“Zaf?” she whispered, her eyes searching his face. Waiting.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “No strings. I can do that.” I hope.

Her smile was pure sunshine. “Good. I do have some conditions, just to make sure we’re on the same page.”

“Okay, but I can feel my actual pulse through my dick right now, so I don’t think I’m legally compos mentis.”

She grinned, leaned closer. Now her tits were pressed hard against his chest, and her mouth was brushing his ear, and he might be having a heart attack. “I’ll be clear, then. One: make me come. Two: don’t catch feelings. And three: don’t spend the night.”

Well, that was a fucking cold shower. Not that it made his dick relax or anything—at this point, a horse tranquilizer probably couldn’t do that—but it did punch a hole through the lies he’d told himself, laying the truth of his feelings bare. No matter how hard he rationalized this, Zaf was barreling headfirst into meaningless sex with a woman he’d accidentally started to adore. Which most people would consider, at best, bad.

And he still wasn’t sure that sex could be meaningless. Not for him, anyway. Did that make him a liar, or just a trier? Shit.

A question spilled out before he could think better of it. “Why are you so against relationships?”

He felt her cool and stiffen into iron. “They don’t agree with me.”

“I’m not trying to say you’re wrong,” he added quickly, squeezing her hip. “You know what you’re doing, Dan. And I respect your choices. I’m just . . . wondering.” I want to know the parts of you that aren’t on display. But only because he’d shown her a little of himself, earlier, sharing the details of his past. He wanted this friendship to be balanced. That was all.

Zain’s voice rang through his head, full of stifled laughter. Lying is haram, little brother.

Yeah, well.

Zaf’s words seemed to relax Dani, because she stopped giving him a death glare and shrugged, her lips pursed. “I’ve attempted romantic relationships before, and it never ends well. I don’t have the necessary qualities to make a ‘good girlfriend.’ ” She made air quotes around the words, rolling her eyes as if that would hide the vulnerable edge to her voice. “I’m too work-focused. I don’t say the right things, or remember romantic little anniversaries. I find excessive affection obnoxious and I don’t enjoy putting other people’s priorities before my career and my family. These facts tend to disappoint prospective partners, and I’m too busy to deal with someone else’s disappointment or the punishment that comes along with it. So I avoid the dynamic altogether.”

Zaf frowned. “But that’s . . .”

She arched an eyebrow.

“That’s not how relationships should be,” he finished, thrown a little off-balance. She’d said those words with such flat, empty hopelessness, as if this was a lesson she’d learned the hard way. As if it was a simple fact that love would ask too much of her, and so she wouldn’t or couldn’t try. He wasn’t sure if the look in her eyes was weariness or an echo of something sharper, harsher. Either way, he didn’t like it.

“I know,” she told him slowly, as if explaining something to a child. “I don’t do things right, and I don’t think I want to. It all seems awfully dull and inconvenient. That’s why I’ve chosen to abstain.”

“No. I meant—priorities that don’t match, punishments for being yourself, that’s not how a relationship should be.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Apparently, he’d surprised her.

“People harp on about compatibility for a reason. If you value family and work, you just need someone who feels the same way, someone who admires that about you. If you can’t do the sappy shit, you just have to find someone who’s okay with that. Someone who understands how awkward you are—”

“I beg your pardon?”

He ignored her. “—and loves it. I know you have a busy life, but you make room for the stuff that matters. If it was worth it, and you wanted to, you could make room for a relationship, too. What you get out of being loved, it’s supposed to be worth the compromise. When it’s good, it makes you want to compromise.”

She eyed him steadily for a moment, her expression unreadable. But something about the line of her mouth, the slow rhythm of her breaths, told him she was thinking. Hard.

In the end, though, it came to nothing. “I have no idea how you aren’t married yet,” she murmured, studying him like he was some kind of exotic insect. Then she sighed and shook her head, as if brushing away fairy tales. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s some lucky individual out there who’s just dying to spend forever with a bookish workaholic who wants to vomit at the prospect of romance, but I don’t care enough to bother searching for them. I’m not interested in the, er, transformative power of love, or what have you. I don’t need it. I know what I want from life, and I know how to get it.”

Each word landed with a thump in Zaf’s chest, like a series of death knells, though he couldn’t say exactly what was dying.

I know what I want from life, and I know how to get it. “So do I,” he said softly.

Dani nodded. “We’re not that different, you know, even if we’re facing opposite directions. I don’t want to waste my time looking for a diamond in a pile of shit. And you don’t want another unhappy ending.”

Another. The way she looked at him, as if she saw his every fear and secret hope, was almost enough to make Zaf sweat. He still wanted to chase away the ghosts in her eyes, but if that meant she got to chase his, too . . . no fucking thank you.

Besides, he hadn’t been lying when he’d said he respected her choices. Didn’t mean he had to like them. But he respected them, because he respected her.

“I accept your conditions,” he said finally. “But I have a couple of my own.” Needed them, he realized, if he was going to come out of this unscathed.

“Hit me,” she murmured. Then she wiggled on his lap, and he narrowly avoided biting off his own tongue. “Quick.”

“First: we can’t do this forever.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Forever isn’t really my thing.”

“I know.” His cheeks heated. “I meant . . . maybe, since we put a deadline on the fake relationship, we can put a deadline on this, too.” That would save him from stumbling over boundaries or breaking rules he’d never learned. Dani was so committed to this no-strings shit, she’d actually prayed about it—and Zaf knew from experience that when you started praying, it meant you were deadly serious or about to die or both. The last thing he wanted to do was embarrass himself by holding on too long.

She eyed him carefully, and if he caught a flash of disappointment in her gaze, it was either wishful thinking or a protest from her sex drive. “All right. Once our charade dies down, you’ll probably get back to looking for your one true love, anyway. I wouldn’t want to get in the way,” she said wryly.

The idea that Dani could get in the way of anything felt wrong—wrong enough to wrench at something vital in his chest. But she’d made a good point, one that tied up their loose ends neatly. “We should end this when we end the fake relationship. We’ll have to stage some kind of breakup around then, anyway.” Which Zaf had managed to avoid thinking about until this moment. “It’ll be good timing. Which gives us . . . three weeks.”

“Three weeks,” she echoed. “I can work with that.”

“Good,” he said, but it didn’t feel good at all. He pushed away nameless, shapeless misgivings and pulled her closer, where she belonged. “I have one last condition.” Because there were a thousand things he wouldn’t push her on, but this? This was different. “I get that you want casual. But as long as we do this, Danika,” he murmured, “no one touches you but me.”

She swallowed hard, but to his relief, she didn’t argue. When she nodded, something vicious inside him sang to life. “Only you,” she whispered.

It was terrible, how perfect those words sounded on her lips. Dangerous, how much he wanted to hear them again, in a thousand different ways.

This might be the best bad idea he’d ever had.

CHAPTER TWELVE