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.