The Billionaire's Innocent. Caitlin Crews

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.