The Billionaire's Innocent - Part 4

As if they were a team after all. A we.

It was pathetic how much she wanted that to be so.

“It will work,” Zair said now. His eyes were trained on the night sky, she saw with a quick sideways glance. Not on her. But she knew he was averting his gaze for the same reason she was—because otherwise they would tangle and get stuck, and there were other things to worry about tonight.

“Your brother thinks you want to marry me.” She cleared her throat and refused to think too much about that. Because that led nowhere she could let herself go tonight. “As discussed.”

“He does.”

“And he’s opposed to it, because of my well-documented whoring ways, as you assumed he would be.”

“He is.”

Her throat didn’t need any further clearing, but she coughed anyway. “And so you’ll be parading me in front of him at his welcome ball tomorrow night so he can check my teeth and probably insult me besides.”

Zair sighed. “I will.”

“Great.” It took an inordinate amount of energy to sound that enthusiastic. “Then we’re all set. Practically engaged.”

She thought they were both much too quiet then, ominously so, and the moment dragged on for a lifetime. More. And then she didn’t know if he turned or she did, but suddenly they were facing each other and her hands were at his waist, and his head was bent to hers while his hand held her face in that bossy way she craved with his mouth just there, while all those flames leaped and danced in the soft night air—

“I don’t—”

“Zair—”

But they both stopped. She would never know how. Nora pulled in a breath and then dropped her traitorous hands back to her sides. Zair stepped back, putting a space between them that felt cold and vast, like a deep well rather than a foot or two.

“I think it’s best we concentrate on what we have to do,” he said, and though his gaze was electric, his voice was cool. Too cool. So cool she knew better, somehow, to believe it. “Not this inconvenient chemistry that rears its head at all the wrong moments.”

“I wasn’t aware chemistry could be inconvenient. Most people are lucky to have any at all.” That didn’t sound like her, though it was. Nora felt bent, somehow. As if almost kissing him had been disfiguring. As if he was the poison as well as the cure.

“There’s too much to do,” he grated at her. “We don’t have time for this shit.”

But there were all those things in the dark between them, around them. He’d called it chemistry. Nora knew it was more than that. It was like lightning and as demanding. It felt like fate. It was the way he’d moved over her in the shadows of her room, the way he’d slid so deep and hard inside her, the way he’d held her while she’d shaken apart in his arms, again and again. It was the way he smiled sometimes, so rarely and only for her. It was the way he could make her feel. Alive. Not pale. Not pointless.

Made for him.

It was history and bated breath. It was all those years they’d danced civilly at grand parties, talked about the weather, and smiled politely over the swirl of the outsize thing that stretched between them, elastic and consuming.

It was real. It had always been real.

Nora was completely and utterly in love with him.

And that was when they heard the plane.

Stepping away from him then felt like tearing off her own skin, but Nora managed it and kept going, because that was the plan. Loving him wasn’t new. It was a fact, not a revelation, and she didn’t have time to examine it. Not here, now. She slid into the back of the SUV and she sat there behind the tinted windows, realizing that “her heart in her mouth” was less of a metaphor than she’d always imagined it was.

She couldn’t watch. She couldn’t not watch.

The sleek jet landed, then taxied toward them, coming to a complete stop some distance away. Zair stayed where he was, lounging against the SUV as if he accepted human deliveries so often it bored him, while his driver walked toward the plane with a gait that made Nora think of the good guys in action films.

“If your brother can pretend to be you,” Nora had asked him that night at her loft, “then why can’t you pretend to be him?”

The truth was, she didn’t think Zair looked anything like the sultan. He was leaner and much, much harder. He was beautiful. He radiated courage and that deep, dark heat from within him, formidable and powerful at a glance. The sultan, by comparison, looked soft and pampered in all the pictures Nora had ever seen of him. Twisted and smug and evil all the way through.

But the men who were making this delivery tonight wouldn’t see any of that. They would see the Ruyi noise. The fierce profile the brothers shared. They would see the family resemblance, and if they thought he looked any different than usual, they’d never dare say so.

That was what Zair and Nora were counting on. That was the only way this would work.

And this had to work.

There were so many ways it could all go wrong that Nora had to force herself to stop thinking each and every terrible possibility through to its grim conclusion. She had to force herself to simply sit there and wait, her breathing too loud and shallow. Her heart racing and near to breaking as it did.

It took a handful of forevers before the Gulfstream’s door opened and unfolded into stairs, and more than that before a man in a dark suit stepped out onto the small landing at the top. He looked around and called something to Zair’s driver, who moved to stand at the foot of the steps.

“Stop talking!” Nora ordered in a harsh whisper, inside the SUV with its tinted windows where no one could hear.

Another age crawled past, filled with male laughter and a noted lack of urgency all around, and then three woman came out the door and started down the steps with another man behind them.