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Satisfaction flashed across his face, and his mouth curved slightly.
Jessa knew she’d made a terrible mistake.
“Excellent.” He inclined his head slightly. “I will send a car for you at six o’clock.”
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS only when Jessa found herself seated at a romantic table out on the fifth-story terrace of one of the finest houses she had ever seen, improbably located though it was in Paris, France, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, that she accepted the truth she had known on some level from the moment she’d so thoughtlessly agreed to this dinner: she was outmatched.
“I am pleased you could make it,” Tariq said, watching her closely for her reaction. Jessa ordered herself not to give him one, but she could feel her mouth flatten. Had he had any doubt she would come?
“I was hardly given any choice, was I?” she asked. He had played her like the proverbial fiddle, and here she was, out of the country and entirely within his power.
Tariq only smiled arrogantly and waved at the hovering servant to pour the wine.
They sat outside on the terrace that circled the top floor of the elegant home, surrounded by carved stone statuary and wrought iron, the Paris night alive around them with lights and sounds. Yet Jessa could not take in the stunning view laid out before her, much less the beautiful table set with fine linen and heavy silver. Her head still whirled until she feared she might faint. She stared at Tariq from her place across from him while conflicting emotions crashed through her, but he only smiled slightly indulgently and toyed with the delicate crystal stem of his wineglass. And why should he do anything else?
She had taken care to wear her best dress, there was no pretending otherwise. If it was within the realm of possibility for someone like her to impress him, she’d wanted to do it—and now the royal-blue sheath dress she’d felt so pretty in earlier felt like sackcloth and ash against her skin, outclassed as it was by the splendor of Paris and what she knew was simply one of the homes Tariq must own.
How had she ever dreamed she could compete with this man, much less fascinate him in any way, no matter what lies he told? And the most important question was why had she wanted to do so in the first place? What did she hope to win here? She knew that he desired her, but she had already learned exactly how much stock he put in such things, hadn’t she? As her sister had told her years before, at the end of the day you’re not the type a man like that will marry, are you?
Whatever happened tonight, Jessa could never tell herself she hadn’t known better.
Of her own free will she had stepped into the car he’d sent. She hadn’t complained when, instead of delivering her to some appropriately luxurious hotel in the York area that might live up to the expectations of a king, whatever those might be, it had taken her instead to the Leeds Bradford Airport. She hadn’t uttered a sound when she was handed aboard the impressive private jet by his ever-courteous, ever-solicitous staff. She’d told herself some story about Tariq’s self-importance and had imagined she would make cutting remarks to him about his having to fly down to London for dinner. She had even practiced the sort of urbane, witty things she might say as she relaxed against the deep, plush leather seats and accepted a glass of wine from the friendly and smiling air hostess.
But then one hour had turned to two, and she had found herself emerging not in London at all, but in Paris. France.
To whom, exactly, should she complain? Tariq hadn’t even been aboard the plane to compel her to come here. The scary thing was that Jessa knew full well that she had compelled herself.
“You cannot be angry with me,” Tariq said softly, his voice low but no less intense. Jessa could feel the rich, slightly exotic sound of it roll through her, as if he’d hit some kind of tuning fork and her body was springing to attention. He nodded toward the view of stately buildings and glittering monuments in the cool night air, then returned his dark gaze to hers. “Such beauty forbids it.”
“Can I not?” Jessa folded her hands in her lap and resolved to keep the hysteria at bay no matter what else happened. And if she was honest, what she felt when she looked at him was not hysteria, or anger. It was far more complicated than that.
“You agreed to dinner,” Tariq said with a supremely arrogant shrug. A smile played with the corner of his mouth but did not quite take root there. “You did not specify where.”
“Silly me,” Jessa said. She met his eyes calmly, though it cost her something. “It never occurred to me that one was required to designate a preferred country when one agreed to a meal.” Under duress, she wanted to say but did not. It wasn’t entirely true, was it?
“There are many things that have not occurred to you, it seems,” Tariq replied. Jessa did not care to explore the layers or possible meanings in that remark.
“You mean because of your vast wealth and resources,” she said instead, as if she was used to discussing such things with various members of assorted royal families. “It is only to be expected when one is a king, isn’t it? Surely these things would be much more impressive if they were the result of your own hard work and sweat.”
“Perhaps,” he said, a dark, affronted edge in his voice, though he did not alter his position. He continued to lounge in his chair like the pasha she supposed he really was. Only his gaze sharpened, piercing her, reminding her that she insulted him at her peril—and only because he allowed it.
“Do you find royalty offensive, Jessa?” he asked in a drawl. His brows rose, mocking her. “You English have a monarch of your own, I believe.”
“The Queen has yet to whisk me off to a foreign country for a dinner that would have been uncomfortable enough in the local chip shop,” Jessa retorted.
“It will only be uncomfortable if you wish it so,” Tariq replied with infuriating patience, as if he knew something she did not. This time he really did smile, and it was not reassuring. “I am perfectly at ease.”
“Somehow, that is not soothing,” Jessa said, with the closest thing to a real laugh that she had uttered yet in his presence. It surprised them both. He looked startled as their eyes met and held. The moment seemed to stretch out and hover, locking Jessa in the green depths of his eyes with the glorious shine and sparkle of Paris stretching out behind him.
Her gaze drifted to his mouth, that hard, almost cruel mouth that could smile so breathtakingly and could do things to her that made her feel feverish to imagine. She felt her own lips part on a breath, or perhaps it was a sigh, and the world seemed to narrow and brighten all at the same time. She felt the now familiar coiling of tension in her belly, and the corresponding melting in her core. She felt the arch of her back and the matching curve of her toes inside her shoes. She began to feel each breath she took, as her heart kicked into a heavy, drugging rhythm that reminded her too well of his mouth upon her own, his hands on her skin.
Suddenly, brutally, the veil lifted. And Jessa realized in a sudden jolt, with an almost nauseating mixture of self-awareness and deep, feminine certainty, that this was exactly why she had come so docilely, so easily. Across borders, onto private planes, with nary a whisper of protest. This was why she had taken such pains in her bath earlier, dabbed scent behind her ears and between her breasts. She had told herself she was putting together her feminine armor. She had told herself she would dress the same way for any person she wished to appear strong in front of, that it was not romantic in the least to want to look her best or pin her hair up into a French twist or wear her most flattering and most lethal shoes. She had lied to herself, even as something within her knew the truth and had cried out for the wicked royal-blue dress that exposed her shoulders, kissed her curves and whispered erotically over her legs.
She had come here for him. For Tariq. For this raging passion that coursed through her veins and intoxicated her, this all-consuming desire that the intervening years and her own sacrifices had failed to douse in any way.
With a muttered oath that even she wasn’t sure was a cry of desperation or a simple curse, Jessa rocked forward and to her feet. Restlessly—agitation making her body feel jerky and clumsy—she pushed herself away from the table and blindly headed toward the wrought-iron railing that seemed to frame the Paris street five stories below her feet as much as protect her from falling into it.
The truth seemed as cold as the autumn night, now that she had moved away from the brazier that hovered near the table—and the far more consuming fire that Tariq seemed to light in her.
She wanted him. Arguing with herself did nothing to stop it. She had spent the whole day determined to simply not be at home when he sent his car for her, and yet she had found herself immersed in the bath by half past four. She had ordered herself not to answer the door when the driver rang, but she had had the door open and her wrap around her shoulders before he could press the button a second time.
“Surely this should not distress you,” Tariq said from behind her. Too close behind her, and once more she had not heard him move. Jessa closed her eyes. If she pretended, it was almost as if he was the magical, trustworthy lover she had believed him to be so long ago, and she the same starry-eyed, besotted girl. “It is a simple dinner, in a lovely place. What is there to upset you here?”
What, indeed? Only her own betrayal of all she’d thought she believed, all she thought she had gained in the years since his departure. What was that next to a luxurious meal on a Paris rooftop with the man she should avoid above all others?
“Perhaps you do not know me as well as you think,” she replied, her voice ragged with all the emotion she fought to keep hidden. Or perhaps she did not know herself.
“Not for lack of trying,” Tariq murmured. “But you will keep your mysteries, won’t you?”
It was no surprise when his warm, strong hands cupped her shoulders, then stretched wide to test her flesh against his fingers, sending inevitable currents of desire tingling down her arms. She let out a sigh and bowed her head.
Perhaps this was inevitable. Perhaps this had always been meant to happen, somehow. She had never had the chance to say her goodbyes to Tariq, her fantasy lover, had she? She had run away to a friend’s flat in Brighton to get her head together. The man she had loved had disappeared, and she learned soon after that he had never existed. But there had been no warning, no opportunity to express her feelings with the knowledge that it was their last time together.
A rebellious, outrageous thought wormed its way through her then, making her catch her breath.
What if she took, instead of lost? What if she claimed, instead of letting herself be deprived? What if she was the one in control, and no longer so passive, so submissive? What if she was the one who needed to get him out of her system, and not the other way around?
She turned in his loose grip, and leaned against the railing, tipping her head back so she could look him in the eye. What if she made this about what she wanted?
And what she wanted was the one last night she’d never had. She wanted to say her goodbyes—and it didn’t hurt that in giving him one night, in taking it for herself, she was acknowledging that it could never be more than that between them. This was a memory, nothing more.
“I will give you one night,” she said, before she lost her nerve. And then it was said, and there was no taking it back.
He froze. His face lost all expression, though his dark eyes glittered with jade fire. She had surprised him. Good.
“I beg your pardon?” he asked, enunciating each word very carefully, as if he thought he had misheard her, somehow. It made Jessa feel bolder. “What do you mean?”
“Must I repeat myself?” she asked, taking too much pleasure in tossing his own words back at him. She felt the power of this choice surge through her. She was the one in charge. She was the one who decided whether or not she would burn on this particular fire. And then she would walk away and finally be done with him. It would be like being reborn. “I don’t recall you being so slow—”
“You must forgive me,” he interrupted her with precious little civility, his teeth bared in something not at all as mild as a smile. “But why would you change your mind so suddenly?”
“Maybe I’ve considered things in a different light,” Jessa said. Did she have to explain this to him, when she could hardly explain it to herself? She raised her brows. “Maybe I’m interested in the same things that you’re interested in. Putting the past behind us, once and for all.”
“For old time’s sake?” he asked. He moved closer, his big body seeming to block out the City of Lights. Tension radiated from every part of him, and she knew she should be afraid of what he could do to her, what he could make her feel. She knew she should feel intimidated, outmatched once again.
But this was the one place where it didn’t matter if he was a king and she a commoner. He wanted her with the same unwelcome intensity that she wanted him. In this, at least, they were equals. They matched.
She felt her mouth curve slightly into a smile that was as old as time, and spoke of a knowledge she had never put into words before, never felt so completely, down into her bones.
“What do you care?” she taunted him softly, daring him, challenging him.
His eyes went darker, his mouth almost grim with the passion she could feel surging through her veins.
“You are right,” he said, his voice hoarse, and rough against her, though she welcomed it. Exulted in it. “I do not care at all.”
His mouth came down on hers in something like fury, though it was much sweeter. Once again, he tasted her and went wild, and yet he merely kissed her, angling his head to better plumb the depths of her mouth, to intoxicate himself with her, with the feel of her soft body pressed against his. Her softness to his hardness. Her moan against his lips.
He had been prepared to seduce her if he had to. He had not been prepared for her to be the aggressor, and the surprise of it had desire raging through him.
“Be certain this is what you want,” he growled, lifting his head and scanning her expression with fierce intensity. Her eyes were glazed with passion, her lips swollen from his kisses. Surely this would put an end to all the madness, all the nights he’d woken and reached for the phantom woman who was never there.
“Have I asked you to stop?” she asked, her breath uneven, her tone pure bravado. She tilted her stubborn chin into the air. “If you’ve changed your mind—”
“I am not the one who required so many games to achieve this goal,” he reminded her, passion making his voice harsh. “I made my proposal from the start, hiding nothing.”
“It is up to you,” she said, her eyes narrowing in a maddening, challenging manner, her words infused with a certain strength he didn’t understand. Who did Jessa Heath think she was that she so consistently, so foolishly, stood up to him, all the while refusing to tell him anything about her life, claiming she could only bore him? He could not recall the last person who had defied, much less taunted, him. Only Jessa dared.
A warning bell rang somewhere deep inside of him, but he ignored it.
“You will find that most things are, in fact, up to me,” he replied, reminding them both that he, not she, was the one in charge, no matter how conciliatory he might act when it suited him.
He was a king. He might not have been born to the position, and he might have spent the better part of his life as an embarrassment to the man who had been, but he’d spent the past five years of his life atoning. He was in every way the monarch his uncle would have wished him to be, the nephew he should have been while his uncle lived. No imprudent and foolish woman could change that, not even this one, whom he realized he regarded as a kind of specter from his wastrel past. He would never fully put that past behind him until he put her there, too.
Jessa reached out her hand and placed it against his cheek. Tariq’s mind went suddenly, scorchingly, blank as electricity surged between them.
“We can talk, if that is what you want,” she said, as calmly as if discussing the evening’s dinner menu. As unaffected, though he could feel the slight tremor in her delicate palm that belied her tone. “But it is not what I want.”
“And what is it you want?”
“I do not want to talk,” she said distinctly, purposefully, holding his gaze, her own rich with suggestion and the desire he was certain was written all over him. “And I don’t think you want to, either. Do you?”
“Ah, Jessa,” he said on a sigh, while a kind of moody triumph pumped through him and pulsed hard and long into his sex. She thought she was a match for him, did she? She would learn. And soon enough he would have her exactly where he wanted her. “You should not challenge me.”
She cocked her head to one side, not cowed in the least, with the light of battle in her cinnamon eyes, and smiled.
It went directly to his head, his groin. He reached for her without thought, without anything at all but need, and pulled her into his arms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS not enough. Her taste, her scent, her mouth beneath his and her hands tracing beguiling patterns down his chest. He wanted more.
“I want to taste you,” he whispered in Arabic, and she shuddered as if she could understand him.
He wanted everything. Her surrender. Her artless, unstudied passion. The past back where it belonged, and left there.
But most of all, he wanted her naked.
Tariq raked his fingers into her hair, never lifting his mouth from hers, sending her hairpins flying and clattering against the heavy stones at their feet. Her heavy mass of copper curls tumbled from the sophisticated twist at the back of her head and fell in a jasmine-scented curtain around her, wild and untamed, just as he wanted her. Just as he would have her.
He lifted his mouth from hers and took a moment to study her face. Why should he spend even an hour obsessing over this woman? She was no great beauty, like some of the women he had been linked with in the past. Her face would never grace the covers of magazines nor appear on twelve-foot-high cinema screens. Yet even so, he found he could not look away. The spray of freckles across her nose, the sooty lashes that framed her spicecolored eyes—combined with her courtesan’s mouth, she was something more unsettling than beautiful. She was…viral. She got into the blood and stayed there, changing and growing, and could not be cured using any of the usual methods.
Tariq had no idea where that appallingly fanciful notion had come from. He would not even be near her now were it not for the mornings he had woken in the palace in Nur, overcome by the feverish need to claim this woman once more. He scowled down at her, and then scowled harder when she only smiled that mysterious smile again in return, unfazed by him.
“Come,” he ordered her, at his most autocratic, and took her arm. Not roughly, but not brooking any argument, either, he led her across the terrace and ushered her into the quiet house.
His staff had discreetly lit a few lamps indoors. They cast soft beams of light across the marble floors and against the high, graceful ceilings. He led her through the maze of galleries filled with priceless art and reception rooms crowded with extravagant antiques that comprised a large portion of the highest floor of the house, all of them boasting stellar views of nighttime Paris from the soaring windows. He barely noticed.
“Where are we going?” she asked, but there was a lack of curiosity in her voice. As if she was as cool and as unaffected as she claimed to be, which he could not countenance. Surely it shouldn’t matter—surely she could pretend anything she wished and he should not care in the slightest—but Tariq fought to keep himself from growling at her. He could not accept that she was so calm while he felt so wild. Even if her calmness was, as he suspected and wanted to believe, an act.
None of this matters, he reminded himself, coldly. As long as you get her out of your system, once and for all.
After all, despite his obsessive concentration on a single woman for far too long, the truth was that Tariq did not have time for this. He had a country to run. Nur was poised on the brink of great change, but change did not come easily, especially in his part of the world. There was always a price. There were always those who preferred to stick to the old ways, out of fear or faith or sheer stubbornness. There were those who wanted only to see the old regime, of which Tariq was the last surviving member, crumble and disappear, and no matter that such a thing would cause even more chaos and bloodshed.
There were border disputes to settle, and tribal councils to oversee. Tariq loved his beautiful, harsh, deeply complicated and often conflicted country more than he had ever loved a human being, including himself. It felt like the worst kind of disloyalty to be tangled up with this woman, especially since she was the last one he had been with in his previous incarnation. Perhaps he judged her more severely because she was the other face he saw when he revisited his old disgraceful behavior in his mind.
Tariq led Jessa into the sumptuous master suite that sprawled across the back of the house, and only released her arm when he had closed the door behind them, shutting them in. Would she still be so brave now that the games were quickly coming to an end? Would she dare to continue this foolishness?
She took a few steps into the room ahead of him, her head slightly bent and her hands clasped in front of her as if she was listening for second thoughts or offering up a prayer. Too late, he thought with no little satisfaction. He let his gaze follow the soft indentation of her spine down to the flare of her hips, as the royal-blue dress shimmied in the low lights and seemed to grow brighter in the reflection of the gilt-edged opulence that surrounded them. Tariq was no particular fan of French furniture—he found it too fussy, too liable to collapse beneath his large frame—but he could appreciate the way so much Continental splendor seemed to enhance her natural glow. She turned her head then, looking at him over her shoulder.
It was as if the room smoldered. Tariq thought only of flame, of heat, of burying himself so deeply inside of her that the only thing he’d care about would be the way she gasped his name.
She did not speak. She only watched him, her eyes wide but without apprehension as he closed the distance between them with a few short strides. He reached out and used his hands to trace the parts of her body that his eyes had so recently touched: the soft nape of her neck, the sinuous length of her spine, the mesmerizing place where her hips curved gently into her bottom. He reached down and drew the silky dress up over her legs, slowly, letting the fabric caress her. The room was silent, only the sounds of their breathing and the faint, seductive whisper of fabric moving against flesh. He prolonged the moment, enjoying the way the dress felt in his hands, enjoying more the way her flushed skin felt as he touched her in passing, and then he drew the filmy dress over her head and cast it aside.
She turned to face him then, a flush rising in her cheeks, and he saw her arms move as if she wanted to cover herself or hide from him. She stopped herself, her expression betraying nothing more than a quick blink of her eyes, and dropped her arms back down to her sides.
She stood before him, clad only in a black lace bra that pushed her breasts toward him, the swell of all that creamy flesh calling his name, begging for his tongue, his hands. Below, she wore nothing save a pair of sheer panties and her wickedly high shoes. She looked like something she was not, or had not been when he knew her, when he had claimed her innocence as his right. She looked decadent. Delicious.
Mine.
“It appears I will have my dessert before my dinner,” Tariq said, pushing aside the possessive urge that roared through him. He traced the delicate ridge of her collarbone, dipping into the hollow where her pulse beat hard against her throat. She was like his own private banquet. Just because he had ulterior motives it didn’t mean he wasn’t prepared to thoroughly enjoy himself.
“Perhaps I want dessert as well,” Jessa replied, only the slightest tremor in her voice, as if she was not flushed with color and practically naked before him.
She wanted to be tough. Tariq smiled, released her.
“Then by all means, help yourself.”
She swayed toward him, rocking slightly on her feet. It could be the precarious shoes in the deep carpet, though Tariq rather thought it was the same strange hunger that gripped him and made him feel curiously close to unsteady himself. Then her hands were on him, sweeping across the hard planes of his chest, testing the hardy muscles he’d built up after five years of intensive training with his royal guard. A king must be prepared to fight the battles he expected his subjects to fight, Tariq’s uncle had always believed. And so Tariq had transformed himself from an idle playboy who visited a fancy spa-like gym merely to maintain a certain trouser size that photographed well, to a warrior capable of lethal combat. He shrugged off his jacket and let it drop to the floor. The expertly tailored concoction barely made a sound as it hit the ground. Jessa did not spare it so much as a glance.
Tariq’s eyes narrowed against his own pounding hunger as he let Jessa explore this new, fierce body of his, sliding her palms from his shoulders to his waist to yank his shirttails free from his trousers. He watched her pull her seductive lower lip between her teeth as she worried the buttons out of their holes one by one and slowly, torturously, exposed his skin to the slightly cooler air of the suite around them. When she had unbuttoned every button and unhooked his cuff links, she pushed the shirt back on his shoulders so it hung there, exposing his chest to her view.
She let out a long hiss of breath. He could feel it tickle across his skin, arrowing straight to his arousal, making him thicken. He made no move to hide it, only continued to wait, to watch, to see what she would do.
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.
