The Forbidden Series

Billionaires who can look, but shouldn’t touch!

For Logan Black, Jaiven Rodriguez and Zair al Ruyi, New York City is spread out before them like the Garden of Eden…and no one knows the sweet taste of forbidden fruit better than America’s most ruthless billionaires!

Jaded and cynical, with a darkness that threatens to consume them whole, they think they’ve seen it all. But temptation has something new in store for each of them…

When Nora Grant decided she wanted to make something of her life, she didn’t realize it would lead straight to Prince Zair al Ruyi. Beneath his polished royalty, Zair has warrior’s blood running through his veins, and he’s found his next conquest! No matter how innocent Nora is, she can’t resist the touch of this royal billionaire.

Collect all three novels in The Forbidden Series:

THE BILLIONAIRE’S INTERN by USA TODAY bestselling author Maisey Yates

THE BILLIONAIRE’S FANTASY by USA TODAY bestselling author Kate Hewitt

THE BILLIONAIRE’S INNOCENT by USA TODAY bestselling author Caitlin Crews

The Billionaire’s Innocent

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Maisey and Katharine for being such wonderful companions on the Fifth Avenue/Forbidden journey! I couldn’t admire you both more!

And to Flo Nicoll, my wonderful editor, who took the mess I handed her and made it sing.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter One

ZAIR AL RUYI walked onto the yacht like a nightmare come to life, and Nora Grant’s first stunned thought was that she was hallucinating. She had to be, because he couldn’t be here.

Not Zair. Not here.

But it was still him, and he was still there in the entryway—his security guards flanking him as he stole all the air from the intimately lit sunken lounge with the French sea glittering in the moonlight outside the windows, wearing a hard smile and shaking the smarmy host’s hand—after Nora clamped her eyes shut and then opened them again. After she pinched herself savagely on her own mostly bare thigh, hard enough to leave an immediate purple bruise.

He was still there, and he looked as relaxed as a man like Zair ever did—maybe more relaxed than Nora had ever seen him. He appeared to be utterly at his ease, in fact, like all the rest of the enormously powerful, extraordinarily well-connected men indulging in this very high-priced evening on an especially extravagant luxury yacht off the coast of Cannes, France.

You don’t know what you’re asking, little girl, he’d told her six years ago on what had been, until now, the worst night of her life. He’d been very certain. His dark green gaze had left marks. Swim back to the shallow end before you drown.

“Prostitutes and punters,” one of the other girls said beneath her breath from beside Nora, which diverted Nora’s attention from the entryway. “A match made in heaven.”

“Lucky us,” Nora replied with a smoky sort of laugh, the way she would if she really were the jaded party girl she was pretending to be tonight.

She expected that when she looked again, it would be some other dark-haired man prowling there in the doorway. That her mind had conjured up Zair because he was, truly, the worst person she could imagine seeing in a place like this, outside a member of her own family.

But when she turned back, he was still there. Still Zair al Ruyi, the bane of her existence. The only man who had ever turned her down, and emphatically at that. The last man she’d ever want to see under normal circumstances, which these were not. Still hideously, horrifyingly real and right there besides.

And because he was Zair, he was far more beautiful than the rest of the assembled punters no matter how much money or fame they had at their disposal. He was dangerously magnetic and impossible to look away from, as though he’d created his own vortex simply by entering the room. He wore one of his exquisitely crafted bespoke dark suits with his shirt collar open at the neck, exposing the strong column of his throat and the suggestion of his sculpted chest below. He took the drink one of the stewards handed him with a hint of his usual athletic, martially trained grace. He laughed that same velvet scrape of a laugh that had always made Nora’s stomach flip no matter how many times she told herself she disliked him, and tonight was no exception, despite the circumstances.

This really is a nightmare, Nora thought in deepening horror as one moment became a handful, because he didn’t appear to know she was there. And that meant he was in this place of his own volition. It meant he was a guest, come to sample the women assembled for the taking and pick out his favorite, just like all the rest of them.

He’s one of them.

And that meant Nora didn’t know Zair at all no matter how many years he’d been in and around her life, because no matter how much she’d claimed to hate him since that humiliating night after her eighteenth birthday party, she would have said it was impossible he could be involved in something like this.

She had said exactly that.

Gorgeous, mysterious, impossibly sexy Zair of the cool green eyes, jet black hair, and that body Nora knew was all lean muscle and fighting fit because he’d learned how to defend his country with his hands before he’d left it when he was eighteen. He couldn’t be one of these disgusting men, she thought then with no little desperation. He couldn’t, because he was one of her older brother Hunter’s best friends from college. He was the ambassador to the United States from the very wealthy sultanate in the Middle East his own much older half brother had ruled for the last decade. More than that, Nora had adored him. Right up until the night he’d rejected her so emphatically.

He can’t be one of them, she thought again, fiercely.

But he was here. And the fact that a man she knew—a man she’d touched with her own hands, danced with and eaten meals with across the years, a man she’d once begged to kiss her and more—could be a man like this was like a kick.

Hard. Right in the stomach.

And then he saw her.

Those deep green eyes of his that had always seen straight through her found her across the outrageous lushness of the yacht’s vast lounge area, across all the pretty girls vying for the attention of the wealthy clientele, across the laughter and the flirting and the increasingly lewd displays to where Nora sat on one of the low sofas.

Slammed into her like a fist, more like.

Everything stopped for a searing, shattering, horrifying instant. The night. The world. Zair froze where he stood, his storm-cloud eyes as hard as steel and something like unforgiving on hers despite the dangerous smile still stamped on his uncompromising mouth.

Nora’s heart stopped beating.

His gaze moved on in the next breath, slid past her and onto the rest of the smiling and preening girls displaying their wares in a number of alluring poses, as if Nora were a stranger. As if she were no more than an interchangeable thing for sale and nothing more to him than that.

Which, of course, she was.

Tonight, she was.

Her heart slammed against her ribs with a vicious wallop, so hard she felt dizzy and sick at once and worried she might faint right there on the gold-and-navy nautical carpet, and Zair walked deeper into the vile little gathering as though he belonged there. He was welcomed as if he did, as if all the revolting people here already knew him well. It didn’t make sense. She couldn’t let it make any kind of sense.

She couldn’t accept—she refused to accept—what it meant that he was here. It was bad enough that she was.

It was bad enough that she’d come to Cannes on a kind of lunatic kamikaze mission in the first place, especially when there was a possibility that the unconcerned British police were right and her missing friend Harlow might not even want to be found after her disappearance from London a few weeks back.

There is the distinct possibility that Ms. Spencer has merely done what many young women do on their first trip abroad, the impatient British detective had said when she’d contacted him. There is almost always a foreign lover and a last-minute adventure she’d rather not share with anyone back home. I rather doubt she’ll appreciate all this fuss when she turns up.

But possibilities weren’t enough for Nora. Not when it was Harlow.

It wasn’t until a CCTV picture had surfaced showing Harlow entering Nice, France, with a grim-looking stranger—hardly the lover everyone seemed to think she’d taken, not with that merciless grip on her arm—that Nora had been sickeningly sure she knew exactly what had happened.

Harlow had written her undergraduate thesis on human trafficking and then, thanks in part to her friendship with their sorority sister Addison Treffen and in part to Nora’s merciless prodding that she do something with her life—not that Nora had taken her own advice—she’d accepted a prestigious law internship at Treffen, Smith, and Howell’s London office as a first step toward the kind of world-saving work she’d always said she wanted to do. But then the Jason Treffen scandal had broken a few months back and Addison’s father had been exposed as the leader of a high-class sex ring he’d operated out of his New York City law office, making him responsible for all manner of appalling things—including the death of the college girlfriend of Nora’s brother Hunter. Now Jason was dead, shot by an unknown assailant who’d never been found, right in front of poor Addison, and Nora knew there was no way Harlow could possibly have resisted poking her nose into things in that London office. Because if it was anything like the office Jason Treffen had run in New York…

All it had taken was a simple internet search on “sex trafficking” and “the south of France,” and Nora had found a wealth of unsavory information on the “yacht girls” who swarmed Cannes during the famous annual film festival to ply their trade on the yachts that dotted the Côte d’Azure bays and the Mediterranean Sea beyond. The yachts, the boulevards, the upscale, breathlessly opulent hotels that lined the iconic beaches, and the airy villas high in the hills. Some were prostitutes, some were down-on-their-luck actresses looking for cash and a way back to the bright lights of Hollywood by any vehicle possible, and still others were bored socialites simply out for a good time with a bit of rough and some pocket money besides.

Nora would have bet anything she had that Harlow was headed there. Which meant she needed to do the same, because she knew what no one else did. What she could scarcely admit even in her own head.

This was her fault.

Which made fixing this, by any means necessary, her responsibility.

She watched Zair stop and talk to a pair of very elegantly dressed twins on the far side of the lounge, both of whom giggled at his brooding attention. He gazed down at them in that hard, leashed-danger way of his that made her chest feel tight. Except she knew she shouldn’t let it.

He wasn’t flirting with them. He was inspecting the merchandise.

I can play whatever game you want, she’d told him on her eighteenth birthday. A desperation unlike anything she’d ever experienced before had swamped her as she’d stared at him out on that dark terrace with Manhattan at their feet, making her feel drunk and unsteady, when she’d been neither. I can do anything you want me to do.

Zair had watched her with that same expression on his face. Harsh. Predatory. Knowing.

Is that so? Anything is a big word, Nora. It covers a multitude of sins.

So can I. She’d thought she sounded sultry. Tempting.

The kind of sins I like leave marks, he’d told her. You don’t know what you’re asking, little girl.

Nora jolted when a hand grabbed her upper arm, slamming her back into the here and now, where she was still sitting on a vast yacht pretending to be a prostitute and Zair was still standing on the other side of the room in a sea of women, presumably because he wanted to buy one.

Proving that he’d been right six years ago. She’d had no clue what she was asking for back then. She’d had no idea who the hell he was. And there was no reason she should feel that like a wash of shame now, making her throat feel tight, as though he’d wrapped his hard hand around it and squeezed when he wasn’t even looking in her direction.

The real hand on her arm clenched tighter, and when she looked around, Nora found herself gazing into the disconcertingly sweet face of the woman who was running things tonight, Laurette Fortin. Who had been so easy to meet, really, once she’d arrived in France. Too easy. An old boarding school friend Nora hadn’t seen in a while, a late night talking about how bored she was with her life and how she’d kill for a little adventure, the crazier the better, and here she was. Greer, the friend in question and herself a notoriously ill-behaved plastics heiress with a penchant for public nudity, had presented Nora to Laurette back on shore an hour or so ago as though she’d been showing off her latest acquisition.

Because, of course, she had been.

“She’s cool,” Greer had said, nodding at Nora as she’d kicked off her wedges to climb into the little speedboat that would transport the group of girls out to the much bigger yacht. “An old friend of mine from prep school. And her brother is Hunter Grant. You know. The American football star.”

Laurette had obviously recognized Hunter’s name, which had made Nora feel…profoundly unsettled. She’d eyed Nora up and down, taking in everything. The short, flirty dress Nora had worn for this strange occasion that drooped from one shoulder but then caught tight beneath her breasts, the shoes that made her bared legs seem twice as long. Every minute detail of Nora’s appearance, making her want to squirm, or cover herself. Or both.

This is her job, Nora had thought, and though that was as awful as all the rest of it, she’d started to feel a bit numb. Which had been a bit like a blessing, all things considered.

“I’m Nora,” she’d supplied when the silence stretched out between them, and the other woman had smiled back at her in a way that had made Nora’s blood chill. She’d had to fight not to shudder, and from the look on Laurette’s face, she’d known it. And liked it.

“It is not your name that matters, chérie. It is all that American old money stamped on your face. They like to look at that while they fuck you in every degrading way they can think of. It makes them feel like the gods they think they are.” The older woman had jerked her chin at the boat. “Climb in. Let’s see how you do.”

Not very well, if the current expression on Laurette’s face was anything to go by.

“Are you feeling all right?” Laurette asked, her voice as concerned as the look in her dark eyes was hard. She dropped her hand from Nora’s arm, but she didn’t shift herself from the arm of the sofa. “A little seasick, maybe? Poor darling.”

“Not at all.” Nora forced a smile she didn’t feel at all. “Why would you think that?”

“Because this is a party,” Laurette murmured silkily. Viciously. “Everyone is here to have a good time. To make friends, have fun. Do you know how to have fun? I ask because no one else is sitting in the corner, frowning at the ground.”

Nora almost laughed out loud, but not because anything was funny. She wasn’t sure anything could ever be funny again, not after tonight.

Get a hold of yourself, she ordered herself sternly. This is about Harlow. And you’re not going to find her if you don’t figure out a way to please this woman. You know exactly what that means you have to do, so stop sitting over here feeling sorry for yourself that your teenage crush has turned out to be a disgusting pig, and do it.

Yes, she knew what she was asking of herself. What she was going to do with…whoever. She’d turned it over again and again in her head, she’d studied the pictures plastered all over the internet of pretty starlets in the grip of repugnant, always older and less attractive men, and she hadn’t been able to come up with a reasonable alternative. It was her fault Harlow had left New York in the first place. This was how she’d pay for that.

She’d rationalized it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Some girls picked up strange men in bars every weekend and had sex with them for free, she’d reminded herself. How was this any different? It was probably smarter, really, because if Greer and her friends and certain Vanity Fair articles were to be believed, Nora could come out of this with a hefty addition to her investment portfolio rather than a run-of-the-mill Sunday morning hangover and its attendant regrets.

Of course, she’d also be a prostitute, but that was only a word, she’d assured herself. That dark, hollow thing inside her that whispered otherwise was irrelevant. It had to be. She had no other choice if she wanted to find Harlow.

“I was just getting up now,” Nora said and did so at once, with a bit more speed than necessary. She caught herself before she toppled over and aimed a too-bright smile at Laurette to cover it. “To mingle.”

“This is good,” Laurette said, still in that voice that sounded lovely on the surface but had all those sharp claws beneath, and Nora was certain she felt each one of them draw blood. “Mingling is much better than frowning at the floor, reminding a man of the troubles he is here to forget, mais oui?”

Nora agreed with a vigorous nod and then smoothed her hands down the front of her too-short dress, steeling herself to look around. But not to look too closely when she did, because she didn’t want to see which lissome girls had caught Zair’s attention now. She didn’t want to know anything further about him or his proclivities—

So there was no reason she should have felt something like disappointment, if far sharper, when she couldn’t spot him. Had he already made his choice? Selected a girl as if she were a shiny bit of produce and headed off to get his kicks—whatever those were?

Nora refused to let herself wonder. You’re not here for Zair. You’re here for Harlow.

She had to order herself to focus. She didn’t want to focus.

There were too many people crowding the vast and tastefully decorated room, none of them Harlow, and it was obvious at a glance which people were displaying themselves as the merchandise tonight and which ones were doing the shopping. It wasn’t like a run-of-the-mill, meat-markety Manhattan bar scene at all, no matter how many times Nora tried to tell herself otherwise. There was a different sort of energy in the room, taut and gritty and spiked, that she could feel along the length of her spine every time one of the men looked at her.

Because each man was deciding whether or not he wanted to fuck her, which wasn’t the same thing as hitting on a girl in a bar and hoping for the best. This was a room filled with grim certainties, not any bright or drink-fueled optimism.

Nora had to fight not to shudder, or to break for her freedom and swim back to shore. She had to scream at herself until she managed to smile prettily. To act as though she was happy to be here and having the best time. She had to force herself to look as cheerful as she did available.

And as she looked around she realized that Zair—wherever he was, and she shouldn’t care, she shouldn’t let herself speculate, she couldn’t deal with how awful that was just yet—wasn’t the only person she recognized.

There was a famous director widely lauded for his incisive, intellectual, even feminist films with his arm around a giggling brunette who was letting him fondle her between her legs where she stood. There was an actor best known for his much-celebrated television role as a wise and generous old father figure surrounded by three laughing young girls on one of the sofas, none of them fully clothed. She saw a well-known financier she’d never met personally but had last seen with his wife and daughters at a Manhattan gala to benefit victims of domestic violence, smiling down at a woman Nora recognized as a former runway model in a manner that could only be described as smug.

But Harlow was nowhere to be seen.

Nora felt a rush of something—and she couldn’t tell if it was relief that her friend wasn’t subjecting herself to this horror or a keen disappointment that she was still missing. Both, perhaps. It meant that Nora would have to find out if any of the girls had seen Harlow around, which could take more than this single night—and she knew what that meant. What it would entail. Where this course of action had always been leading her.

Keep smiling, you idiot, she ordered herself. So what if you have to do this more than once? No one here looks anything but happy. You can do it. You’ll be fine.

But it was hard to keep her smile on her face. If that awful woman hadn’t still been right beside her, she doubted she’d have managed it—

“Bonsoir, Laurette.”

Nora recognized Zair’s voice instantly. Worse, she felt it.

It rolled through her like low, ominous thunder and she had to fight to keep herself from flinching. Laurette, who still sat there on the sofa arm studying Nora as if looking for visible cracks, brightened and extended her hands.

And then it was impossible for Nora to pretend this wasn’t happening. That it wasn’t him. Zair was right there, kissing this hard, dangerous woman on one smooth cheek and then the next.

As if they were dear old friends on the best of terms. As if he attended sex slave auctions every night of the week.

Maybe he did.

Nora didn’t know if she wanted to be sick or maybe collapse into tears, but she knew she absolutely could not do either.

This is who he is, she snapped at herself. Deal with it—and deal with it right now. You can’t fall apart here.

But the truth was, Zair was right there beside her, she didn’t want to believe that he could be as evil as he clearly was, and she didn’t think she’d survive the next few moments.

And Harlow was still missing somewhere. Nora didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with any of it.

“This one will do,” she heard him say to Laurette, and she could feel his eyes on her. Intense. Too much. Even worse than usual. “I’ve always had a thing for blondes.”

Laurette’s laugh was horrible. It slid inside Nora and broke something in her into jagged little pieces. “This I know.”

Later, Nora thought, sick and not numb enough and torn apart in a thousand ways she knew she couldn’t let show on her face, she would look back at this moment. Zair’s comment and Laurette’s awful laugh that told her so many things she didn’t want to know.

Later, she could grieve.

But here, now, she had to think about Harlow.

There was a flurry of the French she’d had no idea Zair spoke so fluently, another silvery little laugh from Laurette that left ice shards lodged into her heart, and then Nora and Zair were left standing there alone.

“Look at me,” he said.

It was that same voice that she knew so well. The same voice that had slapped her down so calmly, so ruthlessly, six years ago. The same voice that he’d used only a few weeks ago when she’d been forced to spend an evening with him at an art gala, all smiles and surface and lies, apparently.

It was also an order.

Her heart didn’t stop this time. It beat so hard it made the edges of everything seem to flicker, to fade in and out, and she had to force herself to breathe through it. To stay standing, no matter what.

Because if Zair was a part of this thing the way Harlow’s old faculty adviser Louise had suggested outright back in New York, if all signs pointed to the involvement of a high-ranking member of the Ruyian government and Zair was the only person fitting that description at this party, then Nora had to convince him that she was exactly who she was pretending to be: a bored trust-fund princess having “adventures” on the far side of acceptable behavior—a description that was a touch too close to home. Because he might be her only chance of finding Harlow.

“I know you heard me,” he said, with a darker current in his low voice.

He was her only chance. This was the only way. Nora forced herself face him. To look him straight in the eye.

Zair gazed down at her in that haughty, commanding way of his that announced his royal Ruyian blood without his having to utter a word. Even in the high sandals she wore that added a few inches to her height, he towered over her the way he always had, strong and undeniably, disastrously gorgeous. So compelling that his sheer dizzying masculinity couldn’t be erased by what his presence here meant. So beautiful he cast even the Côte d’Azure and a roomful of men celebrated around the world for their good looks into shadow.

This close to him, she could smell the hint of that scent he always wore, something like cedar and indefinably male beneath. It made a prickling sort of heat spread over her and threaten to flood her eyes. Only a kick of panic at what it might mean for Harlow if she burst into tears here, if she exposed herself like that and thereby ensured she couldn’t come back to continue her search, kept her from it.

His green eyes, usually so cool and remote, were like fire tonight. Too bright. Too hot. His gaze seared into her, ripping through her, making Nora worry she might be blown backward by the sheer force of it.

Nora had memorized his face a long time ago. Those perfect, aristocratic cheekbones under slashing black brows, that harsh blade of his nose. And that tough desert warrior’s mouth below that had always made something roll over deep inside her and then curl up tight, so out of place was it on a polished diplomat like him.

But her memory was never as arresting as the real thing. It never did him justice. He was more. He was vital and male, breathtaking in a way she’d never been able to put into words—a way that here, in this sordid place where he’d revealed the rot beneath his spectacular surface, she hated herself for noticing the way she always did. As if everything was normal when nothing could be, ever again.

Zair didn’t speak. He only studied her, his face unreadable, those green eyes alight with that too-bright fire.

She wanted to say a million things, but they all crowded together on her tongue and choked her silent. Are you a john or a pimp, Zair? Do you know where my best friend is? Was that your boat she took out of London? Does my brother know what kind of nasty pervert you are? Is he one, too?

Nora felt a desperate kind of heat behind her eyes, worse now that she was looking at him, and the way he gazed down at her was terrible. Terrible. It made her shake, deep inside, low in her belly, and everywhere else. It made her more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

But not of him, though she should have been. And however deep that fear might have gone, it didn’t make her turn away.

He muttered something in Arabic then, the words a caress and a blow at once. And then, “You can’t be here. This is no place for tourists.”

“I think you’ll find that sex tourism is one of the world’s great economic powerhouses,” she said, pleased at the flippant sound of her voice. “But then, look where you are. I suspect you already know that.”

“Nora.” The way he said her name made everything tilt and then slide inside her, but she still didn’t turn away. And she only hated herself that much more for her weakness. “What the hell are you doing here?”

She wanted to hit him. Her hand curled into a fist at her side, but then she remembered all the eyes on them, Laurette’s in particular, and forced it open again.

“Selling my body to the highest bidder,” she said, as politely as she could. The way she’d discussed appetizers with him when she’d seen him last. Or had it been the weather? “As you do.”

He reached over and brushed a lock of her blond hair back from her face, and Nora couldn’t conceal her shudder. 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 his harsh gaze kept her from it.

“Do you always kiss your prostitutes?” she asked. “Oh, I’m sorry. Am I speaking out 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 her pretty eyes every time she looked at him, no matter how she’d shivered when he’d pulled her hair and taken her mouth as though she were already his, she wasn’t that kind of girl. She was Nora Grant.

But he could test that theory. “Perhaps it’s high time I gave you what you think you want,” he said, watching her closely. “Consider this your one and only warning, Nora. Nothing about me is easy.”

He could see the effect of the small smile he gave her in the gooseflesh that prickled up the length of her arms, and he liked that more than he should. He wanted it to mean more than it could. But then, he’d been born a broken man and he’d only ever pretended he might be anything else. What was this but further confirmation of things he already knew? He angled his head closer to hers and tormented himself with her scent. Lavender and cream, and he was already hard. Who was he kidding? He’d been hard the moment he’d seen her here, in this cesspool, and he was all too aware the kinds of things that said about him.

He hadn’t cared about that in years. And he cared less the longer he studied the woman before him, served up to him here like his own fantasies come to life at last.

“I like art,” she replied, her voice crisp and her chin at a challenging angle, but there was a darker truth in those pretty eyes that he felt inside him like a touch. It made him imagine things that could never be, not with her. Not here, not now. He wanted her proud and desperate. Begging and then his. Irrevocably his—and he couldn’t have it. Her. “You have nice lines and a pleasing shape, Zair. Who wouldn’t appreciate that? Too bad that up close, with a little bit of scrutiny, it all falls apart.”

“Did I ask you a direct question?” he asked softly, and the wild thing in him growled hard at the way she shivered, then pinkened, at the quiet rebuke.

“I thought we were having a conversation.”

“No, you thought you were putting me in my place,” he corrected her, his voice mild though he knew his gaze was not. He saw her blue eyes widen. “Do you feel that you succeeded in that?” He watched the way she swallowed, her gaze trained on his, and once again let his imagination go a little crazy. She’s never going to be what you want her to be, he reminded himself. No matter what it looks like. “That was a direct question, Nora, but I should advise you to think very carefully about the way you speak to me. There are consequences.”

“It seems like there are nothing but consequences,” Nora said, still in that husky voice that tempted him to forget himself entirely and follow his lust instead, which was something he’d never allowed himself to do. Nor was this the place to start.

She tilted her head slightly to one side, and her expression changed. Became speculative, as if she could see straight past the mask he wore, down deep inside him, where there was nothing but emptiness and gloom and iron control.

“Is that what you like, Zair? Doling out the consequences? Is that what you think I can’t handle?”

He reached over and traced the soft line of her neck, down over the exposed skin of one sleek shoulder, and felt his mouth curve when she sucked in a breath he almost couldn’t hear.

“Perhaps it is,” he said, his voice low, so she was forced to angle herself closer to hear him—and she did it without being asked. As if she wanted to hear him more than she wanted to be safe, and the way he thrilled to that wasn’t safe at all. “Perhaps the consequences I mean involve you over my knee. Or down on yours, awaiting my judgment. Perhaps I mean my hand, or a whip, or far more diabolical tools to make you cry out and beg for mercy. There are so many ways to torture a soft, pretty thing like you.” He slid his hand up along her neck to cup her tender cheek and held it there, feeling the way she shook, knowing it came from deep inside her. Arousal. Fear. His favorite combination, and for a moment he was nothing more or less than a man who wanted her. Badly. “And I know every last one of them.”

He didn’t recognize her then. There was something bleak in her gaze, and for a moment he forgot completely that she wasn’t for him. That this wasn’t real. That she had no business here and wouldn’t be stretching herself out on the sacrificial altar of his choosing any time soon, no matter how much he wished otherwise. No matter what she said to the contrary.

“Great,” she said, and he could feel the way she set her jaw, as though she expected a hit, when all it did was make him notice that mouth of hers. Plump lips and a thousand fantasies of what he could do with them. “Do it. Do all of it. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re such a liar, Nora.” But he moved his hand against her cheek in a gesture that could only be called a caress, and for a moment he hardly knew himself. “And this is how little girls like you get themselves in trouble.”

Her blue eyes flashed dark at that. He saw her fists clench at her sides, and there was no particular reason either of those things should pool like lust inside him, but they did. God, the things he wished he could do to this woman.

“I wasn’t a little girl six years ago and I’m not one now,” she told him, and there was too much he couldn’t read then, in her eyes and across her lovely face. “Why don’t you stop threatening me and put your money where your mouth is?”

“If you insist,” Zair murmured, and he made no attempt whatsoever to cloak the threat in his voice then. Or the dark longing beneath it.

He reached over and wrapped his hand around her smooth upper arm. He felt the immediate kick of it, as if it were a far more intimate touch. The fire roared inside him again, making him harder than before, and ready. Almost too ready. He ignored that and tugged her closer to him, forcing her off balance so she swayed into his chest.

“What are you doing?” she hissed as he slid his palm down the length of her arm and took her hand, and he could feel her nerves in the way she jolted at the contact.

Not a whore, then, he thought, with far too much satisfaction, as if he’d had any doubt. Or if she was, she was a terrible one.

“You’re the only woman in the room who isn’t fucking or about to be fucked,” he pointed out coolly. “Let’s rectify that, shall we? But not here.”

Finally, a look of alarm. As if the precariousness of her position was sinking in at last.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said.

“You are.” He didn’t wait for her to reply, he simply started walking, which meant she had to walk with him or be pulled off her feet. She chose to walk, though she kept tugging against the hold he had on her hand. “This is how it works, Nora, or don’t you know that? You don’t choose. I do.”

“Let’s be clear, Zair, that this is who you are. This is the kind of man you are.”

She shouldn’t have said that, and he thought she knew it when he looked at her then without the usual filter he used to hide his temper. Or his dark, twisted soul. He saw her swallow again, almost convulsively. He saw a hectic glitter in her luminous eyes, and he felt a little tremor run through her.

“This is what selling yourself means,” he said softly, and he knew when she flinched that he’d scored a direct hit. He would have to congratulate himself for that later, he thought bitterly. Zair closed his hand harder around her arm and pulled her closer, so he could speak directly into her ear. He could smell her shampoo and the soft scent of her skin. He could feel her heat. And he wanted her, the way he had for years. And as hopelessly, because she was a pretty little heiress who lived in the light and he was the bastard brother of a twisted king, dark unto his very soul. “We go where I want to go. We fuck how I want to fuck. I’ll let you know if I want you to speak. Until then? You keep your mouth shut unless I’m putting something in it.”

* * *

He felt her temper like a living thing between them, but then she ducked her head down and she didn’t argue. And he liked that too much.

“Good girl,” he said again, and he felt her shake at that, too. Almost as if she really were bent like him. Almost as if she found as much pleasure in the act of obeying him as he would have found in issuing orders, if any of this were real. If it weren’t dangerous. If there weren’t too many eyes on them already.

This is the sister of the famous Hunter Grant, Laurette had said in her arch, insinuating way, the fact that she spoke in her native French making it sound harsher, somehow. But you know this already, do you not? He is a great friend of yours, I believe.

We went to university together, Zair had replied mildly. But there is friendship between men, Laurette. And then there are whores. And he’d shrugged, letting his mouth flatten as he did. These things have very little to do with each other.

The woman had laughed. Enjoy breaking her in, Zair, she’d said. Try not to do any permanent damage.

He’d laughed, too, because that was what he did. It was who he was, who he’d been for long enough now that the edges had long since blurred. The boundaries were no longer clear.

I always leave my mark, Laurette, he’d said quietly. Or how will she know I was there?

And that was the trouble. That was always the trouble. The best lies, the best disguises, started with a kernel of truth. He knew his did. He wanted whatever Nora’s game was tonight to be rooted in the same kind of truth—and that was as crazy as it was unlikely. He’d seen her insipid boyfriends over the years. He’d seen the dynamics of her relationships, where she held all the power and was always bored. Even if, somewhere deep inside, she secretly longed to hand over her control in the most intimate of settings, he very much doubted she was ready to face that, and certainly not here. Not like this. Not with him. Those were dark imaginings and best kept locked deep inside him, he knew.

He wasn’t going to force her. Zair could barely tolerate himself as it was.

But his ace in the hole was that she didn’t know that.

He kept his grip on her as he steered her toward the exit, slightly harder than necessary. He pulled out his phone as they moved through the crowd, calling the embassy in Washington, DC, where it was just after 5:00 p.m. He talked business almost idly as his security detail fell into place on either side of him, letting go of Nora only when they were all settled in his private speedboat.

He saw Laurette watching him from up on the yacht’s deck and nodded at her the way he had every time he’d left one of these parties with another pretty girl in tow, but he didn’t end the call. He let his assistant relay his messages as the boat set off for Cannes, and when they hit the shore and were met by his driver, he looked around for cameras before he escorted Nora into the car with the same firm grip, like a bare-handed leash.

He caught his head of security’s dark gaze and the other man shook his head. Which meant a camera Zair hadn’t seen. He let out a breath, turning over the implications of that in his head…but there was no undoing this. There was no un-taking that picture and there was no letting Nora wander off to do this kind of thing again tomorrow night with God knows which monster. There was only hoping the paparazzo in question was too lazy or too glutted on all the Hollywood royalty in town this month to make the connection between another blonde woman on Zair al Ruyi’s arm and former tabloid staple Hunter Grant.

Once in the car, he sat back and made a few more calls to the usual people—the sultan’s primary aide for the daily update on his brother Azhil’s bad rulings and uncertain temper, his other liaison in the palace in Ruyi for the unofficial political mutterings from the regime’s enemies back home—as the car swept them away from the mad glitter of Cannes and up into the relative safety of the hills.

He finally put his mobile away when the car pulled into the long drive that took its time winding around to the sprawling villa he used when he was in the South of France, as befit the ambassador to and half brother of the great Azhil, Sultan of Ruyi. The car stopped at the foot of the curved steps that led to the massive carved entryway, but Nora didn’t move. Zair’s driver opened the passenger door, letting in a cool night breeze that danced around the interior, scented with rosemary and a hint of salt from the sea far below.

And Nora sat like a statue beside him, mute despair etched all over her lovely face.

Zair was certain, then, that whatever she’d been doing on that yacht, she’d never done it before. As certain as he was that she’d never do it again. Not if he had anything to say about it.

And he had quite a lot to say on that topic, in fact. As she would soon discover.

He inclined his head, a silent command that she exit the car ahead of him. For a moment he thought she might crack—but she climbed out instead, squaring her shoulders and straightening her spine as she stood there beneath the stars with the breeze in her hair, and he found he admired her for it. More than was at all wise.

That was as dangerous as anything else.

He ushered her into the villa, dismissing his guards as he went, knowing that only once they’d taken their positions on the grounds outside could he speak freely. Until then, he studied this bright, shining girl who shouldn’t have been here, with him, in this tainted place.

He was looking for clues as to why she’d come to Cannes, he told himself. Looking for weaknesses you can use to your advantage, you mean, the cynical voice inside him said. Or hints that she’s what you’d like her to be.

God, but he was tired of himself.

Nora walked in through the airy atrium, straight through the graceful sprawl of the open reception and living areas to the wall of windows on the far side. Zair followed at a distance. The night was clear and cool, and he thought she could see almost to Italy. The gemlike coastal cities stretched out like a necklace threaded along the shoreline, from Antibes to Cap Ferrat to Monte Carlo, and Nora had never looked more celestial to him than she did then, bracketed here in the hills of France with the whole of the Côte d’Azure at her feet.

But they were both playing deep games tonight, and there was no place for angels in this particular gutter.

He heard the faint beep that meant the villa was clear of any potential intruders and that his guards had retreated to the security quarters elsewhere on the property. And for the first time all night, Zair took a long, deep breath and felt something like himself.

“Nora.”

She turned around then and he didn’t recognize her. That girl he thought he knew was absent entirely from her face, her usually expressive eyes. She was an icy blonde stranger, a confection of smooth limbs and the glorious blond waves that surged over her shoulders. Her blue eyes were a wall he couldn’t see through, and if it was possible, he wanted this tough, unreadable version of her more.

He wanted to take her apart. He wanted her to want that as much as he did.

But it didn’t matter what he wanted. It mattered what he did. And Zair supposed it mattered what she was doing here—because he didn’t buy that she was looking for the kind of rough evenings that friend of hers returned for, year after year.

Everything else was fantasy. And would be reason enough for her brother—his friend, he reminded himself acidly—to kill Zair with his own hands.

“So?” Nora’s voice was challenging and went through 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. That it was something more than a cold, hard transaction and that Zair, too, was something more than a rich, dissolute john.

And meanwhile, Zair was studying her in that disconcerting way of his, as though he was taking her apart and analyzing every piece of her, and she needed to focus. This wasn’t some random guy with a yen for deviant sexual behavior; this was Zair. She had no doubt that he feasted on political intrigue for breakfast, thanks to his job, and she already knew he was lethal. He was formidable and dangerous on every possible level. If she wanted to keep her secrets from him, it was going to take every last bit of her concentration.

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” he asked, proving himself something like psychic, his cool green eyes seeing far too deep inside her head.

“You mean other than fucking?”

“No matter how many times you throw that word at me,” he said with a certain quiet menace she felt spear through her, making her feel breathless and needy and deeply anxious at once, “it won’t make this charade of yours any more convincing.”

Nora realized, in that searing moment, that she’d anticipated having to do this—if she’d truly had to do it at all, as she’d indulged in a rather sepia-toned fantasy sequence of spotting Harlow the moment she set foot on the yacht and the two of them breaking for land before any transactions took place—with a stranger. She hadn’t imagined she’d have to put on this act for someone who knew her.

She’d certainly never imagined doing this with him.

Nora tucked the fat envelope into her clutch, buying herself a little bit of breathing room, and then she eyed him again, wishing she’d thought to wear some kind of body armor tonight. Alas.

“You don’t actually know me very well, Zair,” she said, and she stopped trying to pretend she was the Happy Hooker. She just said it, flat and matter-of-fact. “I’m sorry if you can’t handle this. But it’s not up to you to decide what I get to do for fun.”

“Fun?” He looked so relaxed, suddenly. He tucked his hands in the pockets of his trousers and shifted back on his heels, and Nora knew, somehow, that he was the most furious she’d ever seen him. It should have terrified her. Instead, it made her…tingle. Everywhere. “This is what you find fun? Sucking the cocks of strange men in foreign countries? For cash you don’t need?”

“If I needed the cash, it wouldn’t be fun, would it?”

“And what pleasure do you get from this, exactly?” He shook his head, his gaze darker and more tormented than she’d ever seen it before—but surely that was a trick of the light. It was gone in an instant. “If this is an adrenaline thing, you should consider more extreme sports. Flinging yourself from planes and down the backs of unmapped mountains would be far safer, don’t you think?”

She smiled. “I appreciate your concern for my well-being. Do you extend the same consideration to all the women you buy?”

That fascinating mouth of his moved into something too dark to be a smile in return. “How often do you do this?”

“As often as I feel like it.” Nora tilted her chin up when he looked dubious. “I don’t need your approval, Zair. It’s none of your business.”

“That is where you are wrong.”

“I think you should spend some time thinking about how you only seem to find my participation problematic,” she told him, ignoring the simmering way he was looking at her. “If women selling their own bodies is a bad thing, then it must be equally bad for everyone on that boat. Yet you went there to buy someone. And you only left with me.”

“You were the only woman in the room related to my best friend,” he gritted at her. “What was I supposed to do?”

“You’re wasting my time.” She squared her shoulders when he glared at her, and she wished that she felt as tough as she was acting. Or that he didn’t still appeal to her, despite all of this. “You dragged me away from a boat full of prospects. I didn’t come to France to sit through a lecture. I’m calling a cab.”

She started for the door with her head high, though she was prudent enough to give him a wide berth as she went. Her heart was clattering against her ribs and her knees felt weak, but she thought she could hold herself together long enough to make it into a taxi.

Then she could spend the rest of this terrible night in the fetal position, crying for the death of the Zair al Ruyi who had clearly never existed outside her childish fantasies.

And then start this whole thing over again tomorrow.

She had her hand on the front door and she didn’t hear a thing—Zair simply came up behind her and slapped his own hands against the tall, smooth wood on either side of her, caging her there. He didn’t touch her. But she could feel the heat of his hard body like a furnace, roaring just there at her back, easing into her bones and making her feel weak and greedy.

She was suddenly, powerfully glad that the huge, heavy door was right there in front of her, propping her up. It kept her from sliding into a heap on the ground when he leaned in close, swept her hair to one side, and pressed his mouth to the nape of her neck.

Nora went white hot. Her eyes slid shut while that same wildfire scoured her, hotter than before, burning her alive and making her want more. More.

She felt that bold, sensual kiss everywhere. His mouth was so hot, so clever. He was so big and so powerful, and he touched her so gently, it made her mind blank out while her body shivered into total, needy awareness.

And he knew it.

He laughed, low and dark, and Nora knew that he was as aware of that tightness in her breasts, that flush that lit her up from her cheeks to her navel, even that molten heat between her legs, as she was. He knew everything, as if she were nothing but a wide-open book to a man like him. She suspected she really was.

Even that notion failed to do anything but make her want him all the more.

“I won’t lecture you,” he told her, his voice like a hundred dark dreams, winding through her, pulling those gleaming threads of need inside her so tight they took her breath. “But you took my money, Nora. Surely you must realize that I must take my pound of flesh in return. This is how it works.”

“I’m your best friend’s sister,” she reminded him, her voice ragged. “Weren’t you clutching your pearls about that not five minutes ago?”

“I can think of a number of uses for pearls, none of which involve clutching them,” he said, and the obviously sexual insinuation should have left her cold.

But it didn’t. Which meant she was as twisted as he was.

Nora couldn’t bring herself to care about that. In that moment, with him right there, his mouth on her skin and his body braced behind her like a promise she wanted desperately for him to keep, she didn’t care about a single thing except having him.

She’d wanted him for years. Even while she’d claimed to hate him, she’d wanted him. Surely the circumstances didn’t matter. Surely she could have him just this once.

She turned around. His green eyes blazed with something harshly male and triumphant. His mouth was a hard, determined line, and Nora thought that she really might die if she didn’t taste him again.

Nora leaned forward, thought about extreme sports, and then she threw herself off that cliff, pressing her mouth to his.

This time, the kiss skyrocketed into madness the moment their mouths touched, and she had the wild notion that he’d been holding back before. Sensation pounded through her, so intense she was afraid, on some level, that she might not survive it. His hands moved to cradle her face and he crowded into her, pressing her back against the door, leaning into her with that athletic body of his, and she loved it. She wanted more.

She only realized when she heard a sound she dimly recognized as her voice that she’d said that out loud. “More.”

He angled his head for a better fit, and Nora rejoiced in it. In him. She kissed him with all her fear, her panic, and the driving passion inside her that made her feel like a stranger to herself.

Zair muttered something and then he pulled back. He shrugged his way out of his jacket and let it drop to the hard stones beneath them, then he moved in close again and this time, he simply picked her up. He propped them both against the door and he brought her legs up, helping her wind them around his narrow waist.

And all the while he kissed her, feasting on her mouth, tasting her over and over as if he was as starved for this as she was. As if he felt the same need.

As if they were both equally doomed.

His mouth moved from hers then, and he tasted his way across her jaw, then down her neck to the place where it met her shoulder. He pressed her harder into the door and smoothed one of his big, tough hands down her side, then over the outside of one leg. Then he reversed directions and traced that same lazy pattern beneath the rucked-up hem of her dress, up along the smooth skin of her inner thigh.

Nora trembled, but it didn’t occur to her to protest. Or to do anything at all but open herself to him and then welcome him in. He made a sound that was something like a growl, and she felt it inside her like an echo. Zair reached the core of her, hot and aching, and she jolted against him as he caressed the wet, swollen heat there through the lace panties she wore.

Zair lifted his head to meet her gaze. His green eyes were so bright they almost hurt her, his mouth was that solemn, distracting line that Nora could feel like music inside her, and then he slipped his fingers beneath the lace and satin she wore and he stroked his way deep into her.

He muttered something—a curse, a prayer. Nora arched against him, tossed and torn by the crash of so much sensation, so much searing, electric need. Zair thrust his fingers deep inside her, setting a hot, dark rhythm while he held her there, pinned between the door and the immovable wall of his chest.

She was open and immobile. She was outside herself. She was so lost in his spell she didn’t care about anything but what he was doing to her. She tossed her head back and she matched her hips to his movements, and she was scalding, hot, wild, and his. Undeniably his.

The way she always had been, something intoned, deep inside her, like a bell.

“Come,” he ordered her in a harsh whisper, and it sent a thrill through her, making her hurt—and then he pressed down hard against the aching center of her and she burst into desperate, gorgeous pieces all around him, sobbing out his name, tipping over the side of the world and falling straight off into the stars.

And when she came back to herself he was setting her down carefully on her wobbly feet, putting the skirt of her dress to rights and watching her in that hooded, lethal way of his that made her tremble all over again.

“What about now?” he asked silkily, appearing to be in complete and utter control of himself. “Are you ready to tell me the truth yet?”

And she was terrified that he’d see too much on her face now. Or worse, that she’d blurt it all out, because she felt rubbed raw. Outside her own skin. Completely incapable of protecting herself.

The way he wanted her to be, she understood, and she couldn’t let it happen.

She did the next best thing.

Holding his gaze, Nora sank down onto her knees before him.

Chapter Three

NORA BRACED HER hands on Zair’s rock-hard thighs and then pressed her mouth to the hard, hot length of him through the fine material of his trousers.

She felt him thicken even further and told herself it didn’t make her tremble, that she didn’t feel a bolt of new heat pierce through the core of her like a brilliant ache. That this was simply playing offense instead of defense.

“What the hell are you doing?” Zair demanded, and she liked that he sounded as rough as she felt. His strong hands came down and blocked her, taking her face between his palms and gently, if inexorably, tilting it up so he could scowl at her.

“I’m sucking the cock of a strange man in a foreign country,” she said in a voice she hardly recognized as her own. “The way I like to do. I told you.”

It could have been a few moments there on her knees, or several years. Nora felt caught. Suspended somewhere in his dark green gaze, outside herself. She found she’d caught her breath—

And then he moved, scooping her up from the floor in another offhanded display of his superior strength and it thrilled her in a way that had nothing to do with what she thought she ought to feel and everything to do with something primitive and deeply feminine inside her that she was afraid to examine too closely. He swept her up and onto her feet and then he used her shoulders to turn her toward one of the long corridors that ran off from the great room.

“Walk.” It was a low, gruff command.

Nora simply obeyed him.

It made her calm. It made it easy to walk straight ahead until he told her to turn and then follow the spiral stairs down and around into the vast, two-story master suite that plunged down the side of the hill, a cunning merging of old French country accents like the exposed wood beams and the Provençal color scheme with a certain modern sleekness, making the room feel old and new and somehow perfectly Zair. The grand windows offered views of all the sparkling lights that would, come daylight, transform from all its current glittering dark beauty into the serene, sun-drunk stretch of the Côte d’Azure and the gleaming Mediterranean Sea beyond.

Zair followed her down the stairs. When she turned to face him on the dark wood floor between the sitting area arranged around a great stone fireplace and the stout, pillared bed that dominated the far wall, he smiled.

A small, infinitely predatory quirk of his wondrous mouth. Nora let out her breath in a rush.

“Strip,” he said gently. Almost tenderly.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

She stared at him. Paralyzed, somehow.

Zair’s smile deepened, grew more lethal. “Are we about to have another conversation about the role of the common prostitute, Nora? For someone who finds this line of work so delightful she travels the world to indulge herself in the joy of it, you certainly seem untutored in how to proceed. Curious, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t say anything of the kind.”

He moved to the back of the nearby sofa and leaned against it. He crossed his arms over his muscular chest and his long legs at the ankle, and he fixed that dark green gaze of his on hers.

“Let me tell you what I think,” he said.

“I can’t imagine why you think I’m interested.” But all she could think about was his taste. His kiss. How terribly she wanted him, even now. His gaze was a smoldering thing, and it took everything she had to stand there so insouciantly, as if it hardly signified.

“I don’t buy it,” he said, with a small shrug.

Nora sniffed. “In fact, you did. Literally.”

Zair laughed, low and dark. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you’re here for fun.”

“It’s cute that you think you know me,” she replied, though her heart was beating too hard then. Much too hard. “But you don’t.”

“If you say so.” His voice was steel now. Demanding in a different way, as if he was fighting his own temper. “But you should certainly know better than to lie to me.”

She swallowed, hard. “I’m not lying.”

He pushed himself off the back of the couch, and she had the hysterical notion that he was taller, somehow. Darker. Certainly more grim as he came toward her, towering above her, making her chest feel too tight.

“Do you want me to push you, Nora? Because I can. I will.” He laughed again, and it was a stark sound. A scrape against her skin. “I’ll enjoy it.”

“Go ahead,” she said, though it came out much thicker than it should have. “If that’s what turns you on. That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?”

He frowned, and there was a bleak thing alive in his gaze then, making his green eyes seem haunted.

“I am not a good man. This is not safe place.” But he reached over and pulled a long blond wave between his fingers, and it made her heart stutter. And for absolutely no reason at all, she felt far safer in that moment than she had all night. Protected, somehow. “There is nothing I won’t do to get what I want, Nora. No one I won’t hurt. Even you.”

She ached in a different way then. The air around them seemed heavy, spiked. It was too hard to breathe. And every instinct she had called her to step forward, to take him in her arms, to soothe him. To tell him everything he wanted to know, because maybe he could help her. And because maybe she could help him, too.

But she couldn’t risk it.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she whispered, and the lie seemed to light up the room, casting them both in its harsh, unforgiving glare. “I came to France to—”

“To fuck,” he finished for her. He let her hair drop from between his fingers and there was no reason on earth that the grave look on his face should make her breath catch in her throat. “Yes, I know.”

“Zair—” She didn’t know what she meant to say, though she was horrified it might be too much. Too many things she couldn’t take back if she was wrong about him.

And of course she was wrong about him. He hadn’t been on that yacht by accident, and he hadn’t been there for her. And the yacht that Harlow had last been seen on had been registered to the Port of Ruyi.

“One last chance,” he whispered.

She didn’t hesitate again. “Is this your normal routine? All this talking? Because I feel pretty confident you wouldn’t have to pay a girl for that. You could just go out and talk to one.” She let her smile sharpen. “Or maybe not. Is that your problem, Zair? Are you incapable of closing the deal with a girl who might refuse?”

Zair altered somehow, standing right there before her. He shifted. His face became stern, dark, even more forbidding than usual. His green eyes glittered, and his mouth was so hard she thought it might bruise her if it touched her.

And she was obviously sick unto her soul, because she wanted him anyway. Maybe even a little bit more than before.

“Go on, then,” he said, in the coldest voice she’d ever heard him use. “Strip. And Nora? I wouldn’t disobey me again, if I were you.”

* * *

He didn’t think she’d do it. He expected her to balk—

But Nora Grant was proving to be far more of a puzzle than Zair had anticipated. She swayed slightly on her feet. She blinked, as if trying to clear her head. And then she looked him right in the eye as she reached down and took hold of the hem of the peach-colored dress she wore, pulling it up over her head and off of her in a single smooth motion.

It went straight to his head.

She was perfect. Her curves were lush for her slender form and the smooth expanse of her belly beneath the small pout of her navel made his mouth water. And all those sun-kissed limbs of hers that he wanted to explore until he knew every inch of her secrets seemed to go straight to his head. Because he knew, now, how her pleasure felt in his hand. How she fell apart so quickly. Gave herself so completely.

She was so gorgeous it made him ache.

“Do you need me to explain the mechanics of stripping to you?” he asked, and he didn’t do a single thing to modify his harsh tone. His reward was the widening of her summer-blue eyes, the erratic beat of that pulse in her neck.

God help him, the ways he wanted her.

She reached behind her and unclipped her bra. Then slowly peeled it down her arms, and it didn’t take a particularly keen observer to recognize that she wasn’t trying to be alluring. She was stalling.

He waited for her to call it off.

Instead, Nora took a breath so hard he heard it, then let the bra drop to the floor. She stepped out of her shoes, and then her hands moved to the top of those hot pink panties he imagined would linger in his mind for years to come.

Her gaze flickered to his. He stared back, implacable. He saw her jaw move and realized she’d clenched her teeth.

Good, he thought.

Then she reached down and whisked the panties from her body as if she was afraid that if she thought about it any further she wouldn’t do it. Leaving her naked, at last.

“Turn around,” he said with a relentless calm he wished he felt. “In a circle.”

She flushed with what he assumed was temper, though it could have been shame. He’d take either one, if it worked. He thought she’d break then, but she glared daggers at him instead. She also turned. Slowly. In a circle. And he prayed to the God he was certain had abandoned him a long time ago for his usual control. For the strength to resist.

Because there were some things even he refused to do. Some places he could not allow himself to go, down here in this darkness that was his life. And this woman’s allowing him to have sex with her while she thought the absolute worst of him was, it turned out, high atop that list.

Not that he wanted Nora to know that.

“Get on the bed,” he ordered her.

“The bed.” As though she’d never heard the words before. But she caught herself—or she saw the look he was sure he was wearing on his face and she jolted slightly. She threw a look over her shoulder. “You mean that bed.”

“I do.”

She turned and walked to it, and he had to force himself to breathe low and deep and even despite the perfect curve of that ass. He had to force his head into this game again, because this was much too close to any one of the fantasies he’d tortured himself with in the years since he’d done the noble thing and turned her down flat.

He took his time with his own shirt, and he liked the way she swallowed when he threw it to the side. He liked the way her face blanked out altogether when he kicked off his trousers. And he deeply enjoyed the way her cheeks reddened when she looked down at the hardest part of him at last, and the arousal he made no attempt to hide.

But he couldn’t indulge himself.

Not like this. Not even if he could make her forget who she thought he was.

“Get on your hands and knees,” he said, mercilessly, and she shuddered, her pretty face draining of color.

But then that tilt of her chin again, and she did it.

And she was lithe and lovely beyond measure and he thought this really was going to kill him, because she still didn’t break. She assumed the position. She waited.

So he closed the last of the distance between them, steeling himself to what he had to do now. How he had to push her, and not in a fun way that would get them both off. This was not that fantasy. This was darker. He climbed up behind her and he put his hands on her hips and took hold of her. Hard.

“What…?” She didn’t finish the question. He suspected, from her tone, that she hadn’t meant to ask it.

“You wanted to fuck,” he growled. “This is how I fuck. If I were you, I’d brace myself.”

He gripped her again, pitilessly. He hauled her that last little bit closer, and that was when he felt her wavering. Finally. First it was a ripple that snaked through her perfect form, but she fought it off. She steadied herself, dug her hands deeper into the mattress.

Zair smoothed his hand over one perfectly shaped half of her bottom, ignored the storm raging inside him, and then smacked it. The crack reverberated through the room—and through Nora.

She shuddered hard once, then again, and then she began to shake as if she’d never stop. At last. He was two seconds away from forgetting himself and destroying them both.

Nora lunged to the side and he let her go with some mixture of relief and regret, watching as she rolled and then scrambled all the way to the head of the bed and curled up there with her knees to her chin, effectively shielding herself from his view. Tears streamed down her face and her eyes were dark, bruised shadows and Zair knew that he would carry this moment with him for the rest of his life.

It was one more scar. They never did quite heal.

“Problem?” he asked icily.

“I can’t,” she said, though her voice was thick and the words were broken, and he’d take that with him, too. “I can’t.”

“I know,” he said quietly. Regret and relief and too many other dark things were heavy in the air between them then, or maybe that was only in him. Despair and grief and a harsh satisfaction, too, that he’d read her right. Even if she’d put herself at risk before she’d capitulated. It all swirled together inside him and made him furious. And furious was easier. “And maybe next time you won’t wait so fucking long before you admit it.”

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