The Billionaire's Innocent

This time, the kiss skyrocketed into madness the moment their mouths touched, and she had the wild notion that he’d been holding back before. Sensation pounded through her, so intense she was afraid, on some level, that she might not survive it. His hands moved to cradle her face and he crowded into her, pressing her back against the door, leaning into her with that athletic body of his, and she loved it. She wanted more.

She only realized when she heard a sound she dimly recognized as her voice that she’d said that out loud. “More.”

He angled his head for a better fit, and Nora rejoiced in it. In him. She kissed him with all her fear, her panic, and the driving passion inside her that made her feel like a stranger to herself.

Zair muttered something and then he pulled back. He shrugged his way out of his jacket and let it drop to the hard stones beneath them, then he moved in close again and this time, he simply picked her up. He propped them both against the door and he brought her legs up, helping her wind them around his narrow waist.

And all the while he kissed her, feasting on her mouth, tasting her over and over as if he was as starved for this as she was. As if he felt the same need.

As if they were both equally doomed.

His mouth moved from hers then, and he tasted his way across her jaw, then down her neck to the place where it met her shoulder. He pressed her harder into the door and smoothed one of his big, tough hands down her side, then over the outside of one leg. Then he reversed directions and traced that same lazy pattern beneath the rucked-up hem of her dress, up along the smooth skin of her inner thigh.

Nora trembled, but it didn’t occur to her to protest. Or to do anything at all but open herself to him and then welcome him in. He made a sound that was something like a growl, and she felt it inside her like an echo. Zair reached the core of her, hot and aching, and she jolted against him as he caressed the wet, swollen heat there through the lace panties she wore.

Zair lifted his head to meet her gaze. His green eyes were so bright they almost hurt her, his mouth was that solemn, distracting line that Nora could feel like music inside her, and then he slipped his fingers beneath the lace and satin she wore and he stroked his way deep into her.

He muttered something—a curse, a prayer. Nora arched against him, tossed and torn by the crash of so much sensation, so much searing, electric need. Zair thrust his fingers deep inside her, setting a hot, dark rhythm while he held her there, pinned between the door and the immovable wall of his chest.

She was open and immobile. She was outside herself. She was so lost in his spell she didn’t care about anything but what he was doing to her. She tossed her head back and she matched her hips to his movements, and she was scalding, hot, wild, and his. Undeniably his.

The way she always had been, something intoned, deep inside her, like a bell.

“Come,” he ordered her in a harsh whisper, and it sent a thrill through her, making her hurt—and then he pressed down hard against the aching center of her and she burst into desperate, gorgeous pieces all around him, sobbing out his name, tipping over the side of the world and falling straight off into the stars.

And when she came back to herself he was setting her down carefully on her wobbly feet, putting the skirt of her dress to rights and watching her in that hooded, lethal way of his that made her tremble all over again.

“What about now?” he asked silkily, appearing to be in complete and utter control of himself. “Are you ready to tell me the truth yet?”

And she was terrified that he’d see too much on her face now. Or worse, that she’d blurt it all out, because she felt rubbed raw. Outside her own skin. Completely incapable of protecting herself.

The way he wanted her to be, she understood, and she couldn’t let it happen.

She did the next best thing.

Holding his gaze, Nora sank down onto her knees before him.

Chapter Three

NORA BRACED HER hands on Zair’s rock-hard thighs and then pressed her mouth to the hard, hot length of him through the fine material of his trousers.

She felt him thicken even further and told herself it didn’t make her tremble, that she didn’t feel a bolt of new heat pierce through the core of her like a brilliant ache. That this was simply playing offense instead of defense.

“What the hell are you doing?” Zair demanded, and she liked that he sounded as rough as she felt. His strong hands came down and blocked her, taking her face between his palms and gently, if inexorably, tilting it up so he could scowl at her.

“I’m sucking the cock of a strange man in a foreign country,” she said in a voice she hardly recognized as her own. “The way I like to do. I told you.”

It could have been a few moments there on her knees, or several years. Nora felt caught. Suspended somewhere in his dark green gaze, outside herself. She found she’d caught her breath—

And then he moved, scooping her up from the floor in another offhanded display of his superior strength and it thrilled her in a way that had nothing to do with what she thought she ought to feel and everything to do with something primitive and deeply feminine inside her that she was afraid to examine too closely. He swept her up and onto her feet and then he used her shoulders to turn her toward one of the long corridors that ran off from the great room.

“Walk.” It was a low, gruff command.

Nora simply obeyed him.

It made her calm. It made it easy to walk straight ahead until he told her to turn and then follow the spiral stairs down and around into the vast, two-story master suite that plunged down the side of the hill, a cunning merging of old French country accents like the exposed wood beams and the Provençal color scheme with a certain modern sleekness, making the room feel old and new and somehow perfectly Zair. The grand windows offered views of all the sparkling lights that would, come daylight, transform from all its current glittering dark beauty into the serene, sun-drunk stretch of the Côte d’Azure and the gleaming Mediterranean Sea beyond.

Zair followed her down the stairs. When she turned to face him on the dark wood floor between the sitting area arranged around a great stone fireplace and the stout, pillared bed that dominated the far wall, he smiled.

A small, infinitely predatory quirk of his wondrous mouth. Nora let out her breath in a rush.

“Strip,” he said gently. Almost tenderly.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

She stared at him. Paralyzed, somehow.

Zair’s smile deepened, grew more lethal. “Are we about to have another conversation about the role of the common prostitute, Nora? For someone who finds this line of work so delightful she travels the world to indulge herself in the joy of it, you certainly seem untutored in how to proceed. Curious, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t say anything of the kind.”

He moved to the back of the nearby sofa and leaned against it. He crossed his arms over his muscular chest and his long legs at the ankle, and he fixed that dark green gaze of his on hers.

“Let me tell you what I think,” he said.

“I can’t imagine why you think I’m interested.” But all she could think about was his taste. His kiss. How terribly she wanted him, even now. His gaze was a smoldering thing, and it took everything she had to stand there so insouciantly, as if it hardly signified.

“I don’t buy it,” he said, with a small shrug.

Nora sniffed. “In fact, you did. Literally.”

Zair laughed, low and dark. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you’re here for fun.”

“It’s cute that you think you know me,” she replied, though her heart was beating too hard then. Much too hard. “But you don’t.”

“If you say so.” His voice was steel now. Demanding in a different way, as if he was fighting his own temper. “But you should certainly know better than to lie to me.”

She swallowed, hard. “I’m not lying.”

He pushed himself off the back of the couch, and she had the hysterical notion that he was taller, somehow. Darker. Certainly more grim as he came toward her, towering above her, making her chest feel too tight.

“Do you want me to push you, Nora? Because I can. I will.” He laughed again, and it was a stark sound. A scrape against her skin. “I’ll enjoy it.”

“Go ahead,” she said, though it came out much thicker than it should have. “If that’s what turns you on. That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?”

He frowned, and there was a bleak thing alive in his gaze then, making his green eyes seem haunted.