The Billionaire's Innocent

There was a famous director widely lauded for his incisive, intellectual, even feminist films with his arm around a giggling brunette who was letting him fondle her between her legs where she stood. There was an actor best known for his much-celebrated television role as a wise and generous old father figure surrounded by three laughing young girls on one of the sofas, none of them fully clothed. She saw a well-known financier she’d never met personally but had last seen with his wife and daughters at a Manhattan gala to benefit victims of domestic violence, smiling down at a woman Nora recognized as a former runway model in a manner that could only be described as smug.

But Harlow was nowhere to be seen.

Nora felt a rush of something—and she couldn’t tell if it was relief that her friend wasn’t subjecting herself to this horror or a keen disappointment that she was still missing. Both, perhaps. It meant that Nora would have to find out if any of the girls had seen Harlow around, which could take more than this single night—and she knew what that meant. What it would entail. Where this course of action had always been leading her.

Keep smiling, you idiot, she ordered herself. So what if you have to do this more than once? No one here looks anything but happy. You can do it. You’ll be fine.

But it was hard to keep her smile on her face. If that awful woman hadn’t still been right beside her, she doubted she’d have managed it—

“Bonsoir, Laurette.”

Nora recognized Zair’s voice instantly. Worse, she felt it.

It rolled through her like low, ominous thunder and she had to fight to keep herself from flinching. Laurette, who still sat there on the sofa arm studying Nora as if looking for visible cracks, brightened and extended her hands.

And then it was impossible for Nora to pretend this wasn’t happening. That it wasn’t him. Zair was right there, kissing this hard, dangerous woman on one smooth cheek and then the next.

As if they were dear old friends on the best of terms. As if he attended sex slave auctions every night of the week.

Maybe he did.

Nora didn’t know if she wanted to be sick or maybe collapse into tears, but she knew she absolutely could not do either.

This is who he is, she snapped at herself. Deal with it—and deal with it right now. You can’t fall apart here.

But the truth was, Zair was right there beside her, she didn’t want to believe that he could be as evil as he clearly was, and she didn’t think she’d survive the next few moments.

And Harlow was still missing somewhere. Nora didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with any of it.

“This one will do,” she heard him say to Laurette, and she could feel his eyes on her. Intense. Too much. Even worse than usual. “I’ve always had a thing for blondes.”

Laurette’s laugh was horrible. It slid inside Nora and broke something in her into jagged little pieces. “This I know.”

Later, Nora thought, sick and not numb enough and torn apart in a thousand ways she knew she couldn’t let show on her face, she would look back at this moment. Zair’s comment and Laurette’s awful laugh that told her so many things she didn’t want to know.

Later, she could grieve.

But here, now, she had to think about Harlow.

There was a flurry of the French she’d had no idea Zair spoke so fluently, another silvery little laugh from Laurette that left ice shards lodged into her heart, and then Nora and Zair were left standing there alone.

“Look at me,” he said.

It was that same voice that she knew so well. The same voice that had slapped her down so calmly, so ruthlessly, six years ago. The same voice that he’d used only a few weeks ago when she’d been forced to spend an evening with him at an art gala, all smiles and surface and lies, apparently.

It was also an order.

Her heart didn’t stop this time. It beat so hard it made the edges of everything seem to flicker, to fade in and out, and she had to force herself to breathe through it. To stay standing, no matter what.

Because if Zair was a part of this thing the way Harlow’s old faculty adviser Louise had suggested outright back in New York, if all signs pointed to the involvement of a high-ranking member of the Ruyian government and Zair was the only person fitting that description at this party, then Nora had to convince him that she was exactly who she was pretending to be: a bored trust-fund princess having “adventures” on the far side of acceptable behavior—a description that was a touch too close to home. Because he might be her only chance of finding Harlow.

“I know you heard me,” he said, with a darker current in his low voice.

He was her only chance. This was the only way. Nora forced herself face him. To look him straight in the eye.

Zair gazed down at her in that haughty, commanding way of his that announced his royal Ruyian blood without his having to utter a word. Even in the high sandals she wore that added a few inches to her height, he towered over her the way he always had, strong and undeniably, disastrously gorgeous. So compelling that his sheer dizzying masculinity couldn’t be erased by what his presence here meant. So beautiful he cast even the Côte d’Azure and a roomful of men celebrated around the world for their good looks into shadow.

This close to him, she could smell the hint of that scent he always wore, something like cedar and indefinably male beneath. It made a prickling sort of heat spread over her and threaten to flood her eyes. Only a kick of panic at what it might mean for Harlow if she burst into tears here, if she exposed herself like that and thereby ensured she couldn’t come back to continue her search, kept her from it.

His green eyes, usually so cool and remote, were like fire tonight. Too bright. Too hot. His gaze seared into her, ripping through her, making Nora worry she might be blown backward by the sheer force of it.

Nora had memorized his face a long time ago. Those perfect, aristocratic cheekbones under slashing black brows, that harsh blade of his nose. And that tough desert warrior’s mouth below that had always made something roll over deep inside her and then curl up tight, so out of place was it on a polished diplomat like him.

But her memory was never as arresting as the real thing. It never did him justice. He was more. He was vital and male, breathtaking in a way she’d never been able to put into words—a way that here, in this sordid place where he’d revealed the rot beneath his spectacular surface, she hated herself for noticing the way she always did. As if everything was normal when nothing could be, ever again.

Zair didn’t speak. He only studied her, his face unreadable, those green eyes alight with that too-bright fire.

She wanted to say a million things, but they all crowded together on her tongue and choked her silent. Are you a john or a pimp, Zair? Do you know where my best friend is? Was that your boat she took out of London? Does my brother know what kind of nasty pervert you are? Is he one, too?

Nora felt a desperate kind of heat behind her eyes, worse now that she was looking at him, and the way he gazed down at her was terrible. Terrible. It made her shake, deep inside, low in her belly, and everywhere else. It made her more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

But not of him, though she should have been. And however deep that fear might have gone, it didn’t make her turn away.

He muttered something in Arabic then, the words a caress and a blow at once. And then, “You can’t be here. This is no place for tourists.”

“I think you’ll find that sex tourism is one of the world’s great economic powerhouses,” she said, pleased at the flippant sound of her voice. “But then, look where you are. I suspect you already know that.”

“Nora.” The way he said her name made everything tilt and then slide inside her, but she still didn’t turn away. And she only hated herself that much more for her weakness. “What the hell are you doing here?”

She wanted to hit him. Her hand curled into a fist at her side, but then she remembered all the eyes on them, Laurette’s in particular, and forced it open again.

“Selling my body to the highest bidder,” she said, as politely as she could. The way she’d discussed appetizers with him when she’d seen him last. Or had it been the weather? “As you do.”

He reached over and brushed a lock of her blond hair back from her face, and Nora couldn’t conceal her shudder. She told herself it was revulsion, because it should have been. But she could feel that ribbon of liquid heat that wrapped around her breasts and then pooled between her legs, and she knew better.

Zair’s formidable mouth flattened, and then he sank his fingers into thick spill of blond waves Nora had artfully arranged to fall down her back in seeming abandon. He wasn’t particularly gentle. Nora let out a tiny, shocked gasp that did nothing but make his green gaze narrow.

He didn’t speak for a long moment that dragged on forever, and her pulse was a wild drumming in her veins, catapulting her off balance.

“That hurts,” she managed to say, though it didn’t.

It should have hurt, shouldn’t have it? But instead that small sharpness bled into something like need, and she craved it. More. Him.

She despaired of herself.

“No,” he said, calm and certain. Lethal. “It doesn’t.”

“Zair—” she began, but he only increased the pressure. That sharpness bloomed and the need became a driving, pounding thing that made her feel bright and hot and very nearly desperate.