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“I didn’t make you up, then,” Jessa said in as even a tone as she could manage. She wanted to order him to leave her alone, but she suspected he would pounce on that and use it against her, somehow. Best not to hand the warrior any weapons. “You’re really here.”
“How could I stay away?” he asked, with one of those predatory smiles that managed to distract her even as it unnerved her. She did not believe that he was here simply for her, no matter what he claimed. What was the likelihood that the lover who had had no qualm discarding her so completely would have a sudden drastic change of heart five years later, apropos of nothing? Slim, she had decided sometime in the early morning hours, long after she’d given up on sleeping. Slim to none and bordering on less than zero.
He had to know about Jeremy. Didn’t he?
“You do not believe me,” he murmured. He leaned in closer, taking up far too much space, blocking out the world behind him. “Perhaps I can convince you.”
The good part about this situation, Jessa thought as he moved closer, close enough that she could smell the familiar, haunting scent of sandalwood and spice and his own warm skin, was that it made her choices very simple. There was only one: ease his fears and suspicions however she could, and send him on his way.
She told herself she could do this. Her head felt too light, her knees too weak. But she would do what she must, for her son’s sake. She could handle Tariq. She could. She stepped back and opened the door wider.
“You’d better come in.”
Tariq let Jessa lead him inside the house, which felt dark and close as all English dwellings felt to him. This whole country of low clouds and relentless rain made him crave the impossibly blue skies of Nur, the horizon stretching beyond imagining, the desert wide and open and bright. The fact that he was not where he was supposed to be, where he needed to be—that he was still in England when he should be at the palace in Azhar handling the latest threat of a rebel uprising near the disputed border—reminded him too much of his playboy past. Yet he had still come to find her.
He had no time for this. He had no patience for ghosts or trips through the past. It was finished. He was no longer that self-indulgent, wasteful creature, and had no wish to revisit him now. Yet she had haunted him across the years, as no other woman ever had. He could recall her smile, the arch of her back, the scent of her skin, in perfect detail. He had had no choice but to find her. He had to exorcize her once and for all, so he might finally get on with his life as he should have done five years ago. Marriage, heirs. His duty.
Jessa walked before him into her sitting room, and came to a stop beside the mantel. Slowly, she turned to face him, her tension evident in the way she held herself, the way she swallowed nervously and pulled at her clothes with her hands. He liked that she was not at ease. It made his own uncertainty less jarring, somehow. She could deny it all she liked, but he could feel the awareness swell between them.
Tariq’s eyes swept the room, looking for clues about this simple woman who made him feel such complicated things, so complicated he had tracked her down after all this time, like a besotted fool. The sitting room was furnished simply, with an eye toward comfort rather than glamour. The sofa seemed well used and neat rather than stylish. A half-drunk cup of tea sat on the coffee table, with the remnants of what he assumed to be toast. There were a few photographs in frames beside her on the mantelpiece—a family of three with a mother he took to be Jessa’s sister. Others of the sisters together, as small children, then with Jessa as a gawky teenager.
Her eyes were wide and cautious, and she watched him apprehensively as he finally turned his attention to her. If she thought to hide her responses from him, it was much too late. He was as attuned to her body as to his own.
Tariq reminded himself that he could not simply order her to his bed, though that would be far simpler than this dance. He did not know why she resisted him. But he was not an untried boy. He could play any games she needed to play. He picked up the nearest photograph and frowned down at it.
“You resemble your sister,” he said, without meaning to comment. “Though you are far more beautiful.”
Jessa’s cheeks colored, and not with pleasure. She reached over and jerked the photograph from his hand, leaving him with only a blurred impression of her less attractive sister, a fair-haired husband, and their infant held between them.
“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 stake, and she still couldn’t think straight while he touched her. And he wanted to talk about us, of all things.
“There is no us,” she said crisply, as if she was not melting, as if she was still in control. She met his gaze squarely. “I’m not sure there ever was. I’ve no idea what game you thought you were playing.”
“I have a proposition for you,” he said calmly, as if what she’d said was of no matter. He lounged back against the mantelpiece, letting his hand move from her skin slowly. He was every inch the indolent monarch.
“It is barely half-nine and here you are propositioning me,” Jessa replied, determined to get her balance back. She kept her voice dry, amused. Sophisticated, the way she imagined the glamorous women he was used to would speak to him when he propositioned them. “Why am I not surprised?”
If her heart beat faster and her skin felt overheated, and she could still feel his hand on her like a tattoo, she ignored it.
“Am I so predictable?” His hard face looked cast in iron in the low gloom from the front windows. And yet Jessa sensed that the real shadows came from within him.
She stood ramrod straight because she could not allow herself to move, to back away from him. She thought it would show too much, be too much of a concession. She laced her fingers together in front of her as tightly as possible.
“It is not a question of whether or not you are—or were—predictable,” she said coolly. She raised her eyebrows in unmistakable challenge. “Perhaps you were simply like any other man when things got too serious. Afraid.”
He stilled. The temperature in the room seemed to plunge. Jessa’s heart stuttered to a halt. She knew, suddenly, that she was in greater danger from him in that moment than ever before. Something dark moved across his face, and then he bared his teeth in something far too wild to be a smile.
“Proceed with care, Jessa,” he advised her in a soft voice that sent a chill snaking down her spine. “Not many people would dare call a king a coward to his face.”
“I am merely calling a spade a spade,” Jessa replied, as if she did not have a knot of trepidation in her stomach, as if she was not aware that she was throwing pebbles at a lion. She shook the loose tendrils of her hair back from her face, wishing her curls did not take every opportunity to defy her. “You were not yet a king when you ran away, were you?”
“Ran away?” he echoed, enunciating each word as if he could not quite comprehend her meaning.
“What would you call it?” she asked coolly. Calmly. She even smiled, as if they shared a joke. “Adults typically have conversations with each other when an affair is ending, don’t they? It’s called common courtesy, at the very least.”
“Again,” he said, too quietly, “you have forgotten the sequence of events. You were the one who disappeared into thin air.” He stood so still, yet reminded Jessa not of a statue, but of a coiled snake ready to strike. Yet she couldn’t seem to back down.
“I merely failed to answer my mobile for two days,” Jessa replied lightly. “That’s not quite the same thing as quitting the country altogether, is it?”
“It is not as if I was on holiday, sunning myself on the Amalfi Coast!” Tariq retorted.
Jessa shook her head at him. “It hardly matters now,” she said carelessly, as if her heart hadn’t been broken once upon a time. “I’m only suggesting that perhaps it was a convenient excuse, that’s all. An easy way out.”
Tariq was so still it was as if he’d turned to stone. He studied her as if he had never seen her before. She had the sudden, uncomfortable notion that he was assessing her as he might an enemy combatant on the field of battle, and was coldly scanning her for her weaknesses. Her soft points.
And all the while that awareness swirled around them, making everything seem sharper, brighter.
“I will not explode into some dramatic temper tantrum, if that is your goal with these attacks,” Tariq said finally, never looking away from her. She felt her cheeks heat, whether in relief or some stronger emotion, she didn’t know. “I will not rage and carry on, though you question my honor and insult my character.” His hard mouth hinted at a curve, flirted with it. “There are better ways to make my feelings known.”
She refused to feel the heat that washed through her. She would not accept it. The tightness in her belly was agitation, worry, nothing more. But the desperate, purely feminine part of her that still wanted him, that thirsted for his touch in ways she could not allow herself to picture, knew better.
“What, then?” she demanded, unable to pull her gaze from his. What was this intoxicating fire that burned between them, making her ask questions she knew she did not want the answers to? “What is your damned proposition?”
“One night.” He said it so easily, yet with that unmistakably sensual edge underneath.
Somewhere deep inside, she shuddered, and the banked fire she wanted to deny existed flared into a blaze.
His gaze seemed to see into her, to burn through her.
“That is all, Jessa. That is what I want from you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
TARIQ’S words echoed in the space between them, bald and naked and challenging. Jessa swallowed. He saw her hands tremble, and a kind of triumph moved through him. She could not control what would happen. Perhaps she even knew it. But she did not back down. She still thought she could fight him. It made him want her all the more.
He knew, even if she did not, that she was going to end this confrontation in his bed. Beneath him, astride him, on her knees before him—he didn’t care. He only knew that he would win, and not only because he always won. But because he would accept no other outcome, not with this woman. Not when she had been in his head for all these years.
Because he already knew how this would end, he could be patient. He could wait. He could even let her fight him, if she wished it. What would it matter? It would only make it that much better in the end.
“I don’t want to misunderstand you again,” she said after a long moment. She searched his face, her own carefully blank.
He realized that he liked this grown-up, self-assured version of Jessa. He liked that she stood up to him, that she was mysterious, that she was neither easily read nor easily intimidated. When was the last time anyone had defied him?
“One night of what?” she asked.
“Of whatever I want,” he said softly, pouring seduction into every syllable. “Whatever I ask.”
“Be specific, Tariq,” she said, an edge to her voice. He interpreted it as desire she would have preferred not to feel.
“As you wish,” he murmured. He leaned toward her, pleased with the way she jerked back, startled, and the way her breath came too quickly. “I want you in my bed. Or on the floor. Or up against the wall. Or all of the above. Is that specific enough?”
“No!” She threw one hand into the air as if to hold him back, but it was too late for that. Tariq moved closer and leaned toward her, until her outstretched palm pressed up against his chest. Her hand was the only point of contact between them, her fingers trembling in the hollow between the hard planes of his pectoral muscles.
She did not drop her hand. He did not lean back.
“No, what?” he asked with soft, sensual menace. “No, you do not wish to give me that night? Or no, you do not want to hear how I will sink inside you, making you clench and moan and—”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” She whispered the words, but her eyes glazed with heat and something else, and the hand she held between them had softened into a caress, touching him rather than holding him off.
“It is many things,” Tariq said in a low voice, “but it is not ridiculous.”
He took her hand in his and, never looking away from her, raised her wrist to his lips. He tasted her, her skin like the finest silk, and her pulse beneath it, fluttering out her excitement, her distress. It was like wine and it went to his head, knocking into him with dizzying force.
She made some sound, as if she meant to speak. Perhaps she did, and he could not hear her over the roaring in his ears, his blood, his sudden hardness. He had not expected the surge of lust so sharp and consuming. It barreled through his body from their single point of contact, making him burn. Making him want.
It was worse now that he touched her, now that he was before her, than it had been when he only remembered. Much worse.
“I want you out of my system,” he told her, his voice urgent and deep. Commanding, because he meant it more than he had just moments before. Because he was desperate. He needed a queen and he needed heirs, and she was what kept him from doing that duty. He had to erase the hold she had on him! “Once and for all. I want one night.”
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