The Billionaire's Innocent: Zair al Ruyi (Forbidden Book 3)

by Caitlin Crews

  “You have to go back to New York,” he told her abruptly.

  “Zair—”

  “It’s not a request.”

  He stepped back from her, and it hurt. It hurt like a month of the worst kind of illness. As though he’d run back-to-back marathons for days. He hurt. And he thought that of all the sacrifices he’d made, all the things he’d done over the past five years and before, all things he’d allowed because it would protect and serve this tarnished image of his, this was the one that would cripple him.

  He feared it already had.

  She was everything he’d ever wanted. He’d suspected it six years ago. He knew it now. And Zair couldn’t have the things he wanted. He knew that, too. Playing this game was only making the great darkness that was his life seem that much more pronounced.

  Nora shifted before him, frowning. “I don’t want to go back to New York yet. I don’t want—”

  “You promised to obey me,” he reminded her, more harshly than was strictly necessary. Her eyes widened and she looked turned to stone right there in front of him, but she only waited, as if she really were obedient. As if he were worthy of taking control of a creature like her in the first place, when he knew better than to think such things. “You gave me your word.”

  “Zair.” But that was all. Just his name, like a prayer.

  “I want you gone, Nora,” he said quietly, and he’d never meant anything more. Or wanted it less. “Tonight. This isn’t a negotiation. This is the deal we made.”

  But he would give her a gift, he thought, when she ducked her head in a kind of anguished acceptance and he knew she’d do as he asked. A kind of payment, perhaps, for services rendered. He would risk his own goddamned cover no matter the shit show it would cause, for no other reason than she’d asked him to do it.

  He’d give her Greer.

  *

  New York felt like an insult after hours on a small plane with an irate Greer Bishop, who hadn’t seemed to realize that she’d been helped instead of hindered and that Nora was not, in fact, her enemy.

  The city was no respite. It was too hot and edging toward humid, SoHo was all smelly concrete and no bright sea, and Nora had never felt more ragged or more fragile in her life. When she finally wrestled her bags up to the loft she’d always loved so much in what felt like a different life, she stood there in the center of the big, long, colorful space, waiting to feel the embrace of home. Instead, she felt small. Diminished.

  Broken, even, with too much Zair in her head.

  She thought about going into work—but the very idea of standing in the gallery and pretending to care deeply about the collection of abstract paintings from local artists that was currently on exhibit made her stomach hurt. She felt so wrecked inside. She’d seen too much in Cannes.

  You are not the same person who went there, a little voice inside her that sounded a great deal like Zair told her harshly then. You have to change your life. Make certain it means something, or what was the point of any of this?

  Nora had no idea what the point was. To anything. She hadn’t found Harlow in Cannes. She hadn’t so much as glimpsed her friend in all the terrible places she’d been these past ten days, and that was like a great, yawning sinkhole inside her, worse by the second. I think you have a very good idea what happened to your friend, Zair had said, and she did. God help her, she did. She might have emancipated the surly, notably unappreciative Greer from the circuit, but she’d also discovered what was between her and Zair in the strangest and most brilliant manner—only to lose it, and him, all over again.

  And, she was very much afraid, herself, too.

  Nora had no idea what to do about any of those things.

  So she turned around before she could think better of it. She marched back out to the street, hailed a cab, and headed up to Columbus Circle to ask for help from the only person she knew who might actually be able to provide it—at least in part.

  Which seemed like a really great idea until she was sitting on the low couch in Zoe Brook’s intimidatingly austere office, deeply second-guessing her decision.

  “I’m thinking your brother doesn’t know you’re here,” Zoe said after a moment of silence dragged on into something longer and more perilous, with Zoe’s shrewd gaze boring holes into Nora’s forehead. “Or possibly even that you’ve returned from Cannes.”

  Nora smiled politely. “I couldn’t say what Hunter knows.”

  Zoe leaned back against her chair and smirked. “I’m enjoying myself already.”

  “This isn’t about Hunter,” Nora said quickly. “To be clear.”

  She was doing her best not to look over at the picture on the wall that she’d seen the first time she’d come here. It had been months ago with Hunter, when they’d picked Zoe up for an evening out. Hunter and Zoe had started murmuring things to each other that no younger sister wanted to overhear, and so Nora had drifted over to the large wall covered in photographs featuring Zoe with a variety of famous people. Her clients, clearly. Politicians, movie stars, power brokers in all fields, celebrities of every stripe. Which was when she’d seen Zair. She’d stared, the way she always did when confronted with him. He’d looked as gorgeous and fierce and unreachable as ever, framed standing with Zoe in some well-dressed crowd somewhere. Back then she’d reminded herself that she’d hated him and told herself that was why she’d kept staring. Today she was too jet-lagged and worn thin in her soul to bother with the self-deception.

  “I do read the tabloids, you know,” Zoe said now. “I should warn you that I can’t compromise my clients’ confidentiality. You can’t work with secrets if it comes out that you don’t keep them.”

  Still, that amused look on her face invited Nora to keep going. Nora took a breath. Considered.

  “I don’t want to hire you,” she said. Carefully. “I’m only here as your boyfriend’s naive little sister who found herself swept up in something a little too public.” She smiled. “After all, I look up to you like the older sister I never had—”

  “That’s laying it on a bit thick after a mere four months of dating your brother. But go on.”

  “—and I’m wondering if you have an opinion about one of Hunter’s best friends, since you’d be in a much better position to make an assessment. Socially, I mean.”

  Zoe’s eyes gleamed. “I’d say that Hunter has some interesting friends,” she said after a moment. “I try to overlook his connection to the Treffen family for obvious reasons, and because I don’t necessarily believe all that ‘sins of the father’ crap. I’m not too broken up that no one’s found a shred of evidence to tell us who murdered that evil piece of shit. And I like Alex Diaz well enough despite the fact that he’s a journalist I can’t manipulate. When he’s not asking me probing personal questions about the worst years of my life, that is.”

  “Austin and Alex are both very nice,” Nora agreed, though she wasn’t sure nice was the word she’d use to describe either one of her brother’s other college roommates, both of whom had always struck her more as wolves who happened to look good all dressed up in their sleek human clothes, if no less wolfish.

  “Zair al Ruyi, on the other hand, strikes me as someone who’s unduly invested in living down to low expectations,” Zoe murmured. “The darker and more subterranean those expectations, the better.”

  “But Zair is the Ruyian ambassador to the United States,” Nora said in the same calm, overly precise tone, her gaze fast on Zoe’s face. “He’s Harvard educated with a master’s in public policy from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. He’s a highly accomplished man by any reckoning. Exactly what low expectations could anyone have about him?”

  “My impression,” Zoe said after a moment and a flash of that razor-sharp smile of hers, “which is based entirely on personal and social interactions and not on any professional relationship I might or might not have had with him, you understand, is that it’s necessary to Zair that people think that he is capable of the lowest of acts.”

&nb
sp; “Is he?” Nora asked softly, though she already knew. She knew the truth, no matter what anyone said to the contrary.

  “On the one hand,” Zoe said, her gaze calm and direct, “I believe people are as capable of great evil as they are of tremendous good. They are two sides of a single coin.” She paused. “But in Zair’s case, and again, this is only a social impression, I’d say that perception is not necessarily reality.”

  “Ah.” Nora sat back against the couch, aware only then that her heart was pounding against her ribs as though she’d climbed up the side of a cliff. Or jumped off of one. She looked over at that picture then, at Zair’s elegant warrior’s face and all the secrets she wished she could read in it, then back at Zoe. “You must be as good at your job as they say.”

  “Yes,” Zoe agreed softly. “I am. Which is how I know that you need to give yourself a break, Nora. You just spent a week splashed all over the worst of the tabloids. That’s not easy even if you court that kind of attention. You look like you’re about to fall apart.”

  “I’m fine.” Nora forced a smile. “Just a bit jet-lagged.”

  “Of course.” Zoe sat back in her chair, though her cool gray eyes missed nothing, Nora thought. She rose to her feet and tried to look as “fine” as she claimed she was. “My mistake.”

  *

  “Please tell me that I’ve been struck down with some kind of early-onset dementia,” Alison Blodgett Grant said in her chilliest tone of voice when Nora finally found the courage and called to tell her she was back home. She was certain this was not news to her mother. For someone who claimed never to sully her eyes with the dirty tabloids, her mother certainly knew every time one of her children turned up in them. “And that one of the symptoms involves detailed hallucinations that my only daughter has spent the last week cavorting about the South of France like some vulgar hotel heiress.”

  Nora sighed. “I’m sorry to tell you that you’re probably perfectly healthy, Mother. No need to plan the funeral just yet.”

  “Then I am all ears, Nora. Have you joined the cast of one of those appalling ‘reality’ shows that clutter the cultural consciousness? Please, explain to me what on earth you could possibly have been thinking to put yourself in so many compromising positions?”

  She heard her father rumbling in the background, and she knew that the Nora who’d set off for France, so full of herself and so fired up with good intentions if terrible plans, would have said something to fix this. She’d always been so indulgent when it came to her mother’s ambitions, always found the whole pedigrees and appropriate marriages thing amusing while not taking it too seriously, like her own live version of Downton Abbey. But she didn’t have it in her any longer.

  She stood there in her leftover life with a gaping hole in the middle of it that was Harlow and was Zair, too, and she felt on the cusp of some great purpose—and she might not have known what that was, she might have felt as lost as she did changed, but she was pretty sure it didn’t involve her mother’s eternal fixation on marrying her off to this or that irritating son of one of her father’s golf buddies.

  “I can’t explain myself,” she said simply. “And I don’t want to, either.”

  Then she sat there in the uncomfortable silence that followed and didn’t do a single thing to break it or solve it, apologize for it or laugh it off. She wasn’t surprised when her mother ended the call.

  And another week passed with Harlow still missing. A week in which Nora tried to put what had happened in France behind her and move on, but of course, did nothing of the kind. She was still too raw. Changed all the way down to her bones. Unable to concentrate on her work, unable to care about the life she’d found comfortable enough—if a bit pointless—only two weeks earlier.

  You shine brightest when you let go, Zair had told her. When you believe in yourself.

  Nora didn’t know what she believed. Meanwhile, summer was coming to Manhattan. The June days were lighter, evenings arched blue and orange above the skyscrapers, and Nora couldn’t escape the notion that somehow, if a new season began and Harlow was still gone, she always would be. That there was a ticking clock and it was about to run out.

  It didn’t make sense. But that sense of lost time was the other thing keeping her from sleeping. The first one was tall, dark, a little bit lethal, and had ordered her to leave him after a life-altering kiss.

  Either way, she spent a lot of time wide-awake at 3:00 a.m. She might have simply holed up in her loft until she came up with some new, no doubt equally foolish plan to locate her friend and God knows what else to deal with her unresolved feelings for the only man she’d ever let tell her what to do, but Hunter intervened.

  “It’s Zoe’s birthday,” Hunter said in his voice mail, because she’d stopped picking up the phone days before after too many calls from journalists who wanted to talk about Cannes, and was she only imagining that he sounded harsher than usual? Was she simply at war with everyone these days—or was that only with herself? “I’m throwing a party and you need to show up.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter. “I don’t give a shit if you’re pissed at me, Nora. But don’t disappoint Zoe. She’s not the one who let you down.”

  Which was how Nora found herself in her brother’s rambling three-level penthouse in the Financial District that Saturday night, completely against her will. This is for Zoe, she told herself. Because Zoe hadn’t had to give her any information about Zair, however roundabout. She hadn’t had to talk to Nora at all. That she had was a gift, Nora knew.

  “You came!” Zoe exclaimed, kissing her cheek with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm when Nora walked in. Beside her in the entryway, Hunter loomed like the former-pro-football version of gargoyle, all narrowed eyes and a grumpy expression.

  “Of course I came,” Nora replied. She shot a look at her brother. “Hunter is getting better at laying down the guilt trips.”

  Hunter made a noise a little too much like a growl, but Zoe only laughed that endlessly mischievous laugh of hers, looking bright and happy in a shimmering sheath of cream and champagne that licked over her long, lean body and made her look as pretty as Nora had ever seen her.

  “Yes, well,” Zoe said, patting Hunter’s arm in a vaguely soothing manner, “that requires that he care about things, doesn’t it? It’s a step in the right direction.”

  Nora smiled back weakly, ignored her brother, and then had nothing to do with herself but walk inside this party she hadn’t wanted to attend and be the sour note in the middle of all the merry festivities.

  Fifteen minutes, she promised herself. Twenty at the most, then you can return to driving yourself quietly insane.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Hunter demanded when he caught up to her some time later. Nora had taken herself out onto one of his many terraces, and was staring down at the wilderness of Manhattan far below, as if she could make sense of all the tension and grief and building panic inside her that way.

  “Are you asking because you want to know or because Mom called you to complain about my shocking behavior in our last phone call, now that you and she are so tight?” she asked. She didn’t look at him when he came to stand beside her at the rail.

  “Both,” Hunter muttered.

  Nora felt something a great deal like warmth move deep inside her and wished she didn’t. Numbness would be so much better. So much safer. She’d been trying to will herself numb since that last night in Cannes.

  “I’m fine,” she said. She said that a lot these days.

  “Clearly.” He sighed. “I’ll point out that I’ve never seen you without some kind of a smile on your face in a public setting and yet you just spent at least fifteen minutes impersonating an angry Goth chick on my couch.”

  “I’m wearing Chanel. That’s essentially the definition of not Goth.”

  “It was the scowl more than the clothes. It’s summer, Nora. This is a party. Lighten up.”

  “Summers and parties are often more complicated than
they appear.”

  “Funny thing,” Hunter drawled after a moment. “Austin told me he saw Zair last night. He’s back in New York.”

  She couldn’t let that sink into her. She couldn’t let it knock her down. It didn’t matter that she felt as if her brother had hauled off and punched her in the stomach—right in that hollow place she was worried was already eating her alive.

  “I can’t believe you both don’t have better things to do than sit around and gossip,” she said, fighting to keep her voice even. “Is this what it was like when you were all at Harvard? No wonder you spent half the time acting like you can’t stand each other.”

  “Yeah, and Austin said he sounds about as fine as you do.”

  Nora scowled at Lower Manhattan, which had about as much effect as anything else she’d done this past week. Pointless and pale, Zair had called her life. The city carried on as if she didn’t exist. She was starting to worry that she didn’t. That she’d left something critical behind when she’d left France, like a limb. So she turned toward Hunter and decided this was as good a time as any to stop reacting to things and start acting instead.

  “Since when do you care about what’s going on in my life?” she demanded. “Since when does it matter to you?”

  “Since now.” Hunter shrugged. “Deal with it.”

  “I’m glad you’ve fallen in love and it’s changed your whole life,” Nora bit out. “I really am, because you kind of sucked before you met Zoe and God knows, your taste in women was hideous.” His face darkened in some mixture of temper and shock, but she didn’t let that stop her. She jabbed a finger at him instead and wished, not for the first time in her life, that he wasn’t built like the football player he was. Like bricks and about as movable. “But that doesn’t mean we all have to change along with you, at your command, just because you say so.”

  Because she might take some orders from one man, but that was different. That was theirs, and it had as much to do with that wildfire chemistry between them as the situation they’d been in. And that had been her choice—and had nothing at all to do with this. If anything, obeying Zair even briefly had somehow given her the strength to stand up to overbearing jackasses like her interfering older brother.