Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir

Tariq’s dark jade eyes seemed to sharpen. He thrust his long, elegant hands into the pockets of his trousers with a casualness Jessa could not quite believe. The Tariq she’d known had been nonchalant, at ease, but that man had never existed, had he? And this man in front of her was nothing like the man Tariq had pretended to be. He was too hard, too fierce.

“I see the years have sharpened your tongue.” He considered her. “What else has changed, I wonder?”

There was one specific way she had changed that she could not possibly share with him. Did he already know it? Was he baiting her?

“I have changed,” Jessa said, glaring at him, deciding that an offense was better than any defense she might try to throw up against this strangely familiar man, who was much more like steel than the lover she remembered. “It’s called growing up.” She lifted her chin in defiance, and could feel her hands ball into fists at her sides. “I am no longer likely to beg for anyone’s attention. Not anymore.”

She did not see him move but she had the sense that he tensed, as if readying himself for battle. She braced herself, but he only watched her. Something too ruthless to be a smile curled in the corner of his hard mouth.

“I do not recall a single instance of you begging,” Tariq replied, an edge in his dark voice. “Unless you mean in my bed.” He let that hang there, as if daring her to remember. Mute, Jessa stared back at him. “But if you wish to reenact some such scene, by all means, do so.”

“I think not,” she gritted out from between her teeth. She would not think about his bed, or what she had done in it. She would not. “My days of clinging to pathetic international playboys are long past.”

She felt the air tighten between them. His dark green eyes narrowed, and once again she was reminded that he was not a regular man. He was not even the man she had once known. He was too wild, too unmanageable, and she was a fool to underestimate him—or overestimate herself. Her weakness where he was concerned was legendary, and humiliating, and should have left her when he had.

But she could feel it—feel him—throughout her body, like nothing had changed, even though everything had. Like he still owned and controlled her as effortlessly and carelessly as he had years before. Her breasts felt tight against her blouse, her skin was flushed, and she felt a familiar, sweet, hot ache low in her belly. She bit her lip against the heat that threatened to spill over from behind her eyes and show him all the things she wanted to hide.

She knew she could not let this happen, whatever this was. She wanted nothing to do with him. There were secrets she would do anything in her power to keep from him. Chemistry was simply that: a chemical, physical reaction. It meant nothing.

But she did not look away.

She had haunted him, and Tariq bin Khaled Al-Nur was not a man who believed in ghosts.

He stared at the woman who had tortured him for years, no matter where he went or with whom, and who now had the audacity to challenge him with no thought for her own danger. Tariq considered himself a modern sheikh, a modern king, but he understood in this moment that if he had one of his horses at his disposal he would have no qualm whatsoever about tossing Jessa Heath across the saddle and carrying her away to a tent far off in the desert that comprised most of his homeland on the Arabian Peninsula.

In fact, he would enjoy it.

He was right to have come here. To have faced this woman, finally. Even as she called him names, and continued to defy him. Just as she had done so long before. His mouth twisted in a hard smile.

He knew that he should be furious that she wished to keep him at arm’s length, that she dared to poke at him as if he was some insipid weakling. He knew that he should feel shame that he, Sheikh Tariq bin Khaled Al-Nur, King of Nur, had come crawling back to the only woman who had ever dared abandon him. The only woman he had ever missed. Who stood before him now in an ugly suit that did not become her or flatter her lushness, unwelcoming and cold instead of pleased to see him again. He should be enraged at the insult.

But instead, he wanted her.

It was that simple. That consuming. He had finally stopped fighting it.

One look at the curvy body he still reached for in his sleep, her wide eyes the color of cinnamon, her sinful, lickable mouth, and he was hard, ready—alive with need. He could taste her skin, feel the heat of her desire. Or he remembered it. Either way, he needed to be deep inside her once again.

Then, perhaps, they could see how defiant she really was.

“A pathetic playboy, am I?” he asked, keeping his tone light, though he could not disguise the intent beneath. This woman reminded him so strongly of his other, wasted life—yet he still wanted her. He would have her. “An intriguing accusation.”

Temper rose in her cheeks, turning ivory to peach. “I can’t imagine what that means,” she snapped. “It is not an accusation, it’s the truth. It is who you are.”

Tariq watched her for a long moment. She had no idea how deep his shame for his profligate former existence ran within him. Nor how closely he associated her with all he had been forced to put behind him, and now found so disgusting. He had fought against her hold on him for years, told himself that he only remembered her because she had left him, that he would have left her himself if she’d given him the opportunity, as he had left countless other women in his time.

Still, here he was.

“It means that if I am a playboy, you by definition become one of my playthings, do you not?” he asked. He enjoyed the flash of temper he saw in her face much more than he should have. The warrior inside him was fully roused and ready to take on his opponent. “Does the description distress you?”

“I am not at all surprised to hear you call me a plaything.” Her mouth twisted. “But I was never yours.”

“A fact you made abundantly clear five years ago,” he said drily, though he doubted she would mistake the edge beneath. Indeed, she stiffened. “But is this any way for old friends to greet each other after such a long time?” He crossed the room until only the flimsy barrier of her desk stood between them.

“Friends?” she echoed, shaking her head slightly. “Is that what we are?”

Only a few feet separated them, not even the length of his arm. She swallowed, nervously. Tariq smiled. It was as he remembered. She still looked the same—copper curls and cinnamon eyes, freckles across her nose and a wicked, suggestive mouth made entirely for sin. And she was still susceptible to him, even from across a desk. Would she still burn them both alive when he touched her? He couldn’t wait to find out.

“What do you suggest?” she asked. Her delicate eyebrows arched up, and that sensual mouth firmed. “Shall we nip out for a coffee? Talk about old times? I think I’ll pass.”

“I am devastated,” he said, watching her closely. “My former lovers are generally far more receptive.”

She didn’t like that. The flush in her cheeks deepened, and her cinnamon eyes darkened. She stood straighter.

“Why are you here, Tariq?” she asked, in a crisp, nononsense voice that both irritated and aroused him. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Are you looking to let a flat in the York area? If so, you’ll want to return when the agents are in, so they might help you. I’m afraid they’re both out with clients, and I’m only the office manager.”

“Why do you think I’m here, Jessa?”

He studied her face, letting the question hang there between them. He wanted to see her reaction. To catalog it. Her fingers crept to her throat, as if she wanted to soothe the beat of her own pulse.

“I cannot imagine any reason at all for you to be here,” she told him now, but her voice was high and reedy. She coughed to cover it, and then threw her shoulders back, as if she fancied herself a match for him. “You should go. Now.”

And now she ordered him out? Like a servant? Tariq shifted his weight, balancing on the balls of his feet as if readying himself for combat, and idly imagined how he would make her pay for that slight. He was a king. She should learn how to address him properly. Perhaps on her knees, with that sinfully decadent mouth of hers wrapped around him, hot and wet. It would make a good start.

“If you won’t tell me what you want—” she began, frowning.

“You,” he said. He smiled. “I want you.”

CHAPTER TWO

“ME?” Jessa was taken aback. She would have stepped back, too, but she’d locked her knees into place and couldn’t move. “You’ve come here for me?”

She did not believe him. She couldn’t, not when his dark eyes still seemed laced with danger and that smile seemed to cut right through her. But there was a tiny, dismaying leap in the vicinity of her heart.

She could face the unwelcome possibility that she might still be a fool where this man was concerned, on a purely physical level. But she had absolutely no intention of giving in to it!

“Of course I am here for you,” he said, his eyes hot. One black eyebrow arched. “Did you imagine I happened by a letting agent’s in York by accident?”

“Five years ago you couldn’t get away from me fast enough,” Jessa pointed out. “Now, apparently, you have scoured the countryside to find me. You’ll forgive me if I can’t quite get my head around the dramatic change in your behavior.”

“You must have me confused with someone else,” Tariq said silkily. “You are the one who disappeared, Jessa. Not I.”

Jessa blinked at him. For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about, but then, of course, the past came rushing back. She had gone to the doctor’s for a routine physical, only to discover that she had been pregnant. Pregnant! She had had no illusions that Tariq would have welcomed the news. She had known he would not. She had needed to get away from him for a few days to pull herself together, to think what she might do while not under the spell his presence seemed to cast around her.

Perhaps she hadn’t phoned him. But she hadn’t left him.

“What are you talking about?” she asked now. “I was not the one who fled the country!”

His mouth tightened. “You said you were going to the doctor, and then you disappeared. You were gone for days, and then, yes, I left the country. If that is what you want to call it.”