“And what is it you want?”
“I do not want to talk,” she said distinctly, purposefully, holding his gaze, her own rich with suggestion and the desire he was certain was written all over him. “And I don’t think you want to, either. Do you?”
“Ah, Jessa,” he said on a sigh, while a kind of moody triumph pumped through him and pulsed hard and long into his sex. She thought she was a match for him, did she? She would learn. And soon enough he would have her exactly where he wanted her. “You should not challenge me.”
She cocked her head to one side, not cowed in the least, with the light of battle in her cinnamon eyes, and smiled.
It went directly to his head, his groin. He reached for her without thought, without anything at all but need, and pulled her into his arms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS not enough. Her taste, her scent, her mouth beneath his and her hands tracing beguiling patterns down his chest. He wanted more.
“I want to taste you,” he whispered in Arabic, and she shuddered as if she could understand him.
He wanted everything. Her surrender. Her artless, unstudied passion. The past back where it belonged, and left there.
But most of all, he wanted her naked.
Tariq raked his fingers into her hair, never lifting his mouth from hers, sending her hairpins flying and clattering against the heavy stones at their feet. Her heavy mass of copper curls tumbled from the sophisticated twist at the back of her head and fell in a jasmine-scented curtain around her, wild and untamed, just as he wanted her. Just as he would have her.
He lifted his mouth from hers and took a moment to study her face. Why should he spend even an hour obsessing over this woman? She was no great beauty, like some of the women he had been linked with in the past. Her face would never grace the covers of magazines nor appear on twelve-foot-high cinema screens. Yet even so, he found he could not look away. The spray of freckles across her nose, the sooty lashes that framed her spicecolored eyes—combined with her courtesan’s mouth, she was something more unsettling than beautiful. She was…viral. She got into the blood and stayed there, changing and growing, and could not be cured using any of the usual methods.
Tariq had no idea where that appallingly fanciful notion had come from. He would not even be near her now were it not for the mornings he had woken in the palace in Nur, overcome by the feverish need to claim this woman once more. He scowled down at her, and then scowled harder when she only smiled that mysterious smile again in return, unfazed by him.
“Come,” he ordered her, at his most autocratic, and took her arm. Not roughly, but not brooking any argument, either, he led her across the terrace and ushered her into the quiet house.
His staff had discreetly lit a few lamps indoors. They cast soft beams of light across the marble floors and against the high, graceful ceilings. He led her through the maze of galleries filled with priceless art and reception rooms crowded with extravagant antiques that comprised a large portion of the highest floor of the house, all of them boasting stellar views of nighttime Paris from the soaring windows. He barely noticed.
“Where are we going?” she asked, but there was a lack of curiosity in her voice. As if she was as cool and as unaffected as she claimed to be, which he could not countenance. Surely it shouldn’t matter—surely she could pretend anything she wished and he should not care in the slightest—but Tariq fought to keep himself from growling at her. He could not accept that she was so calm while he felt so wild. Even if her calmness was, as he suspected and wanted to believe, an act.
None of this matters, he reminded himself, coldly. As long as you get her out of your system, once and for all.
After all, despite his obsessive concentration on a single woman for far too long, the truth was that Tariq did not have time for this. He had a country to run. Nur was poised on the brink of great change, but change did not come easily, especially in his part of the world. There was always a price. There were always those who preferred to stick to the old ways, out of fear or faith or sheer stubbornness. There were those who wanted only to see the old regime, of which Tariq was the last surviving member, crumble and disappear, and no matter that such a thing would cause even more chaos and bloodshed.
There were border disputes to settle, and tribal councils to oversee. Tariq loved his beautiful, harsh, deeply complicated and often conflicted country more than he had ever loved a human being, including himself. It felt like the worst kind of disloyalty to be tangled up with this woman, especially since she was the last one he had been with in his previous incarnation. Perhaps he judged her more severely because she was the other face he saw when he revisited his old disgraceful behavior in his mind.
Tariq led Jessa into the sumptuous master suite that sprawled across the back of the house, and only released her arm when he had closed the door behind them, shutting them in. Would she still be so brave now that the games were quickly coming to an end? Would she dare to continue this foolishness?
She took a few steps into the room ahead of him, her head slightly bent and her hands clasped in front of her as if she was listening for second thoughts or offering up a prayer. Too late, he thought with no little satisfaction. He let his gaze follow the soft indentation of her spine down to the flare of her hips, as the royal-blue dress shimmied in the low lights and seemed to grow brighter in the reflection of the gilt-edged opulence that surrounded them. Tariq was no particular fan of French furniture—he found it too fussy, too liable to collapse beneath his large frame—but he could appreciate the way so much Continental splendor seemed to enhance her natural glow. She turned her head then, looking at him over her shoulder.
It was as if the room smoldered. Tariq thought only of flame, of heat, of burying himself so deeply inside of her that the only thing he’d care about would be the way she gasped his name.
She did not speak. She only watched him, her eyes wide but without apprehension as he closed the distance between them with a few short strides. He reached out and used his hands to trace the parts of her body that his eyes had so recently touched: the soft nape of her neck, the sinuous length of her spine, the mesmerizing place where her hips curved gently into her bottom. He reached down and drew the silky dress up over her legs, slowly, letting the fabric caress her. The room was silent, only the sounds of their breathing and the faint, seductive whisper of fabric moving against flesh. He prolonged the moment, enjoying the way the dress felt in his hands, enjoying more the way her flushed skin felt as he touched her in passing, and then he drew the filmy dress over her head and cast it aside.
She turned to face him then, a flush rising in her cheeks, and he saw her arms move as if she wanted to cover herself or hide from him. She stopped herself, her expression betraying nothing more than a quick blink of her eyes, and dropped her arms back down to her sides.
She stood before him, clad only in a black lace bra that pushed her breasts toward him, the swell of all that creamy flesh calling his name, begging for his tongue, his hands. Below, she wore nothing save a pair of sheer panties and her wickedly high shoes. She looked like something she was not, or had not been when he knew her, when he had claimed her innocence as his right. She looked decadent. Delicious.
Mine.
“It appears I will have my dessert before my dinner,” Tariq said, pushing aside the possessive urge that roared through him. He traced the delicate ridge of her collarbone, dipping into the hollow where her pulse beat hard against her throat. She was like his own private banquet. Just because he had ulterior motives it didn’t mean he wasn’t prepared to thoroughly enjoy himself.
“Perhaps I want dessert as well,” Jessa replied, only the slightest tremor in her voice, as if she was not flushed with color and practically naked before him.
She wanted to be tough. Tariq smiled, released her.
“Then by all means, help yourself.”
She swayed toward him, rocking slightly on her feet. It could be the precarious shoes in the deep car
pet, though Tariq rather thought it was the same strange hunger that gripped him and made him feel curiously close to unsteady himself. Then her hands were on him, sweeping across the hard planes of his chest, testing the hardy muscles he’d built up after five years of intensive training with his royal guard. A king must be prepared to fight the battles he expected his subjects to fight, Tariq’s uncle had always believed. And so Tariq had transformed himself from an idle playboy who visited a fancy spa-like gym merely to maintain a certain trouser size that photographed well, to a warrior capable of lethal combat. He shrugged off his jacket and let it drop to the floor. The expertly tailored concoction barely made a sound as it hit the ground. Jessa did not spare it so much as a glance.
Tariq’s eyes narrowed against his own pounding hunger as he let Jessa explore this new, fierce body of his, sliding her palms from his shoulders to his waist to yank his shirttails free from his trousers. He watched her pull her seductive lower lip between her teeth as she worried the buttons out of their holes one by one and slowly, torturously, exposed his skin to the slightly cooler air of the suite around them. When she had unbuttoned every button and unhooked his cuff links, she pushed the shirt back on his shoulders so it hung there, exposing his chest to her view.
She let out a long hiss of breath. He could feel it tickle across his skin, arrowing straight to his arousal, making him thicken. He made no move to hide it, only continued to wait, to watch, to see what she would do.
She looked up then, and their gazes clashed together in a manner that seemed as intimate and passionate as the kisses they’d shared before. Tariq moved to speak, but no words came.
He did not expect her to move, her expression taking on a look of intense feminine satisfaction. He reached for her, but she shocked him by leaning forward and placing her hot, open mouth, that wicked courtesan’s mouth that had featured prominently in his fantasies since he’d tasted it again this morning, in the valley between his pectoral muscles.
When he swore, he swore in Arabic, Jessa discovered in a distant kind of amusement, and he still sounded every inch a king.
Not that she cared. She could not seem to stop tasting him. She trailed kisses across one hard pectoral plane, then moved to the other, worrying the hard male nipple she found with the tip of her tongue, laughing softly when she heard him groan.
Jessa moved even closer and pushed the soft linen shirt from Tariq’s broad shoulders, letting it fall to the floor behind him. His strong, muscled arms came around her, crushing her breasts against his chest and drawing her into the cradle of his thighs. Just like that, they were pressed together, bare skin against bare skin, so that the intrusion of her lacy, delectable bra seemed almost criminal. Heat coiled in her groin and shot through her, making her head spin. She fought to breathe, and wasn’t sure she much cared if she could not. She felt his bare skin against hers like an exultation, like memory and fantasy come to life.
She had not felt like this in five long years. She had missed his skin, the addictive heat of him that sizzled through her and left her feeling branded and desperate for more. Her head dropped back of its own volition, and she heard him muttering words she could not understand against the soft flesh of her neck. He used his tongue, his lips, his teeth. He surrounded her, held her, his hands finding her curves and testing them against his palms, stroking and teasing and driving her hunger to fever pitch. And all the while his exciting, overwhelming hardness pressed against the juncture of her thighs, driving her ever closer to senseless capitulation.
This was how it had always been, this rush to madness, to pleasure, to the addictive ecstasy that only Tariq could bring her. She could not get close enough. She could not think straight, and she could not imagine why she would want to. This was how she remembered him, so hard, so male, dominating her so easily, so completely—
Careful! a voice in the back of her mind whispered, panicked. Jessa pulled herself back from the brink of total surrender, blinking to clear the haze of passion from her eyes. It was so easy to lose herself in him. It was much too easy to forget. She raised her head and searched Tariq’s expression. His features were hard, fierce and uncompromising as he stared back at her. She felt herself tremble deep inside—warning or wanting, she wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. She had been the one to make this decision. She was not weak, malleable, senseless. She could call the shots. She would.
“Second thoughts?” His voice was a rasp, thick with passion, and her hips moved against his in unconscious response. His eyes glittered dangerously, nearly black now in the center of the opulent gold-and-blue room.
“None whatsoever,” she replied. She eased back from him, aware that he let her do it, let her move slightly in the circle of his embrace.
Holding his gaze with all the defiance she could muster—I am strong, not weak; I am in charge—she dropped her hands to his trousers. His hard mouth curved, and he shifted his weight, giving her easier access.
Jessa remembered her horror at exactly this image earlier this same day—her fear that she would far too easily find herself doing what she was about to do. But it was different now, because he was not compelling her to do it. She was not begging him for anything—she was taking what she wanted. He was not orchestrating anything. He was hers to experience as she wished, to make up for all those lonely nights when she would have done anything at all for the chance to touch him again.
She pulled his belt free of its buckle and unbuttoned the top button of his whisper-soft trousers, letting the backs of her fingers revel in the blazing heat of his taut abdomen and the scrape of the coarse hair that surrounded his manhood. She moved the zipper down slowly, careful to ease it over the hard ridge of his jutting sex, and then she freed him entirely, reaching between them to cup him in her hands.
He muttered something too low to catch, though she thought it was her name.
She could not recall him ever allowing her this kind of unhurried exploration before. Their passion back then had always been too explosive, too all-encompassing. She had never thought to ask for anything. She had been too awash in sensation, too overcome and swept off her feet. She had surrendered to him entirely, body and soul.
But that was the past. Here, now, she caressed his impressive length. He let out a sound too fierce to be a moan. He reached for her, his hands diving once again into the thick mass of her hair and holding her loosely, encouraging her, not correcting her. Jessa ignored him, and concentrated on this most male part of him instead. He was softer here than anywhere else on his rugged warrior’s form, like the softest satin stretched across steel. And so much hotter, so hot that she felt an answering heat flood her own sex, and an ache begin to build inside her.
She raised her head up to meet his gaze, while his hands moved to frame her face. She frowned slightly when he bent his head toward hers. He paused, his mouth a scant breath away. Jessa felt her heart pound and could feel him stir in her hands.
“No?” he asked softly. He did not quite frown in return. “Is this another game, Jessa?”
“This is my night.” She felt his hands flex slightly, but she felt too powerful to allow him to cow her. “My game.”
“Is that so?” His eyes mocked her, though his expression otherwise remained the same. He did not believe she could take control, perhaps. Or he knew how close she came to losing herself, her head, when he touched her. Jessa told herself it didn’t matter.
“Perhaps you should tell me the rules of this game, before you begin it.” His voice and his eyes were more distant, suddenly, but his hands against the delicate skin of her cheekbones were still warm, still exciting.
“There is only one rule,” Jessa said evenly. Deliberately, so there could be no misunderstanding. “And it is that I am in charge.”
Something ignited in his gaze then, and sent an answering shudder down along her spine to weaken her knees. He pulled himself up without seeming to move, arrogant and imperial, and looked at her as if he could not comprehend what she had said. Jessa
held her breath.
“And what does that entail, exactly?” he asked, his voice lower and laced with warning. “Will I wake to find myself bound naked from the chandelier, to be tittered over and eventually cut down by the housekeeper?”
Jessa tested out the image of Tariq so completely at her mercy and smiled slightly, even as a hectic kind of restlessness washed through her, urging her to continue what her hands had already started. She tested his length against her palm once again and watched his arrogant focus shatter.
“If that is what I want, then yes,” she said recklessly. “Don’t pretend you won’t enjoy it.”
“And what about what I want?” he asked. Idly, he wrapped a single long, copper curl around his finger and tugged. Jessa did not mistake the sensual menace underlying his tone. She shrugged.
“What about it?” she asked.
“Jessa—”
But he cut himself off, because Jessa sank down in front of him, onto her knees, in a single smooth motion. She heard his breath leave him in a rush. She watched his eyes darken even further, becoming like night.
She did not feel diminished. She did not feel mindless or senseless, or under his power. Quite the opposite.
She felt like a goddess.
“Jessa,” he said again, but this time her name was a prayer. A wish.
She smiled. And then she took him deep into her mouth.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JESSA heard him sigh, or maybe he said her name once more, too low to be heard.
It was thrilling. Jessa felt her own sex throb and melt in time to his slow, careful thrusts, and felt him grow harder. He moaned and she felt potent. Alive. Powerful beyond imagining.
“Enough,” he said suddenly, abruptly disengaging from her.
Jessa sat back on her heels, stunned.
“I’m the one who will decide when it’s enough,” she retorted, glaring up at him. “Not you. Or have you already forgotten that I’m to be in charge?”
Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir Page 7