LITMIR.BIZ

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only, Azhil. As is everything.”

      * * *

      The June night was clear and softly warm, but Nora was chilled to the bone, which she knew had nothing at all to do with the weather.

      The private airfield was deserted. Zair had picked her up a few hours after dark and it was the first time she’d seen him in casual clothes in as long as she could remember. It was better to focus on that than the storm that washed through her at the sight of him, so dark and forbidding and gorgeous, standing there at her door with a frown on his face and all the memories of the last time he’d been at her loft dancing in the air between them.

      Better to concentrate on this instead, she’d told herself, because she definitely wasn’t imagining him naked: Zair al Ruyi was dressed like a regular guy instead of an elegant diplomat.

      She’d blinked, and then her throat had gone dry, as though his hand was around it again, hot and hard. Maybe there was no avoiding the storm, after all.

      “I didn’t know you owned a pair of jeans,” she’d said, and she knew he’d seen the heat that flooded her face then. She’d seen that awareness in his green gaze. She’d seen the way he’d looked back at her. Hungry. “In fact, if anyone had asked, I’d have insisted that you didn’t. That you were incapable of wearing anything that wasn’t slaved over by at least six Italian tailors.”

      “Don’t be ridiculous,” he’d chided her. “You’re not allowed to graduate from an American college without at least three pairs of jeans. Much less graduate school.”

      And something warm had swelled there, for an instant, in the space between them, a certain buoyancy that had lit Nora up from the inside. She’d smiled before she thought better of it, seen it reflected in the green of his eyes, and then he’d scowled at her.

      “My brother often dresses in the disguise of the common man, particularly when he is pretending to be me,” Zair had said then, his voice clipped, reminding Nora why he’d turned up at her door. Not for a date. Not for anything good.

      Not to share a smile in the large, open loft that contained her bed.

      Not many people looked the way he did in jeans, Nora thought now, ignoring the empty runway and the too-still night and focusing on Zair instead. It was easier to let her gaze linger on the way the band of weathered denim clung to that flat, low part of his abdomen that she knew the taste of now. It was easier to admire the length of his strong legs and the way the breeze moved his soft cotton T-shirt against his extraordinary torso.

      Maybe it would be even easier if he weren’t quite so beautiful. Maybe it would make everything hurt less. Then again, maybe everything about him hurts and always will.

      He was on the phone now, one hand rubbing the back of his neck as he paced and muttered in a dark tone, his sharp gaze flickering to her and away every now and again. Then again, maybe nothing about Zair would ever be easy. Maybe that was the part Nora was going to have to find a way to come to terms with.

      He ended his call and walked over to her, leaning against the back of the glossy black SUV next to her, even crossing his arms over his chest the way she was doing. They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t look over at the driver Zair had turned up with who wasn’t a part of his usual detail, who stood some distance away from the SUV, waiting. But Nora thought she could feel the heat of Zair’s arm, almost touching hers, moving through her like the embrace she’d never dare ask him to give her.

      No matter how much she craved it. Needed it, even.

      “Do you think this will work?” she asked.

      She’d been afraid to ask it in the drive out here tonight. The driver had navigated their way through the rush and roar of Manhattan traffic while Nora sat in the back and ordered herself not to put her hands on the man who’d sprawled there in an evident, seething fury beside her. She’d understood that his reaction might well have been explosive. She’d concentrated instead on the plane that should even now be making its final descent into the New York area.

      And the person she hoped against hope would really, truly be on it.

      “If the house is in your name, then the girls inside it must be, too,” she’d said that night in her loft. Zair had still been standing at the door, glaring at her as if it had all been some elaborate ruse on her part to get him back in her bed. She hadn’t been entirely sure it wasn’t.

      “Presumably.”

      “Then you should be able to order them to send those girls wherever you want them.”

      He’d stared at her. She’d held her breath, but he’d turned fully toward her then and even took a step closer. Away from the door.

      “For example,” she’d continued, “you could make them send Harlow here.”

      Zair had drifted closer, and soon they’d both been sitting on her couch together, talking. Plotting how they could do this—if they could do it, and what it would entail. Whom they could trust and how they’d bring those people in, if they went ahead and did the things they were discussing.

      As if they were a team after all. A we.

      It was pathetic how much she wanted that to be so.

      “It will work,” Zair said now. His eyes were trained on the night sky, she saw with a quick sideways glance. Not on her. But she knew he was averting his gaze for the same reason she was—because otherwise they would tangle and get stuck, and there were other things to worry about tonight.

      “Your brother thinks you want to marry me.” She cleared her throat and refused to think too much about that. Because that led nowhere she could let herself go tonight. “As discussed.”

      “He does.”

      “And he’s opposed to it, because of my well-documented whoring ways, as you assumed he would be.”

      “He is.”

      Her throat didn’t need any further clearing, but she coughed anyway. “And so you’ll be parading me in front of him at his welcome ball tomorrow night so he can check my teeth and probably insult me besides.”

      Zair sighed. “I will.”

      “Great.” It took an inordinate amount of energy to sound that enthusiastic. “Then we’re all set. Practically engaged.”

      She thought they were both much too quiet then, ominously so, and the moment dragged on for a lifetime. More. And then she didn’t know if he turned or she did, but suddenly they were facing each other and her hands were at his waist, and his head was bent to hers while his hand held her face in that bossy way she craved with his mouth just there, while all those flames leaped and danced in the soft night air—

      “I don’t—”

      “Zair—”

      But they both stopped. She would never know how. Nora pulled in a breath and then dropped her traitorous hands back to her sides. Zair stepped back, putting a space between them that felt cold and vast, like a deep well rather than a foot or two.

      “I think it’s best we concentrate on what we have to do,” he said, and though his gaze was electric, his voice was cool. Too cool. So cool she knew better, somehow, to believe it. “Not this inconvenient chemistry that rears its head at all the wrong moments.”

      “I wasn’t aware chemistry could be inconvenient. Most people are lucky to have any at all.” That didn’t sound like her, though it was. Nora felt bent, somehow. As if almost kissing him had been disfiguring. As if he was the poison as well as the cure.

      “There’s too much to do,” he grated at her. “We don’t have time for this shit.”

      But there were all those things in the dark between them, around them. He’d called it chemistry. Nora knew it was more than that. It was like lightning and as demanding. It felt like fate. It was the way he’d moved over her in the shadows

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