CAITLIN CREWS - One Reckless Decision - Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past

He was a king. He might not have been born to the position, and he might have spent the better part of his life as an embarrassment to the man who had been, but he’d spent the past five years of his life atoning. He was in every way the monarch his uncle would have wished him to be, the nephew he should have been while his uncle lived. No imprudent and foolish woman could change that, not even this one, whom he realized he regarded as a kind of specter from his wastrel past. He would never fully put that past behind him until he put her there, too.

Jessa reached out her hand and placed it against his cheek. Tariq’s mind went suddenly, scorchingly, blank as electricity surged between them.

“We can talk, if that is what you want,” she said, as calmly as if discussing the evening’s dinner menu. As unaffected, though he could feel the slight tremor in her delicate palm that belied her tone. “But it is not what I want.”

“And what is it you want?”

“I do not want to talk,” she said distinctly, purposefully, holding his gaze, her own rich with suggestion and the desire he was certain was written all over him. “And I don’t think you want to, either. Do you?”

“Ah, Jessa,” he said on a sigh, while a kind of moody triumph pumped through him and pulsed hard and long into his sex. She thought she was a match for him, did she? She would learn. And soon enough he would have her exactly where he wanted her. “You should not challenge me.”

She cocked her head to one side, not cowed in the least, with the light of battle in her cinnamon eyes, and smiled.

It went directly to his head, his groin. He reached for her without thought, without anything at all but need, and pulled her into his arms.

IT WAS not enough. Her taste, her scent, her mouth beneath his and her hands tracing beguiling patterns down his chest. He wanted more.

“I want to taste you,” he whispered in Arabic, and she shuddered as if she could understand him.

He wanted everything. Her surrender. Her artless, unstudied passion. The past back where it belonged, and left there.

But most of all, he wanted her naked.

Tariq raked his fingers into her hair, never lifting his mouth from hers, sending her hairpins flying and clattering against the heavy stones at their feet. Her heavy mass of copper curls tumbled from the sophisticated twist at the back of her head and fell in a jasmine-scented curtain around her, wild and untamed, just as he wanted her. Just as he would have her.

He lifted his mouth from hers and took a moment to study her face. Why should he spend even an hour obsessing over this woman? She was no great beauty, like some of the women he had been linked with in the past. Her face would never grace the covers of magazines nor appear on twelve-foot-high cinema screens. Yet even so, he found he could not look away. The spray of freckles across her nose, the sooty lashes that framed her spicecolored eyes—combined with her courtesan’s mouth, she was something more unsettling than beautiful. She was…viral. She got into the blood and stayed there, changing and growing, and could not be cured using any of the usual methods.

Tariq had no idea where that appallingly fanciful notion had come from. He would not even be near her now were it not for the mornings he had woken in the palace in Nur, overcome by the feverish need to claim this woman once more. He scowled down at her, and then scowled harder when she only smiled that mysterious smile again in return, unfazed by him.

“Come,” he ordered her, at his most autocratic, and took her arm. Not roughly, but not brooking any argument, either, he led her across the terrace and ushered her into the quiet house.

His staff had discreetly lit a few lamps indoors. They cast soft beams of light across the marble floors and against the high, graceful ceilings. He led her through the maze of galleries filled with priceless art and reception rooms crowded with extravagant antiques that comprised a large portion of the highest floor of the house, all of them boasting stellar views of nighttime Paris from the soaring windows. He barely noticed.

“Where are we going?” she asked, but there was a lack of curiosity in her voice. As if she was as cool and as unaffected as she claimed to be, which he could not countenance. Surely it shouldn’t matter—surely she could pretend anything she wished and he should not care in the slightest—but Tariq fought to keep himself from growling at her. He could not accept that she was so calm while he felt so wild. Even if her calmness was, as he suspected and wanted to believe, an act.

None of this matters, he reminded himself, coldly. As long as you get her out of your system, once and for all.

After all, despite his obsessive concentration on a single woman for far too long, the truth was that Tariq did not have time for this. He had a country to run. Nur was poised on the brink of great change, but change did not come easily, especially in his part of the world. There was always a price. There were always those who preferred to stick to the old ways, out of fear or faith or sheer stubbornness. There were those who wanted only to see the old regime, of which Tariq was the last surviving member, crumble and disappear, and no matter that such a thing would cause even more chaos and bloodshed.

There were border disputes to settle, and tribal councils to oversee. Tariq loved his beautiful, harsh, deeply complicated and often conflicted country more than he had ever loved a human being, including himself. It felt like the worst kind of disloyalty to be tangled up with this woman, especially since she was the last one he had been with in his previous incarnation. Perhaps he judged her more severely because she was the other face he saw when he revisited his old disgraceful behavior in his mind.

Tariq led Jessa into the sumptuous master suite that sprawled across the back of the house, and only released her arm when he had closed the door behind them, shutting them in. Would she still be so brave now that the games were quickly coming to an end? Would she dare to continue this foolishness?

She took a few steps into the room ahead of him, her head slightly bent and her hands clasped in front of her as if she was listening for second thoughts or offering up a prayer. Too late, he thought with no little satisfaction. He let his gaze follow the soft indentation of her spine down to the flare of her hips, as the royal-blue dress shimmied in the low lights and seemed to grow brighter in the reflection of the gilt-edged opulence that surrounded them. Tariq was no particular fan of French furniture—he found it too fussy, too liable to collapse beneath his large frame—but he could appreciate the way so much Continental splendor seemed to enhance her natural glow. She turned her head then, looking at him over her shoulder.

It was as if the room smoldered. Tariq thought only of flame, of heat, of burying himself so deeply inside of her that the only thing he’d care about would be the way she gasped his name.

She did not speak. She only watched him, her eyes wide but without apprehension as he closed the distance between them with a few short strides. He reached out and used his hands to trace the parts of her body that his eyes had so recently touched: the soft nape of her neck, the sinuous length of her spine, the mesmerizing place where her hips curved gently into her bottom. He reached down and drew the silky dress up over her legs, slowly, letting the fabric caress her. The room was silent, only the sounds of their breathing and the faint, seductive whisper of fabric moving against flesh. He prolonged the moment, enjoying the way the dress felt in his hands, enjoying more the way her flushed skin felt as he touched her in passing, and then he drew the filmy dress over her head and cast it aside.