One Reckless Decision

No matter what she might have to do.

CHAPTER THREE

JESSA was not surprised to find Tariq at her front door the following morning. If anything, she was surprised he had waited the whole of the night before reappearing. It might have lured her into a false sense of security had she not known better.

Perhaps she did still know him after all.

She opened the door to his peremptory knock because she knew that simply ignoring him would not only fail to deter him, it might also rouse her neighbors’ interest and Jessa didn’t want that. She didn’t want someone noticing that the King of Nur was lounging about outside her otherwise unremarkable terraced house on a quiet Fulford side street just outside York’s medieval walls. What good could come of drawing attention to the fact they knew each other? She needed to get him to go back to his own country, his own world, as quickly as possible.

She cracked the door as little as she could, and stood in the wedge, as if she was capable of keeping him out with her body if he wanted to come in.

Their eyes caught and held. Time seemed to halt in its tracks. Jessa felt her heart quicken its pace to thud heavily against her ribs, and her breath caught in her throat.

She was aware on some level that the morning was gray and wet, but the weather faded from her notice, because he was all she could see. And he was distressingly, inarguably real. Not the figment of her imagination she had half convinced herself he had been, conjured from the depths of her memory to torture herself with the night before. Not a dream, not even a nightmare.

“Good morning, Jessa,” he said, as casually as if he spent all of his Saturday mornings fetched up on her doorstep, looking impossibly handsome and as inaccessible as ever.

He was no hallucination. He was flesh, blood, and all male, packed into one deceptively lean and powerful body. Today he wore black jeans and a tight black jersey that hugged the muscular planes of his chest and announced that whatever else the King of Nur might do while enjoying his luxurious lifestyle, he kept himself in top physical condition. His jade eyes burned into hers, nearly black in the morning gloom.

“I didn’t make you up, then,” Jessa said in as even a tone as she could manage. She wanted to order him to leave her alone, but she suspected he would pounce on that and use it against her, somehow. Best not to hand the warrior any weapons. “You’re really here.”

“How could I stay away?” he asked, with one of those predatory smiles that managed to distract her even as it unnerved her. She did not believe that he was here simply for her, no matter what he claimed. What was the likelihood that the lover who had had no qualm discarding her so completely would have a sudden drastic change of heart five years later, apropos of nothing? Slim, she had decided sometime in the early morning hours, long after she’d given up on sleeping. Slim to none and bordering on less than zero.

He had to know about Jeremy. Didn’t he?

“You do not believe me,” he murmured. He leaned in closer, taking up far too much space, blocking out the world behind him. “Perhaps I can convince you.”

The good part about this situation, Jessa thought as he moved closer, close enough that she could smell the familiar, haunting scent of sandalwood and spice and his own warm skin, was that it made her choices very simple. There was only one: ease his fears and suspicions however she could, and send him on his way.

She told herself she could do this. Her head felt too light, her knees too weak. But she would do what she must, for her son’s sake. She could handle Tariq. She could. She stepped back and opened the door wider.

“You’d better come in.”

Tariq let Jessa lead him inside the house, which felt dark and close as all English dwellings felt to him. This whole country of low clouds and relentless rain made him crave the impossibly blue skies of Nur, the horizon stretching beyond imagining, the desert wide and open and bright. The fact that he was not where he was supposed to be, where he needed to be—that he was still in England when he should be at the palace in Azhar handling the latest threat of a rebel uprising near the disputed border—reminded him too much of his playboy past. Yet he had still come to find her.

He had no time for this. He had no patience for ghosts or trips through the past. It was finished. He was no longer that self-indulgent, wasteful creature, and had no wish to revisit him now. Yet she had haunted him across the years, as no other woman ever had. He could recall her smile, the arch of her back, the scent of her skin, in perfect detail. He had had no choice but to find her. He had to exorcize her once and for all, so he might finally get on with his life as he should have done five years ago. Marriage, heirs. His duty.