The Billionaire's Innocent - Part 3
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Caitlin Crews
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Harlequin
HarlequinChapter Five
ZAIR AL RUYI wanted her to think the worst of him. So it shouldn’t have felt like a red-hot poker through the chest—like the worst kind of betrayal—that she did.
“Will we get to the truth this time?” he asked. He put the wineglass down and then leaned against the rail, shifting so he was closer to her.
Nora Grant, who had always believed the best of him. It stunned him to realize that he’d imagined she always would.
“I’m not the one who’s been concealing the truth,” Nora said, her voice thick, but she swayed toward him anyway, as though her body trusted him no matter what came out of her mouth. “I’ve told you everything. All you’ve done is talk about obedience and make me trail around after you like a dog on a leash.”
“Why did you come here, to Cannes? Into this grim little world?” he asked her, making no attempt to modify his tone. “What on earth would make you put yourself at risk like this?”
Her eyes glittered with emotion. “I told you—”
“Yes, of course.” He moved so he was trapping her at the rail, a hand on either side of her hips and his face too close to hers. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t need to touch her—not when he could see the fine little tremors that moved over her skin. Not when he could smell her perfume and the warm heat of her arousal beneath it. Not when he could see the way she melted toward him, then yanked herself back. “This epic friendship of yours, the likes of which the world has never seen before or since. I am fond indeed of my friends, Nora. And if I suspected they were caught up in something like this, I would contact the authorities. I would not prance into the middle of this cesspool with absolutely nothing to protect me.”
“That might not have been my smartest move,” she acknowledged. “But you don’t understand.”
“Tell me, then, what I need to know,” he encouraged her, but his voice was a dark thing and he could see it move through her and tangle inside her. He could see the misery and the longing transform her lovely face. “Tell me why.”
“Harlow is the best friend I’ve ever had,” she whispered. “Do you know what it’s like to meet someone and feel like they instantly become family? So much so that it’s inconceivable that they weren’t always there? She isn’t just a college friend, Zair. She’s like a sister to me.”
He held her gaze for a long moment and then slowly shook his head. Nora swallowed, hard.
“Try again,” he said. He saw unshed tears glimmer in her eyes, and she raised her hands up as if to push him away—but only held them there, in fists, and didn’t touch him. Her blue eyes filled with misery.
“It’s my fault,” she whispered, spitting out the words as if they were poisoned.
Zair didn’t question the impulse to gather her to him, pulling her into his arms and ignoring those fierce fists, hard against his chest. He didn’t question that thing in him that made him bring her close, made him bend down so her face was buried in his neck, so she could whisper all her guilt and panic and fear into something hard and strong like his shoulder, which could take it.
“My life is so hollow,” she told him, told that dark little pocket of space. She rested her forehead against him and her lips barely moved, but he heard her. He could be her confessional. He could give her absolution, if nothing else. “It’s a constant battle between expectations and pointlessness and none of it matters. It’s empty and I know—I know—what a privilege it is to have that kind of life in the first place. I have nothing to complain about. And Harlow was just like me.” She pulled in a breath, short and hard. “But at least she wrote a thesis on something more important to the world than a bunch of two-hundred-year-old paintings. So I told her she had to do something with that. She thought maybe she’d take a year or two to travel, to go to Bali and do yoga for months. And I said she could either fake spirituality with a bunch of assholes like the ones we already knew or she could go a completely different way and make a real difference. I was her best friend and I was a jerk about it.” Her voice was choked then, and Zair lifted a hand to cradle the back of her head, his gaze trained on the glittering shore in the distance but his attention entirely on Nora. “So she went to London and she worked in another Treffen law firm, and you know what happened in New York. You know what happens in places like that. With those people who use girls exactly like her… You know what she was walking into.”
“I do,” he agreed. “But I don’t understand how you had anything to do with it.”
“I made her go!” she hissed at him, and she moved her fists against him in emphasis. “If it weren’t for me she’d be working on her downward dog in Bali, Zair. She wouldn’t be missing in France!”
He shifted back so he could look down into her face.
“Are you so powerful?” he asked mildly. “Did this friend of yours require that you make all her decisions for her? Did she pledge to obey you in all things?”
“Of course not. But—” He shook his head and she fell quiet, and he saw the exact moment it occurred to her that she had pledged to obey someone else. In public, anyway. “What are you trying to say? That you’re responsible for me because I agreed to play these games with you?”
“My responsibilities aren’t the point,” he said, dark and low. “This is about your guilt.” She tried to pull away from him then, but he only held her closer and put his mouth to her ear. “We’re still in public, Nora. Don’t forget. This is when these games matter most.”
She went still, but it was a tense, humming sort of stillness.
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said softly. He looked down and found her gaze, so dark now and filled with all those shadows. “I haven’t forgotten all the things you said, either. What a foolish rich girl I am. How much of an idiot I must be to have come here. You’re not wrong. But it doesn’t matter, because—”
“You deserve it?” he asked, lethal and soft at once, and she sucked in a breath as if he’d hit her.
“I didn’t say that.” But he could see it in the dark thing that dimmed the blue of her eyes then.
Zair laughed softly. He pressed a kiss to her temple, indulging himself in the feel of her satiny skin, and then he stepped back. She looked bereft, and he was twisted enough to enjoy that.
“I could tell you that no one deserves what they walk into when they come here,” he said quietly. “But I suspect that intellectually, you know this. It isn’t about your mind, is it? This is about something else.”
“Yes.” Her eyes were wide, her face was pale, and she watched him as though she didn’t know whether to run away or fall to her knees before him, and sick fuck that he was, he liked that, too. “This is about friendship. I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that.”
“This is about control,” he corrected her. With utter certainty.
“Not everything is about sex. Or whatever this is, this thing you do. This obedience thing.”
“Control, obedience.” He shrugged, though he watched her closely. “It’s all the same thing.”
“I don’t see the connection between what happened to my best friend—”
“I think you have a very good idea what happened to your best friend,” he said. “This isn’t about her. This is about why you, Nora, who are certainly wealthy enough to buy yourself some interested policemen if appealing to their better natures didn’t work, felt the need to talk your way into a sex slave auction. Why you put yourself not merely in harm’s way, but on an actual yacht filled with people who were there for the express purpose of doling out the kind of harm that would have taken you a lifetime to get past.”
She looked unsteady on her feet, but he didn’t reach out to her, no matter how much he wanted to. He let her rock slightly.
“I admitted that wasn’t such a great plan,” she bit out in a low voice. “I know that. Do you want me to tell you that I feel lucky that it was you who found me there? I do. Okay?”
“Nora.” He kept his voice soft, and thrust his hands into his pockets to keep them to himself. “I’m not trying to break you apart. I just want you to face the truth. You want this to be your fault. You want your friend’s disappearance to be directly traceable to decisions you made and things you did. You came all the way to Cannes to take responsibility for it.”
She made a small, hurt noise, and covered her mouth with her hand, but not before he saw the way her lips crumpled in on themselves. Zair hated himself, but he pushed on anyway, because as much as this might hurt her, it would hurt her far worse if she stayed stuck in the place she was right now. He knew.
“Please,” she whispered.
“Do you want to know why?” he asked, inexorable and calm. So calm, as if this didn’t hurt him. As if her beauty and her courage didn’t make him proud of her, that she was still standing. Still listening. That she hadn’t run off into the night the way he could see she wanted to do.
“Because,” he said quietly, watching her eyes swim with tears, watching her chin tilt up as if she could weather any blow, “you think that if you make this your fault, you can control it. When you accept that you can’t control any of it, that it’s simply a thing that happened to someone you love, you’ll also have to accept that it wasn’t you who did it.”
“And you think that’s better?” she asked, fierce and broken at once. “Because it sounds to me like giving up.”
“Do you know why I rejected you six years ago, Nora?” he asked then, and she let out a hard, long breath. “You were a gorgeous girl. Young and beautiful and you said you wanted me. You said you’d give me anything.”
“I would have,” she whispered.
“You would have given me your body in some or other carefully constructed transaction that you controlled completely,” he said brutally. “I can fuck anyone I like, whenever I like. What is another fuck to me?”
“Thank you.” Her voice shook but she raised her chin. “I think we covered this six years ago.”
“You were just a little girl,” he said. “But now? Here? This is truly beautiful, Nora. This is unique. And you can’t control it.”
“Obedience,” she whispered.
“Not the obedience itself,” he said, smiling faintly, “though let’s be clear, I think it’s hot. But I asked you to hand over your control to me and you did it. That’s strength. That’s beauty. Especially because it scares the hell out of you.” He felt his mouth move and he wanted to kiss her, to taste her, more than he could remember wanting anything else. “If you take anything away from this little show of ours, Nora, let it be that. You shine brightest when you let go. When you believe in yourself.”
For a moment—maybe a year—she only breathed. And a thousand things passed between them in that electric band that felt tighter, tauter, every second.
“If that’s true,” she said quietly, “then you should do it, too. You don’t have to tell me what your objectives are here, Zair. I don’t believe you’re another Jason Treffen. But you can prove it.”
“Can I? Monsters play games, too, Nora. Deeper games than you can imagine.”
“Don’t play another game,” she whispered. “This isn’t about that. And you’re no monster..”
Her eyes were so blue then, even damp with emotion. And she made him remember, suddenly, all those dreams he’d had years ago—all those bright fantasies. That he could be a better man. Some kind of hero. That he was something other than dirty.
“Help someone, Zair,” she urged him, as if believing in him were easy. As if she already did. “Help Greer.”
