The Billionaire's Innocent - Part 4
Author
Caitlin Crews
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3
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, Zair 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.”
It occurred to Zair to wonder, then, how many illegitimate children of his own Azhil had collected in his reign as sultan, and if he gathered them all into the palace the way their father had done. And whether Azhil’s typical insistence that Zair hurry up and procreate was motivated by familial feelings or, more likely, the fact that Zair resembled him so strongly. Did he want a broader pool of a look-alikes for him and his sons to utilize? The possibilities were endless once Zair allowed himself to think the way Azhil obviously did.
And Zair didn’t know if he’d kept himself deliberately blind all these years, to avoid knowing the answers to these questions—or if he’d known all along that there were so many of these things he didn’t want to face.
But he couldn’t focus on that now. Not when he had to bait the trap.
“Perhaps I will find out sooner rather than later,” he said to Azhil then, and it was too easy, that slick, oily smile. That shrug. It came to him as if it were part of him, and there was a part of him that worried it was. That all of this was in him. That none of these past dark years had been as much of an act as he liked to pretend. “Perhaps very soon. I would like your blessing.”
Azhil studied him, his smile in place but a certain assessing look in his dark eyes that Zair was certain he’d never seen before. Or more likely, he hadn’t wanted to see it.
“You wish to marry?”
“I do.” He forced a satisfied expression, all smugness and complacency. “I’ve already started making the arrangements. She’s particularly advantageous. Old American money, a touch of celebrity in the family through a brother which, of course, their parents find vulgar—”
“You do not mean that Grant girl.”
“I see the tabloids found you in Ruyi, where I’d have thought they were banned.” Zair shrugged. “It is regrettable. But it can’t be helped.”
Azhil laughed as if Zair had made a joke. When Zair only gazed back at him, he sighed, and it was all so theatrical. Feigned and exaggerated for effect. How had Zair failed to recognize this before?
“You cannot be so naive,” his brother said. He shifted on the couch, assuming a position that was even more relaxed. Any further and he’d slide to the floor. “You occupy a prominent position in my government.” Azhil waved a bejeweled hand in the air. “The pictures from Cannes, an affair? This is questionable enough. You are an ambassador, not a pop idol. But you can’t marry such a creature.” He sniffed. “You know as well as I do that ours is a conservative country. They already consider Western women whores. That one actually is. I can’t allow it.”
Zair waited for the pounding, murderous rage inside him to subside. He let the urge to throttle Azhil settle into his bones, and waited until he thought he could keep it under control. He smiled at the glass in his hand and knew everything rode on his playing this role to perfection. All these years he’d spent neck-deep in the swill of other men’s sins. What they’d put into motion days ago. Nora.
He couldn’t fail. Which meant he couldn’t treat his brother to his well-trained fists the way he wanted to do with every last cell in his body. He couldn’t show Azhil the difference between lounging on couches all one’s life and learning how to fight instead. Though he thought he might dream about it.
“You and I have never discussed these things,” he said instead, and made certain that Azhil noted the careful way he said it. “But I have…certain preferences.”
“I am aware,” the sultan said grandly. “You have no secrets from me, Zair.” His laugh was perhaps more strained then, or maybe that was a rare bit of honesty shining through. “Unless you have something you wish to confess?”
Zair laughed, too, and it sounded so obviously fake to him that he half expected Azhil to summon his guards and have him charged with treason then and there, but his brother only watched him with that same smile and even an indulgent look on his face.
It did not occur to Azhil that the boy he’d elevated to ambassador could ever turn on him. This was perfectly clear to Zair. And if there was a part of him that grieved for both of them, if there was a space within him where he would always be that boy and believe the things that boy had believed about what little family he had, he refused to indulge it now. He couldn’t. He had too much else to lose.
“She is an asset,” Zair said when the laughter ebbed. “The fact that she was for sale means only one thing, brother. That I own her. That is why I allowed us to be photographed.”
“That is what dowries are for,” Azhil said dismissively. “They serve the same function without the attendant tabloid attention, and they are far more useful to me in other regions of the world where I could use alliances.”
“That can’t possibly offer the same level of control,” Zair replied. He shrugged at Azhil’s stare. “I am not an emotional man. I have no tie to this girl. I am anxious to please you, nothing more. I do not mean to argue with you, brother, but this is all part of a plan.”
Lie after lie after lie. What would be left of him when this was done? If this was ever truly done? What would look back at him when he saw himself in the mirror? Or would he simply learn how to live with what he was now—this ghost of a man he’d become?
Azhil sighed again, as if Zair was testing the limits of his indulgence. “And what plan is this, dare I ask?”
Zair smiled, and it was hard to keep it from edging over into something dark and triumphant.
“It would give our enemies great pleasure to see me wedded to a woman they know is nothing more than a yacht girl. Water seeks its own level, they will say.”
“This is my objection.”
“Ah, but we can use it.” Zair settled against his chair. “Our enemies may smirk, but our allies will applaud, for the same reason. Because they will know she is completely under my control.” He laughed. “And yet I will parade her into state dinners and introduce her to the American president. It can only cement your stature and legend, that you can offer such an insult on the same hand as your friendship.”
He saw Azhil ponder that obviously appealing prospect, and felt his mind quiet even as his body stilled. The way it always had in combat, when the thinking and the plotting were done and there was only the fight. Nothing but the fight.
And through the fight, the inevitable win.
“I cannot deny the appeal of that,” Azhil murmured after a moment, as Zair had hoped he would. As they’d banked he would.
“Meanwhile, Nora Grant is the equivalent of American royalty,” Zair continued. “There are only a select few who will understand what she was doing in France, and then only because they make use of such services themselves. Who will they tell? Each other? These are the types of men—and I can tell you this from experience—who are more likely to ask to rent her out instead.”
“Still. Does a woman like this deserve the elevation of a marriage that connects her to me?” Azhil’s stare was hard. Ugly, even. The truth, Zair understood, written on his face at last. “Even if it is only through one of my father’s bastards?”
Azhil smiled faintly as he said it, and his voice was something like kind, but Zair did not mistake that for anything but what it was: the sultan’s booted foot, heavy on his neck. He couldn’t remember if Azhil had said such things before—but then, perhaps he hadn’t needed to remind Zair of their positions before.
Zair chose to take it as a positive thing indeed that he felt moved to do so now.
“How could any woman be worthy of such a thing?” he asked, because that was the expected response. That was the only possible way Azhil might be mollified. He bowed his head down and it didn’t even feel servile. It was necessary, nothing more. A feint before the strike. “How could anyone?”
That sat there for a moment or two, as if Azhil wanted them both to truly experience the difference in their positions. Then he lifted a finger, beckoning Zair to continue.
“Is there more?” he asked. “I am not convinced.”
Zair shifted in his seat because he was meant to find it uncomfortable, not because he did. And because that, too, would please Azhil. All these little indications of status and sadism. All these little games.
“Her brother has the kind of fame that these people dream about in their endless quest for personal celebrity,” he said. “And all of these things together are as good as engraved invitations into different levels of American society and more important, the money that drives it.” He frowned thoughtfully. “And yet she is also tarnished. In that way, she is truly the perfect choice for one such as me.”
He paused, then inclined his head with the subservience his brother would expect, and told himself that soon enough, he’d never have to bow his head to anyone again. Or he’d cut his own damned head off and circumvent the issue entirely.
“Unless, of course, you have something else in mind for me. It is at your pleasure only, Azhil. As is everything.”
* * *
The June night was clear and softly warm, but Nora was chilled to the bone, which she knew had nothing at all to do with the weather.
The private airfield was deserted. Zair had picked her up a few hours after dark and it was the first time she’d seen him in casual clothes in as long as she could remember. It was better to focus on that than the storm that washed through her at the sight of him, so dark and forbidding and gorgeous, standing there at her door with a frown on his face and all the memories of the last time he’d been at her loft dancing in the air between them.
Better to concentrate on this instead, she’d told herself, because she definitely wasn’t imagining him naked: Zair al Ruyi was dressed like a regular guy instead of an elegant diplomat.
She’d blinked, and then her throat had gone dry, as though his hand was around it again, hot and hard. Maybe there was no avoiding the storm, after all.
“I didn’t know you owned a pair of jeans,” she’d said, and she knew he’d seen the heat that flooded her face then. She’d seen that awareness in his green gaze. She’d seen the way he’d looked back at her. Hungry. “In fact, if anyone had asked, I’d have insisted that you didn’t. That you were incapable of wearing anything that wasn’t slaved over by at least six Italian tailors.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he’d chided her. “You’re not allowed to graduate from an American college without at least three pairs of jeans. Much less graduate school.”
And something warm had swelled there, for an instant, in the space between them, a certain buoyancy that had lit Nora up from the inside. She’d smiled before she thought better of it, seen it reflected in the green of his eyes, and then he’d scowled at her.
“My brother often dresses in the disguise of the common man, particularly when he is pretending to be me,” Zair had said then, his voice clipped, reminding Nora why he’d turned up at her door. Not for a date. Not for anything good.
Not to share a smile in the large, open loft that contained her bed.
Not many people looked the way he did in jeans, Nora thought now, ignoring the empty runway and the too-still night and focusing on Zair instead. It was easier to let her gaze linger on the way the band of weathered denim clung to that flat, low part of his abdomen that she knew the taste of now. It was easier to admire the length of his strong legs and the way the breeze moved his soft cotton T-shirt against his extraordinary torso.
Maybe it would be even easier if he weren’t quite so beautiful. Maybe it would make everything hurt less. Then again, maybe everything about him hurts and always will.
He was on the phone now, one hand rubbing the back of his neck as he paced and muttered in a dark tone, his sharp gaze flickering to her and away every now and again. Then again, maybe nothing about Zair would ever be easy. Maybe that was the part Nora was going to have to find a way to come to terms with.
He ended his call and walked over to her, leaning against the back of the glossy black SUV next to her, even crossing his arms over his chest the way she was doing. They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t look over at the driver Zair had turned up with who wasn’t a part of his usual detail, who stood some distance away from the SUV, waiting. But Nora thought she could feel the heat of Zair’s arm, almost touching hers, moving through her like the embrace she’d never dare ask him to give her.
No matter how much she craved it. Needed it, even.
“Do you think this will work?” she asked.
She’d been afraid to ask it in the drive out here tonight. The driver had navigated their way through the rush and roar of Manhattan traffic while Nora sat in the back and ordered herself not to put her hands on the man who’d sprawled there in an evident, seething fury beside her. She’d understood that his reaction might well have been explosive. She’d concentrated instead on the plane that should even now be making its final descent into the New York area.
And the person she hoped against hope would really, truly be on it.
“If the house is in your name, then the girls inside it must be, too,” she’d said that night in her loft. Zair had still been standing at the door, glaring at her as if it had all been some elaborate ruse on her part to get him back in her bed. She hadn’t been entirely sure it wasn’t.
“Presumably.”
“Then you should be able to order them to send those girls wherever you want them.”
He’d stared at her. She’d held her breath, but he’d turned fully toward her then and even took a step closer. Away from the door.
“For example,” she’d continued, “you could make them send Harlow here.”
Zair had drifted closer, and soon they’d both been sitting on her couch together, talking. Plotting how they could do this—if they could do it, and what it would entail. Whom they could trust and how they’d bring those people in, if they went ahead and did the things they were discussing.
As if they were a team after all. A we.
It was pathetic how much she wanted that to be so.
“It will work,” Zair said now. His eyes were trained on the night sky, she saw with a quick sideways glance. Not on her. But she knew he was averting his gaze for the same reason she was—because otherwise they would tangle and get stuck, and there were other things to worry about tonight.
“Your brother thinks you want to marry me.” She cleared her throat and refused to think too much about that. Because that led nowhere she could let herself go tonight. “As discussed.”
“He does.”
“And he’s opposed to it, because of my well-documented whoring ways, as you assumed he would be.”
“He is.”
Her throat didn’t need any further clearing, but she coughed anyway. “And so you’ll be parading me in front of him at his welcome ball tomorrow night so he can check my teeth and probably insult me besides.”
Zair sighed. “I will.”
“Great.” It took an inordinate amount of energy to sound that enthusiastic. “Then we’re all set. Practically engaged.”
She thought they were both much too quiet then, ominously so, and the moment dragged on for a lifetime. More. And then she didn’t know if he turned or she did, but suddenly they were facing each other and her hands were at his waist, and his head was bent to hers while his hand held her face in that bossy way she craved with his mouth just there, while all those flames leaped and danced in the soft night air—
“I don’t—”
“Zair—”
But they both stopped. She would never know how. Nora pulled in a breath and then dropped her traitorous hands back to her sides. Zair stepped back, putting a space between them that felt cold and vast, like a deep well rather than a foot or two.
“I think it’s best we concentrate on what we have to do,” he said, and though his gaze was electric, his voice was cool. Too cool. So cool she knew better, somehow, to believe it. “Not this inconvenient chemistry that rears its head at all the wrong moments.”
“I wasn’t aware chemistry could be inconvenient. Most people are lucky to have any at all.” That didn’t sound like her, though it was. Nora felt bent, somehow. As if almost kissing him had been disfiguring. As if he was the poison as well as the cure.
“There’s too much to do,” he grated at her. “We don’t have time for this shit.”
But there were all those things in the dark between them, around them. He’d called it chemistry. Nora knew it was more than that. It was like lightning and as demanding. It felt like fate. It was the way he’d moved over her in the shadows of her room, the way he’d slid so deep and hard inside her, the way he’d held her while she’d shaken apart in his arms, again and again. It was the way he smiled sometimes, so rarely and only for her. It was the way he could make her feel. Alive. Not pale. Not pointless.
Made for him.
It was history and bated breath. It was all those years they’d danced civilly at grand parties, talked about the weather, and smiled politely over the swirl of the outsize thing that stretched between them, elastic and consuming.
It was real. It had always been real.
Nora was completely and utterly in love with him.
And that was when they heard the plane.
Stepping away from him then felt like tearing off her own skin, but Nora managed it and kept going, because that was the plan. Loving him wasn’t new. It was a fact, not a revelation, and she didn’t have time to examine it. Not here, now. She slid into the back of the SUV and she sat there behind the tinted windows, realizing that “her heart in her mouth” was less of a metaphor than she’d always imagined it was.
She couldn’t watch. She couldn’t not watch.
The sleek jet landed, then taxied toward them, coming to a complete stop some distance away. Zair stayed where he was, lounging against the SUV as if he accepted human deliveries so often it bored him, while his driver walked toward the plane with a gait that made Nora think of the good guys in action films.
“If your brother can pretend to be you,” Nora had asked him that night at her loft, “then why can’t you pretend to be him?”
The truth was, she didn’t think Zair looked anything like the sultan. He was leaner and much, much harder. He was beautiful. He radiated courage and that deep, dark heat from within him, formidable and powerful at a glance. The sultan, by comparison, looked soft and pampered in all the pictures Nora had ever seen of him. Twisted and smug and evil all the way through.
But the men who were making this delivery tonight wouldn’t see any of that. They would see the Ruyi noise. The fierce profile the brothers shared. They would see the family resemblance, and if they thought he looked any different than usual, they’d never dare say so.
That was what Zair and Nora were counting on. That was the only way this would work.
And this had to work.
There were so many ways it could all go wrong that Nora had to force herself to stop thinking each and every terrible possibility through to its grim conclusion. She had to force herself to simply sit there and wait, her breathing too loud and shallow. Her heart racing and near to breaking as it did.
It took a handful of forevers before the Gulfstream’s door opened and unfolded into stairs, and more than that before a man in a dark suit stepped out onto the small landing at the top. He looked around and called something to Zair’s driver, who moved to stand at the foot of the steps.
“Stop talking!” Nora ordered in a harsh whisper, inside the SUV with its tinted windows where no one could hear.
Another age crawled past, filled with male laughter and a noted lack of urgency all around, and then three woman came out the door and started down the steps with another man behind them.
And Nora had to look away then, because she was knocked sideways with panic and hope and instant, paralyzing terror that she hadn’t really seen what she thought she’d seen, that she wanted it too much and was imagining it—
She peeked again, and realized she was shaking hard as she did. Breathe, said that voice in her head that sounded so much like Zair’s, bossy and cool.
It really was Harlow. Right there, in the flesh. On the other side of the car window, stepping down onto the tarmac. Dressed in strange clothes, clutching the hand of the woman next to her and with her arm slung over the shoulders of what looked like a teenage girl on her other side. Harlow, looking tired and drawn and too skinny. But it was really, truly, indisputably her.
Harlow. At last.
It was only when the tears began to tickle the bottom of her chin that Nora realized she was weeping. Sobbing with her hands over her mouth. But they weren’t yet in the clear. Zair had said the sultan’s men would expect to gas up the plane and leave for Ruyi immediately, but first they were escorting the women to the car.
And with every step Harlow took across the tarmac, every step closer to safety, Nora’s heart beat out about a hundred hard kicks against her chest.
Closer. Closer, now.
Zair’s driver opened the passenger door to the SUV and Nora curled herself into a stiff, tense ball in the farthest corner. The woman who had been holding Harlow’s hand slid inside, her guarded gaze meeting Nora’s briefly then sliding away, as if she hadn’t seen her.
As if it’s no particular surprise to see another woman here, with tears pouring down her face, because in the hell she’s been in that’s obviously par for the course.
Nora’s stomach twisted, but she didn’t say a word. She waited, on edge, as she heard Harlow’s voice on the night air.
“—really didn’t think it would be you,” Harlow was saying. She sounded exhausted. But within that, defiant somehow. “I definitely didn’t see that coming.”
“Shut up,” Zair said, lethal and vicious, and only Nora could possibly know it was for the benefit of the sultan’s goons nearby. “Get in the car.”
But it was the teenage girl who climbed in, ducking her head and sliding in hard to the other woman’s side. She didn’t meet Nora’s gaze. She didn’t acknowledge that Nora was there. She only shuddered and tried to make herself smaller.
“This puts a whole new spin on everything,” Harlow was saying, her voice arch and amused, as though she was having fun. “It’s like I woke up and found out the world really is made of jelly beans. Sick, evil, fucked-up jelly beans.”
“I don’t even remember your name,” Nora heard Zair say in his cruelest voice, and she winced. “And you don’t want to make me learn it. Trust me on this.”
She heard Arabic then, and laughter from the men, and then Harlow was getting into the car. Harlow checked the teenager before she was even fully seated, then frowned at the other woman, who shook head hard, once, in response. She settled next to the teenager, put her arm around the younger girl again, and only then did she look across the interior of the SUV.
Her gaze locked with Nora’s.
Harlow blinked. Her face remained blank. Nora held her breath.
Outside, there was more laughter.
Zair swung into the car, next to Nora, and barked out an order. The engine turned over as his door slammed shut.
Harlow was still staring straight at Nora. She blinked again. Her brown eyes, usually so merry and anything but that tonight, moved over Nora’s face as her own tightened, then crumpled. She paled.
“Harlow—” Nora began, in a thick whisper.
“No,” Harlow said in a soft voice.
The SUV moved then, pulling away from the two men who still stood on the tarmac, one lighting a cigarette while the other checked his phone.
“No!” Harlow cried, louder, and she tore her gaze from Nora’s and turned it on Zair. Then she screamed, “I’ll kill you!”
And she launched herself at Zair as though she wanted to put out his eyes with her fingers.
Nora didn’t think. She lunged for her friend, and everything was a desperate crush, loud and awful. Harlow was falling apart and screaming bloody murder, Zair was using some kind of martial arts hold to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else as she thrashed there, trying to get to him, and Nora was holding her as best she could.
“You’re safe,” she kept saying, or crying, because she was sobbing while she said it. The other girls were grabbing on to each other without a sound but Harlow was still screaming. Over and over, until Nora’s whisper seemed to penetrate.
Zair let go of her the moment she took a deep breath, but Nora didn’t.
“You’re safe,” she said, again and again and again. “Harlow. Listen to me. You’re home. You’re safe.”
And slowly, gingerly, Harlow sat up. She pushed her dark hair back from her face. She ran her palms over her eyes as though she wasn’t entirely certain she was awake. She looked at Nora, kneeling down on the floor of the SUV with her, half on the seat and half off. Then she looked at Zair.
“He’s not…?”
Nora’s reply was swift. Unequivocal. “Never.”
“And you?”
“No,” she whispered fiercely. She reached over and squeezed her friend’s hands. “Harlow. I promise. You’re safe now.”
And her best friend smiled such a sad, broken smile it did more than shatter Nora. It altered her. She understood even as Harlow was aiming it at her, even as she returned it, that it would haunt her for the rest of her life.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever believe you,” Harlow whispered.
“That’s the great thing about it,” Nora said. She met Zair’s bleak gaze then, and it made her feel stronger, somehow. Better, despite everything. She held on tight to Harlow. She’d do it forever if that was what it took. Harlow gripped her so hard it hurt, but Nora didn’t care. “You don’t have to believe it and it’s still true. I’ll believe it for you.”
And she didn’t let go of Harlow for the rest of the drive into the city.
