The Billionaire's Innocent - Part 3

“Control, obedience.” He shrugged, though he watched her closely. “It’s all the same thing.”

“I don’t see the connection between what happened to my best friend—”

“I think you have a very good idea what happened to your best friend,” he said. “This isn’t about her. This is about why you, Nora, who are certainly wealthy enough to buy yourself some interested policemen if appealing to their better natures didn’t work, felt the need to talk your way into a sex slave auction. Why you put yourself not merely in harm’s way, but on an actual yacht filled with people who were there for the express purpose of doling out the kind of harm that would have taken you a lifetime to get past.”

She looked unsteady on her feet, but he didn’t reach out to her, no matter how much he wanted to. He let her rock slightly.

“I admitted that wasn’t such a great plan,” she bit out in a low voice. “I know that. Do you want me to tell you that I feel lucky that it was you who found me there? I do. Okay?”

“Nora.” He kept his voice soft, and thrust his hands into his pockets to keep them to himself. “I’m not trying to break you apart. I just want you to face the truth. You want this to be your fault. You want your friend’s disappearance to be directly traceable to decisions you made and things you did. You came all the way to Cannes to take responsibility for it.”

She made a small, hurt noise, and covered her mouth with her hand, but not before he saw the way her lips crumpled in on themselves. Zair hated himself, but he pushed on anyway, because as much as this might hurt her, it would hurt her far worse if she stayed stuck in the place she was right now. He knew.

“Please,” she whispered.

“Do you want to know why?” he asked, inexorable and calm. So calm, as if this didn’t hurt him. As if her beauty and her courage didn’t make him proud of her, that she was still standing. Still listening. That she hadn’t run off into the night the way he could see she wanted to do.

“Because,” he said quietly, watching her eyes swim with tears, watching her chin tilt up as if she could weather any blow, “you think that if you make this your fault, you can control it. When you accept that you can’t control any of it, that it’s simply a thing that happened to someone you love, you’ll also have to accept that it wasn’t you who did it.”

“And you think that’s better?” she asked, fierce and broken at once. “Because it sounds to me like giving up.”

“Do you know why I rejected you six years ago, Nora?” he asked then, and she let out a hard, long breath. “You were a gorgeous girl. Young and beautiful and you said you wanted me. You said you’d give me anything.”

“I would have,” she whispered.

“You would have given me your body in some or other carefully constructed transaction that you controlled completely,” he said brutally. “I can fuck anyone I like, whenever I like. What is another fuck to me?”

“Thank you.” Her voice shook but she raised her chin. “I think we covered this six years ago.”

“You were just a little girl,” he said. “But now? Here? This is truly beautiful, Nora. This is unique. And you can’t control it.”

“Obedience,” she whispered.

“Not the obedience itself,” he said, smiling faintly, “though let’s be clear, I think it’s hot. But I asked you to hand over your control to me and you did it. That’s strength. That’s beauty. Especially because it scares the hell out of you.” He felt his mouth move and he wanted to kiss her, to taste her, more than he could remember wanting anything else. “If you take anything away from this little show of ours, Nora, let it be that. You shine brightest when you let go. When you believe in yourself.”

For a moment—maybe a year—she only breathed. And a thousand things passed between them in that electric band that felt tighter, tauter, every second.

“If that’s true,” she said quietly, “then you should do it, too. You don’t have to tell me what your objectives are here, Zair. I don’t believe you’re another Jason Treffen. But you can prove it.”

“Can I? Monsters play games, too, Nora. Deeper games than you can imagine.”

“Don’t play another game,” she whispered. “This isn’t about that. And you’re no monster..”

Her eyes were so blue then, even damp with emotion. And she made him remember, suddenly, all those dreams he’d had years ago—all those bright fantasies. That he could be a better man. Some kind of hero. That he was something other than dirty.

“Help someone, Zair,” she urged him, as if believing in him were easy. As if she already did. “Help Greer.”

Chapter Six

AND ZAIR UNDERSTOOD then how much of a danger this woman posed to him. Not just to him personally, but to everything he’d worked for these past years. All Nora had to do was look at him like this, with all that faith and wonder and belief in her pretty eyes, and he’d do anything. He couldn’t even bring himself to mind it as he should.

But he knew it had to end. Here, now. Before he ruined years of work and not all of it his. Before he allowed terrible men to escape justice because he couldn’t resist this one woman and her insistence on thinking him something other than what he was.

“I was hoping we’d see a bit more of her,” the slithery Laurette Fortin had said earlier, while Nora had been off colluding with Greer Bishop, who had always struck Zair as far too hard, too armor-plated to need help. He didn’t like thinking about what that kind of judgment suggested about him. “She could make quite a splash here.”

They’d both known what Laurette had meant by that. How much Laurette could make on a “splash.”

Zair had only shrugged. “I suspect this is but a passing flirtation. I doubt her family would permit anything further.”

She’d sniffed. “Pity, that.”

He’d laughed it off. “There are always more, Laurette, are there not? Season after season, year after year.” The other woman’s gaze had been too shrewd for his liking then, while his own, he’d suspected, was too bleak. “In a few weeks neither one of us will remember she was ever here.”

But he would never forget it.

Zair leaned over and ran his finger over the elegant line of Nora’s collarbone now, lazily tracing a pattern against the smooth skin and delicate bone exposed by the red strips that barely covered her. Goose bumps followed the path he took, rising up like a wake as he indulged himself in the feel of her, so soft and perfect.

“Help her,” Nora said again, and more fiercely this time. “Help Greer. I know you can. Is that why the girls you take home disappear, Zair? Do you spirit them off to safety and only pretend they come to bad ends?”

He laughed, but none of this was funny. He was monitored and followed by his own countrymen. He lived a double life, at the least, and he couldn’t trust a soul. And yet it had never occurred to anyone involved in this project that it wouldn’t be someone who thought the worst of him who would see straight through him. It was someone who foolishly insisted on seeing the best in him instead. No one had thought to protect him against that, least of all Zair himself. His chest felt tight.

“You’re naive, Nora,” he gritted out. “Sheltered and cossetted. You should stick to your art projects and your happy, rich girl life in Manhattan, stepping over the homeless on your way to your next charity dance. I don’t help people. Ever.”

She only shrugged, as if he couldn’t hurt her, though he could see the truth in her too-bright gaze. “You’ve already helped me. I don’t think you know how to keep yourself from it. Notably unlike a monster.”

She’d never been more beautiful than she was then. The light from the lanterns strung above them danced over her, brushing her with gold, making her look like something he might have dreamed up throughout his lonely childhood. Something that couldn’t possibly be real. Something, he knew, that he would ruin simply by letting her too close.

She was already too close.

You need to handle that Grant girl, one of his Washington contacts had emailed him the other day on his secure account. She cannot jeopardize the operation.

But he couldn’t seem to do what he knew he should.

“You little fool,” Zair muttered instead. “The only thing likely to kill me—and you—is your mouth. You need to remember that we’re standing in a pit of vipers.”

“I remember,” she whispered fiercely. “But that doesn’t make you one of them. You’re a fraud, Zair.”

For a stunning moment, he couldn’t believe she’d said that. That she’d actually called him a fraud on a boat teeming with enemies, no matter how private they seemed to be at the moment. There were too many unfriendly ears—and they were everywhere. Too many people who would be only too delighted to believe her. Some he worried already did.

So he did what he should have done in the first place, the only thing that would end this conversation at once and without any further accusations from Nora.

He dropped his head and took her mouth with his.

As if she had never been anything but his, whether he bought her or merely begged for her, or simply gave in to how much he wanted her. As if she never would be anything but his, no matter what happened next.

She tasted like lightning and need and he was too damned greedy. Too wild for her, and he stopped pretending, for this single electric moment, that he’d been anything else for a long time. He angled his head to take more of her and she wasn’t nearly close enough, so he reached over and hauled her to him with a peremptory hand at her neck.

And she melted against him like chocolate.