The Billionaire's Innocent

“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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