“You deserve it?” he asked, lethal and soft at once, and she sucked in a breath as if he’d hit her.
“I didn’t say that.” But he could see it in the dark thing that dimmed the blue of her eyes then.
Zair laughed softly. He pressed a kiss to her temple, indulging himself in the feel of her satiny skin, and then he stepped back. She looked bereft, and he was twisted enough to enjoy that.
“I could tell you that no one deserves what they walk into when they come here,” he said quietly. “But I suspect that intellectually, you know this. It isn’t about your mind, is it? This is about something else.”
“Yes.” Her eyes were wide, her face was pale, and she watched him as though she didn’t know whether to run away or fall to her knees before him, and sick fuck that he was, he liked that, too. “This is about friendship. I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that.”
“This is about control,” he corrected her. With utter certainty.
“Not everything is about sex. Or whatever this is, this thing you do. This obedience thing.”
“Control, obedience.” He shrugged, though he watched her closely. “It’s all the same thing.”
“I don’t see the connection between what happened to my best friend—”
“I think you have a very good idea what happened to your best friend,” he said. “This isn’t about her. This is about why you, Nora, who are certainly wealthy enough to buy yourself some interested policemen if appealing to their better natures didn’t work, felt the need to talk your way into a sex slave auction. Why you put yourself not merely in harm’s way, but on an actual yacht filled with people who were there for the express purpose of doling out the kind of harm that would have taken you a lifetime to get past.”
She looked unsteady on her feet, but he didn’t reach out to her, no matter how much he wanted to. He let her rock slightly.
“I admitted that wasn’t such a great plan,” she bit out in a low voice. “I know that. Do you want me to tell you that I feel lucky that it was you who found me there? I do. Okay?”
“Nora.” He kept his voice soft, and thrust his hands into his pockets to keep them to himself. “I’m not trying to break you apart. I just want you to face the truth. You want this to be your fault. You want your friend’s disappearance to be directly traceable to decisions you made and things you did. You came all the way to Cannes to take responsibility for it.”
She made a small, hurt noise, and covered her mouth with her hand, but not before he saw the way her lips crumpled in on themselves. Zair hated himself, but he pushed on anyway, because as much as this might hurt her, it would hurt her far worse if she stayed stuck in the place she was right now. He knew.
“Please,” she whispered.
“Do you want to know why?” he asked, inexorable and calm. So calm, as if this didn’t hurt him. As if her beauty and her courage didn’t make him proud of her, that she was still standing. Still listening. That she hadn’t run off into the night the way he could see she wanted to do.
“Because,” he said quietly, watching her eyes swim with tears, watching her chin tilt up as if she could weather any blow, “you think that if you make this your fault, you can control it. When you accept that you can’t control any of it, that it’s simply a thing that happened to someone you love, you’ll also have to accept that it wasn’t you who did it.”
“And you think that’s better?” she asked, fierce and broken at once. “Because it sounds to me like giving up.”
“Do you know why I rejected you six years ago, Nora?” he asked then, and she let out a hard, long breath. “You were a gorgeous girl. Young and beautiful and you said you wanted me. You said you’d give me anything.”
“I would have,” she whispered.
“You would have given me your body in some or other carefully constructed transaction that you controlled completely,” he said brutally. “I can fuck anyone I like, whenever I like. What is another fuck to me?”
“Thank you.” Her voice shook but she raised her chin. “I think we covered this six years ago.”
“You were just a little girl,” he said. “But now? Here? This is truly beautiful, Nora. This is unique. And you can’t control it.”
“Obedience,” she whispered.
“Not the obedience itself,” he said, smiling faintly, “though let’s be clear, I think it’s hot. But I asked you to hand over your control to me and you did it. That’s strength. That’s beauty. Especially because it scares the hell out of you.” He felt his mouth move and he wanted to kiss her, to taste her, more than he could remember wanting anything else. “If you take anything away from this little show of ours, Nora, let it be that. You shine brightest when you let go. When you believe in yourself.”
For a moment—maybe a year—she only breathed. And a thousand things passed between them in that electric band that felt tighter, tauter, every second.
“If that’s true,” she said quietly, “then you should do it, too. You don’t have to tell me what your objectives are here, Zair. I don’t believe you’re another Jason Treffen. But you can prove it.”
“Can I? Monsters play games, too, Nora. Deeper games than you can imagine.”
“Don’t play another game,” she whispered. “This isn’t about that. And you’re no monster..”
Her eyes were so blue then, even damp with emotion. And she made him remember, suddenly, all those dreams he’d had years ago—all those bright fantasies. That he could be a better man. Some kind of hero. That he was something other than dirty.
“Help someone, Zair,” she urged him, as if believing in him were easy. As if she already did. “Help Greer.”
Chapter Six
AND ZAIR UNDERSTOOD then how much of a danger this woman posed to him. Not just to him personally, but to everything he’d worked for these past years. All Nora had to do was look at him like this, with all that faith and wonder and belief in her pretty eyes, and he’d do anything. He couldn’t even bring himself to mind it as he should.
But he knew it had to end. Here, now. Before he ruined years of work and not all of it his. Before he allowed terrible men to escape justice because he couldn’t resist this one woman and her insistence on thinking him something other than what he was.
“I was hoping we’d see a bit more of her,” the slithery Laurette Fortin had said earlier, while Nora had been off colluding with Greer Bishop, who had always struck Zair as far too hard, too armor-plated to need help. He didn’t like thinking about what that kind of judgment suggested about him. “She could make quite a splash here.”
They’d both known what Laurette had meant by that. How much Laurette could make on a “splash.”
Zair had only shrugged. “I suspect this is but a passing flirtation. I doubt her family would permit anything further.”
She’d sniffed. “Pity, that.”
He’d laughed it off. “There are always more, Laurette, are there not? Season after season, year after year.” The other woman’s gaze had been too shrewd for his liking then, while his own, he’d suspected, was too bleak. “In a few weeks neither one of us will remember she was ever here.”
But he would never forget it.
Zair