him like electricity. She folded her arms over her chest and he watched that belligerent chin of hers tilt up. “How do you want to fuck?”
For a long moment, Zair simply froze solid while red-hot images chased each other through his head. But then he felt his pulse, hard and insistent, drumming through him. She shouldn’t have been here at all, but she was. And for once, he simply acted.
He stalked toward her, taking a deep satisfaction in the way her eyes widened. He knew she wasn’t as cool or collected as she apparently wanted to pretend. He could read it in the way she held herself, the way she reacted—a man with his preferences and years of martial arts training learned how to read the signals a woman showed with every inch of her body.
But it had been a long night even before he’d made it to that yacht, and she was the last person he’d expected to see when he got there. And if she wanted to play this game with him, Zair didn’t think he had it in him to refuse.
He didn’t try.
“Right here?” she asked when he was nearly upon her, her eyes dark and wary, and that scratchy note in her voice that he thought was more than a little bit of panic. If he were a better man, he might not have reveled in it. “Right in front of the windows?”
“Wherever the hell I want,” he growled at her. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”
And then he indulged himself, at last.
They weren’t in public anymore. He didn’t have to play his stomach-churning role and make certain he looked the part as he sought his own pleasure. He swept her to him, capturing her mouth with his and letting his hands roam where they pleased. At last. From her soft cheeks to her satiny shoulders, then down the tantalizing, bared curve of her back. He finally found her hips, and he soaked in their lush shape for a moment before he hauled her up against the hardest part of him.
And then he let himself go.
He kissed her the way a dying man might, and he hadn’t understood until that moment how very much he felt as if he really were dying. As if he already had. As if the Zair al Ruyi he’d been all those years ago had ceased to exist when he’d decided to build this new persona, the better to flush out his quarry. When he’d decided he had no other choice.
She tasted as bright and as beautiful as she looked, and Zair wanted to lose himself inside her more than he wanted anything else. More, in that moment, than he wanted the truth and the justice that he’d been seeking all these years.
More.
He kissed her until he thought he might lose his iron grip on himself and even then, when he pulled away, he was so hard it nearly hurt.
And she looked up at him, dazed and wild, her sweet mouth ajar and her breath coming in little pants, and it took everything Zair had not to simply pick her up, wrap her legs around his hips, and sink deep inside her where they stood. She was a slight thing, for all her height, and it would hardly take—
She blinked as if she were the one who could read him. She licked her lips, and when he let out a rough sound at the sight, her blue eyes flew to his.
And then he watched her remember the game she played tonight. He saw that wall of hers come down, hard, and his hands tightened where they were still buried in her hair.
“You need to pay me first,” she said, coarse and sharp.
He felt as if she’d slapped him. He imagined that was the point. He let go of her, stepping back to put space between them and to keep himself under control. He saw the way she tilted back her head, as if she was bracing for his temper.
As if that was exactly what she wanted.
Because, he realized then, she thought he really was the kind of monster he’d pretended to be all this time. She saw only the mask he wore. She thought he was the mask, exactly as he’d wanted her to think. Exactly as he’d wanted everyone to think.
There was absolutely no reason that he should feel that like some kind of grand betrayal. It wasn’t. And he opted not to ask himself why he felt something far too much like grief besides. As if a silly crush a spoiled little girl like this one had had on him throughout her adolescence should have meant something. He knew it didn’t.
Instead of giving her the show of temper she was courting, he reached into his jacket and pulled out the envelope he’d stashed there. It was stuffed full of euros and her eyes widened, as if she hadn’t expected that. Perhaps she wasn’t entirely sure if he was his mask or not.
He held it out, yet didn’t hand it to her.
“You can have it,” he told her. “But it’s not a donation. You’ll have to work for it.”
Zair watched her pale. And he was a lost cause, a twisted creature all the way through, because he liked it, for all kinds of reasons. Chief among them, the fact that she didn’t back down, pale as she’d become. How far would she take this?
“Is there a problem?” he asked, calm again. Cool, while she stared back at him with wide, worried eyes, and he liked that, too. “Because surely you must know this, Nora. This is what hookers do.”
* * *
Nora opened her mouth to automatically object to him calling her a hooker—but caught herself in the nick of time.
Tonight, she was a hooker. It was easier to keep that in mind when she was the one saying the kinds of crass, come-hither-with-cash things she imagined hookers might say. It was a lot harder when Zair did it. It veered a little bit too close to a host of shameful, hurtful feelings she’d assured herself she was immune from because she had reasons for doing this. Because it wasn’t a choice she was making, it was a mission.
This isn’t about you, she reminded herself then. Fiercely. Or him. Or whatever happens here.
“Of course,” she said, forcing that calm note into her voice. She held out her hand and his mouth twitched slightly as he slapped the envelope into her palm. “We can do whatever you want, Zair. Just tell me what that is and we’ll get going.”
There was something different about the way he was looking at her, something she might have called indulgent in a more optimistic frame of mind, but she told herself she was imagining it.
That kiss had rocked her. She could still feel it, everywhere, as if he’d changed the chemistry of her body and she was something different now, something new. She’d thought kissing him on that yacht was hard enough, mind-blowing and insane. Here, all alone, with the sparkling lights of the beautiful French Riviera gleaming down below and a mess of stars above, it had been like throwing herself off the side of the nearest cliff.
She wasn’t certain she’d landed yet.
But she couldn’t let herself think too much. She’d decided in the car ride on the winding roads that led up into these hills that she had to concentrate on getting through this night with him, and that was all. She couldn’t let her age-old fantasies about this man confuse the issue.
And if she had to have sex with him to prove she was the whore she was pretending to be, well, she could do that. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t wanted to sleep with him for years. Maybe if she closed her eyes, she could convince herself that this was all romantic, somehow.
