One Reckless Decision: Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past

She looked up then, and their gazes clashed together in a manner that seemed as intimate and passionate as the kisses they’d shared before. Tariq moved to speak, but no words came.

He did not expect her to move, her expression taking on a look of intense feminine satisfaction. He reached for her, but she shocked him by leaning forward and placing her hot, open mouth, that wicked courtesan’s mouth that had featured prominently in his fantasies since he’d tasted it again this morning, in the valley between his pectoral muscles.

When he swore, he swore in Arabic, Jessa discovered in a distant kind of amusement, and he still sounded every inch a king.

Not that she cared. She could not seem to stop tasting him. She trailed kisses across one hard pectoral plane, then moved to the other, worrying the hard male nipple she found with the tip of her tongue, laughing softly when she heard him groan.

Jessa moved even closer and pushed the soft linen shirt from Tariq’s broad shoulders, letting it fall to the floor behind him. His strong, muscled arms came around her, crushing her breasts against his chest and drawing her into the cradle of his thighs. Just like that, they were pressed together, bare skin against bare skin, so that the intrusion of her lacy, delectable bra seemed almost criminal. Heat coiled in her groin and shot through her, making her head spin. She fought to breathe, and wasn’t sure she much cared if she could not. She felt his bare skin against hers like an exultation, like memory and fantasy come to life.

She had not felt like this in five long years. She had missed his skin, the addictive heat of him that sizzled through her and left her feeling branded and desperate for more. Her head dropped back of its own volition, and she heard him muttering words she could not understand against the soft flesh of her neck. He used his tongue, his lips, his teeth. He surrounded her, held her, his hands finding her curves and testing them against his palms, stroking and teasing and driving her hunger to fever pitch. And all the while his exciting, overwhelming hardness pressed against the juncture of her thighs, driving her ever closer to senseless capitulation.

This was how it had always been, this rush to madness, to pleasure, to the addictive ecstasy that only Tariq could bring her. She could not get close enough. She could not think straight, and she could not imagine why she would want to. This was how she remembered him, so hard, so male, dominating her so easily, so completely—

Careful! a voice in the back of her mind whispered, panicked. Jessa pulled herself back from the brink of total surrender, blinking to clear the haze of passion from her eyes. It was so easy to lose herself in him. It was much too easy to forget. She raised her head and searched Tariq’s expression. His features were hard, fierce and uncompromising as he stared back at her. She felt herself tremble deep inside—warning or wanting, she wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. She had been the one to make this decision. She was not weak, malleable, senseless. She could call the shots. She would.

“Second thoughts?” His voice was a rasp, thick with passion, and her hips moved against his in unconscious response. His eyes glittered dangerously, nearly black now in the center of the opulent gold-and-blue room.

“None whatsoever,” she replied. She eased back from him, aware that he let her do it, let her move slightly in the circle of his embrace.

Holding his gaze with all the defiance she could muster—I am strong, not weak; I am in charge—she dropped her hands to his trousers. His hard mouth curved, and he shifted his weight, giving her easier access.

Jessa remembered her horror at exactly this image earlier this same day—her fear that she would far too easily find herself doing what she was about to do. But it was different now, because he was not compelling her to do it. She was not begging him for anything—she was taking what she wanted. He was not orchestrating anything. He was hers to experience as she wished, to make up for all those lonely nights when she would have done anything at all for the chance to touch him again.

She pulled his belt free of its buckle and unbuttoned the top button of his whisper-soft trousers, letting the backs of her fingers revel in the blazing heat of his taut abdomen and the scrape of the coarse hair that surrounded his manhood. She moved the zipper down slowly, careful to ease it over the hard ridge of his jutting sex, and then she freed him entirely, reaching between them to cup him in her hands.

He muttered something too low to catch, though she thought it was her name.

She could not recall him ever allowing her this kind of unhurried exploration before. Their passion back then had always been too explosive, too all-encompassing. She had never thought to ask for anything. She had been too awash in sensation, too overcome and swept off her feet. She had surrendered to him entirely, body and soul.

But that was the past. Here, now, she caressed his impressive length. He let out a sound too fierce to be a moan. He reached for her, his hands diving once again into the thick mass of her hair and holding her loosely, encouraging her, not correcting her. Jessa ignored him, and concentrated on this most male part of him instead. He was softer here than anywhere else on his rugged warrior’s form, like the softest satin stretched across steel. And so much hotter, so hot that she felt an answering heat flood her own sex, and an ache begin to build inside her.

She raised her head up to meet his gaze, while his hands moved to frame her face. She frowned slightly when he bent his head toward hers. He paused, his mouth a scant breath away. Jessa felt her heart pound and could feel him stir in her hands.

“No?” he asked softly. He did not quite frown in return. “Is this another game, Jessa?”

“This is my night.” She felt his hands flex slightly, but she felt too powerful to allow him to cow her. “My game.”

“Is that so?” His eyes mocked her, though his expression otherwise remained the same. He did not believe she could take control, perhaps. Or he knew how close she came to losing herself, her head, when he touched her. Jessa told herself it didn’t matter.

“Perhaps you should tell me the rules of this game, before you begin it.” His voice and his eyes were more distant, suddenly, but his hands against the delicate skin of her cheekbones were still warm, still exciting.

“There is only one rule,” Jessa said evenly. Deliberately, so there could be no misunderstanding. “And it is that I am in charge.”

Something ignited in his gaze then, and sent an answering shudder down along her spine to weaken her knees. He pulled himself up without seeming to move, arrogant and imperial, and looked at her as if he could not comprehend what she had said. Jessa held her breath.

“And what does that entail, exactly?” he asked, his voice lower and laced with warning. “Will I wake to find myself bound naked from the chandelier, to be tittered over and eventually cut down by the housekeeper?”

Jessa tested out the image of Tariq so completely at her mercy and smiled slightly, even as a hectic kind of restlessness washed through her, urging her to continue what her hands had already started. She tested his length against her palm once again and watched his arrogant focus shatter.

“If that is what I want, then yes,” she said recklessly. “Don’t pretend you won’t enjoy it.”

“And what about what I want?” he asked. Idly, he wrapped a single long, copper curl around his finger and tugged. Jessa did not mistake the sensual menace underlying his tone. She shrugged.

“What about it?” she asked.

“Jessa—”

But he cut himself off, because Jessa sank down in front of him, onto her knees, in a single smooth motion. She heard his breath leave him in a rush. She watched his eyes darken even further, becoming like night.

She did not feel diminished. She did not feel mindless or senseless, or under his power. Quite the opposite.

She felt like a goddess.

“Jessa,” he said again, but this time her name was a prayer. A wish.

She smiled. And then she took him deep into her mouth.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JESSA heard him sigh, or maybe he said her name once more, too low to be heard.

It was thrilling. Jessa felt her own sex throb and melt in time to his slow, careful thrusts, and felt him grow harder. He moaned and she felt potent. Alive. Powerful beyond imagining.

“Enough,” he said suddenly, abruptly disengaging from her.

Jessa sat back on her heels, stunned.

“I’m the one who will decide when it’s enough,” she retorted, glaring up at him. “Not you. Or have you already forgotten that I’m to be in charge?”

“I have not forgotten anything,” Tariq replied, his voice clipped, rough, impatient with need. “But perhaps you have forgotten that I did not agree.”

“But you—”

“Later,” Tariq said, interrupting her. He sank to his knees on the carpet in front of her, making her heart stutter in her chest before kicking into a frenetic beat. This close, Jessa could see the wildness in his eyes, and the passion stamped across his features, giving him a certain breathtaking ferocity.

She started to argue, but instead he leaned closer and claimed her mouth with his. He held her head between his hands, held her captive, and she didn’t think to fight it. He moved her to the angle that best suited him, plundering her mouth with his, taking control. Claiming her. Proving his mastery, and it made her ache and swell and melt against him. Again. Then again, and again.

Heat like liquid washed over her, through her. She felt hectic, frantic, alive with need, shaky from the inside out. She buried her hands in his thick, black hair, exulting in the way it felt like rough silk against her palms, in such contrast to the punishing, glorious demands of his mouth.

It occurred to Jessa that she should protest, wrench back the control she refused to accept he’d only allowed her, indulged her.

Tariq took one strong, capable hand from her head and slid it down her back, leaving trails of sensation in his wake, causing her to arch against him at the wonder of his touch. Then he moved around to her front and pulled once, twice, against the band of her panties. By the time Jessa registered the fact that he was using both of his hands, and that he seemed to be tugging, there was a rip and he was done. He tossed her torn panties aside, and the look he slanted her way dared her to comment on it.

She didn’t say a word. She wasn’t sure she could speak. She was having trouble breathing, much less thinking, as they knelt together in the center of the thick Aubusson carpet.

Tariq’s long, elegant fingers slipped between her thighs, tracing the contours of her sex, then the honeyed heat within. His green eyes held her still, imprisoned her, even as he tested her tight sheath with one strong finger, then another. Jessa felt herself clench around him, and shuddered.

“Forgive me, but I cannot wait for you to finish playing your games with me,” he said then, but there was absolutely no apology in the way he looked at her. He was all arrogant male, every inch a king, and he did not wait for her to respond. Instead, he slid his hands back up the length of her torso and then picked her up as if she weighed no more than a pound coin. He shifted her across the space between them and settled her astride him.

“Tariq—” But she didn’t know what she wanted to say, or how to say it, and he merely twisted his hips and thrust deep inside her.

So deep. So full. Finally.

“Yes,” he said, need pulling his face taut, his eyes black and wild for her. “Finally.”

Only then did Jessa realize she’d spoken aloud. Her breasts seemed to swell even more against their prison of lace, and she rubbed herself helplessly against the wall of his chest, unable to stop, unable to get enough of the feel of him. Again. Finally.

The perfection of it, of him, of their bodies fused together, overwhelmed her. She had no memory of looping her arms around his neck, and yet she held him. Other memories, older ones, of the many times they’d tested the feverish joy of this slick, matchless, breathtaking union, threatened to spill from her eyes.

Now she remembered why she had thrown away her life so heedlessly because of this man. Now she remembered why she had let Tariq twist her into knots and cast her aside like a rag doll—why she hadn’t even recognized what was happening until it was done. For the glory of this moment, this connection, this addictive, electrifying link.

And then he moved, one long, sure stroke, and Jessa came apart. He thrust once, twice. She sobbed against him while her body exploded into pieces, as she shook and shook and shook. She panted, her face in the crook of his neck. The world disappeared and there was nothing but the singular scent and taste of Tariq’s skin at her mouth, and his hard length still buried deep in her sex.

“Come back to me.” His voice was rough, intimate. “Now.” It was no less an order for the sensual tone in which it was delivered. Still, it made her shiver.

“I am finished,” she managed to say, her eyes still closed, her head still cradled between his throat and his wide shoulder. She meant, I am dead. She was not sure she would have minded were that true.

“But I am not.” Tariq shifted position, holding her bottom in one large hand and keeping her hips flush with his. “Hold on to me,” he demanded, and she was too dazed, too drunk on the sensations still firing through her to do anything but what he asked. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and then everything whirled around and she was on her back on the plush carpet and he was between her legs and still so deep inside her, so hard and so big, she thought she might weep from the sheer pleasure of it.

Tariq bent his head and took a stiff nipple into his mouth, sucking on it through the lace barrier. Jessa moaned as a new fire seared through her, the slight abrasion of the lace and the hot, wet heat of his mouth together almost too much to bear.

He laughed softly, and began to move his hips, guiding himself in and out of her with consummate, devastating skill. He turned his attention to her other breast, making Jessa arch into him again and raise her hips to meet his every stroke. Their hips moved in perfect harmony. Once again, she ached. Once again, the fire grew and raged and consumed her. Jessa felt the storm growing within her, taking her to fever pitch, though she fought against it.

“Let go,” he said, his voice fierce, his gaze intense.

“But you—and I—” But how could she concentrate on what she wanted to say when every slide of his body against hers turned her molten, incandescent?

“I command it,” he said.

Her eyes flew wide. Tariq smiled. And then he reached between their bodies and touched her, and she flew over the edge again.

This time, he did not stop. He did not wait. He continued to thrust into her, slow and steady, until her sobs became ragged breaths and her eyes focused once more on his face.

“One more time,” he ordered her, his eyes gleaming.

“I cannot possibly!”

“You can.” He bent toward her, pulling the lace cup away from one breast to tease the flesh beneath with his lips. His tongue. His teeth. Jessa shuddered in response. Tariq slanted a look at her. “You will.”

And when she did, he went with her.

It took a long time for Jessa to return to earth, and when she did, he was still stretched out over her, still pressing her into the floor. She was afraid to think too much about what had just happened. She was afraid to allow herself to face it. She wasn’t certain she would like what she might find.

That much pleasure could only be trouble. She could not assign it too much meaning, decide it was something it could never be. She could not allow herself to forget that this was her idea. That she was here to take some of this pleasure for herself and hoard it. This was her longoverdue goodbye, that was all. She didn’t know why she felt so fragile, so vulnerable.

Tariq stirred and rolled off her, sitting up as he yanked his trousers back into place. As he fastened them, Jessa struggled to sit up herself. Was this it, then? She hadn’t thought much beyond the actual pleasure part of the one night of pleasure idea. How was one expected to negotiate such moments? The last time she had been with him, she had been openly and happily in love with him. There had been no awkwardness. Jessa pulled her bra back into position, and swallowed when her eyes fell on the torn scraps of what used to be her panties. She looked down and saw, with some amazement, that she still wore her impractical shoes.

Beside her, Tariq rose to his feet in a single, lithe movement that reminded her that he was a warrior now, in ways she could only pretend to understand. He turned and looked down at her, his expression unreadable.

Jessa was suddenly painfully aware of her surroundings, the majestic grandeur of the well-appointed room, from its carved moldings to the graceful furniture that looked more like works of art than places to sit or to store belongings. It was not even the bedroom, merely the first in what she could see now was a series of rooms. A suite, complete with floor-to-ceiling windows that showed off the lights of Paris shooting off in all directions. Tariq stood before her, half-naked, his thick hair tangled and hanging around his face, making him look untamed and remote but no less regal. He belonged in such a place, surrounded by such things. And here she was, half-naked on a priceless rug, Jessa Heath from Fulford with nothing to show for herself, not even her panties.

It occurred to her that he had only said he wanted to get her out of his system. He had never elaborated what might happen when he had.

The moment stretched between them, long past awkward. Jessa could still feel him between her legs, and yet it was as if a perfect stranger stood before her, carved from stone. Some avenging angel prepared to hand down judgment.

But she had been through worse, she reminded herself, and no matter what happened, no matter how unpleasant the moment, she had chosen this. That was the key point. She had chosen this.

Jessa sat up straighter and pushed her hair back from her face. It hardly mattered if she looked disheveled at this point, after all. He must have had his mouth or his hands on every inch of her body. And what could he possibly do or say to her? Would he leave her cruelly, perhaps? She had already survived that once, relatively unscathed. She met his gaze proudly.

“Thank you,” she said in her most polite tone. It was the one she used in fancy restaurants and to bank managers. “That was exactly what I wanted.”

“I am delighted to hear it.” His tone was sardonic. “I live to serve.” Now he openly mocked her. She pretended she could not hear the edge in his voice.

“Yes, well.” She got to her feet with rather less grace than he had displayed, and looked around for her dress. She saw it in a crumpled heap a few feet away. “If only that were true. You would be a different man, wouldn’t you?” She moved toward the dress.

“Jessa.” Her name was another command, and she looked at him even though she knew she should ignore him, pick up her things and walk out. “What are you doing?”

“My dress…” She gestured at it but couldn’t seem to turn away from him, not when he was looking at her that way, so brooding and dark and something else, something she might have called possessive on another man.

“You won’t need it.”

“I won’t?”

He didn’t move, he only watched her, but his eyes were hot. Jessa was shocked to feel her body respond to him. Anew. Again. Her nipples hardened, her sex pulsed.

It was absurd. She had gotten what she’d wanted, hadn’t she? What was the point of drawing it out? No matter how ravenous she seemed to be for him.

“We are not done here,” he said quietly. His gaze was hard, yet she softened. “We have hardly begun.”

CHAPTER NINE

TARIQ stood at the window that rose high above the bedroom, looking out over the city. Dawn snuck in with long pink fingers, teasing the famous rooftops of Paris before him, yet he barely saw it. Behind him, Jessa slept in the great bed that stood in the center of the ornate room, the heavy white-and-gold-brocade coverlet long since discarded, her naked limbs curled beneath her, rose and pink from the exertions of the long night. He did not need to confirm this with his own eyes again; he would hear it if her breathing altered, if she turned over, if she awoke.

It was as if he could feel her body as an extension of his own. Perhaps this was inevitable after such a night, he told himself, but he knew better. He had lived a life of excess for more years than he cared to recall, and he had had many nights that would qualify as extreme, and yet he had never felt this kind of connection to a woman. He didn’t care for it. It reminded him of all the things he had worked so hard to forget.

“You make me feel alive,” he had told her once, years ago, recklessly, and she had laughed as she rose above him, naked and beautiful, her face open and filled with light.

“You are alive,” she had whispered in his ear, holding him close. She had then proceeded to prove it to them both.

Tariq had lost count of the times he had reached for her last night, or her for him. He knew he had slept but little, far more interested in tasting her, teasing her, sinking into her one more time. He had reacquainted himself with every nook and cranny of her body, all of its changes, all of its secrets—the pleasure so intense, so astounding, that he could not bring himself to let it end.

Because he knew that once he stopped, he would have to face the truths he was even now avoiding. And as the night wore on, Tariq had found himself less and less interested in doing so.

“This is a feast,” Jessa had said at some point, while they sat in the sitting room and ate some of the rich food they’d ignored earlier, wearing very little in the way of clothes. She had smiled at him, unselfconscious and at ease with her legs folded beneath her and her hair tumbled down around her bare shoulders. She had looked free. Just as she had always been with him.

“Indeed it is,” he had replied, but he had not been talking about the meal.

Memories chased through him now, hurtling him back to a time he wanted to forget—had worked to forget, in fact, for years. Touching her, tasting her, breathing in her scent. These things had unlocked something in him that he had worked hard to keep hidden, even from himself.

His parents had died in a car accident when he was too young to remember more than fleeting images of his father’s rare smile, his mother’s dark curtain of hair. He had been taken into the palace by his only remaining relative, his uncle the king, and raised with his cousins, the princes of Nur. His uncle was the only parent Tariq had ever known, and yet Tariq had always been keenly aware that he was not his uncle’s son. Just as he had always known that his cousins were the future rulers of the country, and had been trained from birth as such.

“Your cousins have responsibilities to our people,” his uncle had told Tariq when they were all still young.

“And what are my responsibilities?” Tariq had asked guilelessly.

His uncle had only smiled at him and patted him on the head.

Tariq had understood. He was not important, not in the way his cousins were.

And so he did as he pleased. Though his uncle periodically suggested that Tariq had more to offer the world than a life full of expensive cars and equally costly European models, Tariq had never seen the point in discovering what that was. He had played with the stock market because it amused him and he was good at it, but it had been no more to him than another kind of high-stakes poker game like the ones he played in private back rooms in Monte Carlo.