LITMIR.BIZ

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of his other, wasted life—yet he still wanted her. He would have her. “An intriguing accusation.”

      Temper rose in her cheeks, turning ivory to peach. “I can’t imagine what that means,” she snapped. “It is not an accusation, it’s the truth. It is who you are.”

      Tariq watched her for a long moment. She had no idea how deep his shame for his profligate former existence ran within him. Nor how closely he associated her with all he had been forced to put behind him, and now found so disgusting. He had fought against her hold on him for years, told himself that he only remembered her because she had left him, that he would have left her himself if she’d given him the opportunity, as he had left countless other women in his time.

      Still, here he was.

      “It means that if I am a playboy, you by definition become one of my playthings, do you not?” he asked. He enjoyed the flash of temper he saw in her face much more than he should have. The warrior inside him was fully roused and ready to take on his opponent. “Does the description distress you?”

      “I am not at all surprised to hear you call me a plaything.” Her mouth twisted. “But I was never yours.”

      “A fact you made abundantly clear five years ago,” he said drily, though he doubted she would mistake the edge beneath. Indeed, she stiffened. “But is this any way for old friends to greet each other after such a long time?” He crossed the room until only the flimsy barrier of her desk stood between them.

      “Friends?” she echoed, shaking her head slightly. “Is that what we are?”

      Only a few feet separated them, not even the length of his arm. She swallowed, nervously. Tariq smiled. It was as he remembered. She still looked the same—copper curls and cinnamon eyes, freckles across her nose and a wicked, suggestive mouth made entirely for sin. And she was still susceptible to him, even from across a desk. Would she still burn them both alive when he touched her? He couldn’t wait to find out.

      “What do you suggest?” she asked. Her delicate eyebrows arched up, and that sensual mouth firmed. “Shall we nip out for a coffee? Talk about old times? I think I’ll pass.”

      “I am devastated,” he said, watching her closely. “My former lovers are generally far more receptive.”

      She didn’t like that. The flush in her cheeks deepened, and her cinnamon eyes darkened. She stood straighter.

      “Why are you here, Tariq?” she asked, in a crisp, nononsense voice that both irritated and aroused him. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Are you looking to let a flat in the York area? If so, you’ll want to return when the agents are in, so they might help you. I’m afraid they’re both out with clients, and I’m only the office manager.”

      “Why do you think I’m here, Jessa?”

      He studied her face, letting the question hang there between them. He wanted to see her reaction. To catalog it. Her fingers crept to her throat, as if she wanted to soothe the beat of her own pulse.

      “I cannot imagine any reason at all for you to be here,” she told him now, but her voice was high and reedy. She coughed to cover it, and then threw her shoulders back, as if she fancied herself a match for him. “You should go. Now.”

      And now she ordered him out? Like a servant? Tariq shifted his weight, balancing on the balls of his feet as if readying himself for combat, and idly imagined how he would make her pay for that slight. He was a king. She should learn how to address him properly. Perhaps on her knees, with that sinfully decadent mouth of hers wrapped around him, hot and wet. It would make a good start.

      “If you won’t tell me what you want—” she began, frowning.

      “You,” he said. He smiled. “I want you.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      “ME?” Jessa was taken aback. She would have stepped back, too, but she’d locked her knees into place and couldn’t move. “You’ve come here for me?”

      She did not believe him. She couldn’t, not when his dark eyes still seemed laced with danger and that smile seemed to cut right through her. But there was a tiny, dismaying leap in the vicinity of her heart.

      She could face the unwelcome possibility that she might still be a fool where this man was concerned, on a purely physical level. But she had absolutely no intention of giving in to it!

      “Of course I am here for you,” he said, his eyes hot. One black eyebrow arched. “Did you imagine I happened by a letting agent’s in York by accident?”

      “Five years ago you couldn’t get away from me fast enough,” Jessa pointed out. “Now, apparently, you have scoured the countryside to find me. You’ll forgive me if I can’t quite get my head around the dramatic change in your behavior.”

      “You must have me confused with someone else,” Tariq said silkily. “You are the one who disappeared, Jessa. Not I.”

      Jessa blinked at him. For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about, but then, of course, the past came rushing back. She had gone to the doctor’s for a routine physical, only to discover that she had been pregnant. Pregnant! She had had no illusions that Tariq would have welcomed the news. She had known he would not. She had needed to get away from him for a few days to pull herself together, to think what she might do while not under the spell his presence seemed to cast around her.

      Perhaps she hadn’t phoned him. But she hadn’t left him.

      “What are you talking about?” she asked now. “I was not the one who fled the country!”

      His mouth tightened. “You said you were going to the doctor, and then you disappeared. You were gone for days, and then, yes, I left the country. If that is what you want to call it.”

      “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

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