The Billionaire's Innocent - Part 2
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Caitlin Crews
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Chapter Three
“ZAIR, CAN I trust you?” Nora Grant asked.
But his gaze was bleak. His mouth a hard, bitter crook.
“Absolutely not,” Zair al Ruyi told her, his voice low. “I would sooner trust a fat-tailed scorpion than the likes of me. It would be far less likely to strike you dead where you stand.”
And Nora didn’t know if she was crazy to trust him anyway. How could she tell what was crazy after a night like this? When everything inside her felt torn into pieces and turned on its head? But the fact remained: she’d offered herself up to him on a platter, on her hands and knees in front of him, and he hadn’t taken the bait. He hadn’t taken her.
If he were the man he claimed he was, he would have.
“I’m looking for someone,” she said, before she could think better of it. “A friend.”
He went still, though the green of his eyes seemed sharper somehow. “I think you need a better class of friends.”
“You’ve met her.” She smiled, even if it felt strange on her lips. “You said once that she was like a lightbulb.”
He let out a long breath with a muttered curse at the end, and raked a hand through that thick hair of his again. “The tiny little brown-haired one. I remember.”
“Sometimes we also call her Harlow.”
Zair sent her a dark look, but he didn’t respond. Nor did he allow the mood in the room to lighten. He moved over toward the bank of windows and frowned out them, as if his gaze could penetrate the night. Was Harlow down there, Nora wondered? Did he know where?
Would he help Nora find her?
“What would make you look for her here?” he asked after a long moment, and his voice was weary despite how straight he stood, how tall. “In a place like that auction? And do not kid yourself, please. An auction was exactly what that was. Flesh for sale to the highest bidder.”
She laughed, though she wasn’t sure why. “Google?”
“Is this amusing to you, Nora?” That politely relaxed tone reminded her how dangerous he was. She wasn’t sure why she kept allowing herself to forget it, especially when he turned and fixed that cool green gaze on her. “A time for jokes? If I’m understanding you, you have some reason to think your friend has found herself neck-deep in the worst kind of trouble. It might dress up nicely for Cannes and parade around in front of the paparazzi for a couple of weeks in May, but make no mistake, it’s a grimy spiral of a brutal, painful, deeply bleak existence. It is no place for a soft little thing like that friend of yours. Much less you.”
“I was fine.”
“You had a target painted on your head, and what I can’t decide is whether you did it deliberately—if that was your plan all along—or if you’re truly so stupid that you were oblivious to the danger you were in. Laurette Fortin makes a run-of-the-mill monster like me look like a guardian fucking angel.”
“I was handling myself fine,” Nora told him, from between her teeth. “This isn’t about me. It’s about my missing best friend.” She lifted her head, tilting up her jaw. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her.”
“How poetic.” His voice could have stripped paint. “That sentiment goes nicely in a greeting card, I’m sure, but is less comprehensible when it involves prostitution. Or am I misunderstanding the common American concept of friendship?”
“She would do the same for me,” Nora said staunchly.
“And yet she was not there, hawking her wares to the unworthy like one of your New York City hot dog vendors, was she?”
“Stop!” she threw at him, and she didn’t know which one of them was more shocked. Nora doubted very much he was the kind of man anyone dared yell at. “If you want to pretend to be concerned about why I was on the same boat you were tonight, that’s going to have to wait. Harlow is missing. No one else seems to care, but I do. We tracked her to France, so here I am. I’m not a complete idiot!”
His mouth moved into a curve that hurt to look at. “I have seen no evidence to support that.”
“I knew I’d have to sleep with someone, yes,” she snarled at him, and there was a heedless thing a little too much like exhilaration in doing it, like careering in a car down a steep hill with no brakes. “I knew it would probably be awful. Maybe it would hurt. Who knows? I didn’t care. Women do it all the time, Zair.”
“Spoken by a woman who never has,” he pointed out.
Nora stiffened and tried not to die of the sudden shame she felt bloom across her cheeks, then stain her neck. “I’m not a virgin.”
“You have my deepest congratulations,” he said, and the chill in his voice made that shame brighten and spread across her skin. “But your experiences, however pale and pointless, are hardly likely to have prepared you for a goddamned sex auction.”
She felt that like a punch. How could he know—how could anyone know—things she’d never said out loud? Not even to her best friends? Pale and pointless. Her entire romantic history—her entire personal history, for that matter—in two sharp words. She felt bright and glowing red with mortification, as if he’d peered into the very heart of her. He had.
“It’s only sex,” she gritted out. “It has as much weight as I choose to give it. If I don’t want to be traumatized by what I have to do here, I won’t be. The end.”
“That, of course, is why you sobbed like a motherless child for fifteen minutes while rocking yourself in the fetal position on that bed.” His brows lowered, belligerently, she thought. “And that was without any sex.”
“That was because it was you!” she threw at him, raising her hands in the air and only then realizing they were fists she’d like to slam into him, and might have, had she not known he was built like stone and it would hurt no one but her. “It’s one thing to talk yourself into potentially disturbing sex with a stranger and something else entirely when the person you have to talk yourself into having that kind of sex with is the man you were in love with for half your life!”
That hung there in the great two-story space, crowding out the stars in the night sky high above them through the glass there, pressing in as if it were a small room after all.
“Don’t you dare use that word to describe a schoolgirl’s crush on an invented, imagined creature,” he rasped out, that muscle working in his jaw again, his green eyes narrowed and harsh. “You don’t have the slightest idea what it means.”
She laughed, and it was a wild sound, made wilder by the heavy way she was breathing. “Don’t worry, Zair. You ruined it six years ago. You did it deliberately. But that hardly made tonight less disturbing, did it?”
* * *
Zair didn’t know how he kept himself from closing the distance between them. How he refrained from reaching out and putting his hands on her again.
Especially when the look she gave him then was shattering. “Why did you kiss me like that?” she asked.
He ordered himself to get a grip on the storm in him before he betrayed himself completely. “Because you were in my house and you took my money. Be thankful it was only a kiss and a few liberties.”
“As opposed to what?” She rolled her eyes. “A punishing sonnet?”
“That,” he said flatly. “Or anal.”
They glared at each other.
“On the boat,” Nora said after a tense moment, “why did you grab me like that and kiss me? Why did you tell me we were putting on a show? What game are you playing here, Zair?”
“Why did you let me kiss you at all?” he retorted. “Ah, but that’s the issue, isn’t it? It wasn’t up to you. That’s what happens when you make yourself a product. A mere object. People use you without your permission and in ways you might not like.”
“I find it telling you can’t answer a simple question.” She tilted her head slightly to one side though her gaze never wavered. “I had no idea you were quite so slippery a politician.”
“I keep warning you,” he said tightly. “This won’t end well. I wasn’t swept away in a firestorm of longing, Nora, if that’s what you’re imagining. It wasn’t a covert expression of love or longing in such a wretched place. I was staking my claim before anyone else could.”
“Next time, why not pee on me instead?” Her voice was so sweet it took him a moment to process what she’d said. “It’s quicker and more direct.”
He let himself smile though he knew he shouldn’t, and then it deepened when he saw the way she bit at her lip in response.
“Don’t fool yourself,” he advised her. “I don’t have boundaries. You can’t push me into a corner. And I doubt very much you’ll like what happens when you try.”
Maybe she was imagining what it would be like if she tried. Maybe that was what crackled there between them, complicating the air, making everything seem to hum with expectation—or perhaps that was only him.
“I don’t want to push you anywhere,” she said, when he’d started to believe they would stand here, mute and frozen, until the end of time. And that was better. Safer. “I want to find Harlow.”
“I haven’t seen her.”
Nora’s eyes were too blue. Zair was afraid she could see too much.
“Where exactly have you been looking?” she asked quietly, in a tone of voice that suggested she had an idea already, if tonight was anything to go by. “And why were you there in the first place?”
And that was where this had to end. It had already gone too far. He couldn’t answer her questions without giving too much away. Hell, he already had.
Zair closed the distance between them. He ignored the shocked little gasp she tried to hide as he came close, just as he ignored the sense of deep, pervasive rightness when he scooped her up and into his arms, as though she was his.
He strode across the room, shouldering his way into the sprawling bath that ambled lazily in an L shape alongside the bedroom and featured a great glassed-in shower that protruded from the side of the house and let in the night on three sides. He set her down inside it and concentrated on unbuttoning her from his shirt, taking charge of her as if he really had claimed her. As if she really were his.
And he didn’t miss the fact that she simply…let him. As if this was her surrender.
Not for the first time, Zair wished he were someone else. Anyone else.
He ignored the way the backs of his hands brushed the slopes of her breasts, the smooth expanse of her soft belly. He ignored the way she shook beneath his touch. He ignored what it was like to peel his own shirt from her lush, sleek little body. He banished the vision of her on her hands and knees before him, because that was unlikely to help the situation. He ignored that fire inside him, that pounding need, that made him feel something far too much like drunk. He stripped the shirt from her, rid himself of his boxer briefs, and then he turned on the faucets. Steam billowed all around them. It was hot and close and would wash away a thousand sins, he was sure of it.
“I don’t want—” she began.
“Quiet.”
And for some reason, she obeyed him.
Her acquiescence flowed through him like honey. And Zair pretended. That it could be this simple. That it was all as easy as a steamy shower and this woman naked before him, her face tipped toward his as if he were the most trustworthy creature she knew and she was safe with him besides. That it took nothing more than water to make him clean, to sanctify him, to make him what he should have been all along.
He knew better. But here, now, for her, he pretended.
Gently, he turned her toward the hot spray and let the water turn her blond hair dark. He tilted her chin even further toward him and he carefully washed her face until the last of her black eye makeup swirled away and down across the deep-blue-tiled floor to the drain.
If only all the black marks he wore could wash away as easily and leave as little stain behind.
When he was finished he took her out to the soft rug that stretched from the shower to the massive tub and he dried her off, taking his time and learning her body the way he longed to do with his mouth. This is close enough, he lied to himself. He combed through her hair and left it damp and curling down her back, and when he was finished he picked her up again.
“I can walk,” Nora told him, with a faint frown that he imagined was meant to look fierce, but her voice sounded lazy and drugged and her eyes were slumberous on his.
“I’ll let you know when that becomes relevant,” he said, his voice little more than a growl, and it was hard not to smile when she simply exhaled. Then relaxed against him, her head finding his shoulder.
Zair carried her to the bed and laid her down on it, pulling the soft sheets and covers over her and tucking her in. She smiled sleepily at him and he felt it like a vise around his heart. He didn’t smile back. He wasn’t sure he could. He moved around the room instead, turning off the lights and putting her clothes on the chaise near the bed, until the vast room was dark and all that remained were the stars above and the famous chain of cities far below.
She was asleep before he returned to her side, and he felt that in his chest like another kiss. Another wrenching twist of that thing wrapped tight around his heart.
Zair stood there much longer than was wise. And then far longer than that.
But eventually he roused himself and made his way back up to the main floor. He retrieved his laptop from his briefcase and his second, private mobile phone. When the usual masking rituals had been taken care of and he was certain nothing he did could be tracked, he opened up his files and sent more pictures off to his partners in this enterprise back in Washington, DC, who used him as a lure in their dangerous trap as if he were merely an operative. As if he had no personal stake in this game.
And there were so many pictures. JPEG after JPEG of the girls he’d taken home with him. The girls who had helped him build his own deeply unsavory reputation, brick by brick, sordid night by sordid night.
The girls he’d pumped for information before letting his partners effect their rescue when it couldn’t be traced to him. A white knight one step removed, he thought, his lip curling in self-derision, which hardly counted, did it?
He could not prove who was at the center of the vast sex trafficking ring that had already consumed so much of his three former Harvard roommates’ lives. He only knew—as he’d known for far longer than Hunter, Austin Treffen, and Alex Diaz had, though he’d been unable to speak of it to any of them—that it was not contained to New York City and one law firm under the guidance of one perverse man. He’d heard whispers. Then he’d heard more pointed rumors. And all of them led back to his own country. To the highest levels.
Possibly to the highest level of all—but there was still a part of Zair that refused to accept that.
Because Azhil was not merely Zair’s ruler, his sultan. Twenty years older than Zair and the son of their father’s first and most cherished wife, Azhil had treated the illegitimate, ignored Zair like one of his own. He’d supported him, encouraged him. When Zair had gone to Harvard, Azhil had accompanied him but had done so completely under the radar, making Zair feel that he was a member of the family instead of just another bastard.
“I have a hundred courtiers already,” Azhil had told him when Zair was twelve and Azhil was already running the country. “Many of them are family. They claim my blood, they flatter my every word and deed, and they would each knife me in the back if they could. I need you to be anything but that.”
“What can I possibly be for you that you don’t already have?” Zair had asked, awed.
Azhil could have ignored him the way everyone else did. Zair was no more than another of their father’s numerous mistakes. Granted a place to live in the sultan’s vast palace complex and the money to strike out on his own should he wish it by virtue of the blood in his veins, but never an heir. Never anything more than a grudging obligation.
But Azhil had treated him like a brother.
“I don’t need any further flattery,” Azhil had said. “I need someone I can trust. A blade, sharpened and honed, to fit in my hand and no one else’s. I think this is you, Zair. If you wish it.”
He’d smiled at Zair then, and Zair would have done anything he asked. He had.
“I will be the finest blade a sultan has ever had,” he’d vowed then. He’d trained and he’d studied. He’d honed his body and he’d sharpened his mind. And he’d dedicated himself, body and soul, to his brother.
How could he accuse Azhil now? The fact that he could consider such treachery at all made him sick. The fact that he regularly funneled information to those who would hurt Azhil if they could made him loathe himself. He’d spent the first few years of this operation assuming that what he’d find would exonerate his brother. It had only been the last couple of years that had curdled him, changed him. Made him despair.
Made him understand that Azhil was likely not the man Zair had always believed he was.
Yet he’d thought he had a handle on it, this knife-edged tightrope walk of his. And then he’d looked up and seen Nora Grant, of all people, standing in the midst of all that ugliness. And something inside him had simply refused. There was a line he wouldn’t cross, apparently, and it was her.
Zair rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. He would keep Nora safe no matter what, even if it was from himself. He would keep her out of this mess. He’d do it even if he had to truss her up and ship her back home to New York in the cargo hold of his plane. He vowed it.
It was still so dark outside, though not nearly as dark as it was inside him, and it was such a little thing to cling to, Zair knew. Such a tiny, inconsequential thing. One blonde girl whose smile altered the world a little bit when she aimed it at him, when she believed in him. It made all this darkness that little bit brighter.
That smile was all he had left.
But the next morning there were pictures of Zair and Nora all over the papers. And that changed everything.
