Zair groaned, and Nora thought it was the best thing she’d ever heard.
And then she lost herself in the taste of him, male and hot and perfect. She tested his length in her mouth; she tasted every inch of him with her tongue. She wrapped her hands around him and indulged herself. He tasted of salt and need, and she wanted him so much she shook.
“Enough,” he said roughly when she’d lost herself there, lost herself in him. His voice was a thick, strained thing she’d never heard before, and then his hands were on her, lifting her away from him and to her feet. He kicked his way out of his trousers and peeled off his shirt, then he turned his attention to Nora.
His green eyes glittered and his mouth was a hard line, and she stood there and let him strip the wet clothes from her body until she was as naked as he was.
“The bed is through there,” she told him, but he only shook his head at her. He walked her backward until her knees hit the arm of her couch, and then he smiled at her. It was a heartbreak in a simple curve and a flash of his teeth.
“Say thank you,” he told her.
“Thank—” she began. He pushed her backward, a gentle press against her shoulders. Nora fell, laughing, knowing that the deep cushions of the couch would catch her.
And then his mouth was on her, licking deep into her heat, as she landed.
Nora screamed. He held her thighs fast, one in each strong hand, and he simply took her. It was ferocious. It was insane. He used his mouth and a hint of his teeth and she was already molten hot from the taste of him. And when she burst into a thousand shards of glass all around him she didn’t know which side of her was up or down, and she could feel him laughing against the core of her, sending her into another long, lush shiver against his mouth.
She only vaguely registered it when he lifted her up and held her against him. She was barely aware of it as he moved through the loft. She stared back the way he’d come, focusing on the trail of water they left across the cool floors, the footsteps on the concrete.
As if they’d brought the storm inside.
She only realized she’d said that out loud when he angled a look down at her.
“This is only the eye of the storm,” Zair replied in a low, rough voice that ran along her skin like some kind of delicious sandpaper, textured and right. “There’s far more weather yet to come.” He set her down beside the big brass bed and studied her face in the little bit of light that poured in from the streetlamps outside. “Climb up on the bed if you think you’re up for the rest of it.”
And she understood what he was doing, using that tone of his that was tough, but not implacable. Giving her an out. Making sure she was with him. Making this whole thing as different from Cannes as he could. Nora leaned forward and pressed a kiss between the hard, flat planes of his pectoral muscles, then smiled when she heard the ragged breath he pulled in.
She slid her bottom onto the bed and then crawled backward, pulling herself into the middle of the snow-white coverlet and watching him as she went.
“Condoms?” he asked.
Nora couldn’t speak. She nodded toward her bedside table and he opened the drawer there, pulling out a strip of three and pulling one off. She found she was holding her breath. Then he tossed the condom to her and she stopped breathing entirely.
“I assume you know what to do with that,” he said. Was that his version of teasing? He crawled toward her, a look in his green eyes she could hardly bear. It made her whole body shiver, inside and out. It made the flesh between her legs feel swollen and too hot. “Or do you require a lesson?”
Nora swallowed and ripped open the packet. Zair moved over her, kneeling up so that when she was done, she could roll the latex down over the boldest part of him, sheathing him. When she was finished, her hands were shaking and she was too hot and too shivery all over again.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready.” She didn’t sound like herself. “I’ve been ready for six years.”
“Are you sure?”
Nora glared at him. And impossibly, Zair laughed.
Then, before she could process that, he moved—pulling her into his arms and then rolling them both until she was splayed beneath him in the center of her bed, he was above her, and the whole world disappeared and became the beat of her heart.
Slow. Hard. Finally.
She could feel him everywhere. The breadth of his shoulders, the press of his hardness against the entrance to her soft, wet heat. He was all fine, hard muscles and that mouthwatering physique and she wanted him so badly she shook with it. She shook and she shook. She wanted to shake apart. She wanted them to do it together.
A different storm came into his gaze then, as he held himself there above her.
“I will destroy you,” he warned her. “It’s what I do best.”
But Nora only laughed. “Promise?”
Zair let out one last, muttered curse. Then he pulled her legs around his hips, wrapped his arms around her shoulders, and thrust deep and hard inside her.
Yes.
Nora shattered. It was like being thrown off the side of the planet, scattered into a trillion stars, and when she could finally find her way back, he was still braced there over her, hard and hot and staring down at her in that dark, possessive way that shouldn’t have made her shiver all over again.
But it did. Oh, how it did.
“That was completely unearned,” she told him, amazed that she could speak. “That was my little-girl fantasies in action, that’s all.”
He didn’t quite smile. The slight curve of his mouth was too intense for that.
“This is real life, not fantasy,” he replied, quietly thrilling and sure in that particular way of his, and then he began to move. “This is better.”
He was right.
Zair built that fire all over again. He did it with his mouth, with his clever hands, and the way he moved that athlete’s body of his. He was masterful and dark, thrilling and focused. He tasted her everywhere. He stroked her and adored her. He set a driving, glorious pace and Nora met him, losing herself in that long, perfect slide, in the ecstasy of each slick touch, while the tension in her grew and pulled taut, driving her straight toward that edge again.
Where he kept her for what seemed like forever.
He licked his way over each of her breasts, testing the tight peaks and pulling them deep into the heat of his mouth. He laughed when she tried to hurry him, then made a growling, approving sort of sound when she was reduced to a mindless begging, her head thrashing against the pillows, her wet hair around her shoulders and her arms flung up over her head.
With only the sound of her own voice echoing back from the walls, desperate and needy.
“Once again,” he told her then, in a rough way that felt like a separate caress, and made her shake in exquisite delight against him. “I want to hear my name, Nora. I want the neighbors to know I was here.”
Then he reached down in between their bodies and rubbed his way along the place where they were joined as if he knew her body as well as he did his own, as if he’d figured out all her secrets. As if she were truly his. It was too much.
Nora exploded, nothing but his name on her lips, nothing but Zair in her head.
And he said her name like a prayer when he followed.
She didn’t know how long she slept. Only that when she woke, she was wrapped in his arms and it didn’t take more than a shift in her breathing to wake him. Or a simple kiss to send them both hurtling back into that storm of theirs, all over again.
When she snapped awake again some indeterminate amount of time later, she noticed first that Zair had left the bed, and she hated the way her stomach plummeted. It took her a moment to realize he was standing beside it, half hidden in the darkness.
“Are you leaving?” she asked, stunned—though she knew she shouldn’t have been. He hadn’t promised her anything. No matter what she felt.
“Not yet.” He studied her for a long moment. “We have to t
alk.”
And she knew, somehow. That she didn’t want to hear whatever he was about to say. She knew. But she was paralyzed, lying there before him in the soft gloom of her bedroom with only the muted lights from the street outside to fight back the pressing darkness. It made him almost wholly shadow and that, she found, scared her most of all. As if it was some kind of confirmation.
She wanted to say something, to stop him, but she couldn’t seem to make a sound as he folded his arms over his chest and turned himself to stone.
Zair’s green eyes were hard like jade. Uncompromising. “I know what happened to your friend.”
*
Nora flinched. “What?”
Zair knew she’d heard him but he repeated himself anyway. “I know what happened to your friend. The brown-haired one.”
“Harlow.” She said it more like a mantra than a name, and then she looked at him with so much hope, so much fear. “Is she—?”
“She is alive, if that’s what you’re asking.” Zair rubbed his hand over his mouth, as if that could take the bad taste away. As if anything could. “But I’m not sure I’d call it living.”
The silence groaned out between them. And Nora, who had just given him more than he’d ever dreamed possible, shuddered as if the damp wind battering the windows really had come inside. She scraped her hair back into a stark knot and it took everything in him to keep from reaching over and taking it out again and letting her hair tumble down as it had before, untamed and delirious, the way she’d been in his arms.
She reached over and turned on her bedside lamp, sending a small bit of light spooling over her. Zair stayed where he was, in the shadows. It was like a perfect fucking metaphor. She pulled her legs up under her and then swallowed, hard. She looked beautiful beyond measure and so terribly delicate, and he still wanted her with all the greed and hunger he always did. One taste wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. He understood that. Accepted it.
But he knew it would be all he’d get. He would have to find a way to accept that, too.
“That should have been the first thing you told me.” She didn’t pretend that wasn’t an accusation. “It should have been the only thing you told me.”
“I had other things on my mind, Nora.”
She looked away then, and he felt the loss of her gaze like a physical thing. And he knew he should regret what had happened here tonight the way she clearly did—but he didn’t. He couldn’t.
“Is Harlow all right?” Nora asked, and he could hear, in the way she said it, how terrified she was of the answer.
“She’s alive,” he repeated, and Nora winced. “She’s in Ruyi.”
It took a moment for her gaze to meet his. Her clear blue eyes were solemn, and she didn’t blink. “With whom?”
He moved closer to the bed without meaning to do it, as if the pull she exerted was that hard to deny, then caught himself.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” he promised her. “But it’s a long story. And not a pleasant one.”
She smiled faintly, though it was nothing like her real smile, and that was one more cut to add to the pile of them. A scar to match the rest. What was the point of bemoaning them? Soon, he thought, they would be all he had left of her.
“You have to understand,” he said as swiftly as he could, because it wouldn’t get any easier. “My brother, the sultan, is the only family I’ve ever known.”
He told her of his sketchy memories of childhood, of being raised in the palace by various disengaged nurses whose job it was to tend to the small collection of royal bastards. The by-blows. The sons and daughters whose blood connection to the old sultan rendered them worthy of a certain elevation above the masses, but certainly not to the level of fawning attention reserved for their mighty father’s legitimate heirs.
And of the way Azhil had picked him out from the rest and taken an interest in him when no one else ever had.
“I would have done anything for him,” he said. He could feel a far greater storm inside him than the one that still carried on outside. And he couldn’t deny that there was still such a huge part of him that wanted to continue pretending it wasn’t there. “Anything he asked of me. Anything he required. And I did.”
Perhaps Zair had always understood that once he said these things out loud, once he accepted them as truths instead of suppositions thrown at him by Americans with broader agendas, there would be no taking them back. There would be no further agonizing over what to do.
The truth was the truth. Real and unmistakable. Ugly.
It was also high treason.
“I was only a year or so into my ambassadorship when I began to realize that there were too many things in too many places—intelligence reports, conversations, interactions—that didn’t make sense.” He stood straighter. Taller, as though that might help what he was about to say. Make it more palatable, somehow. “It didn’t take me long after that to discover that there was obvious human trafficking going on right under the noses of too many nations to count.”
“Sex slavery.” Her voice was rough. “Escorts and yacht girls.”
“Yes.” He wanted to touch her. He didn’t. “There was a sex trafficking ring. It was quite brazen once I knew what to look for, and one of its major ports was Ruyi.”
“Did you know about Jason Treffen? What he was doing out of his law firm?”
He sighed. “I did. But I couldn’t prove it.” He shook his head, feeling the weariness of all these years. These shitty decisions. These vicious secrets. “That is what you must understand, Nora, if nothing else. I couldn’t prove anything. I still can’t.”
She swallowed, then nodded, both too jerky, as if she wasn’t quite in control of herself.
“What made it obvious?” she asked.
He studied her for signs of revulsion or anger—but she only watched him with those summer-blue eyes of hers and he found himself talking again, as if this were easy. Safe, somehow. As if this were something he’d said out loud a hundred times before, when he’d hardly dared think it all the way through. When he’d argued against this for years, played devil’s advocate in a thousand meetings, been so sure he would find something else, someone else, at the end of this road—
But he knew where this was going. Maybe he’d always known.
“I kept getting the impression that some of the people I met—higher-level power brokers in certain cities, chief executives of particular companies, rulers of various countries—were speaking from a script they expected me to know as well as they did. But I was clueless.” He watched her face carefully, but she didn’t move so much as a muscle, because, he realized, she trusted him. Not only with her body. With all of her. Because there couldn’t really be one kind of trust without the other, could there? But he couldn’t get caught up in the implications of that, so he pushed on. “It was perhaps lucky I was raised as I was. I learned early on how to fake almost anything, how to act as if I knew all the secrets of the palace when I did not. But it happened so often, more and more the longer I was in office, that I began to think that there was only one way I could really figure out what was happening. I talked to some people I know in Washington, who work on cases like these, and I offered myself as bait. And then I found someone to convince the world I was scum.”
He saw the knowledge dawn in her blue gaze. “Zoe,” she breathed then. “She helped you pretend.”
“She is brilliant,” he agreed. “She mounted a campaign made entirely of whispers and half truths. Things almost said into the right ear. Things too quickly denied. It was a work of genius. And of course, it is no great stretch to imagine that a man in my position might be as devoid of honor, as sick and twisted, as I pretended. So many are.”
“You let her put your picture on her wall.”
He smiled slightly. “Anyone who sees that picture will conclude that I went to her to cover up my crimes, not create them. It gives it all that patina of authenticity.” He shook his head again, disgusted anew. “And then, i
n addition to understanding the subtext in some strange conversations, I started receiving invitations to the right parties.”
“And you started taking home the girls.”
“Yes.”
“And were you a martyr to your cover story?” she asked, perhaps a shade too sharply. He couldn’t quite smile.
“I picked the incapacitated ones.” His voice was a low throb, too dark and too gritty. “The low-hanging fruit. The ones who were too addled to remember what happened the next morning, so they assumed all manner of things had happened when they had not.”
For the first time since he’d started telling her this wretched tale, she paled. He thought it was the most sensible reaction she’d had yet. It also tore at him, more pieces of himself he couldn’t afford to lose. When so few remained.
“If they woke up scared and sickened, I offered them an escape,” he told her. “Not personally—that would be too risky. I would contact my partners in Washington and they would extract her a day or so later, so there could be no direct line between us. If, on the other hand, they woke up too far gone to reach, I had no choice but to let them go and tell whatever stories they liked about me when they did.”
Her head tipped forward, and he couldn’t tell if it was in relief or disgust. He told himself that hardly mattered.
“And all the while I gathered evidence. Rumor. Supposition. The ringleader of this international venture was obviously very wealthy and very smart. He was always hidden. He moved others around the globe like chess pieces, always several steps ahead. He particularly liked to center his bordellos in places no one would think to look. A law firm in New York City. A Catholic academy in Rome. Many more such places. And every clue, every scrap of information I could find, all of it led to one person.” She gazed at him expectantly, and he felt an arid thing move in him, making him feel brittle and torn asunder at once. “Me.”
That sat there for what felt like a lifetime in the space between them. Nora’s head jerked up and she stared back at him, and they were both frozen there then, in the brutal understanding of what that meant.
The Billionaire's Innocent: Zair al Ruyi (Forbidden Book 3) Page 14
