CAITLIN CREWS - The Billionaire's Innocent - Part 4

Made for him.

It was history and bated breath. It was all those years they’d danced civilly at grand parties, talked about the weather, and smiled politely over the swirl of the outsize thing that stretched between them, elastic and consuming.

It was real. It had always been real.

Nora was completely and utterly in love with him.

And that was when they heard the plane.

Stepping away from him then felt like tearing off her own skin, but Nora managed it and kept going, because that was the plan. Loving him wasn’t new. It was a fact, not a revelation, and she didn’t have time to examine it. Not here, now. She slid into the back of the SUV and she sat there behind the tinted windows, realizing that “her heart in her mouth” was less of a metaphor than she’d always imagined it was.

She couldn’t watch. She couldn’t not watch.

The sleek jet landed, then taxied toward them, coming to a complete stop some distance away. Zair stayed where he was, lounging against the SUV as if he accepted human deliveries so often it bored him, while his driver walked toward the plane with a gait that made Nora think of the good guys in action films.

“If your brother can pretend to be you,” Nora had asked him that night at her loft, “then why can’t you pretend to be him?”

The truth was, she didn’t think Zair looked anything like the sultan. He was leaner and much, much harder. He was beautiful. He radiated courage and that deep, dark heat from within him, formidable and powerful at a glance. The sultan, by comparison, looked soft and pampered in all the pictures Nora had ever seen of him. Twisted and smug and evil all the way through.

But the men who were making this delivery tonight wouldn’t see any of that. They would see the Ruyi noise. The fierce profile the brothers shared. They would see the family resemblance, and if they thought he looked any different than usual, they’d never dare say so.

That was what Zair and Nora were counting on. That was the only way this would work.

And this had to work.

There were so many ways it could all go wrong that Nora had to force herself to stop thinking each and every terrible possibility through to its grim conclusion. She had to force herself to simply sit there and wait, her breathing too loud and shallow. Her heart racing and near to breaking as it did.

It took a handful of forevers before the Gulfstream’s door opened and unfolded into stairs, and more than that before a man in a dark suit stepped out onto the small landing at the top. He looked around and called something to Zair’s driver, who moved to stand at the foot of the steps.

“Stop talking!” Nora ordered in a harsh whisper, inside the SUV with its tinted windows where no one could hear.

Another age crawled past, filled with male laughter and a noted lack of urgency all around, and then three woman came out the door and started down the steps with another man behind them.

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