She told herself it was revulsion, because it should have been. But she could feel that ribbon of liquid heat that wrapped around her breasts and then pooled between her legs, and she knew better.
Zair’s formidable mouth flattened, and then he sank his fingers into thick spill of blond waves Nora had artfully arranged to fall down her back in seeming abandon. He wasn’t particularly gentle. Nora let out a tiny, shocked gasp that did nothing but make his green gaze narrow.
He didn’t speak for a long moment that dragged on forever, and her pulse was a wild drumming in her veins, catapulting her off balance.
“That hurts,” she managed to say, though it didn’t.
It should have hurt, shouldn’t have it? But instead that small sharpness bled into something like need, and she craved it. More. Him.
She despaired of herself.
“No,” he said, calm and certain. Lethal. “It doesn’t.”
“Zair—” she began, but he only increased the pressure. That sharpness bloomed and the need became a driving, pounding thing that made her feel bright and hot and very nearly desperate.
And Zair was tilting her head back, bringing her mouth that much closer to his, showing off his brute strength to the whole of the yacht, displaying her before him like property.
Like his property.
Nora told herself she loathed the part of her that thrilled to that—to all of it. The part that didn’t care where they were or what all of this meant or who was watching or what might happen next. The part that wanted him the same way she’d always wanted him, no matter that she’d decided to hate him after he’d rejected her six years ago or that her friends thought he was the bad guy or what nasty truths she’d discovered about him tonight.
Someday, she thought, she’d loathe herself for that in earnest. But tonight she needed to survive him so that tomorrow, she could keep hunting for Harlow.
“The first rule is this, especially in public,” he said, in a low, measured voice that was his and not his. Gone was the warmth, the life that usually infused his rich baritone and that vaguely British intonation of his. The hint of his dry humor. This version of his voice was darkly patient. Menacing and yet calm at once, and it should have chilled her straight through. Instead it moved in Nora like an open flame, and maybe he wasn’t the sick one here. “Don’t speak to me unless I tell you to speak or ask you a direct question. Whatever leeway I give you—and I don’t know that I’ll give you any, I don’t care how long I’ve known you—will happen in private.”
“You can’t be serious.”
He laughed, and it swept through her like a bewildering kind of wildfire, and only partly because there was so little amusement in the sound. He dragged her closer to him with that merciless hand buried deep in her hair and no other change in his intent expression, and Nora told herself she was acting when she went. When she didn’t protest. When she did nothing but obey the simple command of the pressure he exerted.
But her body wasn’t performing any role. She couldn’t fake her reaction to being close to him at last—and she couldn’t control it, either. Her breasts brushed against the hard planes of his chest and felt deliciously heavy at once, her nipples pulling taut and needy. An answering heat rushed through her, pooling in the core of her, making her feel wild and dirty. Making her hate herself even as she longed for him the way she always had.
“Do you understand?”
It was the perfectly calm way he asked that question that got to her, despite the cruel hand that held her captive and that she should have found as reprehensible as if he’d chained her up.
But instead, it made her throat go dry. It made the rest of her turn molten and run wild. It made her wonder if there was anything that could make her stop wanting this man. Any depravity. Any crime. Anything at all.
She didn’t want to know the answer.
Because she already did. And she could see, from that same knowing gleam in his fierce green gaze, that he did, too.
“I understand,” she whispered.
He traced a pattern over her cheek with his free hand, as light against her skin as his other hand was hard against her scalp, and the dual sensations buffeted her, pulling at her and destroying her, as if he’d taken over her body without her permission.
And she liked it. How could she like it?
“Good girl,” he murmured, and God help her, but she liked that, too.
And then Zair simply bent down, jerked her that last little bit closer, and slammed his mouth to hers.
It was a hot, stark, possessive kiss.
Fire roared through her, setting off a thousand chain reactions in an annihilating instant, an explosion of light and yes and finally and a brilliant, devastating thing she suspected was pure passion.
Nora felt Zair’s hard, dangerous mouth everywhere. In the tips of her painted toenails. In the weakness that made her knees feel suddenly precarious beneath her. In her hands that rose of their own accord and flattened against the glorious planes of his chest at last.
It was the culmination of more than a decade of intense, vivid fantasies, and Nora couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t fight this. She couldn’t fight him.
Worse, she didn’t want to fight him.
Zair kissed her as though he’d done it a thousand times before, as though he were already deep inside of her, as though this wasn’t a first kiss at all, and Nora simply exulted in it. There was nothing but his mouth and hers, the delirious tangle of their tongues, the taste and the feel and that power he wore so easily all around her.
There was no thought, no panic, no terrible worry, no fear of exposure—nothing but Zair.
He was all heat and steel beneath her palms, but his mouth was hotter by far. He tasted like desire, like a little bit of wine and something indefinably, intriguingly male. She kissed him as if they might never touch again, as if this were the first and last and only time she’d ever get to taste him.
She kissed him as if it were her heart on the line, when she knew better. He’d broken it six years ago when he could have been kind, but had instead been cruel. He’d broken it when he’d walked onto this yacht tonight. When he’d revealed himself.
Her head was spinning when he pulled away, and she already regretted it. The abandon, the need. The fact that she’d let him touch her at all, much less here.
The fact that she didn’t want to stop. That she didn’t care how many people were watching or what they thought of her. That this was a betrayal of her best friend.
Zair eased his grip in her hair but he didn’t back up; he only stared down at her with a faint hint of heat across his high cheekbones and that narrow green glare of his that made her ache, low and hot and sweet.
But then she remembered where they were, and her stomach sank.
Nora dropped her hands and would have stepped away from him, put some much-needed distance between them at last—but something in
