The Billionaire's Innocent - Part 2

“That was because it was you!” she threw at him, raising her hands in the air and only then realizing they were fists she’d like to slam into him, and might have, had she not known he was built like stone and it would hurt no one but her. “It’s one thing to talk yourself into potentially disturbing sex with a stranger and something else entirely when the person you have to talk yourself into having that kind of sex with is the man you were in love with for half your life!”

That hung there in the great two-story space, crowding out the stars in the night sky high above them through the glass there, pressing in as if it were a small room after all.

“Don’t you dare use that word to describe a schoolgirl’s crush on an invented, imagined creature,” he rasped out, that muscle working in his jaw again, his green eyes narrowed and harsh. “You don’t have the slightest idea what it means.”

She laughed, and it was a wild sound, made wilder by the heavy way she was breathing. “Don’t worry, Zair. You ruined it six years ago. You did it deliberately. But that hardly made tonight less disturbing, did it?”

* * *

Zair didn’t know how he kept himself from closing the distance between them. How he refrained from reaching out and putting his hands on her again.

Especially when the look she gave him then was shattering. “Why did you kiss me like that?” she asked.

He ordered himself to get a grip on the storm in him before he betrayed himself completely. “Because you were in my house and you took my money. Be thankful it was only a kiss and a few liberties.”

“As opposed to what?” She rolled her eyes. “A punishing sonnet?”

“That,” he said flatly. “Or anal.”

They glared at each other.

“On the boat,” Nora said after a tense moment, “why did you grab me like that and kiss me? Why did you tell me we were putting on a show? What game are you playing here, Zair?”

“Why did you let me kiss you at all?” he retorted. “Ah, but that’s the issue, isn’t it? It wasn’t up to you. That’s what happens when you make yourself a product. A mere object. People use you without your permission and in ways you might not like.”

“I find it telling you can’t answer a simple question.” She tilted her head slightly to one side though her gaze never wavered. “I had no idea you were quite so slippery a politician.”

“I keep warning you,” he said tightly. “This won’t end well. I wasn’t swept away in a firestorm of longing, Nora, if that’s what you’re imagining. It wasn’t a covert expression of love or longing in such a wretched place. I was staking my claim before anyone else could.”

“Next time, why not pee on me instead?” Her voice was so sweet it took him a moment to process what she’d said. “It’s quicker and more direct.”

He let himself smile though he knew he shouldn’t, and then it deepened when he saw the way she bit at her lip in response.

“Don’t fool yourself,” he advised her. “I don’t have boundaries. You can’t push me into a corner. And I doubt very much you’ll like what happens when you try.”

Maybe she was imagining what it would be like if she tried. Maybe that was what crackled there between them, complicating the air, making everything seem to hum with expectation—or perhaps that was only him.

“I don’t want to push you anywhere,” she said, when he’d started to believe they would stand here, mute and frozen, until the end of time. And that was better. Safer. “I want to find Harlow.”

“I haven’t seen her.”

Nora’s eyes were too blue. Zair was afraid she could see too much.

“Where exactly have you been looking?” she asked quietly, in a tone of voice that suggested she had an idea already, if tonight was anything to go by. “And why were you there in the first place?”

And that was where this had to end. It had already gone too far. He couldn’t answer her questions without giving too much away. Hell, he already had.

Zair closed the distance between them. He ignored the shocked little gasp she tried to hide as he came close, just as he ignored the sense of deep, pervasive rightness when he scooped her up and into his arms, as though she was his.

He strode across the room, shouldering his way into the sprawling bath that ambled lazily in an L shape alongside the bedroom and featured a great glassed-in shower that protruded from the side of the house and let in the night on three sides. He set her down inside it and concentrated on unbuttoning her from his shirt, taking charge of her as if he really had claimed her. As if she really were his.

And he didn’t miss the fact that she simply…let him. As if this was her surrender.

Not for the first time, Zair wished he were someone else. Anyone else.

He ignored the way the backs of his hands brushed the slopes of her breasts, the smooth expanse of her soft belly. He ignored the way she shook beneath his touch. He ignored what it was like to peel his own shirt from her lush, sleek little body. He banished the vision of her on her hands and knees before him, because that was unlikely to help the situation. He ignored that fire inside him, that pounding need, that made him feel something far too much like drunk. He stripped the shirt from her, rid himself of his boxer briefs, and then he turned on the faucets. Steam billowed all around them. It was hot and close and would wash away a thousand sins, he was sure of it.

“I don’t want—” she began.

“Quiet.”

And for some reason, she obeyed him.

Her acquiescence flowed through him like honey. And Zair pretended. That it could be this simple. That it was all as easy as a steamy shower and this woman naked before him, her face tipped toward his as if he were the most trustworthy creature she knew and she was safe with him besides. That it took nothing more than water to make him clean, to sanctify him, to make him what he should have been all along.

He knew better. But here, now, for her, he pretended.

Gently, he turned her toward the hot spray and let the water turn her blond hair dark. He tilted her chin even further toward him and he carefully washed her face until the last of her black eye makeup swirled away and down across the deep-blue-tiled floor to the drain.

If only all the black marks he wore could wash away as easily and leave as little stain behind.

When he was finished he took her out to the soft rug that stretched from the shower to the massive tub and he dried her off, taking his time and learning her body the way he longed to do with his mouth. This is close enough, he lied to himself. He combed through her hair and left it damp and curling down her back, and when he was finished he picked her up again.

“I can walk,” Nora told him, with a faint frown that he imagined was meant to look fierce, but her voice sounded lazy and drugged and her eyes were slumberous on his.

“I’ll let you know when that becomes relevant,” he said, his voice little more than a growl, and it was hard not to smile when she simply exhaled. Then relaxed against him, her head finding his shoulder.

Zair carried her to the bed and laid her down on it, pulling the soft sheets and covers over her and tucking her in. She smiled sleepily at him and he felt it like a vise around his heart. He didn’t smile back. He wasn’t sure he could. He moved around the room instead, turning off the lights and putting her clothes on the chaise near the bed, until the vast room was dark and all that remained were the stars above and the famous chain of cities far below.

She was asleep before he returned to her side, and he felt that in his chest like another kiss. Another wrenching twist of that thing wrapped tight around his heart.

Zair stood there much longer than was wise. And then far longer than that.

But eventually he roused himself and made his way back up to the main floor. He retrieved his laptop from his briefcase and his second, private mobile phone. When the usual masking rituals had been taken care of and he was certain nothing he did could be tracked, he opened up his files and sent more pictures off to his partners in this enterprise back in Washington, DC, who used him as a lure in their dangerous trap as if he were merely an operative. As if he had no personal stake in this game.

And there were so many pictures. JPEG after JPEG of the girls he’d taken home with him. The girls who had helped him build his own deeply unsavory reputation, brick by brick, sordid night by sordid night.

The girls he’d pumped for information before letting his partners effect their rescue when it couldn’t be traced to him. A white knight one step removed, he thought, his lip curling in self-derision, which hardly counted, did it?

He could not prove who was at the center of the vast sex trafficking ring that had already consumed so much of his three former Harvard roommates’ lives. He only knew—as he’d known for far longer than Hunter, Austin Treffen, and Alex Diaz had, though he’d been unable to speak of it to any of them—that it was not contained to New York City and one law firm under the guidance of one perverse man. He’d heard whispers. Then he’d heard more pointed rumors. And all of them led back to his own country. To the highest levels.

Possibly to the highest level of all—but there was still a part of Zair that refused to accept that.

Because Azhil was not merely Zair’s ruler, his sultan. Twenty years older than Zair and the son of their father’s first and most cherished wife, Azhil had treated the illegitimate, ignored Zair like one of his own. He’d supported him, encouraged him. When Zair had gone to Harvard, Azhil had accompanied him but had done so completely under the radar, making Zair feel that he was a member of the family instead of just another bastard.

“I have a hundred courtiers already,” Azhil had told him when Zair was twelve and Azhil was already running the country. “Many of them are family. They claim my blood, they flatter my every word and deed, and they would each knife me in the back if they could. I need you to be anything but that.”

“What can I possibly be for you that you don’t already have?” Zair had asked, awed.