LITMIR.BIZ

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red strips that barely covered her. Goose bumps followed the path he took, rising up like a wake as he indulged himself in the feel of her, so soft and perfect.

      “Help her,” Nora said again, and more fiercely this time. “Help Greer. I know you can. Is that why the girls you take home disappear, Zair? Do you spirit them off to safety and only pretend they come to bad ends?”

      He laughed, but none of this was funny. He was monitored and followed by his own countrymen. He lived a double life, at the least, and he couldn’t trust a soul. And yet it had never occurred to anyone involved in this project that it wouldn’t be someone who thought the worst of him who would see straight through him. It was someone who foolishly insisted on seeing the best in him instead. No one had thought to protect him against that, least of all Zair himself. His chest felt tight.

      “You’re naive, Nora,” he gritted out. “Sheltered and cossetted. You should stick to your art projects and your happy, rich girl life in Manhattan, stepping over the homeless on your way to your next charity dance. I don’t help people. Ever.”

      She only shrugged, as if he couldn’t hurt her, though he could see the truth in her too-bright gaze. “You’ve already helped me. I don’t think you know how to keep yourself from it. Notably unlike a monster.”

      She’d never been more beautiful than she was then. The light from the lanterns strung above them danced over her, brushing her with gold, making her look like something he might have dreamed up throughout his lonely childhood. Something that couldn’t possibly be real. Something, he knew, that he would ruin simply by letting her too close.

      She was already too close.

      You need to handle that Grant girl, one of his Washington contacts had emailed him the other day on his secure account. She cannot jeopardize the operation.

      But he couldn’t seem to do what he knew he should.

      “You little fool,” Zair muttered instead. “The only thing likely to kill me—and you—is your mouth. You need to remember that we’re standing in a pit of vipers.”

      “I remember,” she whispered fiercely. “But that doesn’t make you one of them. You’re a fraud, Zair.”

      For a stunning moment, he couldn’t believe she’d said that. That she’d actually called him a fraud on a boat teeming with enemies, no matter how private they seemed to be at the moment. There were too many unfriendly ears—and they were everywhere. Too many people who would be only too delighted to believe her. Some he worried already did.

      So he did what he should have done in the first place, the only thing that would end this conversation at once and without any further accusations from Nora.

      He dropped his head and took her mouth with his.

      As if she had never been anything but his, whether he bought her or merely begged for her, or simply gave in to how much he wanted her. As if she never would be anything but his, no matter what happened next.

      She tasted like lightning and need and he was too damned greedy. Too wild for her, and he stopped pretending, for this single electric moment, that he’d been anything else for a long time. He angled his head to take more of her and she wasn’t nearly close enough, so he reached over and hauled her to him with a peremptory hand at her neck.

      And she melted against him like chocolate.

      He kissed her until he very nearly forgot his name or why he’d started this in the first place. He kissed her with all the things he couldn’t say, all the longing, all the secrets, all the sick and terrible truths he couldn’t let out into the light.

      And she kissed him back as if he truly were the hero of her dreams, her Prince Charming despite everything. As if he really were that shining, glorious creature he’d sometimes seen reflected in her pretty eyes when she looked at him. She wound her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him in lush surrender and he reveled in it, pulling her harder and tighter against him.

      He kissed her instead of speaking words he didn’t dare say aloud. He kissed her until he thought they might cause a scene, and only then did he pull back, moving his hands to tangle in her hair, tugging her head back into the kind of angle that made them both breathe too hard. Just like that first night on another yacht like this one. They would no doubt find pictures of this moment splashed across all the tabloid websites within the hour and the magazines and papers by morning—and he didn’t care.

      What he cared about was that light in her eyes that echoed inside him, as if they were two halves of a twisted whole. As if all of this were as real as it felt.

      And it was all a great mess within him, fury and futility and that shimmering thread of what he chose to call lust, because it couldn’t be anything else. It all rolled into something else and it came out harsh and too much like cruel when he spoke again, in the clipped voice of a stranger.

      “I could have killed all those girls who disappeared with the hands that are on you right now,” he told her, condemning them both even as his fingers tightened and her head jutted back further and he saw the proof of how that made her feel in the tight peaks of her nipples against the soft silken straps of her dress. His mouth watered. “And yet all I have to do is kiss you and you’re mine. That easily. There are prostitutes, Nora, and then there are whores.”

      He felt her shake slightly beneath his hands, but her eyes were bluer than the sea and they were clear. Calm. Fast on his, as if she would follow him anywhere. As if she trusted him implicitly. As if he were worthy of such things.

      “What does that make you, Zair?” she asked softly. “What are you getting from this performance of yours? Are you a spy? Are you writing a story? Are you the tourist here? What?”

      “I keep trying to impress upon you that this isn’t a game, Nora, no matter what roles we play for the papers and the pimps.” His voice was so hard it was like a hail of bullets, though he tried valiantly to keep it a quiet whisper, but she didn’t seem to notice either way. “This isn’t some college prank your fancy little sorority dreamed up. When people lose here, they lose a good deal more than their dignity.”

      She reached up and traced his mouth with her fingers, and it sent a bolt of fire straight through him. Searing and bold and far worse than that kiss. Far more damaging.

      “I know,” she said simply and then, impossibly, she smiled. “Don’t worry, Zair. I’ll protect you.”

      And he understood then, with another bolt of that same lightning, that if he didn’t let her go now he never would. Never. There was a selfish part of him that didn’t care. But the part of him that wanted only to protect her cared too much.

      “You have to go back to New York,” he told her abruptly.

      “Zair—”

      “It’s not a request.”

      He stepped back from her, and it hurt. It hurt like a month of the worst kind of illness. As though he’d run back-to-back marathons for days. He hurt. And he thought that of all the sacrifices he’d made, all the things he’d done over the past five years and before, all things he’d allowed because it would protect and serve this tarnished image of his, this was the one that would cripple him.

      He feared it already had.

      She was everything he’d ever wanted. He’d suspected it six years ago. He knew it now. And Zair couldn’t have the things he wanted. He knew that, too. Playing this game was only making the great darkness that was his life seem that much more pronounced.

      Nora shifted before him, frowning. “I don’t want to go back to New York yet. I don’t want—”

      “You promised to obey me,” he reminded her, more harshly than was strictly necessary. Her eyes widened and she looked turned to stone right there in front of him, but she only waited, as if she really were obedient. As if he were worthy of taking control of a creature like her in the first place, when he knew better than to think such things. “You gave me your word.”

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