“You’re very high up in the Ruyian government, Zair.”
“I am.”
“And in Ruyi, all those who take positions of authority must bear the blood of the ruling family.” Her smile was wry. “I may have read that somewhere, while pretending you didn’t exist.”
“There are many lower-level ambassadors from different clans, but the one who holds the post in Washington is always connected by blood to the sultan,” Zair agreed, his voice harsh. It was beyond his control. All of this was. “There are perhaps a dozen men who could operate this kind of ring, and far more than that who might think they could. But there are only two or three, realistically, who could do so in such a way that they could remain concealed while also framing me.” She waited. Zair realized he was waiting, too. To see if he would actually say it, after all this time dancing around it. “And only one of them looks enough like me to be confused for me in a certain light, at a distance. When it would be convenient to be recognized as someone other than himself.”
Her face crumpled slightly, as if she wanted to weep for him but held herself back at the last moment. And Zair wanted anything but this, he told himself. Anything but her pity.
“Are you sure?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“I have seen receipts for parties I never threw with my signature on them,” he said quietly. “I’ve been informed that I was seen in places I’ve never been. I’ve even seen pictures of a blurry man who, yes, looks a great deal like me, doing things I never did.” He shifted. “Am I sure? Yes, though I don’t want to be. But I still don’t have anything that might function as irrefutable proof.”
“Oh, Zair,” she said after another lifetime inched past, and it was the tears welling up in her eyes that she blinked away that pierced him. As if this was truly sorrow on his behalf, not that terrible pity he couldn’t abide. “I’m so sorry.”
“I never saw it,” he heard himself say. “He was the heir to everything and I was only a forgotten bastard. Only one among many. Why should he notice me? Why should he pick me out of the crowd?” He let out a sharp laugh. “Such narcissism. It never crossed my mind that he simply found the one he could best use.”
She moved then, pushing herself forward until she was kneeling before him, up on the bed so that she could frown at him from up close. And if he were the better man he sometimes wished he was, Zair knew, he would step away. He would put himself out of the reach of temptation. He would keep himself too far away from her to inhale the scent of her skin or remember how little chance he’d had to indulge himself in her earlier. Her scent, her textures, her lean curves.
Her desire to play the games he liked best.
He would have to hoard those memories. He would have to make them last.
“You are not to blame for trusting someone who should have been trustworthy,” she said fiercely. “Someone who deliberately misled you.”
Zair shook his head. “Forgive me if you like, Nora. I won’t do the same. I should have known.”
She sank down, her bottom on her heels, and studied him for a moment. “And Harlow?”
“As best I can tell, she talked her way into a very specific sort of party on a yacht in London. Perhaps they taught that skill in your sorority?” He shouldn’t have been as heartened as he was by that small smile of hers. But he was. “And by the time she reached France, she had so distinguished herself that it was determined that she should be brought back to Ruyi.”
“What does that mean?” Her hands were in fists on her thighs. “Do I want to know what that means?”
“It means they thought they were bringing her to me.”
Nora frowned. “In Ruyi?”
He realized he was still standing stock still, like a statue. Like a soldier braced for impact.
“I recently learned that there is a house tucked away outside one of the more remote villages on the far side of the desert.” He shifted into a looser stance and cupped one hand at the nape of his neck, as if he could squeeze the tension out. He kept his eyes on Nora. “It is unremarkable, really, aside from the guards and the women who enter and only leave under the cover of darkness in armored vehicles, never to return.” He smiled that razor’s edge of a smile again. “And it is in my name.”
“She’s there?”
“As of three days ago, yes.” He shook his head when Nora slumped in obvious relief. “I don’t know what state she’s in. I don’t know what’s happened to her or how long she’s been there. Or how long they’ll keep her there.”
“She’s alive. She’s been spotted recently. Don’t you understand?” She ran shaking hands over her face, and when she dropped them again her blue eyes swam with emotion. “I thought she was dead. Or…gone.”
“I’m not sure I would rejoice just yet. There are some things that might make death seem preferable.”
Nora shook her head fiercely. “You know where she is.” She whispered it, as if in wonder. As if this were cause for celebration, this conversation. “Zair, you found her.”
And the smile she aimed at him then should have made him feel ten sizes bigger. It should have made him want to leap buildings for her. It did. Maybe that was why it chilled him, too, because he knew better. He knew he couldn’t be even half the man she persisted in thinking he was.
“Not exactly,” he said, scowling.
But her eyes were lit up again, blazing with a joy that he found almost terrifying, and she was staring right at him as if he was the savior in this story. As if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
“You found Harlow,” she said. “Now all we have to do is save her.”
We. The word pricked at him. There couldn’t be any we.
“Save her,” he repeated. “Like what? A daring team of rescuers? Heroes?”
He saw the wariness creep over her fine features. “I’m not sure I’d use that word.”
“Because heroism isn’t actually doing the big splashy things like racing into guarded houses a world away, Nora,” he gritted out. “Everyone would grab the crying baby and race from the burning building. It’s hardwired into all of us. That’s the easy part.”
“Does any of this feel easy?” she whispered.
He ignored her. “Are you kind? Are you good? Do you stand up for yourself or those weaker than you when there’s no benefit in it for you at all—when it could hurt you? Do you do what’s right rather than what’s easy?” He shook his head. “You don’t. You’re a Grant. I don’t. I’ve been pretending to be a monster so long I can hardly tell what’s real and what’s fake any longer.”
“That’s not true.” But her voice was thicker, as if he’d struck a nerve. “You saved me that night on the yacht.”
“Did I?” He stared at her, fighting to keep that bright fury inside him from spilling over and liquefying them both. “Or did I merely find your misguided guilt trip useful?” He laughed, though it was little more than a scrape against the shadows. “But perhaps I’ve been reading this all wrong. Perhaps it wasn’t guilt that brought you there. Perhaps you saw your friend’s disappearance as an excellent opportunity to do something—one thing—that actually mattered. Your own little shot at heroism.”
She glared at him for so long he didn’t think she’d answer, and he hated himself for that sheen in her eyes that she didn’t let spill over into tears. But then she pulled in a breath and surprised him. He supposed he should have been used to that by now.
“Yes,” she said, her voice too crisp. “I felt guilty. I told you I did. But if you hadn’t been there, I would have been fine. One way or another. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it didn’t work out like that. But I was fine.”
“Laurette Fortin would have eaten you alive,” he growled at her. “She’s a piranha.”
“She didn’t do anything to me!”
“I know she didn’t.” His gaze was scorching. His mouth was grim. “Because I bought you.”
Nora gaped at him. He watched her blink, watched her struggle to take that in.
“Yes.” He showed her no mercy. He couldn’t afford it, not even when her hands moved to cover her belly as if she thought she might get sick. “And then, when I saw her again on your last night in Cannes, for good, to make sure she’d never come after you again.” He smiled then, and she jerked back as though he’d slapped her. He might as well have, he thought. It might have hurt them both less. “That cost more.”
*
Nora had to move then. It was that or simply fold in on herself, surrendering whatever was left to that growing fissure inside her—so dark and terrible she thought it might devour her whole.
She rolled off the bed and onto her feet, skirting Zair as though he was one of the great pillars that anchored the loft and if she ran into him she might knock herself down. She left the bedroom and went into the great room instead, flipping on the lights as she moved, trying to figure out how to breathe through the thing inside her that threatened to tear her apart.
He followed her at a distance, and when she turned to face him he’d made his way to the great windows that lined the wall again and stood there, looking out over the SoHo street, his arms crossed over his perfect chest as he frowned out into the dark. She snatched up the envelope he’d given her in Cannes from her sideboard and brought it to him, holding it out as if her arms didn’t feel weak. He glared down at the envelope in a way that reminded her of the royal blood in his veins, then he turned that same look on her.
“I’ll pay you back the rest,” she said, her voice a shocking burst of sound against the quiet room. When he didn’t take the envelope, she placed it on the windowsill, too carefully, as if it might explode. “Whatever Laurette charged you. It turns out I’d actually rather not be a prostitute.”
He looked at her in a way that made every hair on her body shiver into awareness, and that thing inside her kick at her, hard. A jolt and then a long, slow roll, and she was as sure she didn’t want to hear what he had to say next as she was certain she loved him, and neither one of those inescapable truths made her feel any better. Maybe nothing could, when his gaze was so dark, his mouth so grim, and there was nothing between them but too much space and the inevitability of pain.
“I need to get Harlow home, where she belongs,” Nora said before he could speak, though she felt as if she were being strangled. “That’s what I need to do, Zair. Will you help me?”
He turned from the window then and faced her again. He looked remote, sculpted of some hard, unyielding stone, and the expression on his face made her want to cry.
“No,” he said quietly. “You’ve already risked too much.”
It was so unexpected. It was a lash of searing, blinding heat, indistinguishable from pain. It lit her up and took her out at the knees. It made her stomach flip and her throat go dry. It was worse than the fault line that had shaken loose inside her. It was worse than any aftershocks.
“Let me finish this,” he said, his voice a ruthless scrape of sound. An order and a plea at once, and there was something in his gaze then, too green and too dark. “Let me protect you.”
“Zair—”
“You promised to obey me—”
“In front of paparazzi and pimps!” she threw at him. “Or when we’re alone, because it’s hot! Not when you’re playing petty dictator—”
“When I’m playing petty dictator, Nora, or not at all, in bed or out.”
She could see he meant it. Every word. And she hated herself—because she felt torn. How could she stop looking for Harlow? But how could she let Zair go?
“Don’t do this,” she whispered.
“It’s done.” He still stood like a sentry. Like a rock. “You’re out of this. You should never have been in it.”
She didn’t know how long they stood there. She felt turned to stone herself, and some part of her wished she had been, because surely that would have been easier than this. He watched her for what felt like a thousand years, each one of them terrible, and then he gathered up his discarded clothes and disappeared back into the bedroom. He moved on soft, silent feet as though he was made of shadows, with a lethal grace she didn’t want to admire, and still she stood there as if she’d stay rooted to the spot until she crumbled into ash.
Too many things catapulted through her head, one after the next, hard and bright and searing. Too many thoughts, too many images, too many snippets of conversation and too much regret for things she knew she wouldn’t change even if she could. She would leave for France on a plane tonight if she thought that might help Harlow. And she would do anything this man asked of her, anything at all.
Except this.
When he came back out of her bedroom he was dressed in his wet clothes, his jacket over his arm and a wealth of that same darkness on his beautiful face. He looked at her for what seemed like another very long time, that muscle worked in his jaw, and then he turned for the door.
“Zair. Wait.”
She heard him sigh from across the cavernous space. She thought she heard his heartbeat, too, a wild, masochistic drumming so loud it made her ears ache—until she realized that was her own.
“If I see you out there again, putting yourself in harm’s way, Laurette Fortin will be the least of your worries,” he said. But he didn’t turn back toward her. “Believe me.”
“Wait,” she said again. She wished her throat weren’t so dry. She wished she were braver, or more numb. Or the hero Zair seemed to think she wanted to be. She wished so many things, but there was only one way out of all of this she could think of. Only one way to save Harlow and maybe Zair, too—and it required his cooperation. “I have an idea.”
Chapter Eight
SULTAN AZHIL AL Ruyi arrived in Manhattan with typical fanfare for what was billed as his “low-key appearance” at the United Nations, insofar as he was capable of “low-key” anything. He was greeted by the unctuous Ruyian consul general, who was also his cousin, and a phalanx of other diplomats when he touched down at a private airfield outside the city. The convoy delivered him to the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, where Azhil proceeded in all his glory to the vast and luxurious Presidential Suite that had been meticulously prepared according to his particular specifications.
Where Zair waited for him, like the obedient half brother and grateful diplomatic appointee he’d been most of his life, with a number of the Ruyian attachés who reported to him and therefore to the sultan. He rose when Azhil entered the suite, his brother’s eminent feet loud and sure on the checkered marble floor of the suite’s spacious foyer, like the drummers who sometimes led Azhil’s motorcade through the streets of the capital city in Ruyi. Zair bowed deeply, respectfully, as his brother finally strolled into the living room.
Like all the rest of the sultan’s many minions.
Zair hid his fury and betrayal beneath the politician’s smile he’d been practicing all his life. He did his best to blend in with the graceful, silk-lined walls, the stunning views of this most acrobatic of cities arrayed around them, and when his brother gave him the same effusive half hug of greeting he always did, Zair returned it.
“Ah, my brother!” Azhil cried the same way he always had when he saw Zair, with every appearance of sincerity and even a hint of affection. “It has been too long!”
Because it was sincere, Zair reminded himself as he waited for Azhil to confer with his aides, to take the telephone calls he’d refused while in flight, to override his personal assistant’s directions to the private butler who waited on him. This was not a betrayal as far as Azhil was concerned, this deliberate framing of Zair to take a potential fall someday, this hand-feeding of explosive information to detract attention from the true ringleader of this sick circus. This was business as usual. This was no doubt the reason Azhil had elevated Zair from the ranks of the by-blows in the first place.
Azhil might even enjoy his company the way he’d always pretended he did, Z
air reflected as he took a respectful step back from the center of the room and waited to come to his brother’s attention once more, as was proper. But enjoying his company didn’t mean Azhil would change his plans for Zair. Why should it?
Finally, the formal greetings and initial reports of the lower-ranking members of the Ruyian diplomatic mission were finished. Zair dismissed the attachés to their jobs and their hotels or lodgings at the consulate, to prepare for the upcoming week of meetings and the small ball the consulate was throwing the following night.
Azhil dispatched the various members of his entourage to their duties, and when he and Zair were left more or less alone, made his way to the sofa in the suite’s wood-paneled library, gesturing for Zair to join him in one of the far less comfortable chairs around the coffee table. A deliberate move, Zair understood. The intimacy of the library setting spoke of their familial connection, but placing Zair in a higher, stiffer chair while Azhil lounged comfortably was meant to make Zair deeply aware of his subordinate position. Much like a naughty schoolboy in the headmaster’s office.
They spoke of policy and diplomacy. Zair briefed him on a number of matters of state, took the sultan’s counsel on all of them as was customary, and when they’d finished the business portion of their meeting, smiled his more personal smile and settled back in his chair as if he found it perfectly comfortable.
Azhil wasn’t the only one who could play these games. He might have made Zair his US ambassador for his own selfish reasons, but Zair was a damned good one.
“Tell me your family is well,” Zair said when they were both settled with drinks and the last of Azhil’s aides had stepped away to give this part of their conversation the illusion of privacy, and his brother smiled.
“Ahmed—” Azhil’s eldest son and his heir apparent “—finished Cambridge this year. Time passes more quickly these days.” He smiled benevolently and then continued, as Zair had anticipated he would, because he always did, into his favorite refrain. “As you will find out yourself, God willing. The blood of Ruyi is gold to be shared, brother, not hoarded.”
The Billionaire's Innocent: Zair al Ruyi (Forbidden Book 3) Page 15