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.
Azhil could have ignored him the way everyone else did. Zair was no more than another of their father’s numerous mistakes. Granted a place to live in the sultan’s vast palace complex and the money to strike out on his own should he wish it by virtue of the blood in his veins, but never an heir. Never anything more than a grudging obligation.
But Azhil had treated him like a brother.
“I don’t need any further flattery,” Azhil had said. “I need someone I can trust. A blade, sharpened and honed, to fit in my hand and no one else’s. I think this is you, Zair. If you wish it.”
He’d smiled at Zair then, and Zair would have done anything he asked. He had.
“I will be the finest blade a sultan has ever had,” he’d vowed then. He’d trained and he’d studied. He’d honed his body and he’d sharpened his mind. And he’d dedicated himself, body and soul, to his brother.
How could he accuse Azhil now? The fact that he could consider such treachery at all made him sick. The fact that he regularly funneled information to those who would hurt Azhil if they could made him loathe himself. He’d spent the first few years of this operation assuming that what he’d find would exonerate his brother. It had only been the last couple of years that had curdled him, changed him. Made him despair.
Made him understand that Azhil was likely not the man Zair had always believed he was.
Yet he’d thought he had a handle on it, this knife-edged tightrope walk of his. And then he’d looked up and seen Nora Grant, of all people, standing in the midst of all that ugliness. And something inside him had simply refused. There was a line he wouldn’t cross, apparently, and it was her.
Zair rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. He would keep Nora safe no matter what, even if it was from himself. He would keep her out of this mess. He’d do it even if he had to truss her up and ship her back home to New York in the cargo hold of his plane. He vowed it.
It was still so dark outside, though not nearly as dark as it was inside him, and it was such a little thing to cling to, Zair knew. Such a tiny, inconsequential thing. One blonde girl whose smile altered the world a little bit when she aimed it at him, when she believed in him. It made all this darkness that little bit brighter.
That smile was all he had left.
But the next morning there were pictures of Zair and Nora all over the papers. And that changed everything.
Chapter Four
NORA WOKE UP to find herself sprawled out in Zair’s absurdly comfortable bed, all by herself in a shower of sunlight.
The view from the tall windows—the whole of the Riviera arranged below her with the Mediterranean sparkling beyond as if for her pleasure alone—was as breathtaking as she’d expected, but what she hadn’t anticipated was how scrubbed-fresh-and-clean she would feel. As if Zair’s shower the night before had truly been magical—or perhaps it was the fact that he’d been there with her, washing her with all of that tenderness and intense focus of his, that had cast some kind of enchantment over her. As if this were some kind of love story after all.
She sat up slowly and breathed in deep, and she felt more like herself in that moment than she had since she’d realized Harlow was missing. She even smiled with a surge of something a great deal like joy—
And then felt sick with guilt in the next breath.
“I’m sorry, Harlow,” Nora whispered fiercely into the quiet bedroom, appalled at herself. Her own callousness. “I haven’t forgotten you.”
She had to keep looking. No matter what Zair thought. And no matter that she had an entirely different take on what “looking” might entail come the bright light of day. She rubbed her hands over her face and breathed out, long and hard.
Could she do it? Now that it wasn’t a throwaway rationalization—now that she’d stood on that yacht and felt all those harsh male stares, now that she’d been dragged away and had an envelope slapped in her hand—could she go through with this? Because this was her entire plan for finding Harlow. And it wouldn’t be Zair the next time.
She tried to imagine how she’d feel if all the things that had happened last night had been with some stranger. Someone who wouldn’t have stopped when Zair had. Someone who would have ignored her panic and her tears and her terror—or, worse, maybe wouldn’t have ignored it but would have handled it differently. Perhaps with a backhanded slap across the face?
What the hell were you thinking? she asked herself, incredulous. How could you have imagined this was a good plan?
Nora crawled over to the side of the bed and slid off, feeling very small. Very fragile. And deeply, profoundly embarrassed, too. A wave of it washed over her, making her feel tiny and reckless at once. Was she that careless? That stupid? That she would walk straight into the kind of situation so many women—women she knew, she thought as shame wound through her, like her brother Hunter’s new girlfriend, Zoe Brook, who had appeared on national television to talk about what she’d endured at Jason Treffen’s hands—had fought their way out of at great cost to themselves?
She tried to access the conviction that had carried her across the Atlantic Ocean and onto that yacht last night, but it was gone as if it had never been. Leaving nothing in its place but that small, ugly thing inside her that whispered that because this was all her fault, because she’d talked Harlow into taking that internship, she should suffer, too.
Maybe Hunter wasn’t the only tornado of self-hatred and outrageous behavior in the family after all, she thought then.
No one likes a martyr, her mother liked to say. Least of all the would-be martyr herself come the morning after, when the full folly of her behavior seemed clear—and her own sheer luck in escaping the fate she’d thrown herself toward beat hard inside her like a further betrayal of her best friend.
“I’m still going to find you,” Nora said out loud, to Harlow wherever she was, fierce and low. Her hands clenched tight enough that her nails broke the skin of her palms, but she ignored the sting. “I’m just going to do it a different way.”
That little bit of forced optimism felt a bit misplaced, however, when she walked upstairs in another one of Zair’s shirts to find him hard-mouthed and cold-eyed,
his mobile phone clapped to his ear, looking even more ferocious and more unapproachable than usual.
“I can’t help you,” he said in a clipped, distant tone into the phone, but his green eyes slammed into her the moment she entered the great room that spread out across the top of the villa. Zair was wearing nothing but a pair of trousers low on his hips, that perfect chest of his on stunning display, his dark hair a delicious sort of mess, and that look of stone and shadow on his hard face. “I would if I could.”
He paused, still not moving his gaze from Nora, and she felt a prickle of something like foreboding move down her spine.
“If that were true,” he said into the phone in that silky way of his that Nora knew spelled nothing but danger, “I wouldn’t have answered this call.”
He put the phone down then, though Nora had the sense he hadn’t been the one to end the call. And then he stared at her, brooding and dark and for a long time.
“Good morning to you, too,” she said when it seemed he didn’t plan to speak and the weight of that stare made her skin feel stretched too thin across her bones. “Should we return to comfortable topics like the weather?” She waved her hand at all the dizzying blue and gold that was the South of France in May. “It’s lovely.”
“That was your brother,” Zair replied, and she detected no attempt on his part to sound anything but harsh. Something like condemning, even.
“Hunter?”
His glare was a scathing green. “Your other brother fades into the sea of other banker types exactly like him, I’m afraid. I don’t even know his name. Only that he makes piles of money and is happy to talk about it at the slightest provocation.”
“Of course you know his name,” she chided him. “And that’s not nice. JP never says anything bad about you.” Nora was too aware, then, of the fact that she was wearing nothing but a man’s long dress shirt—his shirt—with the cuffs rolled up and nothing but yesterday’s underthings beneath. And too aware that he was half naked himself, and so very sculpted and beautiful besides. She wasn’t sure which part of that made her feel more sordid. Or was that vulnerable? She could still feel his hands, wrapped tight around her hips—she coughed. “What did Hunter want?”
But Zair didn’t answer her. He hit a few keys on the laptop in front of him and then swiveled it around to face her. She walked over to where he stood at the long knotted-wood table in the kitchen, that foreboding thing blooming into far more than a mere prickle, and it took her longer than it should have to shift her attention from his hard, still-so-beautiful face and those watchful eyes to the screen.
Where the two of them were featured, climbing from Zair’s boat into his car the night before. Nora’s stomach twisted, then plummeted to her bare feet. There was one grainy shot after the next on the website, but there was no debating that it was the two of them. Just as there was no pretending they weren’t together.
Together, even. Because the pictures made two things perfectly clear.
First, that Zair was in complete control, holding her hand in his in a deeply possessive, starkly sexual manner even as he spoke into his phone. It was something about his body language, the way he surrounded her, the way he led her, and it was obvious in one shot after the next. All of it, somehow, screaming of sex and hunger and need.
And second, that while Nora’s memory of this moment was of conflict and anxiety, that wasn’t what showed on her face. She wasn’t smiling. Sex hung all around them like a cloud, shocking and obvious. Palpable. But despite that—or because of it—she looked somewhere between serene and blissful.
She couldn’t let herself think about that. Or the part of her that whispered: yes.
“Oh,” she said. And Hunter had already called from New York, which was hours behind Cannes, which meant these pictures were…everywhere. “Shit.”
“Precisely,” Zair said, with bite.
Nora had never really been a character in the tabloids before. Sure, she’d been featured as “an unnamed woman” with Hunter a few months back, when his reputation had been at its lowest. That had been briefly exciting for the handful of days before someone had told the paparazzi that the woman seen around Manhattan with the disgraced former football quarterback was, in fact, his sister.
And there’d been a few shots here and there over the years at parties in the city or with the few friends she had who veered toward famous, but that had been more in the Manhattan society pages than on the national gossip sites. And she’d certainly never attracted the attention of the even more unrestrained international tabloids. Nora had no idea how to behave when she was the actual target. When the papers were actually speculating about her.
Hunter Grant’s Little Sister Looks All Grown Up, one of the headlines read, and then, underneath: Ambassador Al Ruyi—Hunter’s College Roomie—Seems to Agree! It was an odd mix of horror and amazement, she decided, even as her head spun. Baby Sister Grant Takes Cannes—And Big Brother’s Friends—by Storm! screamed another. And the one with the worst, most revealing photo of her—gazing up at Zair as if he’d promised her a thousand acres of rose gardens and she’d accepted them, thorns and all—read: Grant Family Princess Sinks Her Claws into Playboy Sheikh!
“I don’t have claws,” Nora said then, still frowning at Zair’s laptop, even as she told herself she couldn’t feel all that heat blazing from his naked chest not a foot away from her. “Is that a snide way of suggesting I get a manicure?”
“This isn’t a joke,” Zair rumbled at her. “We have to decide how to handle this.”
“We can’t ignore it?”
She realized they were standing much too close together then, as she imagined he did, too, when their gazes met. Tangled. He pulled in a breath before he stepped away, and she pretended she didn’t feel that little thrill inside at the sound. That she got to him, too.
“We can call Hunter’s brand-new girlfriend,” Nora suggested, keeping her voice as even as she could. “Her name is Zoe Brook, in case you haven’t kept up with all the gossip while you’ve been stocking up on hookers all across Europe, and she’s supposed to be the best PR person in New York.”
“I know Zoe.”
She eyed him. “Define ‘know.’”
Zair’s mouth twitched in what Nora decided was his version of laughter, though she couldn’t be certain. All the rest of that hard face remained impassive.
“We have two options. First, ignore it as you suggest,” he said in that dark voice of his that sizzled as it worked its way through her. He slid a French press half full of rich deep brown coffee toward her, then handed her a large mug. She was grateful and then, once she took a bracing first sip and felt newly made that easily, something more like reverent. “But that would require that we quickly refute the story by being seen in public with others.”
“That doesn’t sound hard.”
“It couldn’t be easier,” he agreed. His green eyes were too hot when they met hers, and something like lethal. “Save that it will happen over my dead body.”
She smiled at the ferocity in his voice, and told herself it wasn’t a kind of triumph that coursed through her at the sound. It wasn’t a sick kind of victory. Certainly not.
“That also doesn’t sound terribly difficult,” she said instead. “I mean, if you insist, there’s a steep cliff right on the other side of all these windows and I’d be happy to give you a little push. As a friend.”
“The other option is to make it work,” he’d said in a low voice, ignoring her, though his green eyes narrowed and his mouth moved again, hinting at the laughter she was suddenly determined to see. “But let me be clear about what I mean by work.”
“Do I want to guess?” she asked drily. “Or is this another excuse for you to issue a lot of grim commands?”
“You have two choices,” he said evenly, though there was that darkly patient thing in his gaze then that made her feel slippery and hot. “You can return to New York immediately, which I should tell you is your brother’s preference and mine
, too. There’s no doubt that it would be safer. I can have my plane ready for you within the hour—and I’ll make sure you get on it.”
He watched her for a moment, as if he expected a response, and maybe that was the reason she only gazed back at him while she took another, deeper pull of her coffee and said nothing.
“Or you can stay here with me for the remainder of the film festival and I will help you look for this friend of yours,” Zair said softly, something too intense to bear in his green gaze. His mouth moved then, into that hard-stamped quirk that was nothing like a smile and still made her flush hot. “But if you do that, Nora, it will be entirely on my terms. No arguments, no negotiations, no recourse. You will do what I tell you to do or you will leave.”
Maybe the coffee gave her courage. Maybe it was the faint marks she’d left on her own palms that reminded her how brave others had to be—were no doubt forced to be, right now, while she stood here in this villa with a man who scared her but whom she knew—she knew—would never hurt her. She put her mug down and frowned at him.
“You never speak like this to me normally,” she pointed out. “In the past six years when I’ve run into you with Hunter or at parties all you’ve talked about is the weather, my studies and/or my job, and maybe the news. That’s it.”
“You never normally roam about the South of France pretending to be a prostitute,” he shot back, looking very male and completely unmoved. “Somehow, I think the kind of polite conversational fare appropriate for a cancer benefit on Fifth Avenue misses the mark here.”
“I don’t particularly like either one of those options,” she said after a moment. “But it’s not up to you. I’m perfectly happy to go back to my hotel and carry on with my business like last night never happened. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to be involved.”
The Billionaire's Innocent: Zair al Ruyi (Forbidden Book 3) Page 7