her throat. “I thought at first that it was just hormonal—just first-time mother fears, but as time went on, the feeling grew stronger.”

“Why?” Tariq’s voice was barely a whisper, and still so full of anguish. “What was missing in the life you gave him?”