Zair gritted his teeth and reined himself in. Somehow.
“You do realize that this is the post-Fifty Shades world, Zair,” she said drily. “You can just be into dominating people, you know. It doesn’t have to be a prostitution thing. It doesn’t have to be so dramatic.”
“I dominate people by drawing breath,” he told her, amused despite himself. Amused when he should be furious. When he knew perfectly well he should have thrown her on his plane and washed his hands of her. Saved her, whispered that little voice inside him that still imagined he could be heroic. That he could be something other than bait in a trap. “I am that wealthy, that powerful.”
“And that humble,” she observed.
He felt his lips twitch. “This is not a conversation about manners, Nora. It is a conversation about reality.” She shifted against the plush leather of the seat and he smiled, because he could practically smell how much she wanted to argue with him in the same way he could smell her delicate perfume. “All I need to do is walk into a room and women prostrate themselves before me. But that isn’t obedience on their part. It’s strategy.”
“Strategic groveling?”
“Strategic positioning for any woman who thinks she might enjoy life as my significant other.” He shrugged when she frowned at him. “I apologize. You, of course, would never offer yourself to a man like me on a silver platter. You would never vow you’d do anything at all if I would only touch you at last.”
He felt her stiffen beside him and knew they were both remembering that night six years ago when she’d said exactly that. The way she’d swayed toward him, the seductive light in her gaze, the hopeful smile, her hands outstretched. He shifted in his seat to hide his instant, inevitable arousal.
“I didn’t exactly prostrate myself before you,” she said, too much temper in her voice to call herself the least bit obedient, though he doubted she knew it. “You might want to remember that, sir.”
Zair turned toward her, reaching for her jaw again but this time, sliding his hand down so that he held her throat as well. She let out a short, sharp noise, then was still. He could feel her pulse, a wild thunder beneath his fingers. He could feel the heat of her skin, and the flush that worked its way down from her cheeks to spread fire over the tender flesh of her neck. He leaned closer, not quite pressing her against the back of the car, not quite holding her immobile, but not letting go, either.
“Do not use that tone again,” he said, calm and dark. “This isn’t a game.”
“You said this was an act. There’s no audience here.”
“A fact I am certain you considered in all its facets before you decided to get smart with me, yes?” he asked, and he could see the mutinous way she pressed her lips together. “Hear me, Nora,” he said then, not unkindly. But with no give in his voice either. “The kind of people we are trying to convince here are just as used to women throwing themselves at their feet as I am. The sort of control they want comes from ownership, not courtship. They use prostitutes because it eliminates the potential for misunderstandings when power flows one way and one way only. It’s a remarkably simple arrangement.”
“It’s sick,” she whispered. “And my best friend—”
“Are you ready to talk about that?” Zair made no effort at all to hide the edge in his voice then. “The real reason you would put yourself in this kind of danger for a friend?”
“I already told you why—”
He moved closer, so his lips almost brushed the tender shell of her ear when he spoke, and she let out a small sound that made his entire body tighten in a greedy kind of want.
“Lie to yourself if you must, Nora. Don’t lie to me.”
She shivered, and still he held her, even as the car came to a smooth stop outside one of the French Riviera’s most famous restaurants, the entryway already lined with cameramen and a sea of tourists with their cell phone cameras held aloft.
“Are you ready to obey?” Zair asked calmly. “It isn’t enough to look compliant. You must look owned. Do you understand the difference?”
“You’re the expert,” she whispered, and his mouth curved at the bitterness in her voice, so at odds with all that glistening heat in her gaze.
“Do you understand?” he asked again. “You have to say it, Nora. It’s called consent.”
“Like your hand on my throat?” she threw at him, but he could hear the truth in that husky note in her voice. He could see it in the way her nipples poked hard and fierce against the fabric of her dress, the way she moved in her seat, squeezing her thighs together. “Because I don’t recall consenting to that.”
“Am I hurting you?”
He saw her gaze moved over his face. He felt her swallow beneath his hand. Knew—in a way she didn’t, perhaps—that she was as intrigued by her helplessness as she was alarmed by it. He could smell her arousal. He could see the flush on her skin, and the last time he’d heard that particular sigh from her, his fingers had been deep inside her. But that wasn’t the point, not really, and so he waited.
“No,” she said after a moment. “You’re not hurting me.” She glanced at him, then away. “And yes. I understand.”
Zair let go and sat back, signaling his driver that they were ready to exit.
“Hold on to what you feel right now,” he told her, and he’d keep to himself the roaring need that pounded in him, that wanted nothing more than to bury himself inside her and forget about the act they’d agreed to put on. “I know it’s scary. I know you think your heart might burst open inside your chest, and you can’t tell if it’s fear or longing or both. I know, Nora. And I want all of that on your face when we get out of this car.”
“Because this is all an act,” she said quietly, and he didn’t want to understand that look in her gaze. He didn’t want to acknowledge what he saw there. He couldn’t.
“Yes,” he said as the driver cracked open her door. The sound of the crowd outside was like a slap. “And it has to be a good one.”
“Just my luck that you’re apparently a method actor, then,” she said, her blue gaze like an accusation as she moved toward the open door and he felt it like a roundhouse kick to the gut. He told himself that didn’t matter, either. The only thing that mattered was this game. Finding her friend if he could, and more important, finding a handful of final nails for that coffin he’d been building for years now, with his brother’s name on it. “What could possibly go wrong with that?”
Chapter Five
A FEW NIGHTS later, Nora walked onto another luxury yacht out in the deep blue of the Cannes harbor but this time Zair was with her, a solid, intimidating wall at her back, strong and fierce. He kept his hand on the nape of her neck, a firm and commanding pressure to guide her exactly where he wanted her to go, which Nora was well aware was a deliberate show of ownership on his part.
It was her job to look suitably owned.
This is a show, she reminded herself as the cameras recorded them and the paparazzi called their names, and she leaned back into Zair’s grasp as if he were there to protect her. This is nothing but a show.
They were creating vignettes that told a broader story, and each one of them came with access to the kinds of places Harlow might have ended up. Every moment they spent together outside the villa was calculated. That long, much-photographed stroll along La Croisette, the famous walk along the Cannes waterfront, where every shot had shown Nora gazing up at Zair as he talked as if he’d been her whole world. A ride in a splashy convertible past the hordes of photographers outside the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat, with Zair’s hand a little higher on her bare thigh beneath her skirt than was strictly polite. An afternoon out sailing on a pretty catamaran on the Baie des Anges off the coast of Nice, never too far from the photographers’ lenses, the better to show Nora sitting below Zair as he lounged on the deck, essentially at his feet.
Tabloid readers saw a young woman utterly besotted with a dangerously powerful man some years her senior. A certain subset, however, saw the
socialite-turned-prostitute Zair had spirited off that yacht that night and shown no signs of giving up while the famous film festival wore on.
He hadn’t reenacted that moment in the car again, with his strong hand at her throat, and Nora kept telling herself that was a good thing. That his gentle if inexorable hold had frightened her—when the truth was, it had only scared her because it had made her nearly mindless with need. With sheer, uncontrollable lust. Just as she told herself that the flame she nursed deep inside her, the one that brightened and danced whenever he touched her, however he touched her, was a deep fury that they had to play these games—
When she knew, late into the long nights when she was alone in the bed he’d given her in his villa and felt as if she burned alive with all the things she wanted, that she liked these games. She more than liked them.
Nora didn’t know what that made her. She was afraid to ask—because she thought he’d tell her, and she wasn’t at all certain she wanted an answer.
“I have to speak to some people,” Zair told her in an undertone when they’d boarded the yacht and were standing in another lavish ballroom, complete with a set of gently swaying crystal chandeliers. “Go get me a glass of wine. And smile more, please. This is a party, not a funeral, and you are meant to represent the talent, not the help.”
Nora smiled automatically and with a touch of theater, tipping her head back to aim it straight at him, and was surprised when his eyes gleamed, then crinkled the slightest bit in the corners.
“You’re laughing,” she accused him. “I can see it.”
“Dangerous men do not laugh, Nora,” he told her, and a warmth seemed to roll right over her at that dry tone. His hand was still warm at the nape of her neck and his green eyes were light on hers and he was teasing her. “The world would end.”
She was lost. She was so lost. She couldn’t let herself think about it. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“See that you do.” His hand tightened slightly and she felt her lips part as if that were a kiss. His mouth crooked, an acknowledgment. As if he felt that almost-kiss the same way she did, all that lush heat and wildfire. “And this time, do not be so obvious that you’re looking for someone.”
She felt herself flush. “I only asked around the other few times. The way anyone would ask around.”
Zair only lifted a dark brow and she sighed. It was a sound of surrender, unmistakable even in the crowd, and their eyes met then. And held, while that flame leaped inside her and burned white hot, searing through her. And him, too. She could see it.
“Hurry back,” he said in that low, dark voice that she heard in her dreams and that haunted her while she was awake. That voice she thought must have been imprinted on her bones, so wholly did it control her. As if she were his marionette, dancing only to his tune and at his will, when she knew the very notion should appall her.
It certainly shouldn’t have felt like molten heat, a knot low in her belly and fire between her legs. And endless, wanton yearning for him to command her to really dance for him. To perform that scene they’d done that first night and this time, without stopping—
This is a game, she reminded herself as she moved through the crowd, her legs wobbly beneath her as her mind played that scene out again and again in her head, the way she did far too often for her peace of mind, and always with alternate endings. You’re looking for Harlow and he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing and none of this is real. It’s an act, nothing more.
But her dress was made of deep red silk in crisscrossed straps that whispered dark sensual promises every time she breathed. Zair had presented it to her without comment earlier this afternoon and she’d taken it because he was in charge of their little performances and he chose things such as dresses to better enhance each one. And she’d been aware as she arranged all the intricate pieces of the bodice in front of the mirror in her suite that it was what could only be termed haute bondage. All those straps and a flirty skirt beneath. It was another signal. Another quiet announcement only those looking for such things would hear.
“No,” he had said when she’d emerged from her suite that evening, the dress already making her walk a bit differently, she’d been so aware of it.
He’d barely glanced at her from his place on one of the couches in the great room, surrounded by stacks of files and his laptop open on the table in front of him despite the fact that he was dressed for an evening out.
And Nora had paused across the room, stricken that she’d displeased him—and genuinely furious at herself. What kind of reaction was that? She’d worn this absurdity of a dress, hadn’t she? She was supposed to be looking for her lost friend and instead she was parading around the South of France dressed like a bondage slut. What had happened to the infinitely confident and usually emotionally uninvested Nora Grant, who had once, memorably, broken up with a boyfriend because she hadn’t liked the way he’d answered his phone?
It was that Nora who’d answered Zair then.
“No what?” she’d asked, with significantly more “tone” than she’d used in days. This villa was backstage, she assured herself. She could behave any way she liked, say anything in any tone, do whatever came naturally. “I didn’t say anything.”
Zair had sat back against the sofa in that slow, deliciously calm way of his. His green eyes had seemed like smoke from a distance, but they’d slammed into her all the same. And the fact that what she’d wanted most right then was his approval, not whatever asserting herself might bring her, was something she’d been a little bit too afraid to admit, even to herself.
“The point of that dress is nudity,” he’d said mildly, as if he hadn’t heard any tone.
“The point of nudity is nudity,” she’d retorted, and while there’d been a part of her that had been thrilled that she’d stood up to him in some small way, there’d been another—bigger—part of her that had wanted…something else entirely. Some understanding that had flirted on the edge of her mind and had something to do with that dark, brooding patience that was always there in his gaze. As if he knew things about her, about this, and about them that she didn’t.
“Do tell,” Zair had murmured, which didn’t help.
“If you want me to walk around some sick, twisted party filled with johns and deviants and without any clothes on, you’re going to have to be more direct about it,” she’d hurled out into that empty space between them, and into that hollow inside her that she still hadn’t understood at all. “And also be in the midst of a pretty wild wet dream.”
His mouth had curved to one side and he’d only waited until she’d finished, in that wildly disconcerting and compelling way he had, as if he could wait forever. Then, when she’d subsided and had stood there breathing too raggedly into the silence, he’d crooked his fingers at her in the universal signal to go to him.
“I don’t have to do what you tell me when we’re all alone,” she’d thrown at him, and there had been no disguising the panic in her voice.
Or, more telling, the fact that as she’d said it she’d started walking toward him anyway, as if her body hadn’t cared where it was or what it did, only that it obeyed him.
“Consider this practice,” he’d said, and she’d thought she knew what that rich note was in his voice then. That gleam in his gaze. It had been something profoundly male, triumphant and dark at once, and it had moved in her like honey. Richer and deeper. Pooling in her joints and melting into her core. “A dress rehearsal, if you like.”
She’d been standing in front of him, between his outstretched legs, before she’d truly understood she meant to move.
“Take off your panties,” he’d told her. Then smiled that devastatingly lazy smile of his when she’d jolted, as if he’d expected it. He’d reached over and traced a faint line over the curve of her hip. Only that faintest of touches, and it had ricocheted through her, making her throat dry and her breasts ache. “I can see the lines. It ruins the look.”
“It does not.” But h
er voice was so insubstantial then, it might as well have been mist.
“We can argue about that here, and who knows?” His green eyes had gleamed. “Perhaps you’ll win. And you can celebrate that all the way down the hill, where I’ll make you do this in the middle of a party filled with half of Europe and most of Hollywood. Your choice, Nora.”
“It seems like my choices are always between two things I don’t want,” she’d whispered.
“Maybe,” he’d suggested in that cool way of his that had made her heart pound, “you should stop thinking so much about what you want, especially when it only ever leads you into trouble. Think about what I want instead. Pretend that’s what you want most of all.” His mouth curved. “Purely as an exercise, of course.”
And so she’d reached up under her skirt, standing right there in front of him, and peeled her thong down her thighs with her shaky hands, and when she’d shimmied her hips so the little scrap of lace fell to her feet, he’d held out his hand. Another order. She didn’t think he’d seen anything during her little strip show, but that wasn’t the point, was it?
It was that he’d told her to do it. It was that she’d obeyed. It was this bright, hot, electric band that tugged them closer together all the time. They’d stared at each other for what felt like days. Nora had felt her breath scrape in, then out. She’d felt dizzy.
Then she’d reached down, picked up her panties, and handed them to him, feeling as wild and as out of control as if she’d chugged a bottle of champagne. And as absurdly attuned to him, and to her body’s own shuddering need, as if he’d licked his way into her when he’d barely touched her at all.
Zair had stood then, a slow, languorous slide to his feet, with all that ruthless grace of his that made him seem that much more male and that much more profoundly lethal at once. He’d reached over and started arranging the straps of the dress where she stood. A small tug here, a little smoothing there, his fingers agile and strangely elegant against the crisscrossed bodice, spreading that same thrumming heat wherever he touched.
The Billionaire's Innocent: Zair al Ruyi (Forbidden Book 3) Page 9