“I won’t ask what you think you’re doing here,” she said in a low, controlled voice. But he could see the spark of interest in her eyes.
“By all means, ask.” He dared her, arching his brows and leaning closer, crowding her. He liked the lick of fire that scraped across his skin when he was near her. He wanted more. “I am more than happy to explain it to you. I can even demonstrate, if you prefer.” She did not step away, though her color deepened.
“I don’t want to know how you justify your behavior,” she retorted. She tilted her chin into the air. “We have nothing to discuss.”
“You could have told me this on the doorstep,” he pointed out softly. “Why did you invite me into your home if we have nothing to discuss?”
She looked incredulous. “Had I refused to answer the door, or to let you in, what would you have done?”
Tariq only smiled. Did she realize she’d conceded a weakness?
“This game will not last long if you already know I will win it,” he said. His smile deepened. “Or perhaps you do not wish for it to last very long?”
“The only person playing a game here is you,” Jessa retorted.
She put the photograph back on the mantel and then crossed her arms over her chest as she faced him. He moved closer. He stretched one arm out along the mantel and shifted so that they were nearly pressed together, held back only by this breath, or the next. She stood her ground, though he could see it cost her in the pink of her cheeks, hear it in the rasp of her breath. He was close enough to touch her, but he refrained. Barely. He could see her pulse hammer against the side of her neck. It was almost unfair, he thought with a primal surge of very male satisfaction, that he could use her body against her in this way. Almost.
“You keep testing me, Jessa,” he whispered. “What if I am no match for it? Who knows what might happen if I lose control?”
“Very funny,” she threw back at him, her spine straight though Tariq could tell she wanted to bolt. Instead, she scoffed at him. “When is the last time that happened? Has it ever happened?”
Unbidden, memories teased at him, of Jessa sprawled across the bed in his long-ago Mayfair flat, her naked limbs flushed and abandoned beneath him. He remembered the rich, sweet scent of her perfume, her unrestrained smile. The low roll of her delighted laughter, the kind that started in her belly and radiated outward, encompassing them both. The lush swell of her breasts in his hands, her woman’s heat against his tongue. And the near-violent need in him for her, like claws in his gut, that nothing could satiate.
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
