Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir

“I came back,” Jessa said, her voice a low throb, rich with a pain she would have said was long forgotten. “You didn’t.”

There was an odd, arrested silence.

“You will have heard of my uncle’s passing, of course,” Tariq said, his gaze hooded. His tone was light, conversational. At odds with the tension that held Jessa in a viselike grip.

“Yes,” she said, struggling to match his tone. “It was in all the papers right after you left. It was such a terrible accident.” She took care to keep her voice level. “Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the man I’d known as simply the son of a doctor was, as it happened, a member of the royal family and the new king of Nur.”

“My father was a doctor.” His brows rose. “Or do you think I impugned his honor after his death merely for my own amusement?”

“I think you deliberately misled me,” she replied evenly, trying not to let her temper get the best of her. “Yes, your father was a doctor. But he was also the younger brother of a king!”

“You will forgive me,” Tariq said with great hauteur, “if your feelings did not supercede legitimate safety concerns at the time.”

How could he do that? How could he make her feel as if she had wronged him when he was the one who had lied and then abandoned her? What was the matter with her?

“Safety concerns?” she asked with a little laugh, as if none of this mattered to her. Because none of it should have mattered to her. She had come to terms with her relationship with Tariq years ago. “Is that what you call it? You invented a man who did not exist. Who never existed. And then you pretended to be that man.”

He smiled. Jessa thought of wolves. And she was suddenly certain that she did not wish to hear whatever he might say next.

“I’m sorry about your uncle,” she murmured instead, her voice soft. Softer than it should have been, when she wanted only to be strong.

“My uncle, his wife, and both of their sons were killed,” Tariq said coolly, brushing off her words of condolence. The wolf smile was gone. “And so I am not just King of Nur now, but the very last of its ancient, founding bloodline. Do you know what that means?”

She was suddenly terrified that she knew exactly what that meant, and, more terrifying, what he would think it meant. She could not allow it.

“I imagine it means that you have great responsibilities,” Jessa said. She couldn’t think of any reason he would drop by her office in Yorkshire to discuss the line of succession in his far-off desert kingdom, save one. But surely, if he knew the truth, he would not be wasting his time here with her, would he? Perhaps he only suspected. Either way, she wanted him gone. “Though what would I know about it?” She spread her hands out, to encompass the letting office. “I am an office manager, not a king.”

“Indeed.” He watched her and yet he made no move. He only kept that dark green gaze trained upon her while the rest of his big, lean body seemed too still, too much raw power unnaturally leashed. As if he was poised and ready to pounce. “I am responsible to my people, to my country, in a way that I was not before. It means that I must think about the future.” His voice, his expression, was mocking, but did he mock her, or him? “I must marry and produce heirs. The sooner the better.”

All the breath left Jessa’s body in a sudden rush. She felt light-headed. Surely he could not mean…? But there was a secret, hidden part of her that desperately hoped he did and yearned for him to say so—to make sense of these past lonely, bittersweet years by claiming her, finally, as his. To fulfill the foolish dream she’d always held close to her heart, and fervently denied. His wife. Tariq’s wife.

“Don’t be absurd,” she chided him—and herself. She was nothing. A no one. He was the King of Nur. And even if he had been a regular, accessible man, he was also the only one with whom she had so much tangled history. It was impossible. It had always been impossible. “You cannot marry me!”

“First you mock me,” Tariq said gently, almost conversationally. And yet the nape of Jessa’s neck prickled in warning. “You call me a pathetic playboy. Then you order me to leave this place, like some insignificant insect, and now you scold me like a child.” His lips curved into a smile that did not reach his eyes. “Perhaps you forget who I am.”

She knew exactly who he was. She knew too well what he could do to her. What he had done already. She was much more afraid of what he might do now.

“I have not forgotten anything, Tariq,” she said, glad that her voice was calm yet strong, as it ought to be. Glad that she sounded capable and unmoved, as she should. “Which is why I must ask you to leave. Again.”

Tariq shrugged with apparent ease, but his eyes were hot.

“In any case, you misunderstand me,” he said. He smiled slightly. “I am not in the habit of proposing marriage to exlovers who harbor such disdain for me, I assure you.”

It took a moment for his words to fully sink in. Humiliation followed quickly, thick and hot. It was a dizzying reminder of how she had felt when his mobile phone had come up disconnected, his London flat vacated, one after the other, with her none the wiser. Mortification clawed at her throat and cramped her stomach. Had she really imagined that he had appeared out of nowhere because he wished to marry her? She was unbearably foolish, again, as if the past five years had never happened.

But they had happened, she reminded herself. And she had been through far worse than a few moments of embarrassment. It was the memory of what she’d survived, and the hard choices she’d made, that had her pushing the humiliation aside and meeting his gaze. There were more important things in the world than Tariq bin Khaled Al-Nur, and her own mortification. Her cheeks might still be red, but her head was high.

“Then what is it you want?” she asked coolly. “I have no interest in playing games with you.”

“I have already told you what I want,” he said smoothly, but there was still that hard edge beneath. “Must I repeat myself? I do not recall you being so slow on the uptake, Jessa.”

Once again, the way he said her name nearly made her shiver. She shook it off and tried to make sense of what he was saying but then, abruptly, gave up. Why was she allowing this to happen? He had waltzed in after all this time, and cornered her behind her desk? Who did he think he was?

With a burst of irritation, at herself and at him, Jessa propelled herself around the side of her desk and headed for the door of the office. She didn’t have to stand there and let him talk to her this way. She didn’t have to listen to him. He was the one who had had all the choices years ago, because she hadn’t known any better and hadn’t wanted to know any better, but she wasn’t that besotted girl any longer. That girl had died years ago, thanks to him. He had no idea what she’d been through, and she didn’t owe him anything, including explanations.

“Where do you imagine you can go?” he asked, in an idle, detached tone, as if he could not possibly have cared less. She knew better than to believe that, somehow. “That you believe I cannot follow?”

“I have some ideas about where you can go,” Jessa began without turning back toward him, temper searing through her as she stalked toward the door.

But then he touched her, and she had not heard him move. No warning, no time to prepare—

He touched her, and her brain shorted out.

His long fingers wrapped around her arm just above the elbow. Even through the material of her suit jacket, Jessa could feel the heat emanating from him—fire and strength and his hard palm against her arm, like a brand. Like history repeating itself. Like a white-hot electricity that blazed through her and rendered her little more than ash and need.

He closed the distance between them, pulling her up hard against the unyielding expanse of his chest. She gasped, even as his other hand came around to her opposite hip, anchoring her against him, her back to his front, their two bodies coming together like missing puzzle pieces.

She could feel him everywhere. The sweet burn where his powerful body connected with hers, and even where he did not touch her at all. Her toes curled in her shoes. Her lungs ached. Deep in her belly she felt an intoxicating pulse, while between her legs she felt herself grow damp and ready. For him. All for him, as always.

How could her body betray her like this? How could it be so quick to forget?

“Take your hands off me,” she demanded, her voice hoarse with an emotion she refused to name. At once, he stepped back, released her, and all that fire was gone. She told herself she did not feel a hollowness, did not feel bereft. She turned slowly to face him, as if she could not still feel the length of his chest pressed against her.

She thought of Jeremy. Of what she must hide.

Of what Tariq would do if he knew.

“Is this what you think of me?” she asked, her voice low, her temper a hot drumbeat inside her chest. She raised her chin. The hoarseness was gone as if it had never been. “You think you can simply turn up after all this time, after vanishing into thin air and leaving me with nothing but your lies, and I’ll leap back into your arms?”

“Once again, you seem to be confused,” Tariq said, his voice hushed, his gaze intent. Almost demanding. But there was something else there that made a shiver of silent warning slide along her spine. “I am not the one who ran away. I am the one who has reappeared, despite all the time that has passed.”

“You are also the one who lied about who he was,” Jessa pointed out. “Hardly the moral high ground.”

“You have yet to mention where you disappeared to all those years ago,” Tariq said, his voice sliding over her, through her, and making her body hum with an awareness she didn’t want to accept. “Exactly what moral high ground are you claiming?”

And, of course, she could not tell him that she had found out she was pregnant. She could not tell him that she had suspected, even though she had loved him to distraction, that he would react badly. She could not tell him that after days of soul-searching, she had come back to London to share the news with him, only to find him gone as if he had never been. As if she had made him up.

And she certainly could not tell him that he was a father now. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that Tariq’s reaction to the news would be brutal. She sucked in a breath and forced a serene expression onto her face.

“The truth is, I have no interest in digging up the past,” Jessa said. She shrugged. “I got over you a long time ago.”

His eyes were like jade, and glittered with something darker.

“Is that so?” he asked in the same quiet voice, as if they were in the presence of something larger. She shoved the notion away, and had to restrain herself from reaching out and shoving him away, too. She knew better than to touch him.

“I’m sorry if you expected me to be sitting in an attic somewhere, weeping over your picture,” Jessa said, trying to inject a little laughter into her voice, as if that might ease the tension in the room and in her own body. Tariq’s eyes narrowed. “But I’ve moved on. I suggest you do the same. Aren’t you a sheikh? Can’t you snap your fingers and create a harem to amuse yourself?”

She thought for a tense, long moment that she had gone too far. He was, after all, a king now. And far more unnerving. But he looked away for a moment, and his mouth curved in something very nearly a smile.