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His driver opened the back door and Tariq handed Jessa inside, then climbed in after her, sitting so he could look at her beside him. He watched her settle into her seat and told himself he did not notice the way the soaking wet shirt clung to her curves, leaving nothing at all to the imagination. Not that he needed to imagine what he could still taste on his tongue and feel beneath his hands. He wordlessly handed her a bath towel as the car pulled into traffic.
“Thank you.”
Her voice was hushed. Almost formal. She looked at the towel on her lap for a moment and then raised her head. Her eyes seemed too wide, too bright, and haunted, somehow. To his surprise, the anger that had consumed him earlier had subsided. Which was not to say he was happy with her, or had forgotten what she’d done to him—the lies she was still telling with her continued silence—but the fury that had seized him and forced him to walk away from her rather than unleash it in her presence had simmered to a low boil and then faded into something far more painful. Anger was easy, in comparison.
He didn’t know why. He had been coldly furious all day, and doubly so when she’d left the house. He had had his people monitor her movements as a matter of course, and had seethed about it while he ought to have been concentrating on his official duties. When it became clear where she was headed and he had called for the car, he had felt the crack of his temper, but somehow the sight of her standing in the middle of the busy train station had gotten to him. She had looked so forlorn, so lost. Not at all the warrior woman with more fire and courage than sense who had made love to him all night long. Who had stood up to him consistently since he’d walked back into her life. By the time he’d reached her side, he had been amazed to discover that the angry words on his tongue had dissolved, unsaid.
Yet he still had the echo of what she’d said earlier ricocheting in his head, close as it was to something his uncle had said to him years before: What kind of man are you? The kind who terrorized women into risking pneumonia on the streets of Paris, apparently. The kind whose former lover defied him to her own detriment, throwing herself out into a cold autumn rain rather than tell him what had become of their child. What kind of man was he, indeed, to inspire these things?
He watched her towel off her face, then try to tend to the sopping mass of her hair. She shivered.
“You are cold.”
“No,” she said, but there was no force behind it.
“Your teeth are about to chatter,” he said with little patience. Would she rather freeze to death than accept his help? Obstinate woman. He leaned forward to press the intercom button, then ordered the heat turned on. “See? Was that so difficult?”
She looked at him, her eyes dark and wary, then away.
“I hope you had a pleasant walk,” he continued, his tone sardonic. “My men tell me you nearly drowned in a puddle outside the Louvre.”
She looked startled for a moment. “Your men?”
“Of course.” His brows rose. “You cannot imagine that a king’s residence is left so wide open, can you? That any passerby could stroll in and out on a whim? I told you what would happen if you left.”
“I didn’t…” She broke off. She swallowed. “You have security. Of course you do.” She shrugged slightly. “I never saw them.”
Tariq leveled a look at her, lounging back against his seat, taking care not to touch her. Touching her had not led where he had expected it to lead. He had meant to control her and rid himself of this obsession, and instead had risked himself in ways he would have thought impossible. Felt things he was not prepared to examine. Damn her.
“If you saw them, they would not be very good at their jobs, would they?” he asked idly.
Silence fell, heavy and deep, between them. She continued to try to dry herself, and he continued to watch her attempts, but something had shifted. He didn’t know what it was. Her desperate, doomed escape attempt that had proved her brave, if reckless? Or the fact that she looked not unlike a child as she sat there, as bedraggled as a kitten, her eyes wide and defeated?
“Why did you stop walking in the station?” he asked without knowing he meant to speak. “You were nearly run down where you stood.”
She let out a rueful laugh. “I have no money,” she said. She met his gaze as if she expected him to comment, but he only lifted a brow in response.
“And what now?” she asked softly, that defiant tilt to her chin, though her hair was still dark and wet against her face, making her seem pale and small. “Am I your prisoner?”
There was a part of him that wanted to rage at her still. But he had not forgotten, even in his fury, even now, how she had somehow touched him once again, gotten under his skin. He, who had believed himself inviolate in that way. How he had yearned for her all of these years, though he had made up any number of lies to excuse it. How he had waited for her to wake this morning, loath to disturb her. He suspected that a great deal of his anger stemmed from that knowledge, that even as she defied him and lied to him, insulted him and dared him to do his worst, he admired her for it. It had taken him hours, and perhaps the sight of her dogged determination to get away from him in order to keep her secrets no matter what the cost to herself, to understand that truth, however uncomfortable it made him.
