And what she wanted was the one last night she’d never had. She wanted to say her goodbyes—and it didn’t hurt that in giving him one night, in taking it for herself, she was acknowledging that it could never be more than that between them. This was a memory, nothing more.
“I will give you one night,” she said, before she lost her nerve. And then it was said, and there was no taking it back.
He froze. His face lost all expression, though his dark eyes glittered with jade fire. She had surprised him. Good.
“I beg your pardon?” he asked, enunciating each word very carefully, as if he thought he had misheard her, somehow. It made Jessa feel bolder. “What do you mean?”
“Must I repeat myself?” she asked, taking too much pleasure in tossing his own words back at him. She felt the power of this choice surge through her. She was the one in charge. She was the one who decided whether or not she would burn on this particular fire. And then she would walk away and finally be done with him. It would be like being reborn. “I don’t recall you being so slow—”
“You must forgive me,” he interrupted her with precious little civility, his teeth bared in something not at all as mild as a smile. “But why would you change your mind so suddenly?”
“Maybe I’ve considered things in a different light,” Jessa said. Did she have to explain this to him, when she could hardly explain it to herself? She raised her brows. “Maybe I’m interested in the same things that you’re interested in. Putting the past behind us, once and for all.”
“For old time’s sake?” he asked. He moved closer, his big body seeming to block out the City of Lights. Tension radiated from every part of him, and she knew she should be afraid of what he could do to her, what he could make her feel. She knew she should feel intimidated, outmatched once again.
But this was the one place where it didn’t matter if he was a king and she a commoner. He wanted her with the same unwelcome intensity that she wanted him. In this, at least, they were equals. They matched.
She felt her mouth curve slightly into a smile that was as old as time, and spoke of a knowledge she had never put into words before, never felt so completely, down into her bones.
“What do you care?” she taunted him softly, daring him, challenging him.
His eyes went darker, his mouth almost grim with the passion she could feel surging through her veins.
“You are right,” he said, his voice hoarse, and rough against her, though she welcomed it. Exulted in it. “I do not care at all.”
His mouth came down on hers in something like fury, though it was much sweeter. Once again, he tasted her and went wild, and yet he merely kissed her, angling his head to better plumb the depths of her mouth, to intoxicate himself with her, with the feel of her soft body pressed against his. Her softness to his hardness. Her moan against his lips.
He had been prepared to seduce her if he had to. He had not been prepared for her to be the aggressor, and the surprise of it had desire raging through him.
“Be certain this is what you want,” he growled, lifting his head and scanning her expression with fierce intensity. Her eyes were glazed with passion, her lips swollen from his kisses. Surely this would put an end to all the madness, all the nights he’d woken and reached for the phantom woman who was never there.
“Have I asked you to stop?” she asked, her breath uneven, her tone pure bravado. She tilted her stubborn chin into the air. “If you’ve changed your mind—”
“I am not the one who required so many games to achieve this goal,” he reminded her, passion making his voice harsh. “I made my proposal from the start, hiding nothing.”
“It is up to you,” she said, her eyes narrowing in a maddening, challenging manner, her words infused with a certain strength he didn’t understand. Who did Jessa Heath think she was that she so consistently, so foolishly, stood up to him, all the while refusing to tell him anything about her life, claiming she could only bore him? He could not recall the last person who had defied, much less taunted, him. Only Jessa dared.
A warning bell rang somewhere deep inside of him, but he ignored it.
“You will find that most things are, in fact, up to me,” he replied, reminding them both that he, not she, was the one in charge, no matter how conciliatory he might act when it suited him.
He was a king. He might not have been born to the position, and he might have spent the better part of his life as an embarrassment to the man who had been, but he’d spent the past five years of his life atoning. He was in every way the monarch his uncle would have wished him to be, the nephew he should have been while his uncle lived. No imprudent and foolish woman could change that, not even this one, whom he realized he regarded as a kind of specter from his wastrel past. He would never fully put that past behind him until he put her there, too.
Jessa reached out her hand and placed it against his cheek. Tariq’s mind went suddenly, scorchingly, blank as electricity surged between them.
“We can talk, if that is what you want,” she said, as calmly as if discussing the evening’s dinner menu. As unaffected, though he could feel the slight tremor in her delicate palm that belied her tone. “But it is not what I want.”
“And what is it you want?”
“I do not want to talk,” she said distinctly, purposefully, holding his gaze, her own rich with suggestion and the desire he was certain was written all over him. “And I don’t think you want to, either. Do you?”
“Ah, Jessa,” he said on a sigh, while a kind of moody triumph pumped through him and pulsed hard and long into his sex. She thought she was a match for him, did she? She would learn. And soon enough he would have her exactly where he wanted her. “You should not challenge me.”
She cocked her head to one side, not cowed in the least, with the light of battle in her cinnamon eyes, and smiled.
It went directly to his head, his groin. He reached for her without thought, without anything at all but need, and pulled her into his arms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS not enough. Her taste, her scent, her mouth beneath his and her hands tracing beguiling patterns down his chest. He wanted more.
“I want to taste you,” he whispered in Arabic, and she shuddered as if she could understand him.
He wanted everything. Her surrender. Her artless, unstudied passion. The past back where it belonged, and left there.
But most of all, he wanted her naked.
Tariq raked his fingers into her hair, never lifting his mouth from hers, sending her hairpins flying and clattering against the heavy stones at their feet. Her heavy mass of copper curls tumbled from the sophisticated twist at the back of her head and fell in a jasmine-scented curtain around her, wild and untamed, just as he wanted her. Just as he would have her.
He lifted his mouth from hers and took a moment to study her face. Why should he spend even an hour obsessing over this woman? She was no great beauty, like some of the women he had been linked with in the past. Her face would never grace the covers of magazines nor appear on twelve-foot-high
