“That might not have been my smartest move,” she acknowledged. “But you don’t understand.”
“Tell me, then, what I need to know,” he encouraged her, but his voice was a dark thing and he could see it move through her and tangle inside her. He could see the misery and the longing transform her lovely face. “Tell me why.”
“Harlow is the best friend I’ve ever had,” she whispered. “Do you know what it’s like to meet someone and feel like they instantly become family? So much so that it’s inconceivable that they weren’t always there? She isn’t just a college friend, Zair. She’s like a sister to me.”
He held her gaze for a long moment and then slowly shook his head. Nora swallowed, hard.
“Try again,” he said. He saw unshed tears glimmer in her eyes, and she raised her hands up as if to push him away—but only held them there, in fists, and didn’t touch him. Her blue eyes filled with misery.
“It’s my fault,” she whispered, spitting out the words as if they were poisoned.
Zair didn’t question the impulse to gather her to him, pulling her into his arms and ignoring those fierce fists, hard against his chest. He didn’t question that thing in him that made him bring her close, made him bend down so her face was buried in his neck, so she could whisper all her guilt and panic and fear into something hard and strong like his shoulder, which could take it.
“My life is so hollow,” she told him, told that dark little pocket of space. She rested her forehead against him and her lips barely moved, but he heard her. He could be her confessional. He could give her absolution, if nothing else. “It’s a constant battle between expectations and pointlessness and none of it matters. It’s empty and I know—I know—what a privilege it is to have that kind of life in the first place. I have nothing to complain about. And Harlow was just like me.” She pulled in a breath, short and hard. “But at least she wrote a thesis on something more important to the world than a bunch of two-hundred-year-old paintings. So I told her she had to do something with that. She thought maybe she’d take a year or two to travel, to go to Bali and do yoga for months. And I said she could either fake spirituality with a bunch of assholes like the ones we already knew or she could go a completely different way and make a real difference. I was her best friend and I was a jerk about it.” Her voice was choked then, and Zair lifted a hand to cradle the back of her head, his gaze trained on the glittering shore in the distance but his attention entirely on Nora. “So she went to London and she worked in another Treffen law firm, and you know what happened in New York. You know what happens in places like that. With those people who use girls exactly like her… You know what she was walking into.”
“I do,” he agreed. “But I don’t understand how you had anything to do with it.”
“I made her go!” she hissed at him, and she moved her fists against him in emphasis. “If it weren’t for me she’d be working on her downward dog in Bali, Zair. She wouldn’t be missing in France!”
He shifted back so he could look down into her face.
“Are you so powerful?” he asked mildly. “Did this friend of yours require that you make all her decisions for her? Did she pledge to obey you in all things?”
“Of course not. But—” He shook his head and she fell quiet, and he saw the exact moment it occurred to her that she had pledged to obey someone else. In public, anyway. “What are you trying to say? That you’re responsible for me because I agreed to play these games with you?”
“My responsibilities aren’t the point,” he said, dark and low. “This is about your guilt.” She tried to pull away from him then, but he only held her closer and put his mouth to her ear. “We’re still in public, Nora. Don’t forget. This is when these games matter most.”
She went still, but it was a tense, humming sort of stillness.
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said softly. He looked down and found her gaze, so dark now and filled with all those shadows. “I haven’t forgotten all the things you said, either. What a foolish rich girl I am. How much of an idiot I must be to have come here. You’re not wrong. But it doesn’t matter, because—”
“You deserve it?” he asked, lethal and soft at once, and she sucked in a breath as if he’d hit her.
“I didn’t say that.” But he could see it in the dark thing that dimmed the blue of her eyes then.
Zair laughed softly. He pressed a kiss to her temple, indulging himself in the feel of her satiny skin, and then he stepped back. She looked bereft, and he was twisted enough to enjoy that.
“I could tell you that no one deserves what they walk into when they come here,” he said quietly. “But I suspect that intellectually, you know this. It isn’t about your mind, is it? This is about something else.”
“Yes.” Her eyes were wide, her face was pale, and she watched him as though she didn’t know whether to run away or fall to her knees before him, and sick fuck that he was, he liked that, too. “This is about friendship. I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that.”
“This is about control,” he corrected her. With utter certainty.
“Not everything is about sex. Or whatever this is, this thing you do. This obedience thing.”
“Control, obedience.” He shrugged, though he watched her closely. “It’s all the same thing.”
“I don’t see the connection between what happened to my best friend—”
“I think you have a very good idea what happened to your best friend,” he said. “This isn’t about her. This is about why you, Nora, who are certainly wealthy enough to buy yourself some interested policemen if appealing to their better natures didn’t work, felt the need to talk your way into a sex slave auction. Why you put yourself not merely in harm’s way, but on an actual yacht filled with people who were there for the express purpose of doling out the kind of harm that would have taken you a lifetime to get past.”
She looked unsteady on her feet, but he didn’t reach out to her, no matter how much he wanted to. He let her rock slightly.
“I admitted that wasn’t such a great plan,” she bit out in a low voice. “I know that. Do you want me to tell you that I feel lucky that it was you who found me there? I do. Okay?”
“Nora.” He kept his voice soft, and thrust his hands into his pockets to keep them to himself. “I’m not trying to break you apart. I just want you to face the truth. You want this to be your fault. You want your friend’s disappearance to be directly traceable to decisions you made and things you did. You came all the way to Cannes to take responsibility for it.”
She made a small, hurt noise, and covered her mouth with her hand, but not before he saw the way her lips crumpled in on themselves. Zair hated himself, but he pushed on anyway, because as much as this might hurt her, it would hurt her far worse if she stayed stuck in the place she was right now. He knew.
“Please,” she whispered.
“Do you want to know why?” he asked, inexorable and calm. So calm, as if this didn’t hurt him. As if her beauty and her courage didn’t make him proud of her, that she was still standing. Still listening. That she hadn’t run off into the night the way he could see she wanted to do.
“Because,” he said quietly, watching her eyes swim with tears, watching her chin tilt up as if she could weather any blow, “you think that if you make this your fault, you can control it. When you accept that you can’t control any of it, that it’s simply a thing that happened to someone you love, you’ll also have to accept that it wasn’t you who did it.”
“And you think that’s better?” she asked, fierce and broken at once. “Because it sounds to me like giving up.”
“Do you know why I rejected you six years ago, Nora?” he asked then, and she let out a hard, long breath. “You were a gorgeous girl. Young and beautiful and you said you wanted me. You said you’d give me anything.”
“I would have,” she whispered.
“You would have given me your body in some or other carefully constructed trans
action that you controlled completely,” he said brutally. “I can fuck anyone I like, whenever I like. What is another fuck to me?”
“Thank you.” Her voice shook but she raised her chin. “I think we covered this six years ago.”
“You were just a little girl,” he said. “But now? Here? This is truly beautiful, Nora. This is unique. And you can’t control it.”
“Obedience,” she whispered.
“Not the obedience itself,” he said, smiling faintly, “though let’s be clear, I think it’s hot. But I asked you to hand over your control to me and you did it. That’s strength. That’s beauty. Especially because it scares the hell out of you.” He felt his mouth move and he wanted to kiss her, to taste her, more than he could remember wanting anything else. “If you take anything away from this little show of ours, Nora, let it be that. You shine brightest when you let go. When you believe in yourself.”
For a moment—maybe a year—she only breathed. And a thousand things passed between them in that electric band that felt tighter, tauter, every second.
“If that’s true,” she said quietly, “then you should do it, too. You don’t have to tell me what your objectives are here, Zair. I don’t believe you’re another Jason Treffen. But you can prove it.”
“Can I? Monsters play games, too, Nora. Deeper games than you can imagine.”
“Don’t play another game,” she whispered. “This isn’t about that. And you’re no monster..”
Her eyes were so blue then, even damp with emotion. And she made him remember, suddenly, all those dreams he’d had years ago—all those bright fantasies. That he could be a better man. Some kind of hero. That he was something other than dirty.
“Help someone, Zair,” she urged him, as if believing in him were easy. As if she already did. “Help Greer.”
Chapter Six
AND ZAIR UNDERSTOOD then how much of a danger this woman posed to him. Not just to him personally, but to everything he’d worked for these past years. All Nora had to do was look at him like this, with all that faith and wonder and belief in her pretty eyes, and he’d do anything. He couldn’t even bring himself to mind it as he should.
But he knew it had to end. Here, now. Before he ruined years of work and not all of it his. Before he allowed terrible men to escape justice because he couldn’t resist this one woman and her insistence on thinking him something other than what he was.
“I was hoping we’d see a bit more of her,” the slithery Laurette Fortin had said earlier, while Nora had been off colluding with Greer Bishop, who had always struck Zair as far too hard, too armor-plated to need help. He didn’t like thinking about what that kind of judgment suggested about him. “She could make quite a splash here.”
They’d both known what Laurette had meant by that. How much Laurette could make on a “splash.”
Zair had only shrugged. “I suspect this is but a passing flirtation. I doubt her family would permit anything further.”
She’d sniffed. “Pity, that.”
He’d laughed it off. “There are always more, Laurette, are there not? Season after season, year after year.” The other woman’s gaze had been too shrewd for his liking then, while his own, he’d suspected, was too bleak. “In a few weeks neither one of us will remember she was ever here.”
But he would never forget it.
Zair leaned over and ran his finger over the elegant line of Nora’s collarbone now, lazily tracing a pattern against the smooth skin and delicate bone exposed by the red strips that barely covered her. Goose bumps followed the path he took, rising up like a wake as he indulged himself in the feel of her, so soft and perfect.
“Help her,” Nora said again, and more fiercely this time. “Help Greer. I know you can. Is that why the girls you take home disappear, Zair? Do you spirit them off to safety and only pretend they come to bad ends?”
He laughed, but none of this was funny. He was monitored and followed by his own countrymen. He lived a double life, at the least, and he couldn’t trust a soul. And yet it had never occurred to anyone involved in this project that it wouldn’t be someone who thought the worst of him who would see straight through him. It was someone who foolishly insisted on seeing the best in him instead. No one had thought to protect him against that, least of all Zair himself. His chest felt tight.
“You’re naive, Nora,” he gritted out. “Sheltered and cossetted. You should stick to your art projects and your happy, rich girl life in Manhattan, stepping over the homeless on your way to your next charity dance. I don’t help people. Ever.”
She only shrugged, as if he couldn’t hurt her, though he could see the truth in her too-bright gaze. “You’ve already helped me. I don’t think you know how to keep yourself from it. Notably unlike a monster.”
She’d never been more beautiful than she was then. The light from the lanterns strung above them danced over her, brushing her with gold, making her look like something he might have dreamed up throughout his lonely childhood. Something that couldn’t possibly be real. Something, he knew, that he would ruin simply by letting her too close.
She was already too close.
You need to handle that Grant girl, one of his Washington contacts had emailed him the other day on his secure account. She cannot jeopardize the operation.
But he couldn’t seem to do what he knew he should.
“You little fool,” Zair muttered instead. “The only thing likely to kill me—and you—is your mouth. You need to remember that we’re standing in a pit of vipers.”
“I remember,” she whispered fiercely. “But that doesn’t make you one of them. You’re a fraud, Zair.”
For a stunning moment, he couldn’t believe she’d said that. That she’d actually called him a fraud on a boat teeming with enemies, no matter how private they seemed to be at the moment. There were too many unfriendly ears—and they were everywhere. Too many people who would be only too delighted to believe her. Some he worried already did.
So he did what he should have done in the first place, the only thing that would end this conversation at once and without any further accusations from Nora.
He dropped his head and took her mouth with his.
As if she had never been anything but his, whether he bought her or merely begged for her, or simply gave in to how much he wanted her. As if she never would be anything but his, no matter what happened next.
She tasted like lightning and need and he was too damned greedy. Too wild for her, and he stopped pretending, for this single electric moment, that he’d been anything else for a long time. He angled his head to take more of her and she wasn’t nearly close enough, so he reached over and hauled her to him with a peremptory hand at her neck.
And she melted against him like chocolate.
He kissed her until he very nearly forgot his name or why he’d started this in the first place. He kissed her with all the things he couldn’t say, all the longing, all the secrets, all the sick and terrible truths he couldn’t let out into the light.
And she kissed him back as if he truly were the hero of her dreams, her Prince Charming despite everything. As if he really were that shining, glorious creature he’d sometimes seen reflected in her pretty eyes when she looked at him. She wound her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him in lush surrender and he reveled in it, pulling her harder and tighter against him.
He kissed her instead of speaking words he didn’t dare say aloud. He kissed her until he thought they might cause a scene, and only then did he pull back, moving his hands to tangle in her hair, tugging her head back into the kind of angle that made them both breathe too hard. Just like that first night on another yacht like this one. They would no doubt find pictures of this moment splashed across all the tabloid websites within the hour and the magazines and papers by morning—and he didn’t care.
What he cared about was that light in her eyes that echoed inside him, as if they were two halves of a twisted whole. As if all of this were as real a
s it felt.
And it was all a great mess within him, fury and futility and that shimmering thread of what he chose to call lust, because it couldn’t be anything else. It all rolled into something else and it came out harsh and too much like cruel when he spoke again, in the clipped voice of a stranger.
“I could have killed all those girls who disappeared with the hands that are on you right now,” he told her, condemning them both even as his fingers tightened and her head jutted back further and he saw the proof of how that made her feel in the tight peaks of her nipples against the soft silken straps of her dress. His mouth watered. “And yet all I have to do is kiss you and you’re mine. That easily. There are prostitutes, Nora, and then there are whores.”
He felt her shake slightly beneath his hands, but her eyes were bluer than the sea and they were clear. Calm. Fast on his, as if she would follow him anywhere. As if she trusted him implicitly. As if he were worthy of such things.
“What does that make you, Zair?” she asked softly. “What are you getting from this performance of yours? Are you a spy? Are you writing a story? Are you the tourist here? What?”
“I keep trying to impress upon you that this isn’t a game, Nora, no matter what roles we play for the papers and the pimps.” His voice was so hard it was like a hail of bullets, though he tried valiantly to keep it a quiet whisper, but she didn’t seem to notice either way. “This isn’t some college prank your fancy little sorority dreamed up. When people lose here, they lose a good deal more than their dignity.”
She reached up and traced his mouth with her fingers, and it sent a bolt of fire straight through him. Searing and bold and far worse than that kiss. Far more damaging.
“I know,” she said simply and then, impossibly, she smiled. “Don’t worry, Zair. I’ll protect you.”
And he understood then, with another bolt of that same lightning, that if he didn’t let her go now he never would. Never. There was a selfish part of him that didn’t care. But the part of him that wanted only to protect her cared too much.
The Billionaire's Innocent: Zair al Ruyi (Forbidden Book 3) Page 11