The Billionaire's Innocent

SHE DIDN’T BELONG here.

Zair al Ruyi had been surprised very rarely in the last few years, since the day he’d realized his entire life was a lie. Once on a terrace in Manhattan when this golden, gleaming emblem of all the things he couldn’t have had offered herself to him, as if she were entirely unaware that he was a twisted, terrible man. Broken and unworthy. He’d refused her because it had been the right thing to do, and back then that had still mattered. Barely.

And then tonight, when he’d looked up to see Nora sitting on a couch in the middle of this hellhole.

This time he wasn’t going to refuse her, and he didn’t care if it was right or wrong. She didn’t belong here, but she was here anyway, and it didn’t matter why. He had to play the game.

Which meant she did, too.

Zair didn’t believe for a second that Nora Grant, of all people, had been seized with a sudden desire to whore herself out like that infamous redhead the host had said she’d come in with, who was known to have a vast trust fund she couldn’t touch before her fortieth birthday and a very deep fondness for the extreme side of things.

That wasn’t Nora’s style. Not pretty, satisfied, confident Nora, who sailed merrily through a life as gleaming and shallow as she was. There was no fucking way.

“How did you end up here?” he asked her. He shifted slightly so he could look out at the rest of the party. It was the same as it always was. Flesh and power. Money and lies. It was as old as time, it was abrading him unto his very soul, and tonight he felt the bleakness of this path he’d taken like a great, suffocating weight on his chest.

Not that it mattered, either. He was in too deep to get out now.

“I took a boat,” Nora replied tartly, and he slid his attention back to her. To those huge blue eyes of hers that a man could get lost in, if he were to allow himself such weaknesses, which Zair could not. “It was that or swim.”

He had the sudden image of her in the same frothy peach-colored dress she was wearing now, but soaking wet, the material transparent and clinging to the breasts he’d finally felt pressed up against him and those sleek hips of hers his hands itched to touch, to hold, to pull hard and flush against his own—

Enough.

He couldn’t let himself forget where they were or why he was doing this. There were too many eyes on him—and now on Nora, too, which made him want to break things. If he could have thrown every one of these revolting people off this boat and torn the rest of it to shreds with his own hands, he would have. Hell, he would have done it years ago. Instead, he smiled at the woman who gazed up at him, the woman who shouldn’t have been here and shouldn’t have tasted so good, either, and kept playing the game.

Always the goddamned game.

“You’ve wanted me for years,” he murmured, watching her lovely eyes darken. “Haven’t you?”

“I got over that,” she told him, but he could hear the huskiness in her voice. And he could see the fascination in her gaze that doomed her. “I had a crush on Justin Timberlake, too, with about the same amount of success.”

Zair felt cruel. He felt wild. And he knew exactly how he’d like to solve both of those problems—but he knew he couldn’t indulge himself. This was his best friend’s little sister, and no matter that Hunter had spent his life as a professional fuckup knee-deep in women and scandal, he still wouldn’t appreciate a man like Zair anywhere near his baby sister. But more than that, Zair knew—he knew—that no matter what, no matter the hint of a certain intriguing vulnerability he saw in her pretty eyes every time she looked at him, no matter how she’d shivered when he’d pulled her hair and taken her mouth as though she were already his, she wasn’t that kind of girl. She was Nora Grant.

But he could test that theory. “Perhaps it’s high time I gave you what you think you want,” he said, watching her closely. “Consider this your one and only warning, Nora. Nothing about me is easy.”

He could see the effect of the small smile he gave her in the gooseflesh that prickled up the length of her arms, and he liked that more than he should. He wanted it to mean more than it could. But then, he’d been born a broken man and he’d only ever pretended he might be anything else. What was this but further confirmation of things he already knew? He angled his head closer to hers and tormented himself with her scent. Lavender and cream, and he was already hard. Who was he kidding? He’d been hard the moment he’d seen her here, in this cesspool, and he was all too aware the kinds of things that said about him.

He hadn’t cared about that in years. And he cared less the longer he studied the woman before him, served up to him here like his own fantasies come to life at last.

“I like art,” she replied, her voice crisp and her chin at a challenging angle, but there was a darker truth in those pretty eyes that he felt inside him like a touch. It made him imagine things that could never be, not with her. Not here, not now. He wanted her proud and desperate. Begging and then his. Irrevocably his—and he couldn’t have it. Her. “You have nice lines and a pleasing shape, Zair. Who wouldn’t appreciate that? Too bad that up close, with a little bit of scrutiny, it all falls apart.”

“Did I ask you a direct question?” he asked softly, and the wild thing in him growled hard at the way she shivered, then pinkened, at the quiet rebuke.

“I thought we were having a conversation.”

“No, you thought you were putting me in my place,” he corrected her, his voice mild though he knew his gaze was not. He saw her blue eyes widen. “Do you feel that you succeeded in that?” He watched the way she swallowed, her gaze trained on his, and once again let his imagination go a little crazy. She’s never going to be what you want her to be, he reminded himself. No matter what it looks like. “That was a direct question, Nora, but I should advise you to think very carefully about the way you speak to me. There are consequences.”

“It seems like there are nothing but consequences,” Nora said, still in that husky voice that tempted him to forget himself entirely and follow his lust instead, which was something he’d never allowed himself to do. Nor was this the place to start.

She tilted her head slightly to one side, and her expression changed. Became speculative, as if she could see straight past the mask he wore, down deep inside him, where there was nothing but emptiness and gloom and iron control.

“Is that what you like, Zair? Doling out the consequences? Is that what you think I can’t handle?”

He reached over and traced the soft line of her neck, down over the exposed skin of one sleek shoulder, and felt his mouth curve when she sucked in a breath he almost couldn’t hear.

“Perhaps it is,” he said, his voice low, so she was forced to angle herself closer to hear him—and she did it without being asked. As if she wanted to hear him more than she wanted to be safe, and the way he thrilled to that wasn’t safe at all. “Perhaps the consequences I mean involve you over my knee. Or down on yours, awaiting my judgment. Perhaps I mean my hand, or a whip, or far more diabolical tools to make you cry out and beg for mercy. There are so many ways to torture a soft, pretty thing like you.” He slid his hand up along her neck to cup her tender cheek and held it there, feeling the way she shook, knowing it came from deep inside her. Arousal. Fear. His favorite combination, and for a moment he was nothing more or less than a man who wanted her. Badly. “And I know every last one of them.”

He didn’t recognize her then. There was something bleak in her gaze, and for a moment he forgot completely that she wasn’t for him. That this wasn’t real. That she had no business here and wouldn’t be stretching herself out on the sacrificial altar of his choosing any time soon, no matter how much he wished otherwise. No matter what she said to the contrary.

“Great,” she said, and he could feel the way she set her jaw, as though she expected a hit, when all it did was make him notice that mouth of hers. Plump lips and a thousand fantasies of what he could do with them. “Do it. Do all of it. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re such a liar, Nora.” But he moved his hand against her cheek in a gesture that could only be called a caress, and for a moment he hardly knew himself. “And this is how little girls like you get themselves in trouble.”

Her blue eyes flashed dark at that. He saw her fists clench at her sides, and there was no particular reason either of those things should pool like lust inside him, but they did. God, the things he wished he could do to this woman.

“I wasn’t a little girl six years ago and I’m not one now,” she told him, and there was too much he couldn’t read then, in her eyes and across her lovely face. “Why don’t you stop threatening me and put your money where your mouth is?”

“If you insist,” Zair murmured, and he made no attempt whatsoever to cloak the threat in his voice then. Or the dark longing beneath it.

He reached over and wrapped his hand around her smooth upper arm. He felt the immediate kick of it, as if it were a far more intimate touch. The fire roared inside him again, making him harder than before, and ready. Almost too ready. He ignored that and tugged her closer to him, forcing her off balance so she swayed into his chest.

“What are you doing?” she hissed as he slid his palm down the length of her arm and took her hand, and he could feel her nerves in the way she jolted at the contact.

Not a whore, then, he thought, with far too much satisfaction, as if he’d had any doubt. Or if she was, she was a terrible one.

“You’re the only woman in the room who isn’t fucking or about to be fucked,” he pointed out coolly. “Let’s rectify that, shall we? But not here.”

Finally, a look of alarm. As if the precariousness of her position was sinking in at last.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said.

“You are.” He didn’t wait for her to reply, he simply started walking, which meant she had to walk with him or be pulled off her feet. She chose to walk, though she kept tugging against the hold he had on her hand. “This is how it works, Nora, or don’t you know that? You don’t choose. I do.”

“Let’s be clear, Zair, that this is who you are. This is the kind of man you are.”

She shouldn’t have said that, and he thought she knew it when he looked at her then without the usual filter he used to hide his temper. Or his dark, twisted soul. He saw her swallow again, almost convulsively. He saw a hectic glitter in her luminous eyes, and he felt a little tremor run through her.

“This is what selling yourself means,” he said softly, and he knew when she flinched that he’d scored a direct hit. He would have to congratulate himself for that later, he thought bitterly. Zair closed his hand harder around her arm and pulled her closer, so he could speak directly into her ear. He could smell her shampoo and the soft scent of her skin. He could feel her heat. And he wanted her, the way he had for years. And as hopelessly, because she was a pretty little heiress who lived in the light and he was the bastard brother of a twisted king, dark unto his very soul. “We go where I want to go. We fuck how I want to fuck. I’ll let you know if I want you to speak. Until then? You keep your mouth shut unless I’m putting something in it.”

* * *

He felt her temper like a living thing between them, but then she ducked her head down and she didn’t argue. And he liked that too much.

“Good girl,” he said again, and he felt her shake at that, too. Almost as if she really were bent like him. Almost as if she found as much pleasure in the act of obeying him as he would have found in issuing orders, if any of this were real. If it weren’t dangerous. If there weren’t too many eyes on them already.

This is the sister of the famous Hunter Grant, Laurette had said in her arch, insinuating way, the fact that she spoke in her native French making it sound harsher, somehow. But you know this already, do you not? He is a great friend of yours, I believe.

We went to university together, Zair had replied mildly. But there is friendship between men, Laurette. And then there are whores. And he’d shrugged, letting his mouth flatten as he did. These things have very little to do with each other.