had been shockingly unusual for a girl who had always before been at his beck and call, just as he had not forgotten his own panicked response to her unexpected unavailability, something he might have investigated further had history and tragedy not intervened. But there was no point digging into such murky waters, especially when he did not know what he would find there. What mattered was that she still wanted him. He could feel it with his hands, see it in the flush of her skin and the heat in her gaze.
“Tariq—” she began.
“Please,” he murmured, astounded to hear his own voice. Astonished that he, Sheikh Tariq bin Khaled Al-Nur, would beg. For anything, or any reason. And yet he continued. “I just want to talk.”
Was he so toothless, neutered and tame? But he could not seem to stop himself. He had to see this through, and then, finally, be rid of her once and for all. If there was another way, he would have tried it already. He had tried it already!
“About us.”
Us. He’d actually said the word us.
The word ricocheted through Jessa’s mind, leaving marks, much like she suspected his hand might do if he didn’t take it off her—if she didn’t burst into flame and burn alive from the slight contact.
As if there had ever been an us in the first place!
“You have to get on with your life,” her sister Sharon had told her, not unkindly, about two weeks after everything had come to such a messy, horrible end in London and Jessa had retreated to York. Crawled back, more like, still holding the secret of her pregnancy close to her chest, unable to voice the terrifying truth to anyone, even her sister. And all while Tariq’s face was on every television set as the tragedy in Nur unfolded before the world. The sisters had sat together in Jessa’s small bedroom while Sharon delivered her version of comfort. It was brisk and unsentimental, as Sharon had always been herself.
“I don’t know what that means,” Jessa had said from the narrow bed that had been hers as a girl, when Sharon had taken the reins after their parents died within eighteen months of each other. Eight years older, Sharon and her husband Barry had taken over the house and, to some extent, the parenting of Jessa, while they tried and failed to start their own family.
“It means you need to get your head out of the clouds,” Sharon had said matter-of-factly. “You’ve had an adventure, Jessa, and that’s more than some people ever get. But you can’t lie about wallowing in the past forever.”
Tariq hadn’t felt like the past to Jessa. Or even an adventure. Even after everything that had happened—after losing her job, her career, her self-respect; after finding herself pregnant and her lover an unreachable liar, however little she might have come to terms with that—she still yearned for him. He’d felt like a heart that beat with hers, louder and more vibrant inside her chest than her own, and the thought of the gray, barren life she was expected to live without him was almost more than she could bear. She had choked back a sob.
“Men like him are fantasies,” Sharon had said, with no little pity. “They’re not meant for the likes of you or me. Did you imagine he’d sweep you off to his castle and make you his queen? You, little Jessa Heath of Fulford? You always did fancy yourself something special. But you’ve had your bit of fun and now it’s time to be realistic, isn’t it?”
Jessa had had no choice but to be realistic, she thought now. But Tariq was back and there was far too much at stake, and she still couldn’t think straight while he touched her. And he wanted to talk about us, of all things.
“There is no us,” she said crisply, as if she was not melting, as if she was still in control. She met his gaze squarely. “I’m not sure there ever was. I’ve no idea what game you thought you were playing.”
“I have a proposition for you,” he said calmly, as if what she’d said was of no matter. He lounged back against the mantelpiece, letting his hand move from her skin slowly. He was every inch the indolent monarch.
“It is barely half-nine and here you are propositioning me,” Jessa replied, determined to get her balance back. She kept her voice dry, amused. Sophisticated, the way she imagined the glamorous women he was used to would speak to him when he propositioned them. “Why am I not surprised?”
If her heart beat faster and her skin felt overheated, and she could still feel his hand on her like a tattoo, she ignored it.
“Am I so predictable?” His hard face looked cast in iron in the low gloom from the front windows. And yet Jessa sensed that the real shadows came from within him.
She stood ramrod straight because she could not allow herself to move, to back away from him. She thought it would show too much, be too much of a concession. She laced her fingers together in front of her as tightly as possible.
“It is not a question of whether or not you are—or were—predictable,” she said coolly. She raised her eyebrows in unmistakable challenge. “Perhaps you were simply like any other man when things got too serious. Afraid.”
He stilled. The temperature in the room seemed to plunge. Jessa’s heart stuttered to a halt. She knew, suddenly, that she was in greater danger from him in that moment than ever before. Something dark moved across his face, and then he bared his teeth in something far too wild to be a smile.
“Proceed with care, Jessa,” he advised her in a soft voice that sent a chill snaking down her spine. “Not many people would dare call a king a coward to his face.”
“I am merely calling a spade a spade,” Jessa replied, as if she did not have a knot of trepidation in her stomach, as if she was not aware that she was throwing pebbles at a lion. She shook the loose tendrils of her hair back from her face, wishing her curls did not take every opportunity to defy her. “You were not yet a king when you ran away, were you?”
“Ran away?” he echoed, enunciating each word as if he could not quite comprehend her meaning.
“What would you call it?” she asked coolly. Calmly. She even smiled, as if they shared a joke. “Adults typically have conversations with each other when an affair is ending, don’t they? It’s called common courtesy, at the very least.”
“Again,” he said, too quietly, “you have forgotten the sequence of events. You were the one who disappeared into thin air.” He stood so still, yet reminded Jessa not of a statue, but of a coiled snake ready to strike. Yet she couldn’t seem to back down.
“I merely failed to answer my mobile for two days,” Jessa replied lightly. “That’s not quite the same thing as quitting the country altogether, is it?”
“It is not as if I was on holiday, sunning myself on the Amalfi Coast!” Tariq retorted.
Jessa shook her head at him. “It hardly matters now,” she said carelessly, as if her heart hadn’t been broken once upon a time. “I’m only suggesting that perhaps it was a convenient excuse, that’s all. An easy way out.”
Tariq was so still it was as if he’d turned to stone. He studied her as if he had never seen her before. She had the sudden, uncomfortable notion that he was assessing her as he might an enemy combatant on the field of battle, and was coldly scanning her for her weaknesses. Her soft points.
And all the while that awareness swirled around them, making everything seem sharper, brighter.
“I will not explode into some dramatic temper tantrum, if that is your goal with these attacks,” Tariq said finally, never looking away from her. She felt her cheeks heat, whether in relief or some stronger emotion, she didn’t know. “I will not rage and carry on, though you question my honor and insult my character.” His hard mouth hinted at a curve, flirted with it. “There are better ways to make my feelings known.”
She refused to feel the heat that washed through her. She would not accept it. The tightness in her belly was agitation, worry, nothing more. But the desperate, purely feminine part of her that still wanted him, that thirsted for his touch in ways