“I must attend a benefit dinner,” Tariq said, and shrugged. “It is of little importance. A dinner, a speech or two, and some dancing. You will be bored beyond reason.”
As if that were possible when she was with this man. Jessa forced a smile, determined not to let the deeper emotions she could feel boiling within her spill over. This was a dream, nothing more. Cinderella went to the ball, and she would too, but that was all there was to it. The rest of the story did not apply, had never applied. She had no right to dream any Cinderella dreams, and she knew it.
“I am ready,” she said, turning to him, and then stopped, caught by the arrested look on his face. As if he had been waiting for those words, but in a different context. Something unnamed but no less heavy crowded the room, narrowing the distance between them, making her pulse pound.
“Tariq?” Her voice was barely a whisper of sound.
He stood for a moment, his gaze consuming her, his mouth a flat, hard line that against all reason she longed to press her own lips against. Her heart kicked in her chest.
For a moment it seemed as if he might close the distance between them. His eyes dropped to caress her mouth, and Jessa felt it as surely as if he’d used his fingers. Her lips parted slightly, yearning for him.
“Very well then,” he said, his voice rough, in his eyes all the things he had not done, all the ways he had not touched her. “Let us go.”
Tariq bin Khaled Al-Nur’s version of a party of no importance, Jessa found, was in fact a star-studded gala of epic proportions. Dignitaries, politicians and European nobles brushed elbows with cinema stars and international celebrities, in a shower of flashbulbs that overtook one of the famous arcades. The gala took place in a sumptuous hotel near the Place Vendôme and the Jardin des Tuileries, which Tariq confided had less historical significance than the hotel liked to admit. Jessa hardly knew where to look—from the frescoes adorning the ceiling of the reception room to the colossal gilt chandeliers that hung overhead to the rich red of the thick drapes and carpets. She felt as if she were in another world. A dream within a dream.
But this world was one in which Tariq was a king, and treated as such—not merely Tariq, her former lover. Jessa had known he was a powerful man, but she had never seen him in his element before except on television. Tonight, the fact that Tariq was an imperial power was made clear to her in a thousand little ways. It was the near-fawning deference he was shown, the deep bows he was accorded. It was the visible respect of the aides who ran interference for him, tending to his every wish and deflecting those whom he did not wish to interact with. It was the way everyone called him Your Highness or Excellency, when they dared address him at all. Men Jessa only recognized from the news pulled him aside to whisper in his ear.
Once again, Jessa had the odd sensation that the world was shifting beneath her feet. It was one thing to know that Tariq was a king. What did that mean, in the abstract, shut up together in rooms where first and foremost she saw him as a man? It was something else again to really witness what it was for him to be a king, and, she could not help but think, that this was how he was treated in a country not his own. What must it be like when he was at home in Nur? Even among his peers, Tariq stood apart. He was harder, tougher. He was a warrior among bureaucrats.
She had no right to the fantasies that crept in, teasing her when she was less than vigilant. She knew her place in the world. Tariq was meant for a queen, not Jessa. Never Jessa.
“You seem unusually quiet,” he said into her ear at one point, as they waited for dinner to be served. She could feel his breath fanning along her skin, teasing her nerve endings. She held back a shiver of delight.
“I am merely basking in Your Excellency’s shadow,” she replied, smiling at him. His hard mouth kicked up in the corner, surprising her. She snuck a look around the table. Here sat a recognizable head of state, there lounged an internationally acclaimed philanthropist; everyone exuded power of one kind or another.
“I imagine it must go to your head,” she said.
He did not pretend to misunderstand her. “It is who I have become,” he said simply, his gaze direct. Proud.
Had part of her been resistant to the very idea of his elevation in rank and status, even from a distance? Had she hoped, somewhere deep inside, that the doctor’s son she’d loved so totally was the real Tariq and the wildly powerful king only a bad dream? Back then, he had simply been a man, however complicated. And now he was a king, and even more complicated. It was not only his job, his role. It was how he saw the world. It was who he was, every cell and every breath.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I see that.” She longed to touch him, but she did not dare. She did not know if there were rules of etiquette to follow, boundaries to observe.
“I cannot change the past,” he said, and suddenly it was as if no one existed save the two of them. She forgot about rules, or other eyes, and drank him in.
“Neither can I,” she replied without looking away.
So much loss. So many years wasted, a whole life created and given away to others. But could she honestly say she would change any part of it? Knowing that it resulted in a happy, thriving Jeremy? Something sharp twisted through her then, reminding her that she had not told him everything—could not tell him everything, even now.
“Perhaps it is time we stop looking back, then, you and I,” Tariq said in a hushed voice, no less powerful for its low volume. It made something inside swell with a quiet kind of wonder, pushing all else aside.
“Where should we look?” She was in awe of what loomed between them, that made her fingers tremble and her eyes bright with a wild heat, though she refused to name it. She refused.
Tariq lifted her hand to his mouth and placed a kiss on the back of it, never breaking eye contact, not even when he sucked gently on the knuckle and made her gasp. Heat seared through her, melting her. The fire was never gone when he was near—it was only ever banked. Waiting for a trigger, a spark.
“I am sure we’ll think of something,” he said huskily.
Tariq turned to her the moment they crossed the threshold into the house, sweeping her into his arms and fastening his mouth to hers. He could not get enough of her taste, her heat, the soft and warm feel of her pressed against him. Jessa melted against him, her softness inflaming him, looping her arms around the column of his neck and arching into him. He tasted her again and again, exploring her mouth, feeling the kick of her immediate, uninhibited response flood through him.
Once again, he lifted her into his arms and carried her toward the bedroom, up the great stairs and toward their rooms on the top floor. Her fingers toyed with the ends of his hair where it brushed the top of his collar. Her eyes gleamed in the low lights of the quiet house around them while a secret, feminine smile curved her lips.
There were so many things he wanted to say, but he did not know where to start. He only knew that she had become necessary to him. Their tangled history was wrapped around him and growing tighter by the day, making it hard to breathe when she was not within reach. He found his way into the bedroom and set her down, unable to look away. One breath. Another.
She made a soft noise and reached out for him, her small hands framing his face, and pulled his mouth to hers. She tasted like honey and wine and went straight to his head, his heart, his aching hardness.
He set her away from him, turning her so he could look at the expanse of her creamy skin bared by the open back of her gown. He put his mouth, open and hot, on the tender nape of her neck, just to make her moan. He traced her spine with his fingers, making her shiver.
“All night I have wondered how soft your skin would be when I touched it,” he told her in a low murmur, continuing to taste and touch. “You are better than crème brûlée, sweet and rich.”
She let out a laugh, and the small sound ignited something in him, wild and hot and out of control.
He walked her over to the high bed, bending her forward until she braced herself on her elbo
ws against the mattress. He heard the soft exclamation that she blew out on a sigh, or perhaps her breathing was as ragged as his. She turned her head, peering over her shoulder at him, her cinnamon eyes wide and inviting. Her lips parted, and he was certain he could hear the beat of her heart under his own skin. He held her gaze as he slowly pulled her gown up over her trim ankles, her shapely calves, her knees—
“Tariq, please…” It was a moan.
He knelt down between her open thighs, pushing the soft folds of material out of his way, marveling that her skin was softer than the satin of her gown. He pressed a kiss to the hollow behind her knee, the curve of her thigh, the crease where her thigh ended and her lush round bottom began. He curled his fingers into the soft scrap of material that covered her sex, and pulled her panties down and out of his way, helping her step out of them before he tossed them aside. He could feel her tremble. He ran his hands up her legs, testing her flesh beneath his palms. He leaned in close and inhaled the musky scent of her arousal and, moving forward to lick into her softness, tasted the wet, honeyed heat of her sex.
Tariq heard her cry out his name, but he was too far gone to reply. He knew only that he had to be inside of her, joined with her. So deep it would not matter what he could or could not say. He stood, his hands rough and desperate on the fly of his trousers. He sighed as he released himself, hard and pulsing with need. Stepping closer, he guided himself with one hand while he gripped her hip with the other, and drove into her depths.
It was perfect. She was perfect.
Tariq pressed his mouth against her neck, her shoulder, as he began to move, driving them both slowly insane with each sure thrust. He felt her stiffen, heard her cry out, and then she shook apart beneath him, moaning again and again. He withdrew, flipping her over even while she continued to gasp through the aftershocks, and settled her on the edge of the bed.
Her face was flushed, her hair in a mad tangle over one shoulder. Still she smiled at him and opened her arms, her eyes reflecting the man she saw in him—the man he wanted to be, and could be, when she looked at him that way.
Tariq moved over her, and slid back inside of her, making them both groan. She braced her hands against his chest. Still clad in his coat and dress shirt, he set a fierce, uncompromising pace. She locked her ankles in the small of his back and arched her breasts toward his mouth. He tasted her flesh, like salt and a sweetness he knew was all Jessa. All his.
When he hurtled over the edge, he took her with him. She shook around him, sobbing out his name like a song.
When he could think again, Tariq stood, pulling her to her feet and helping her out of the gown. Sleepy-eyed and deliciously naked, she crawled back into the bed, and curled on her side to watch him as he pulled off his formal clothes and tossed them in the direction of the nearest chair.
She was his. She belonged to him, whether it made sense or not, whether she knew it or not. She had survived their past and still made love to him with her whole self, body and soul. She had seen him in both of his incarnations, the shameful past as well as the present, and wanted him anyway.
There was more to it than possessiveness, a wide swathe of darker, deeper emotion, but Tariq pushed that aside. The possessiveness he understood. He could not give her up. Not again. He could not lose her unrestrained passion, her unstudied abandon when he touched her. He could not lose her. He did not want to think about it any further than that. He did not need to. He knew it to be true with a deep, implacable certainty.
“I must return to Nur,” he said abruptly. He saw her tense almost imperceptibly and then drop her eyes to the mattress. “I have been putting it off these past weeks.”
“Of course,” she murmured, her voice even and yet distant, he thought. The hectic color faded from her cheeks as she stared at her hands. “We must all return to real life eventually. I understand.”
How could she understand, when he was not sure he did? But he could easily picture her in the royal palace, wearing silks and jewels that enhanced her quiet beauty, while he made love to her on low pillows or feasted on her lush body in some desert oasis. He could see her against the bright blue skies and the shifting white sands, her eyes mysterious like his people’s favorite spices, making him long to taste her over and over again. He saw her in his arms and immediately felt better. Safer, somehow, however illogical that seemed.
“I do not think you do,” he said slowly, climbing onto the bed, holding her gaze with his as he prowled toward her on his hands and knees. “I want you to come with me, Jessa. I insist upon it.”
“You insist…?” she breathed, but the color returned to her face, red and hot. Her eyes glowed.
He would never let her go again. Never.
“I am the king,” he said, and pulled her to him once more.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I WILL not hold you to what you said last night,” Jessa told him the following morning, not quite meeting his eyes as she sat down at the breakfast table. “About going with you to Nur.”
The morning was bright and unseasonably warm for Paris in autumn, which seemed to Jessa like a stark, strange contrast to inside the bedroom suite, where Tariq had taken her once again before she had fully come awake, pushing his way into her morning shower with that intense look in his eyes and driving her to ecstatic screams against the tiles. She was still quivering.
Tariq had called for breakfast to be served on the private balcony outside the bedroom, more secluded than the one she had seen that first night. He wore a dark button-down dress shirt over dark trousers, the coarse silk of his hair brushing the collar. She thought he looked like a warrior god pretending to be at rest, masquerading as some kind of businessman. The early morning sun teased the treetops and casement windows that lined the ancient street in front of her, and made her think she could do what she’d decided she must do in the shattering aftermath of his lovemaking. She pulled her robe tighter around her and touched the wet hair she’d piled atop her head. She could act serene and calm and disinterested over rich black coffee and croissants so soft they seemed like clouds and butter. She could prove that she was no longer that infatuated, broken girl he’d left behind once before.
“Will you not?” He did not glance up from the papers he read, and yet the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up in warning.
“Of course not,” she said, feeling her temper engage and roll through her. Surely he should at least pay attention when she was attempting to be noble! She knew that if she went with him to Nur, she would not be able to maintain even a tenuous grip on the realities of their different situations in life. She knew she would be lost. “I have my own life to be getting back to, in any case.”
Tariq laid his papers to the side of his plate and leveled a look at her. Jessa kept herself from squirming in her chair by sheer force of will.
“If you do not wish to accompany me to my country, then say you do not wish it,” he said evenly. “But do not wrap it up in some attempt to release me from an obligation. If I did not want you to come, I would not have invited you.”
“I was not—” she began, stung, though his words resonated more than she would have liked.
“We leave tomorrow morning,” he said, rising to his feet. He crooked his brows as he looked down at her. “You must decide.”
“Decide?” she echoed, her heart thumping too hard against her ribs. “Decide what?”
“If you will accompany me of your own free will,” he said, his eyes gleaming, “or if I will simply take you.”
“You cannot take me anywhere!” she gasped, but her body betrayed her, her sex warming and melting as surely as if he’d touched her with his clever, provocative hands.
“If you say so,” he said. He reached down and cupped her cheek with one large hand, his mouth unsmiling and his gaze intent, though still showing his amusement. And still it was as if he was branding her with his touch, his eyes. She felt small, safe and threatened at the same time—and more than that, his.
&n
bsp; Completely and indisputably his.
His thumb dragged across her full lower lip, sending desire shooting through her body, tightening her nipples, wetting her sex further. Tariq smiled then, as if he could see her body’s reaction. One dark eyebrow arched as color heated Jessa’s cheeks. Point made, he turned away, disappearing inside the house and leaving her to her ragged breathing and her pounding heart.
He wanted to take her to Nur.
Part of her rejoiced for what that must mean, surely. It meant at the very least that he did not want this idyll in Paris to end any more than she did. But, of course, it was not quite that simple. Jessa drew her legs up beneath her on the chair, and stared out over the city she had come to love over the past dreamlike weeks, as if that could give her the answer.
She could not go to Nur. She could not continue to stay with him, ignoring reality while she played pretend. There were hundreds of reasons she should run back to York as quickly as she could.
And only one reason to stay.
Jessa rested her chin on her drawn-up knees and let out a shuddering breath as the shattering truth washed over her like the Paris sunlight, sweet and bright and unequivocal.
I love him.
She was in love with him. With Tariq, who had hurt her and lied to her. Who she was still lying to, if only by omission. Who she had made love to anyway, deliciously and repeatedly. Whose pain upset her, made her want to comfort and heal him, even when she was what caused it, and even when her own pain matched his. Their complicated, messy history should have made him the last man on earth she could ever have feelings for, but instead she felt closer to him because of it. As if no one could ever really understand her or what she’d been through, more than the man who grieved along with her.
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