His hand tightened over her breast and she moaned.

Before she could draw a much-needed breath, she felt the air around her turn chilly, felt the sharp sting of his retreat.

His cheekbones were flushed with color under the olive skin, his eyes hazy with desire. His chest rose and fell with each breath. His fingers held her with a hard grip. The first sign that not every aspect of him was under control.

Except, he released her and stepped back. Her gut tensed.

She moved closer to him again, every sense alive, as though waking from a long slumber. “Don’t call it a mistake.”

He didn’t. The bleakness in his gaze, the tension simmering around him said it all. “I should not have stayed back or asked to see you.” He ran a hand through his hair, palpable rage vibrating beneath his jerky movements. “It will not happen again.”

“I have never met another man who detested himself more for what he is, for possessing the smallest weakness. Despite your best efforts, you are a man, not God. There is a limit to how much you can rise above a man’s needs and desires.”

“God...Zohra? I am barely even a man.”

“By whose standards? Will you forever measure yourself against your brother?”

A muscle tightened in his jaw, his gaze flashing absolute fury. “Don’t. You. Dare. Mention. Him.”

Zohra backed down. She couldn’t bear to see the anguish in his expression. She took his fist in her hands, unclenching his long fingers one by one.

Ayaan closed his eyes, unable to think with her hand in his. Her skin was soft against his, her fingers trembling. He shivered, every cell in him hungering for her, to touch and shape every rise and dip of her body, to give in to what both of them wanted. Would she be that soft everywhere? Would she welcome his touch everywhere as eagerly as she had enjoyed his kiss? Would she be shocked at all the ways he thought of having her?

“You like being near me, you like touching me,” she said, the boldness she sought not hiding the little shiver spewing into her words. “That’s why you are here. You made a conscious decision, didn’t you, Ayaan?”

He drew a ragged breath in, realized why she had never uttered his name. His name on her lips sounded like an intimate caress that crossed an invisible boundary that neither of them had wanted to breach.

“Tonight you decided to indulge yourself. But tomorrow you will despise yourself for taking this moment. You can’t even bear to look at me.”

He snatched his hand back, shock robbing him of speech. Every word she said could have been plucked out of his mind. Almost as though she had a direct line to his thoughts.

Self-loathing pounded through him in waves, but not enough to hide the sharp pulse of fear beneath. He had thought to enjoy an hour in her company. But the truth of his hunger for her was far more lethal.

She had somehow become his only way out of a crushing isolation, the one person he sought out instead of running away from, the one person who made him crave normal things even as she brought his darkest fears to the surface.

“If you are saying I came here planning to kiss you—”

“You didn’t but it happened. You find comfort near me.” She shrugged, reducing his earth-shattering need for her into something inconsequential. “I don’t even care that it has nothing to do with me.”

How could she be so alluring and frustrating at the same time, so damn perceptive and thickheaded that he wanted to shake her? He fisted his hands at his sides. He would not touch her again. He had done enough harm. “You think the fact that I am drawn to you has nothing to do with you?”

“I’m beginning to see what a clever, cunning man my father is, beginning to understand what Karim meant,” she said, shaking her head. “If you were a different man, one not plagued by the atrocities you had to endure, you wouldn’t have looked at me, much less married me. But like you said, reality is better if one accepts it. I am beginning to see how miserable I have made myself by not doing that.

“I have been alone for eleven years. I have no friends, no one to lean on, no one to tell me that I am ruining my own happiness.”

She was thinking of the man she had loved and there was nothing he could do to stop it. She moved toward him again and he braced himself. As if she were a knife that could tear into his flesh, a bullet that could lodge under his muscle.

When had this slip of a woman gained so much power over him? How?

She met his gaze, a quiet strength emanating from the very way she held herself. “I have no strength left anymore to be alone, to beat my head against things I cannot change.”

He felt spine-tingling cold. There was no other word for the chill that suddenly permeated him inside out. “Zohra...don’t.”

Tags: Tara Pammi Billionaire Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net