The Billionaire's Innocent. Caitlin Crews
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little desperation. He couldn’t, because he was one of her older brother Hunter’s best friends from college. He was the ambassador to the United States from the very wealthy sultanate in the Middle East his own much older half brother had ruled for the last decade. More than that, Nora had adored him. Right up until the night he’d rejected her so emphatically.
He can’t be one of them, she thought again, fiercely.
But he was here. And the fact that a man she knew—a man she’d touched with her own hands, danced with and eaten meals with across the years, a man she’d once begged to kiss her and more—could be a man like this was like a kick.
Hard. Right in the stomach.
And then he saw her.
Those deep green eyes of his that had always seen straight through her found her across the outrageous lushness of the yacht’s vast lounge area, across all the pretty girls vying for the attention of the wealthy clientele, across the laughter and the flirting and the increasingly lewd displays to where Nora sat on one of the low sofas.
Slammed into her like a fist, more like.
Everything stopped for a searing, shattering, horrifying instant. The night. The world. Zair froze where he stood, his storm-cloud eyes as hard as steel and something like unforgiving on hers despite the dangerous smile still stamped on his uncompromising mouth.
Nora’s heart stopped beating.
His gaze moved on in the next breath, slid past her and onto the rest of the smiling and preening girls displaying their wares in a number of alluring poses, as if Nora were a stranger. As if she were no more than an interchangeable thing for sale and nothing more to him than that.
Which, of course, she was.
Tonight, she was.
Her heart slammed against her ribs with a vicious wallop, so hard she felt dizzy and sick at once and worried she might faint right there on the gold-and-navy nautical carpet, and Zair walked deeper into the vile little gathering as though he belonged there. He was welcomed as if he did, as if all the revolting people here already knew him well. It didn’t make sense. She couldn’t let it make any kind of sense.
She couldn’t accept—she refused to accept—what it meant that he was here. It was bad enough that she was.
It was bad enough that she’d come to Cannes on a kind of lunatic kamikaze mission in the first place, especially when there was a possibility that the unconcerned British police were right and her missing friend Harlow might not even want to be found after her disappearance from London a few weeks back.
There is the distinct possibility that Ms. Spencer has merely done what many young women do on their first trip abroad, the impatient British detective had said when she’d contacted him. There is almost always a foreign lover and a last-minute adventure she’d rather not share with anyone back home. I rather doubt she’ll appreciate all this fuss when she turns up.
But possibilities weren’t enough for Nora. Not when it was Harlow.
It wasn’t until a CCTV picture had surfaced showing Harlow entering Nice, France, with a grim-looking stranger—hardly the lover everyone seemed to think she’d taken, not with that merciless grip on her arm—that Nora had been sickeningly sure she knew exactly what had happened.
Harlow had written her undergraduate thesis on human trafficking and then, thanks in part to her friendship with their sorority sister Addison Treffen and in part to Nora’s merciless prodding that she do something with her life—not that Nora had taken her own advice—she’d accepted a prestigious law internship at Treffen, Smith, and Howell’s London office as a first step toward the kind of world-saving work she’d always said she wanted to do. But then the Jason Treffen scandal had broken a few months back and Addison’s father had been exposed as the leader of a high-class sex ring he’d operated out of his New York City law office, making him responsible for all manner of appalling things—including the death of the college girlfriend of Nora’s brother Hunter. Now Jason was dead, shot by an unknown assailant who’d never been found, right in front of poor Addison, and Nora knew there was no way Harlow could possibly have resisted poking her nose into things in that London office. Because if it was anything like the office Jason Treffen had run in New York…
All it had taken was a simple internet search on “sex trafficking” and “the south of France,” and Nora had found a wealth of unsavory information on the “yacht girls” who swarmed Cannes during the famous annual film festival to ply their trade on the yachts that dotted the Côte d’Azure bays and the Mediterranean Sea beyond. The yachts, the boulevards, the upscale, breathlessly opulent hotels that lined the iconic beaches, and the airy villas high in the hills. Some were prostitutes, some were down-on-their-luck actresses looking for cash and a way back to the bright lights of Hollywood by any vehicle possible, and still others were bored socialites simply out for a good time with a bit of rough and some pocket money besides.
Nora would have bet anything she had that Harlow was headed there. Which meant she needed to do the same, because she knew what no one else did. What she could scarcely admit even in her own head.
This was her fault.
Which made fixing this, by any means necessary, her responsibility.
She watched Zair stop and talk to a pair of very elegantly dressed twins on the far side of the lounge, both of whom giggled at his brooding attention. He gazed down at them in that hard, leashed-danger way of his that made her chest feel tight. Except she knew she shouldn’t let it.
He wasn’t flirting with them. He was inspecting the merchandise.
I can play whatever game you want, she’d told him on her eighteenth birthday. A desperation unlike anything she’d ever experienced before had swamped her as she’d stared at him out on that dark terrace with Manhattan at their feet, making her feel drunk and unsteady, when she’d been neither. I can do anything you want me to do.
Zair had watched her with that same expression on his face. Harsh. Predatory. Knowing.
Is that so? Anything is a big word, Nora. It covers a multitude of sins.
So can I. She’d thought she sounded sultry. Tempting.
The kind of sins I like leave marks, he’d told her. You don’t know what you’re asking, little girl.
Nora jolted when a hand grabbed her upper arm, slamming her back into the here and now, where she was still sitting on a vast yacht pretending to be a prostitute and Zair was still standing on the other side of the room in a sea of women, presumably because he wanted to buy one.
Proving that he’d been right six years ago. She’d had no clue what she was asking for back then. She’d had no idea who the hell he was. And there was no reason she should feel that like a wash of shame now, making her throat feel tight, as though he’d wrapped his hard hand around it and squeezed when he wasn’t even looking in her direction.
The real hand on her arm clenched tighter, and when she looked around, Nora found herself gazing into the disconcertingly sweet face of the woman who was running things tonight, Laurette Fortin. Who had been so easy to meet, really, once she’d arrived in France. Too easy. An old boarding school friend Nora hadn’t seen in a while, a late night talking about how bored she was with her life and how she’d kill for a little adventure, the crazier the better, and here she was. Greer, the friend in question and herself a notoriously ill-behaved plastics heiress with a penchant for public nudity, had presented Nora to Laurette back on shore an hour or so ago as though she’d been showing off her latest acquisition.
Because, of course, she had been.
“She’s cool,” Greer had said, nodding at Nora as she’d kicked off her wedges to climb into the little speedboat that would transport the group of girls out to the much bigger yacht. “An old friend of mine from prep school. And her brother is Hunter Grant. You know. The American football star.”