LITMIR.BIZ

      Henri had been tempted to join Cinnia in the shower when he woke and heard her starting the water, but he forced himself to put a small distance between them while he contemplated a decision that had been rooting a little deeper into his mind with each hour of lovemaking that had ticked by.

      He had never had a mistress, had never wanted anything long-term at all. Not since…

      The wrenching memory struck like a kick in the stomach, ambushing him as that dark day sometimes did.

      Do you love me?

      She had been a pretty thing with caramel eyes and a mouth he’d been trying to kiss for weeks. They were cornered in a stairwell and he was flushed with more attraction than he’d ever felt. Suddenly there was Trella, telling him it was time to go.

      Go, then, he told her. Little sisters are such a pain, he had told the object of his affection, as Trella ran off to be stolen by Gili’s—their affectionate name for Angelique—math tutor. I do, he had assured the caramel eyes as they were given privacy again. At least, he supposed it was love. He grew excited seeing this girl in the distance. He wanted to hold her hand, touch her all the time. He could hardly take his eyes off her when she was anywhere near him.

      And then their friend Sadiq had shouted his name, telling him, “Trella’s been taken.”

      He had seen that girl again, after Trella was home and he and Ramon returned to school. She’d tried to talk to him, but he’d avoided her.

      After that, if girls and women came on to him, if they wanted to give up their bodies for mutual physical pleasure, fine. But he was never going to make the mistake of letting a female mean something to him. It put him off his game, exposed a flank.

      It could cost the life of someone near and dear.

      Romantic love, he had determined, was a weakness he couldn’t afford.

      Taking a mistress, however, was a slightly less dangerous risk.

      He presumed, wondering if he was rationalizing.

      Dressing in his pants and shrugging on his open shirt, he moved into the lounge, where he called in an order for breakfast, put in a request for the boutiques to send a selection for them and picked up the paper left outside his door.

      “Bon matin,” he said to Pierre, who had relieved Guy overnight. “Anything I should know about?”

      “All the coverage seems run-of-the-mill, but fresh posts are still coming out. We’re keeping an eye out.”

      Henri nodded, thoughtful, as he closed the door.

      He’d never taken a mistress for the same reason he refused to marry and have children: the threat of kidnapping. Women who were only briefly linked to his name were not likely to be targeted or used against him. Precautions would have to be extended to Cinnia if he went through with this.

      He scanned the headlines, then picked up his phone to see a text from Ramon. A question mark. Obviously he’d seen the headlines and wondered why Henri was seeing that woman from the nightclub again.

      Henri ignored it and returned a text from Angelique with a video call.

      “Problème?” he asked, continuing in French. “That was a cryptic message. Why are you worried about something you said to Trella about Sadiq? Are they having a romance I don’t know about?”

      “What? No! Of course not. No, I think he’s falling for someone back in Zhamair. Do you know if that’s true?”

      “He didn’t say anything when I spoke to him last.” Sadiq might be the best friend he and his brother had, but they did not discuss their love lives. They talked about important things like stock prices and politics.

      “Why does that affect Trella?” he prompted.

      “I don’t know.” She frowned in her introspective way and he knew to give her a moment to gather her thoughts. Angelique was a quieter personality, more like him, preferring solitude, while Trella and Ramon were the extroverts. Everything Trella did was full bore, including a nervous breakdown. She had been making him mad with worry since her birth, when she had turned blue in his arms the first time he held her.

      He often thought that if it had been Angelique outside the day of the kidnapping, and her tutor had called her over, planning to stuff her in his van, she would have waited for Ramon and insisted he hold her hand and come with her. Shyness had been a hurdle for her, but it was a type of self-protection that served her well.

      Trella had possessed none of that. She had run headlong over to the tutor, eager to be helpful and say she wasn’t Angelique.

      They had stolen her despite her kicks and screams, because how effective was a nine-year-old girl against two strong men?

      The trauma affected his sister to this day, which made him blind with fury if he didn’t carefully drip-feed himself those memories. It made him want to hurry Angelique to tell him how she imagined Sadiq, their friend who had actually helped save Trella, could be a threat to their sister now.

      “I was just talking to her about him,” Angelique continued as though still gathering her thoughts. “And saying it was bound to happen that he would marry someday, even if he’s not in love now. She got really quiet. Now I feel…” She shrugged. “You know. Like she’s upset.”

      “Deeply upset?”

      “No.” She said the word on a rush of relief. “Normal upset. But I think she’s worried that if he did get married, she wouldn’t be able to go to his wedding.”

      “We can cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said. “But thank you for telling me.”

      Trella had been stable for half a year. They were all holding their collective breath that this time she was actually conquering her panic attacks.

      He heard Cinnia and glanced up to see her with dry, windswept hair, wearing one of the hotel robes. “I, um, just want my phone.” She scurried to where he had set her handbag on a table after finding it on the floor, where she’d dropped it last night.

      “Who’s that?” Angelique asked.

      “A friend.” A very beautiful goddess who had done wicked, devilish things with him in the night. He had not misremembered the power of their chemistry. He kept reminding himself he wasn’t a man to be led by his organ, but as many times as they’d made love last night, it wasn’t enough. That’s what he kept coming back to. He wasn’t prepared to go another few weeks, let alone a lifetime, without making love to her again.

      “Don’t run away,” he ordered Cinnia before she could lock herself in the bedroom. “I’m finishing up here.” To his sister, he said, “I’ll touch base

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