Kitabı oku: «One Reckless Decision: Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past», sayfa 3

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 she could not allow herself to picture, knew better.

“What, then?” she demanded, unable to pull her gaze from his. What was this intoxicating fire that burned between them, making her ask questions she knew she did not want the answers to? “What is your damned proposition?”

“One night.” He said it so easily, yet with that unmistakably sensual edge underneath.

Somewhere deep inside, she shuddered, and the banked fire she wanted to deny existed flared into a blaze.

His gaze seemed to see into her, to burn through her.

“That is all, Jessa. That is what I want from you.”

CHAPTER FOUR

TARIQ’S words echoed in the space between them, bald and naked and challenging. Jessa swallowed. He saw her hands tremble, and a kind of triumph moved through him. She could not control what would happen. Perhaps she even knew it. But she did not back down. She still thought she could fight him. It made him want her all the more.

He knew, even if she did not, that she was going to end this confrontation in his bed. Beneath him, astride him, on her knees before him—he didn’t care. He only knew that he would win, and not only because he always won. But because he would accept no other outcome, not with this woman. Not when she had been in his head for all these years.

Because he already knew how this would end, he could be patient. He could wait. He could even let her fight him, if she wished it. What would it matter? It would only make it that much better in the end.

“I don’t want to misunderstand you again,” she said after a long moment. She searched his face, her own carefully blank.

He realized that he liked this grown-up, self-assured version of Jessa. He liked that she stood up to him, that she was mysterious, that she was neither easily read nor easily intimidated. When was the last time anyone had defied him?

“One night of what?” she asked.

“Of whatever I want,” he said softly, pouring seduction into every syllable. “Whatever I ask.”

“Be specific, Tariq,” she said, an edge to her voice. He interpreted it as desire she would have preferred not to feel.

“As you wish,” he murmured. He leaned toward her, pleased with the way she jerked back, startled, and the way her breath came too quickly. “I want you in my bed. Or on the floor. Or up against the wall. Or all of the above. Is that specific enough?”

“No!” She threw one hand into the air as if to hold him back, but it was too late for that. Tariq moved closer and leaned toward her, until her outstretched palm pressed up against his chest. Her hand was the only point of contact between them, her fingers trembling in the hollow between the hard planes of his pectoral muscles.

She did not drop her hand. He did not lean back.

“No, what?” he asked with soft, sensual menace. “No, you do not wish to give me that night? Or no, you do not want to hear how I will sink inside you, making you clench and moan and—”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” She whispered the words, but her eyes glazed with heat and something else, and the hand she held between them had softened into a caress, touching him rather than holding him off.

“It is many things,” Tariq said in a low voice, “but it is not ridiculous.”

He took her hand in his and, never looking away from her, raised her wrist to his lips. He tasted her, her skin like the finest silk, and her pulse beneath it, fluttering out her excitement, her distress. It was like wine and it went to his head, knocking into him with dizzying force.

She made some sound, as if she meant to speak. Perhaps she did, and he could not hear her over the roaring in his ears, his blood, his sudden hardness. He had not expected the surge of lust so sharp and consuming. It barreled through his body from their single point of contact, making him burn. Making him want.

It was worse now that he touched her, now that he was before her, than it had been when he only remembered. Much worse.

“I want you out of my system,” he told her, his voice urgent and deep. Commanding, because he meant it more than he had just moments before. Because he was desperate. He needed a queen and he needed heirs, and she was what kept him from doing that duty. He had to erase the hold she had on him! “Once and for all. I want one night.”

One night.

Jessa stared at Tariq in shock for a moment, as the impossible words shimmered between them like heat. The breathtaking strength of his hard chest against her palm made her whole arm ache, and the ache radiated through her, kicking up brushfires everywhere it touched. Her mind could not seem to process what he’d said, but her body had no such difficulty. She felt her breasts swell in reaction, her nipples hardening into tight, nearly painful points that she was grateful he couldn’t possibly see beneath the wool sweater she’d thrown on earlier. Between her legs, she ached, even as her body readied itself for him. Awareness, thick and heavy and intoxicating, thrummed through her. She was electric.

And he was watching her.

Jessa could no longer bear his proximity. And why was she still touching him? Why had she let the moment draw out? No longer caring that he might see it as a victory—only needing space between them—she snatched her hand away from the heat of his body and moved to the other side of the room. There was only her coffee table between them when she stopped, but it was something. It made her feel slightly less hysterical, slightly less likely to pretend the past five years had never happened and fling herself into his arms. How had she lost control of herself so quickly?

“I beg your pardon,” she began in her stiffest, most formal tone.

“Do you?” he interrupted her, leaning so nonchalantly against her mantel, so big and dark and terrifying, with all of that disconcerting, green-eyed attention focused intently upon her. He was like her own personal fallen angel, come to take her even further into the abyss. She had to remember why she could not let him. “Do not beg my pardon when there are so many more interesting things you could beg me for.”

He was so seductive even when she knew better. Or perhaps it was only that she was so susceptible and weak where he was concerned. She could feel his hands on her, though he had not moved. Her palm itched with the need to soothe itself against the steellike muscles of his chest once more. How could her body want him, still? She had been so sure she was over him, finally. She had been certain of it. She had even, recently, begun to imagine a future in which Tariq was not the shadow over her life, but a bittersweet memory.

“You must be joking,” she said, because that was what she might say if her body wasn’t staging a full-scale revolt—if, in fact, she felt as she ought to feel toward this man. It had taken her five years to get over him once. What would it be like a second time? It didn’t bear considering.

“I assure you, I have no sense of humor at all where you are concerned,” he said.

Somehow, she believed him. And yet there was a certain gleam in his dark eyes that convinced her she was better off not knowing exactly what he meant by that remark.

“Then you are insane,” she declared. “I would no more spend one night with you then I would prance naked down Parliament Street!”

As she heard it echo around her lounge, it occurred to her that a wise woman might not have used the word naked in front of this man, in defiance of this man. Tariq did not seem to move, and yet at the same time he seemed to grow larger. Taller, darker, more. As if he blocked all the exits and kept her chained where she stood, all because he willed it. How did he do such a thing? Had he always been so effortlessly irresistible? In her memories, he had taken over every room he had ever entered with the sheer force of his magnetism, but she had supposed that to be her own infatuation at play, not anything he did himself.

“What I mean,” she said when he simply studied her in that hawkish, blood-stirring way that made her mouth go dry and made her wonder if she might be more his prey than she knew, than she wanted to know. “What I mean is that of course I will not spend a night with you. There is far too much water under the bridge. I’m surprised you would ask.”

“Are you?” He looked supremely unconcerned. Imperial. A brow arched. “I did not ask.”

Of course he had not actually asked. Because he was the King of Nur. He did not need to ask. He needed only to incline his head and whatever he desired was flung at his feet, begging for the chance to serve him. Hadn’t she done the same five years ago?

He had no more than glanced at her across the busy office that fateful day and Jessa had been his. Just like that. It had been that immediate and all-consuming. She had not even waited for him to approach her. As if she was a moth drawn inexplicably and inexorably to the flame that would be the death of her, she had risen to her feet and then walked toward him without so much as a thought, without even excusing herself from the conversation she was taking part in. She had no memory of moving, or choosing to go to him. He had merely looked at her with his dark sorcerer’s eyes and she had all but thrown herself at him.

And that had been while he was playing his game of pretending to be a doctor’s son with some family money, but otherwise of interest to no one. Now he was no longer hiding—now he was a king. No wonder he seemed so much more powerful, so much more alluring, so much more devastating.

“Then you have saved me the trouble of refusing you,” Jessa said, fighting to keep her voice calm, with all the tension ratcheting through her. “Good thing you did not bother to ask.”

“Why do you refuse?” Tariq asked quietly, straightening from the mantel. It was as if he stepped directly into her personal space, crowding her, though he was still all the way across the room. Jessa eased away from him, from the powerful energy he seemed to exude like some kind of force field, but she had to stop when the backs of her knees hit the couch.

You cannot run, she warned herself. He would only chase you. And you must think of Jeremy. You must!

“Why do you want one night?” Jessa retorted. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her trousers, trying to look calm even if she didn’t feel it. “And why now? Five years is a bit too long for me to believe you’ve been carrying a torch.” She laughed at the very idea, the sound dying off when he only looked at her, a truth shimmering in his dark gaze that she refused to accept.

“I told you that I must marry.” He shrugged, as if a lifelong commitment was no more interesting to him than a speck of dust. Perhaps it was not. “But first I wanted to make sure you were no longer a factor. You can understand this, can’t you?”

“I would have thought I ceased being any kind of factor some time ago,” Jessa said. Was her tone the dry, sophisticated sort of tone she’d aimed for? She feared it was rather more bitter than that, and bit her lower lip slightly, wishing she could take it back.

Tariq rubbed at his chin with one hand, still watching her closely, intently, as if he could see directly into her.

“Who can say why certain things haunt a man?” He dropped his eyes. “After my uncle died, my life was no longer my own. My every breath and every thought was of necessity about my country. It was not enough simply to accept the crown. I had to learn how to wear it.” He shook his head slightly, as if he had not meant to say something so revealing. He frowned. “But as it became clear that I could not delay my own marriage further, I knew I could not marry with this history hanging over me. And so I resolved to find you. It is not a complicated story.”

This time, when he looked at her, his dark green eyes were even more unreadable than before.

“You expect me to believe that you…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it, it was too absurd. “There is no history hanging over us!”

“You are the only woman who has ever left me,” he told her. His tone was soft, but there was a hard, watchful gleam in his gaze. “You left an impression.”

“I did not leave you!” she gritted out. There was no way to explain why she had gone incommunicado for those days—she who had rarely been out of his sight for the wild, desperate weeks of their affair.

“So you say.” He shrugged, but his attention never left her face. “Call it what you wish. You were the only one to do it.”

“And this has led you to track me down all these years later,” Jessa said softly. She shook her head. “I cannot quite believe it.”

The air around them changed. Tightened.

“Can you not?” he asked, and there was something new in his voice—something she could not recognize though she knew in a sudden panic that she should. That her failure to recognize it was a serious misstep.

Satisfaction, she thought with abrupt insight, but it was too late.

He crossed the room, rounded the coffee table in a single step and pulled her into his arms.

“Tariq—” she began, panicked, but she had no idea what she meant to say. All she could feel were his arms like steel bands around her, his chest like a wall of fire against hers. And all she could see was his hard face, lit with an emotion she could not name, serious as he looked down at her for a long, breathless moment.

“Believe this,” he said, and fitted his mouth to hers.

CHAPTER FIVE

JESSA’S world spun, until she no longer knew if she stood or if she fell, and the mad thing was that she didn’t much care either way.

Not as she wanted to. Not as she should.

Tariq’s hard, hot mouth moved on hers and she forgot everything. She forgot all the reasons she should not touch him or go near him at all. She forgot why she needed to get rid of him as quickly as possible, so that he could never find out her secrets. So that he could not hurt her again as easily as he’d done before.

None of that seemed to matter any longer. All she cared about was his mouth. All she wanted was more.

He knew exactly how to kiss her, how best to make her head spin in dizzy circles. Long, drugging strokes as he tasted her, sampling her mouth with his, angling his head for a better, sweeter fit.

“Yes,” she murmured, barely recognizing her own voice.

Sensation chased sensation, almost too much to bear. His strong hands moved over her, one flexed into the thick mass of her hair at the nape of her neck while the other splayed across the small of her back, pressing her hips against his. His clever, arousing mouth moved slick and hot against hers. Fire. Heat. Awe. The potent mix of vibrant memory and new, stunning sensation. Touching him was the same, and yet so very different. He tasted like some heady mix of spices, strong and not quite sweet, and she was drunk on it, on him, in seconds.

She could feel him everywhere, pumping through her veins, wrapped around each beat of her heart as it pounded a hectic rhythm against her chest. How had she lived without this for so long? She could not get close enough to him. She could not breathe without breathing him in. She could not stop touching him.

She let her hands explore him, trailing down the length of his impossibly carved torso, like something sculpted in marble, though his skin seemed to blaze with heat beneath her hands. He was nothing as cold as stone. He was so big, bigger than she remembered, and huskier. His strong shoulders were far wider than his narrow hips, his muscles hard from some kind of daily use. She traced patterns across the breadth of his lean back, feeling his strength and his power in her palms.

Tariq muttered something she could not understand. His hands stroked down the length of her back to cup her bottom, urging her closer until she was pressed tight against his thighs and the rock-hard maleness between them. She gasped. She felt her core melt and tremble against him. He sighed slightly, as if in relief. Jessa heard a distant crooning sound and realized, only dimly, that it came from her.

And still, he kissed her. Again and again. As if he could not stop. As if he, too, remembered that it had always been this way between them—this dizzying, terrifying rush of lust and need and now. Jessa could not seem to shake the memories that scrolled through her mind, each more sensual than the last, or the shocking fact that this was real, that they were doing this, all these years later.

She could not think. She could not imagine why she should think.

She twined her arms around his neck, arching her back to press her swollen, tender breasts against the hard planes of his chest, tilting her head back to give him better access. He did not disappoint. He broke from her mouth, his breathing harsh, and kissed his way down her cheek, her neck. His mouth was like a hot brand against her skin.

“More,” he whispered, and his hands went to the hem of her sweater, pulling it up past her hips, then pausing when he uncovered her breasts. He looked at them for a long moment, as if drinking them in. Then he caressed each puckered nipple and tight globe in turn, shaping them through the camisole she wore, while Jessa moaned in mindless, helpless pleasure. Her sex ached, and she could feel an answering heat behind her eyes. She felt burned alive, eaten whole. She wanted more than his hands. She wanted.

Muttering a curse, Tariq stripped the sweater from her body, guiding her head through the opening with his strong, sure hands. He tossed it aside without glancing at it, and then paused for a moment to look down at her, his hard eyes gleaming in the gray morning light. The expression she read there made her belly clench, and pulse to a low, wild drum within.

Jessa’s nipples stood at attention, tight and begging for his mouth. She could feel the hungry, restless heat in her core, begging for his mouth, his hand, his sex. Even her mouth was open slightly and softened, swollen from his kisses, begging for more of the same.

Could actual begging be far behind? How soon before she was right where she swore she’d never be again—literally on her knees, perhaps? Clutching desperately at him as he walked away once more?

The thought was like cold water. A slap. Jessa blinked, and sanity returned with an unwelcome thump, jarring her.

She staggered backward, away from him, out of reach of his dangerous hands. How could she have let this happen? How could she have allowed him to touch her like this?

Again, she thought wildly. How can he do this again?

“Stop,” she managed to say, pushing the word out through the hectic frenzy that still seized her. He had broken her heart five years ago. What would he do this time? What else could he break? It had taken all these years to come to a place of peace about everything that happened, and here she was, tumbling right back into his arms again, just like before.

She hadn’t believed that he could want her then, and she didn’t believe it now, not deep inside of herself. She had never known what game he had been playing and what had led a man like him to notice someone like her. And here she was, much older and wiser, about to make the same mistake all over again! Just like last time, he would leave her when he was finished with her. And he would finish with her, of that she had no doubt. The only question was how much of herself she would turn over to him in the meantime, and how far she would have to go to get herself back when he left her, shattered once more.

No. She could not do this again. She would not.

“You do not want to stop,” he said in that dark, rich voice that sent her nerve endings into a joyful dance and made her that much more resolute. “You only think that you do. Why think?”

“Why, indeed?” she asked ruefully, trying to pull herself together. She stood up straight, and smoothed her palms over the mess of her hair. She was afraid to look into the mirror on the far wall. She felt certain she didn’t wish to know how she looked just now. Wanton and on the brink of disaster, no doubt.

“Whatever else passed between us, there is still this,” Tariq continued, just short of adamant. “How can we ignore it?”

His voice tugged at her, as if it was something more than sex for him. As if it could ever be anything more than that, with this man! Why hadn’t she learned her lesson?

“I won’t deny that I’m still attracted to you,” Jessa said carefully, determined that her inner turmoil should not come out in her voice. That she should somehow transmit a calmness she did not feel. “But we are adults, Tariq. We are not required to act on every last feeling.”

“We are not required to, no,” Tariq replied smoothly, a perfect echo of the easy, tempting lover he had been before, always willing to pursue passion above all else. It was how he had lived his life. He even smiled now, as if he was still that man. “But perhaps we should.”

Jessa took a moment to reach over and draw her sweater toward her, trying to take deep, calming breaths. She pulled it back over her head as if it were armor and might protect her. She smoothed the scratchy wool material down over her hips, and then adjusted the heavy copper spill of her hair, pushing it back over her shoulders. Then she realized she was fidgeting. He would read far too much into it, and so she stilled herself.

How could she want him, as if it were no more than a chemical decision, outside of her control? Yes, of course, he was a devastatingly handsome man. There was no denying it. If he were a stranger and she saw him on the street, Jessa would no doubt find him enthralling. Captivating. But he was not a stranger. He was Tariq bin Khaled Al-Nur. She knew him too well, and she had every reason in the world to be effectively allergic to him. Instead, she melted all over him and had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from asking for more.

Begging for more, even.

She wanted to be furious with herself. But what she was, instead, was terrified. Of her own responses, her own reaction to him. Not even of Tariq himself.

“I thought perhaps you wished to talk about something of import,” she said, sounding merely prim to her own ears, when she wanted to sound tough. She cleared her throat and then indicated the two of them with her hand. “This is not something I want. It’s not something I need in my life, do you understand?”

“Is your life so full, then?” His dark eyes bored into her. His mouth was serious, flat and firm. “You never think of the past?”

“My life is full enough that the past has no place.” She raised her chin, a bolt of pride streaking through her as she thought about how she had changed since he had known her. In ways both seen and unseen, but she knew the difference. She wondered if he could see those differences, but then told herself it hardly mattered. “It would not seem so to a king, I imagine, but I am proud of my life. It’s simple and it’s mine. I built it from scratch, literally.”

“And you think I cannot understand this? That I cannot grasp what it is to build a life from nothing?” He shifted his weight, reminding Jessa that they were standing far too close to the sofa, and that it would be much too easy to simply fall backward and take him with her, letting him crush her so deliciously against the sofa cushions with his—

Enough! she ordered herself. You cannot allow yourself to get carried away with him!

“I know you cannot possibly understand,” she replied. She moved then, rounding the coffee table and putting more space between them. She had always thought her sitting room was reasonably sized, a bit roomy, even. Now it felt like the inside of a closet. Or a small box. She felt there was nowhere she could go that he could not reach her, should he wish to. She felt trapped, hemmed in. Hunted. So why did something in her rejoice in it? “Just as I do not pretend to understand the daily life of the ruler of a country. How could I? It is beyond imagination.”

“Tell me, then,” he said, tracking her as she moved toward the window, then changed direction. “Tell me what it is like to be Jessa Heath.”

“How could I possibly interest you?” she demanded, stopping in her tracks. She threw him an incredulous look. “Why would you want to know anything so mundane?”

“You would be surprised at the things I want to know.” He slid his hands into the pockets of his dark jeans and considered her for a moment. Once more, Jessa was certain there was more going on than met the eye. As if, beneath those smooth words he hid sharp edges that she could only sense but not quite hear. “I have told you that you have haunted me across the years, yet you do not believe it. Perhaps if you told me more about yourself, I would find you less fascinating.”

“I am a simple woman, with a simple life,” she told him, her voice crackling with a kick of temper that she did not entirely understand. She didn’t believe that he was mocking her. But neither did she believe that she could have fascinated him. With what? Her utter spinelessness? Or had he truly believed that she had left him and was one of those men who only wanted what he thought out of reach?