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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
