“Why not?” she asked, as if it was a matter of very little concern to her.
“Even if I was capable of such things, which I am not, there is no future for something that started in that sick place,” he grated at her.
Her smile deepened. “That’s not where it started.”
“You need to move on with your life, Nora,” he said. Darker this time. Laced with a fury that she seemed to ignore entirely as she moved even closer. “You deserve to live untainted by either me or my family. No one will ever believe I wasn’t involved in this ring of Azhil’s. They’ve already started speculating. And Zoe’s work was too good. There’s just enough evidence to convict me in the court of public opinion, if nowhere else.”
“Whose opinion matters?” she asked softly, closing the distance between them entirely then. She slid her hands up his chest and pushed his jacket off his shoulders with a sexy, easy confidence he found instantly addictive. “Theirs or mine?”
“There will always be a set of people who think you’re a prostitute. Who will know that I bought you on a yacht in France.” He was furious she couldn’t see that. He was more furious it had happened—that his own idiocy had allowed such a thing to occur in the first place. “If I’m anywhere near you, it will only confirm that.”
“Yes,” she agreed, and sounded so unbothered it nearly stole his breath. “But these are the same set of people who would think that anyway, even if you hadn’t. The same set of people who think anyone is a prostitute, if offered the right price.” She shrugged, her hands busy on the buttons of his shirt. “Who cares what they think?”
“You deserve better than these shadows,” he whispered, though his body had other ideas, especially when she pressed herself up against him. “You deserve to be free.”
She surged up on her toes, putting her mouth a scant, tempting hair from his.
“So do you, Zair,” she whispered, and then she kissed him.
And he could fight her, or he could fight himself, but he couldn’t do both.
So he took her instead.
His arms came around her and he lifted her to him, wrapping her legs around his waist. He tasted her again and again, walking until she was up against the nearest pillar and he was so hard between her legs he was afraid he might hurt her. Then he pulled his mouth from hers and explored her, down her neck and along the proud ridge of her collarbone, imprinting her into his memory.
Her scent, her taste. The heat of her skin, the faint suggestion of the soap she’d used earlier. The needy little noises she made, the way her hips bucked against his. All of her. All the things he would miss.
He peeled the bra from her perfect breasts and feasted on the taut peaks. She sighed out a broken sound that might have been his name, and Zair felt it like her mouth on the hardest part of him all over again, making him feel wilder. Crazier.
Desperate.
He shrugged his way out of his shirt, letting it fall where it would, and he couldn’t keep his mouth from hers for more than a second. Because it wasn’t enough.
It would never be enough.
But this was all he could allow.
Zair lifted her high against him as he moved through the loft then, walking until he hit her bed and then toppling them both down on the soft spread. And then they were rolling. Kissing and laughing a little bit as they struggled to pull the rest of their clothes off.
“I want—” she started, as they rid him of his trousers and his boxer briefs in one great tangle.
But he quieted her with a deep, hard kiss, burying his hands deep in her hair and raking through the heavy mass of it to pull out the pins. He kissed her until she was boneless against him, so hot to the touch and so beautiful it caused him physical pain.
And he wasn’t ready yet, not yet, to say his final good-byes.
“Put your hands above your head,” he told her, and she grinned at him, and somehow, it was the most sensual thing he’d ever beheld.
“Are you bossing me around?” she asked, her voice an octave or two lower than usual, which only made it harder to breathe, and that look on her face, that bright hot trust in her eyes and the curve to her lips, was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “It’s almost like you want me against your will, Zair.”
“Nothing happens against my will,” he said gruffly. “Not with you. That’s the point.” That hit something in him, but he couldn’t deal with that, not now. He lifted his chin. “Your hands. Up.”
She obeyed, and the shift in position thrust out her perfect breasts and directed his attention lower. He licked his way to her navel, making her laugh and rock a bit beneath him. Then he moved lower still.
And she stopped laughing.
He teased his way over the pale blue lace that covered her, then pushed her smooth thighs farther apart. He inhaled the scent of her, arousal and pure woman, letting it move in him like a caress. She was perfect. And tonight, at least, she was his.
She made a strangled sort of sound as he slipped his hands beneath her to hold her by her bottom, lifting her to him like a delectable platter. But it was his name she called out when he simply leaned in and took her in his mouth, lace and all. It was a hard kiss, and she shook, and he wanted more. So much more.
He shifted to pull her panties down the smooth length of her legs and then he shouldered his way back into place, cocking one of her long legs up and over so it hung down his back, and then he licked his way deep into her sweetness.
God, she tasted good.
She shook and she moaned, and Zair indulged himself. She was like cream and heat, and he thought he’d never get enough of her. He used his lips and his teeth, his jaw and his tongue, and then his hands as he felt her draw tight around him.
He brought her as close to the edge as he could, and then he kept her there. She thrashed against him, rocking her hips into his mouth until finally, he threw her straight over, reveling in the way she called out for him as she fell.
And he wasn’t finished.
He rooted around in her bedside table and found a condom. He sheathed himself, and as her breathing started to sound less like a moan and more like a breath again, he pulled her back into his arms and shifted them around so he was half sitting against the headboard and she was astride him.
She took her time opening her eyes, and when she did, it was like staring into the sun. So blue, so bright.
“This position might give me ideas,” she murmured. “I might start telling you what to do with your hands.”
“Try it,” he suggested.
“Control is a fluid thing,” Nora said. She reached down between them and wrapped her hand around him, making him groan. She only smiled. Then she shifted forward, brought him to her entrance and sank down, taking him all the way to the hilt.
Zair gritted his teeth. Nora let out a shaky breath.
“See?” she taunted him.
He tugged her hands up and rested them on his chest. Then he took her hips in his hands and held her exactly where he wanted her.
“Move,” he ordered her, and he saw the flush break out across her skin, felt the rush of heat where their bodies were joined, felt the way she shivered and her gaze went liquid with passion. “It’s only as fluid as I want it to be, Nora.”
“Thank God,” she breathed. And then she braced her hands against him and she began to move.
Slow, deliberate. A languorous slide, a devilish swivel of her hips. Her rhythm was eclectic and electric, and she drove him insane with every lazy revolution of her hips. He let his hands rest in the crease between her hips and her thighs, he guided her deeper and hotter with every thrust, and he memorized her.
That sweet, distracting fullness of her faintly swollen lips. The patrician line of her nose. The single imperfection he’d found on her skin, that series of four freckles in an arc above her left breast. Those proud nipples on her jutting breasts, the indentation of her waist. He wished he were a painter, an artist who could render her in pencils, in inks. In thick, r
obust oils that would do her some kind of justice.
But he could only remember her once he left, and he vowed he would. He vowed it as he thrust into her and found heaven all over again. He vowed it as the fire took hold of him, making him pick up that lazy pace, making him hold her tighter and move her against him as though they were still dancing, as though he was still leading.
Not that there had been any doubt. Not between them.
She arched back, her body stretched there before him, open and heated and his completely. She began to jerk against him, his name on her lips. And he flipped her over and brought her beneath him at last, driving into her again and again, until he found his own, glorious release.
Zair slipped from the bed much, much later and left her there, curled up tight with her lashes a dark gold against her cheeks. Beautiful Nora, whom he could never deserve. Who would never move on from this—from him—as long as he hung around. He knew she wouldn’t. She’d propositioned him when she’d been only eighteen. She’d made herself a yacht girl to find her missing friend, and then she’d taken every one of his orders as though she really was made for him. What else would she do for him if he let her?
He dressed in the shadows, but he couldn’t keep himself from one last kiss, one last look. He brushed his hand over the heartbreaking silk of her cheek and then he tore himself away.
And he vowed he would never return. Never.
He owed her that much.
“Yes,” he whispered, though he knew she couldn’t hear him. That he would never have said it out loud if she could. “I love you, Nora. Whatever the hell that means. And it doesn’t make any difference.”
Chapter Ten
JUNE EASED INTO July, bringing with it the grimy swelter of full summer in Manhattan, and Zair was gone.
At first, Nora thought it was only a temporary thing. She hadn’t been worried when she’d woken up that morning-after to find him gone. She’d assumed he had to sort things out on a diplomatic level in Washington and that once he did, he’d return. Or at least call.
He didn’t.
She spent the long holiday weekend up in Maine with her parents and brothers and the too-watchful Zoe. She let the crisp, sweet summer breeze move over her. She tilted her head back into the perfect blue of the down east sky. She ate lobster and went sailing and took long walks in the fragrant pines. And she told herself it would fade, this terrible longing. The vicious claws of need digging into her would ease their grip. People moved on. She would, too. Wouldn’t she?
Because she’d made herself a lot of promises while Harlow was away, and she couldn’t let herself drift any longer. She had to change her life. She’d sworn she would if Harlow came home. She’d sworn she wouldn’t waste any more time.
Are you kind? Zair had asked her. Are you good? Do you stand up for yourself or those weaker than you when it could hurt you? Do you do what’s right rather than what’s easy?
She hadn’t, Nora knew. Not ever. Not even when she’d encouraged Harlow to go off and do something real. But she could now.
“I hope this strange tabloid episode is over,” her mother said over breakfast one morning, managing to exude ruffled feathers and well-manicured outrage while wearing a summer dress festooned with embroidered ladybugs. It was one of her greatest talents. “I hope we can look at the last few months as a regrettable period for everyone concerned and move on to bigger and better and far more appropriate things.”
But Nora wasn’t the same person she’d been before Cannes. Before Harlow had come home with ghosts in her eyes. Before Zair had changed everything inside her and then left her anyway. And it was high time she started making that clear.
“I’m leaving the art gallery,” she said, the way she might once have asked for the salt to be passed. “I’ve taken a fellowship at an anti-human trafficking organization in Washington. I start in September.”
Her voice seemed unduly loud in the serenity of the morning room with only the blue water of the bay on the other side of the windows. Louder still, perhaps, because she knew this was something her mother didn’t want to hear.
“You can’t walk away from your responsibilities,” her mother began.
“I’m interviewing for a new person to run the gallery,” Nora replied calmly. She met her mother’s gaze across the table. “I understand that you have an aversion to ‘gritty’ jobs, Mom. But this is what I want. What’s the point of having been born to all this privilege if I can’t do something with it?”
Her mother only stared back at her for a long moment, then shifted her attention back to her bowl of fruit.
“I take it that you mention privilege because this fellowship will be unpaid?” she asked.
Nora hid a smile. “Completely unpaid.”
“And what will happen when it’s done? Will you continue to donate your time? Will you become some kind of avenging angel? Do you have a plan?”
Nora shrugged, and waited for her mother to look at her again. “I have no idea, Mom. All I know is that this is what I have to do. What I’m meant to do. But it probably won’t make for charming cocktail conversation at the club.”
And impossibly, her mother’s aristocratic mouth curved. “An underappreciated skill, to be certain, as I think you’ll find if you do it badly. So awkward.” She studied Nora’s face for a long moment. “The world can be a vicious place to girls, especially bright ones. Just look at that horrible Treffen person. And I can’t bear to see you hurt, Nora. Your brothers are made of Teflon and testosterone, but you…”
Her voice trailed off, and was that the sheen of tears in her eyes? Nora was shaken.
“I know,” she whispered fiercely, “exactly how vicious the world is. How dangerous and disgusting and cruel.” She reached over and took her mother’s hand in hers, surprising them both. “Why do you think I want to fight it?”
Her mother smiled, for all it trembled there on her lips.
“Then perhaps I’ve been wrong all this time and you’re made of Teflon, too,” she said softly.
And she squeezed Nora’s hands tight, giving her blessing.
*
Harlow was released from her safe house a week or so later.
After an attempt to stay at her parents’ place in Baltimore, she returned to New York and took a room in the hotel owned by the reclusive Logan Black, Addison’s new love, where, she told Nora matter-of-factly, she spent as much time as possible in the luxurious bath.
She didn’t say to make myself feel clean. She didn’t have to.
“I can’t have anyone tell me what to do,” Harlow confessed at a lunch one afternoon for all three of them, out on a sidewalk café in the West Village, where they could sit and ease back into one another. No pressure. Just friends. Though it took all of Nora’s self-control not to simply cry all over everything, so relieved was she that Harlow was home and safe. “I think my parents meant well, in their way, but they don’t really get what happened to me. And I don’t want to tell them. I can’t tell them.”
“That makes sense,” Addison said at once, reaching over to grasp Harlow’s hand on the tabletop. Tightly. “There are things no one understands without living through them themselves.”
Nora considered for a moment. She eyed Harlow’s clothes, all dark-colored and baggy, when she’d once called herself the Ambassador of All Things Pink. She noted Harlow’s hair, scraped back on her head in a severe bun, when she’d once considered its full, wavy spill her crowning glory. And it felt like another kick in Nora’s stomach to see the aftermath of Harlow’s experience in all these particulars.
“I know someone you can talk to, if you want,” she offered. Harlow wrinkled up her nose and shook her head in an instant negative, pulling her hand from Addison’s at the same time, as though she needed to ward off any attacks. Even friendly ones.
“No.” She smiled, faintly. “I’m not ready to talk to a shrink. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready.”
“Not a shrink.” Nora shot look at Addison, who n
odded, then focused on Harlow again. “Zoe Brook. Hunter’s girlfriend. She…went through what you’ve been through, more or less.”
Or she thought so, anyway. Harlow was anything but forthcoming, and who could blame her?
“I know who she is.” Harlow looked out toward the street, where Manhattan danced and hurtled and caused its usual commotion, and it seemed to relax her. “I watched that interview. You know the one.”
They all knew.
Nora shrugged. “Maybe she can help.”
Harlow didn’t reply, so perfect socialite Addison promptly and elegantly changed the subject, and Nora thought that was the end of it. Until Harlow showed up at Nora’s door one night.
“Maybe,” she whispered, her arms wrapped tight around her own middle and her eyes so dark and haunted they broke Nora’s heart into ragged little pieces, “I might want to talk to Zoe Brook.”
They went the next morning, to an apartment Nora hadn’t realized Zoe still owned on the Upper West Side.
“Why did I think you and Hunter were already living together?” she asked as Zoe let them in, Harlow so close behind Nora it was as though she was Nora’s shadow.
“Because Hunter’s apartment is literally the size of a football field, which I don’t think is an accident,” Zoe replied at once. “A hundred people could live in it and who would know?” She smiled. “But I’m moving in.”
She was dressed more casually than Nora was used to seeing her. Jeans and a tank top, like a normal, relatable woman—maybe that’s the point, she thought. Zoe ushered them into a bright and colorful living room and offered them coffee, and it was all so civilized and friendly that it was tempting to forget why they were there.
“I don’t have to be here for this,” Nora said when the polite, introductory chatter petered off. “I’ll go and wait at that café down the street, Harlow, and when—”
“No,” Harlow said, her voice soft, but thick. She was holding her hands so tight in a ball in her lap that it hurt to look at them. “Stay.”
“It’s okay,” Zoe said then. “You don’t have to say a word, Harlow. You don’t have to explain anything. You don’t have to do anything. I’m happy to sit here all day and I will.”
The Billionaire's Innocent: Zair al Ruyi (Forbidden Book 3) Page 19