Caitlin Crews - One Reckless Decision

“Ran away?” he echoed, enunciating each word as if he could not quite comprehend her meaning.

“What would you call it?” she asked coolly. Calmly. She even smiled, as if they shared a joke. “Adults typically have conversations with each other when an affair is ending, don’t they? It’s called common courtesy, at the very least.”

“Again,” he said, too quietly, “you have forgotten the sequence of events. You were the one who disappeared into thin air.” He stood so still, yet reminded Jessa not of a statue, but of a coiled snake ready to strike. Yet she couldn’t seem to back down.

“I merely failed to answer my mobile for two days,” Jessa replied lightly. “That’s not quite the same thing as quitting the country altogether, is it?”

“It is not as if I was on holiday, sunning myself on the Amalfi Coast!” Tariq retorted.

Jessa shook her head at him. “It hardly matters now,” she said carelessly, as if her heart hadn’t been broken once upon a time. “I’m only suggesting that perhaps it was a convenient excuse, that’s all. An easy way out.”

Tariq was so still it was as if he’d turned to stone. He studied her as if he had never seen her before. She had the sudden, uncomfortable notion that he was assessing her as he might an enemy combatant on the field of battle, and was coldly scanning her for her weaknesses. Her soft points.

And all the while that awareness swirled around them, making everything seem sharper, brighter.

“I will not explode into some dramatic temper tantrum, if that is your goal with these attacks,” Tariq said finally, never looking away from her. She felt her cheeks heat, whether in relief or some stronger emotion, she didn’t know. “I will not rage and carry on, though you question my honor and insult my character.” His hard mouth hinted at a curve, flirted with it. “There are better ways to make my feelings known.”

She refused to feel the heat that washed through her. She would not accept it. The tightness in her belly was agitation, worry, nothing more. But the desperate, purely feminine part of her that still wanted him, that thirsted for his touch in ways she could not allow herself to picture, knew better.

“What, then?” she demanded, unable to pull her gaze from his. What was this intoxicating fire that burned between them, making her ask questions she knew she did not want the answers to? “What is your damned proposition?”

“One night.” He said it so easily, yet with that unmistakably sensual edge underneath.

Somewhere deep inside, she shuddered, and the banked fire she wanted to deny existed flared into a blaze.

His gaze seemed to see into her, to burn through her.

“That is all, Jessa. That is what I want from you.”

TARIQ’S words echoed in the space between them, bald and naked and challenging. Jessa swallowed. He saw her hands tremble, and a kind of triumph moved through him. She could not control what would happen. Perhaps she even knew it. But she did not back down. She still thought she could fight him. It made him want her all the more.

He knew, even if she did not, that she was going to end this confrontation in his bed. Beneath him, astride him, on her knees before him—he didn’t care. He only knew that he would win, and not only because he always won. But because he would accept no other outcome, not with this woman. Not when she had been in his head for all these years.

Because he already knew how this would end, he could be patient. He could wait. He could even let her fight him, if she wished it. What would it matter? It would only make it that much better in the end.

“I don’t want to misunderstand you again,” she said after a long moment. She searched his face, her own carefully blank.

He realized that he liked this grown-up, self-assured version of Jessa. He liked that she stood up to him, that she was mysterious, that she was neither easily read nor easily intimidated. When was the last time anyone had defied him?

“One night of what?” she asked.

“Of whatever I want,” he said softly, pouring seduction into every syllable. “Whatever I ask.”

“Be specific, Tariq,” she said, an edge to her voice. He interpreted it as desire she would have preferred not to feel.

“As you wish,” he murmured. He leaned toward her, pleased with the way she jerked back, startled, and the way her breath came too quickly. “I want you in my bed. Or on the floor. Or up against the wall. Or all of the above. Is that specific enough?”

“No!” She threw one hand into the air as if to hold him back, but it was too late for that. Tariq moved closer and leaned toward her, until her outstretched palm pressed up against his chest. Her hand was the only point of contact between them, her fingers trembling in the hollow between the hard planes of his pectoral muscles.

She did not drop her hand. He did not lean back.

“No, what?” he asked with soft, sensual menace. “No, you do not wish to give me that night? Or no, you do not want to hear how I will sink inside you, making you clench and moan and—”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” She whispered the words, but her eyes glazed with heat and something else, and the hand she held between them had softened into a caress, touching him rather than holding him off.

“It is many things,” Tariq said in a low voice, “but it is not ridiculous.”

He took her hand in his and, never looking away from her, raised her wrist to his lips. He tasted her, her skin like the finest silk, and her pulse beneath it, fluttering out her excitement, her distress. It was like wine and it went to his head, knocking into him with dizzying force.

She made some sound, as if she meant to speak. Perhaps she did, and he could not hear her over the roaring in his ears, his blood, his sudden hardness. He had not expected the surge of lust so sharp and consuming. It barreled through his body from their single point of contact, making him burn. Making him want.

It was worse now that he touched her, now that he was before her, than it had been when he only remembered. Much worse.

“I want you out of my system,” he told her, his voice urgent and deep. Commanding, because he meant it more than he had just moments before. Because he was desperate. He needed a queen and he needed heirs, and she was what kept him from doing that duty. He had to erase the hold she had on him! “Once and for all. I want one night.”

One night.

Jessa stared at Tariq in shock for a moment, as the impossible words shimmered between them like heat. The breathtaking strength of his hard chest against her palm made her whole arm ache, and the ache radiated through her, kicking up brushfires everywhere it touched. Her mind could not seem to process what he’d said, but her body had no such difficulty. She felt her breasts swell in reaction, her nipples hardening into tight, nearly painful points that she was grateful he couldn’t possibly see beneath the wool sweater she’d thrown on earlier. Between her legs, she ached, even as her body readied itself for him. Awareness, thick and heavy and intoxicating, thrummed through her. She was electric.

And he was watching her.

Jessa could no longer bear his proximity. And why was she still touching him? Why had she let the moment draw out? No longer caring that he might see it as a victory—only needing space between them—she snatched her hand away from the heat of his body and moved to the other side of the room. There was only her coffee table between them when she stopped, but it was something. It made her feel slightly less hysterical, slightly less likely to pretend the past five years had never happened and fling herself into his arms. How had she lost control of herself so quickly?