of turn?” She smirked at him and wished she felt as bulletproof as she sounded. “I suppose you’ll have to punish me, won’t you?”
Zair didn’t appear to move so much as an inch, but she sensed his tension grow. She could feel it expand on all sides, like a force field, enveloping both of them.
“Out of curiosity,” he said in a friendly tone that she knew at once was nothing of the sort, so cold was it when it streaked down her back and left a shiver of goose bumps in its wake, “how long have you been renting yourself out? I saw you not three weeks ago at that tedious art exhibit at MOMA and you looked as you always do. Young, excitable, and distinctly vanilla. You can understand my confusion to find you here, in this squalid little den of iniquity a world away from your charities and your tea parties and whatever the hell it is you do.”
Nora didn’t rise to the bait. She reminded herself that there was more at stake tonight than her feelings or her life choices, and then she crooked her lips in the sort of crafty, self-satisfied smile she imagined she ought to have been wearing. “I told you a long time ago that I was up for anything. Maybe you’re not as good at reading people as you think.”
“Unlikely.” He watched her much too closely, a muscle she’d never seen before at work in the lean perfection of his faintly shadowed jaw. “In my line of work it doesn’t pay to be wrong. I rarely am.”
“What line of work is that, again? The ambassadorial efforts on behalf of your brother or the diplomatic immunity you can hide behind while breaking, for example, the many international laws against patronizing prostitutes?”
That muscle of his jumped again, making his jaw seem that much more male, somehow. Then his mouth moved into something so hard it made her stomach flip over, before plummeting straight down to her feet.
“Does Hunter know?” he asked.
That was meant to be a blow, she thought. She didn’t know why it wasn’t. It was that kiss, maybe. It was still running through her like a lightning storm. She let her smile deepen into a smirk.
“That’s an excellent question, Zair. I don’t think he’s a huge fan of the sex trade, especially with everything that’s happened this year. Pimps and sex rings and so on. Do you think he knows his best friend likes to pay for it, too?”
Which, all things considered, would be the very best outcome of this, Nora realized—and that was when she knew that she was truly sick. Truly, deeply, irrevocably. That her pathetic teenage obsession with this man’s physical beauty had made her as twisted as he was, if she was actually hopeful that he only bought sex.
Because buying sex was better than masterminding an international sex trafficking ring.
You need help, she told herself harshly. Desperately. The Zair you thought you knew is dead. He never existed in the first place.
His mouth shifted into something much too dangerous to be a smile.
“What makes you think he doesn’t pay for it himself?”
Nora didn’t have to consider that appalling possibility. “Because Hunter is many things, but he’s never been a hypocrite.” She met his eyes. “Unlike some.”
“Is that what you think I am?” Zair’s voice was lazy then, but she could see that harsh light in the depths of his green gaze. That muscle that still flexed in his lean jaw. He’s acting, she thought, confused. But for whose benefit? And he was still talking. “I told you exactly who I was six years ago. You didn’t listen. And now here you are, at my mercy.”
Chapter Two
SHE DIDN’T BELONG here.
Zair al Ruyi had been surprised very rarely in the last few years, since the day he’d realized his entire life was a lie. Once on a terrace in Manhattan when this golden, gleaming emblem of all the things he couldn’t have had offered herself to him, as if she were entirely unaware that he was a twisted, terrible man. Broken and unworthy. He’d refused her because it had been the right thing to do, and back then that had still mattered. Barely.
And then tonight, when he’d looked up to see Nora sitting on a couch in the middle of this hellhole.
This time he wasn’t going to refuse her, and he didn’t care if it was right or wrong. She didn’t belong here, but she was here anyway, and it didn’t matter why. He had to play the game.
Which meant she did, too.
Zair didn’t believe for a second that Nora Grant, of all people, had been seized with a sudden desire to whore herself out like that infamous redhead the host had said she’d come in with, who was known to have a vast trust fund she couldn’t touch before her fortieth birthday and a very deep fondness for the extreme side of things.
That wasn’t Nora’s style. Not pretty, satisfied, confident Nora, who sailed merrily through a life as gleaming and shallow as she was. There was no fucking way.
“How did you end up here?” he asked her. He shifted slightly so he could look out at the rest of the party. It was the same as it always was. Flesh and power. Money and lies. It was as old as time, it was abrading him unto his very soul, and tonight he felt the bleakness of this path he’d taken like a great, suffocating weight on his chest.
Not that it mattered, either. He was in too deep to get out now.
“I took a boat,” Nora replied tartly, and he slid his attention back to her. To those huge blue eyes of hers that a man could get lost in, if he were to allow himself such weaknesses, which Zair could not. “It was that or swim.”
He had the sudden image of her in the same frothy peach-colored dress she was wearing now, but soaking wet, the material transparent and clinging to the breasts he’d finally felt pressed up against him and those sleek hips of hers his hands itched to touch, to hold, to pull hard and flush against his own—
Enough.
He couldn’t let himself forget where they were or why he was doing this. There were too many eyes on him—and now on Nora, too, which made him want to break things. If he could have thrown every one of these revolting people off this boat and torn the rest of it to shreds with his own hands, he would have. Hell, he would have done it years ago. Instead, he smiled at the woman who gazed up at him, the woman who shouldn’t have been here and shouldn’t have tasted so good, either, and kept playing the game.
Always the goddamned game.
“You’ve wanted me for years,” he murmured, watching her lovely eyes darken. “Haven’t you?”
“I got over that,” she told him, but he could hear the huskiness in her voice. And he could see the fascination in her gaze that doomed her. “I had a crush on Justin Timberlake, too, with about the same amount of success.”
Zair felt cruel. He felt wild. And he knew exactly how he’d like to solve both of those problems—but he knew he couldn’t indulge himself. This was his best friend’s little sister, and no matter that Hunter had spent his life as a professional fuckup knee-deep in women and scandal, he still wouldn’t appreciate a man like Zair anywhere near his baby sister. But more than that, Zair knew—he knew—that no matter what, no matter the hint of a certain intriguing vulnerability he saw in
