He didn’t understand all the ways he wanted her. He only knew that she had burrowed into him, and he had never been able to escape her, waking or sleeping. She was his own personal ghost. She haunted him even now, standing so close to him and yet still so far away.
He looked away from her for a moment, fighting for control. She took that as a response.
“Exactly,” she said as if she’d uncovered a salient truth. “You are not capable of losing control. No doubt, that serves you well as a king.”
Tariq turned his head and found her watching him, color high on her cheeks and her cinnamon-brown eyes bright. Did she mean to insult him? Tariq did not know. But he did know that he was more than a match for her. There was one arena where he held all the power, and both of them knew it.
“You misunderstand me,” he murmured. He reached over and slid his hand around the back of her neck, cupping the delicate flesh against his hard palm and feeling the weight of her thick, copper curls. She jumped, then struggled to conceal it, but it was too late. He could feel her pulse wild and insistent against his fingers, and he could see the way her mouth fell open, as if she was dazed.
He did not doubt that she did not want to want him. He had not forgotten the days she had disappeared, which had been shockingly unusual for a girl who had always before been at his beck and call, just as he had not forgotten his own panicked response to her unexpected unavailability, something he might have investigated further had history and tragedy not intervened. But there was no point digging into such murky waters, especially when he did not know what he would find there. What mattered was that she still wanted him. He could feel it with his hands, see it in the flush of her skin and the heat in her gaze.
“Tariq—” she began.
“Please,” he murmured, astounded to hear his own voice. Astonished that he, Sheikh Tariq bin Khaled Al-Nur, would beg. For anything, or any reason. And yet he continued. “I just want to talk.”
Was he so toothless, neutered and tame? But he could not seem to stop himself. He had to see this through, and then, finally, be rid of her once and for all. If there was another way, he would have tried it already. He had tried it already!
“About us.”
Us. He’d actually said the word us.
The word ricocheted through Jessa’s mind, leaving marks, much like she suspected his hand might do if he didn’t take it off her—if she didn’t burst into flame and burn alive from the slight contact.
As if there had ever been an us in the first place!
“You have to get on with your life,” her sister Sharon had told her, not unkindly, about two weeks after everything had come to such a messy, horrible end in London and Jessa had retreated to York. Crawled back, more like, still holding the secret of her pregnancy close to her chest, unable to voice the terrifying truth to anyone, even her sister. And all while Tariq’s face was on every television set as the tragedy in Nur unfolded before the world. The sisters had sat together in Jessa’s small bedroom while Sharon delivered her version of comfort. It was brisk and unsentimental, as Sharon had always been herself.
“I don’t know what that means,” Jessa had said from the narrow bed that had been hers as a girl, when Sharon had taken the reins after their parents died within eighteen months of each other. Eight years older, Sharon and her husband Barry had taken over the house and, to some extent, the parenting of Jessa, while they tried and failed to start their own family.
“It means you need to get your head out of the clouds,” Sharon had said matter-of-factly. “You’ve had an adventure, Jessa, and that’s more than some people ever get. But you can’t lie about wallowing in the past forever.”
Tariq hadn’t felt like the past to Jessa. Or even an adventure. Even after everything that had happened—after losing her job, her career, her self-respect; after finding herself pregnant and her lover an unreachable liar, however little she might have come to terms with that—she still yearned for him. He’d felt like a heart that beat with hers, louder and more vibrant inside her chest than her own, and the thought of the gray, barren life she was expected to live without him was almost more than she could bear. She had choked back a sob.
“Men like him are fantasies,” Sharon had said, with no little pity. “They’re not meant for the likes of you or me. Did you imagine he’d sweep you off to his castle and make you his queen? You, little Jessa Heath of Fulford? You always did fancy yourself something special. But you’ve had your bit of fun and now it’s time to be realistic, isn’t it?”
Jessa had had no choice but to be realistic, she thought now. But Tariq was back and there was far too much at stake, and she still couldn’t think straight while he touched her. And he wanted to talk about us, of all things.
“There is no us,” she said crisply, as if she was not melting, as if she was still in control. She met his gaze squarely. “I’m not sure there ever was. I’ve no idea what game you thought you were playing.”
“I have a proposition for you,” he said calmly, as if what she’d said was of no matter. He lounged back against the mantelpiece, letting his hand move from her skin slowly. He was every inch the indolent monarch.
“It is barely half-nine and here you are propositioning me,” Jessa replied, determined to get her balance back. She kept her voice dry, amused. Sophisticated, the way she imagined the glamorous women he was used to would speak to him when he propositioned them. “Why am I not surprised?”
If her heart beat faster and her skin felt overheated, and she could still feel his hand on her like a tattoo, she ignored it.
“Am I so predictable?” His hard face looked cast in iron in the low gloom from the front windows. And yet Jessa sensed that the real shadows came from within him.
She stood ramrod straight because she could not allow herself to move, to back away from him. She thought it would show too much, be too much of a concession. She laced her fingers together in front of her as tightly as possible.
“It is not a question of whether or not you are—or were—predictable,” she said coolly. She raised her eyebrows in unmistakable challenge. “Perhaps you were simply like any other man when things got too serious. Afraid.”
He stilled. The temperature in the room seemed to plunge. Jessa’s heart stuttered to a halt. She knew, suddenly, that she was in greater danger from him in that moment than ever before. Something dark moved across his face, and then he bared his teeth in something far too wild to be a smile.
“Proceed with care, Jessa,” he advised her in a soft voice that sent a chill snaking down her spine. “Not many people would dare call a king a coward to his face.”
“I am merely calling a spade a spade,” Jessa replied, as if she did not have a knot of trepidation in her stomach, as if she was not aware that she was throwing pebbles at a lion. She shook the loose tendrils of her hair back from her face, wishing her curls did not take every opportunity to defy her. “You were not yet a king when you ran away, were you?”
“Ran away?” he echoed, enunciating each word as if he could not quite comprehend her meaning.
“What would you call it?” she asked coolly. Calmly. She even smiled, as if they shared a joke. “Adults typically have conversations with each other when an affair is ending, don’t they? It’s called common courtesy, at the very least.”
“Again,” he said, too quietly, “you have forgotten the sequence of events. You were the one who disappeared into thin air.” He stood so still, yet reminded Jessa not of a statue, but of a coiled snake ready to strike. Yet she couldn’t seem to back down.
“I merely failed to answer my mobile for two days,” Jessa replied lightly. “That’s not quite the same thing as quitting the country altogether, is it?”
“It is not as if I was on holiday, sunning myself on the Amalfi Coast!” Tariq retorted.
Jessa shook her head at him. “It hardly matters now,” she said carelessly, as if her heart hadn’t been broken once upon a time. “I’m only suggesting that perh
aps it was a convenient excuse, that’s all. An easy way out.”
Tariq was so still it was as if he’d turned to stone. He studied her as if he had never seen her before. She had the sudden, uncomfortable notion that he was assessing her as he might an enemy combatant on the field of battle, and was coldly scanning her for her weaknesses. Her soft points.
And all the while that awareness swirled around them, making everything seem sharper, brighter.
“I will not explode into some dramatic temper tantrum, if that is your goal with these attacks,” Tariq said finally, never looking away from her. She felt her cheeks heat, whether in relief or some stronger emotion, she didn’t know. “I will not rage and carry on, though you question my honor and insult my character.” His hard mouth hinted at a curve, flirted with it. “There are better ways to make my feelings known.”
She refused to feel the heat that washed through her. She would not accept it. The tightness in her belly was agitation, worry, nothing more. But the desperate, purely feminine part of her that still wanted him, that thirsted for his touch in ways she could not allow herself to picture, knew better.
“What, then?” she demanded, unable to pull her gaze from his. What was this intoxicating fire that burned between them, making her ask questions she knew she did not want the answers to? “What is your damned proposition?”
“One night.” He said it so easily, yet with that unmistakably sensual edge underneath.
Somewhere deep inside, she shuddered, and the banked fire she wanted to deny existed flared into a blaze.
His gaze seemed to see into her, to burn through her.
“That is all, Jessa. That is what I want from you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
TARIQ’S words echoed in the space between them, bald and naked and challenging. Jessa swallowed. He saw her hands tremble, and a kind of triumph moved through him. She could not control what would happen. Perhaps she even knew it. But she did not back down. She still thought she could fight him. It made him want her all the more.
He knew, even if she did not, that she was going to end this confrontation in his bed. Beneath him, astride him, on her knees before him—he didn’t care. He only knew that he would win, and not only because he always won. But because he would accept no other outcome, not with this woman. Not when she had been in his head for all these years.
Because he already knew how this would end, he could be patient. He could wait. He could even let her fight him, if she wished it. What would it matter? It would only make it that much better in the end.
“I don’t want to misunderstand you again,” she said after a long moment. She searched his face, her own carefully blank.
He realized that he liked this grown-up, self-assured version of Jessa. He liked that she stood up to him, that she was mysterious, that she was neither easily read nor easily intimidated. When was the last time anyone had defied him?
“One night of what?” she asked.
“Of whatever I want,” he said softly, pouring seduction into every syllable. “Whatever I ask.”
“Be specific, Tariq,” she said, an edge to her voice. He interpreted it as desire she would have preferred not to feel.
“As you wish,” he murmured. He leaned toward her, pleased with the way she jerked back, startled, and the way her breath came too quickly. “I want you in my bed. Or on the floor. Or up against the wall. Or all of the above. Is that specific enough?”
“No!” She threw one hand into the air as if to hold him back, but it was too late for that. Tariq moved closer and leaned toward her, until her outstretched palm pressed up against his chest. Her hand was the only point of contact between them, her fingers trembling in the hollow between the hard planes of his pectoral muscles.
She did not drop her hand. He did not lean back.
“No, what?” he asked with soft, sensual menace. “No, you do not wish to give me that night? Or no, you do not want to hear how I will sink inside you, making you clench and moan and—”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” She whispered the words, but her eyes glazed with heat and something else, and the hand she held between them had softened into a caress, touching him rather than holding him off.
“It is many things,” Tariq said in a low voice, “but it is not ridiculous.”
He took her hand in his and, never looking away from her, raised her wrist to his lips. He tasted her, her skin like the finest silk, and her pulse beneath it, fluttering out her excitement, her distress. It was like wine and it went to his head, knocking into him with dizzying force.
She made some sound, as if she meant to speak. Perhaps she did, and he could not hear her over the roaring in his ears, his blood, his sudden hardness. He had not expected the surge of lust so sharp and consuming. It barreled through his body from their single point of contact, making him burn. Making him want.
It was worse now that he touched her, now that he was before her, than it had been when he only remembered. Much worse.
“I want you out of my system,” he told her, his voice urgent and deep. Commanding, because he meant it more than he had just moments before. Because he was desperate. He needed a queen and he needed heirs, and she was what kept him from doing that duty. He had to erase the hold she had on him! “Once and for all. I want one night.”
One night.
Jessa stared at Tariq in shock for a moment, as the impossible words shimmered between them like heat. The breathtaking strength of his hard chest against her palm made her whole arm ache, and the ache radiated through her, kicking up brushfires everywhere it touched. Her mind could not seem to process what he’d said, but her body had no such difficulty. She felt her breasts swell in reaction, her nipples hardening into tight, nearly painful points that she was grateful he couldn’t possibly see beneath the wool sweater she’d thrown on earlier. Between her legs, she ached, even as her body readied itself for him. Awareness, thick and heavy and intoxicating, thrummed through her. She was electric.
And he was watching her.
Jessa could no longer bear his proximity. And why was she still touching him? Why had she let the moment draw out? No longer caring that he might see it as a victory—only needing space between them—she snatched her hand away from the heat of his body and moved to the other side of the room. There was only her coffee table between them when she stopped, but it was something. It made her feel slightly less hysterical, slightly less likely to pretend the past five years had never happened and fling herself into his arms. How had she lost control of herself so quickly?
“I beg your pardon,” she began in her stiffest, most formal tone.
“Do you?” he interrupted her, leaning so nonchalantly against her mantel, so big and dark and terrifying, with all of that disconcerting, green-eyed attention focused intently upon her. He was like her own personal fallen angel, come to take her even further into the abyss. She had to remember why she could not let him. “Do not beg my pardon when there are so many more interesting things you could beg me for.”
He was so seductive even when she knew better. Or perhaps it was only that she was so susceptible and weak where he was concerned. She could feel his hands on her, though he had not moved. Her palm itched with the need to soothe itself against the steellike muscles of his chest once more. How could her body want him, still? She had been so sure she was over him, finally. She had been certain of it. She had even, recently, begun to imagine a future in which Tariq was not the shadow over her life, but a bittersweet memory.
“You must be joking,” she said, because that was what she might say if her body wasn’t staging a full-scale revolt—if, in fact, she felt as she ought to feel toward this man. It had taken her five years to get over him once. What would it be like a second time? It didn’t bear considering.
“I assure you, I have no sense of humor at all where you are concerned,” he said.
Somehow, she believed him. And yet there was a certain gleam in his dark eyes that convinced her she was bette
r off not knowing exactly what he meant by that remark.
“Then you are insane,” she declared. “I would no more spend one night with you then I would prance naked down Parliament Street!”
As she heard it echo around her lounge, it occurred to her that a wise woman might not have used the word naked in front of this man, in defiance of this man. Tariq did not seem to move, and yet at the same time he seemed to grow larger. Taller, darker, more. As if he blocked all the exits and kept her chained where she stood, all because he willed it. How did he do such a thing? Had he always been so effortlessly irresistible? In her memories, he had taken over every room he had ever entered with the sheer force of his magnetism, but she had supposed that to be her own infatuation at play, not anything he did himself.
“What I mean,” she said when he simply studied her in that hawkish, blood-stirring way that made her mouth go dry and made her wonder if she might be more his prey than she knew, than she wanted to know. “What I mean is that of course I will not spend a night with you. There is far too much water under the bridge. I’m surprised you would ask.”
“Are you?” He looked supremely unconcerned. Imperial. A brow arched. “I did not ask.”
Of course he had not actually asked. Because he was the King of Nur. He did not need to ask. He needed only to incline his head and whatever he desired was flung at his feet, begging for the chance to serve him. Hadn’t she done the same five years ago?
He had no more than glanced at her across the busy office that fateful day and Jessa had been his. Just like that. It had been that immediate and all-consuming. She had not even waited for him to approach her. As if she was a moth drawn inexplicably and inexorably to the flame that would be the death of her, she had risen to her feet and then walked toward him without so much as a thought, without even excusing herself from the conversation she was taking part in. She had no memory of moving, or choosing to go to him. He had merely looked at her with his dark sorcerer’s eyes and she had all but thrown herself at him.
Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir Page 4
