A couple of long breaths that swelled his chest against her hands. It was still early evening, the sun not yet set, and for the first time while they made love, she could see the true color of his eyes: the brown that lurked, that made them not quite black, like dark, dark water. “All right.”
It was a million times better than sitting in his salon, soaking up his flavors. She got to soak up him, all over everywhere him, hands running along his body, mouth kissing those gorgeous impossible muscles, all the way down, down, down his arm, over every hard curve and line of tendon and muscle, down to his wrist, to the inside of his wrist, to press a kiss into the center of his palm, to curve her face into that big hand, stroking it back and forth against the calluses, wallowing in him.
“Jaime.” His voice sounded broken, all rough and harsh, with none of that veil of gentleness she was used to.
She rubbed her face the same way over his stomach, his chest, like an animal seeking comfort, and the hand in which she had nestled followed her, riding on her skull, the nape of her neck, gripping her shoulder in a sudden spasm. She didn’t like having her nape exposed, but it didn’t feel breakable or fragile with his big hand curved over it. It felt utterly enveloped and protected.
God, the warmth of him, the strength of him, she could bury herself in it and never come out. “You’re so beautiful,” she whispered against his stomach, in English, all her French having left her.
And, “So beautiful,” against the bone and muscle of his hip as she pressed his jeans down.
And, “So beautiful,” as she slid back up him, dragging her body against his the way one might drag a finger down a plate to lick that last little bit of deliciousness, to get every taste she could.
His hands scraped up and down her back, trying not to hold her, but occasionally the stroke tightened into a grip, despite himself. He shuddered under her. “Jaime.”
Her name in his mouth was always such a shock. It made her dream all kinds of things.
She laid her body the length of him, all her weight on him, framed his face in her hands, and kissed his mouth. Taking her time. Feeling the flex and yield of his lips to her, the strength of his response, the taste of him, the way her hands could sink into his overlong hair, all silk, while the heel of her palms rubbed against the roughness of his jaw. She sank deeper and deeper into his mouth, unable to pull herself away now that she had started, kissing him over and over, angling her mouth, first one way, then another, exploring every fit.
With her every touch, more power seemed to gather in his body, more and more and more until it seemed close to breaking out of him, uncontainable, like lightning from a storm cloud. He dragged one hand over the headboard but found no purchase on its flat surface. She ran her hand up that stretched arm, over the bulge of biceps, and he fisted his hand over the pillow, squeezing one great corner of it into a small ball.
He wrenched his mouth away. “Jaime. Let me.” His other hand curled over her bottom, pressing her against his arousal.
She buried her face in his neck and let him push her jeans down, let him part her thighs, let him slide her down on him. She loved the shivering flick that ran through his body when he pulled her onto him, as if he had been touched with a whip. She loved the sound he made. “Ma chérie. Let me. Let me.”
His hands began to move her in a slow, steady, deep rhythm, while she kissed his shoulders. Her thigh-length sweater fell over his hands, tugged between their bodies. He slid his hands up once to push it off, but she would have none of it, pressing down again, catching it between their skin.
He did not try too hard. His focus now was elsewhere. Condensing into his sex, into the rhythm of their hips. He rolled them over suddenly, and she liked that, liked losing power, liked finding herself in the cave of his body. Caught in a cage formed by his strength. “Jaime.” He slipped a hand down the length of her, between their bodies. “Do you like that, minette? Do you like it?” He was breathing very hard, the rough words almost soundless. “Ma chérie,” he breathed as her body fell back into the mattress, all weakness, while her hips arched up. “Mine. Use me. Oui, minou. Use me just—like—that.”
She convulsed into him. It felt like skydiving into the sun, right into its brilliant heat. The sun surged back at her, his heat driving into her deeply, his hands hardening in one last bruising second as they both came together.
Later, Dom lay on his back, with one arm behind his head and the other around her, curling her into his side. She felt damp, lax, entirely his. “It’s funny,” he said softly. “I don’t feel used.”
She must have thought he was making fun, for she pinched his ribs. He caught her hand and closed it in his so she couldn’t repeat the gesture.
He turned his head to look down at her, not joking at all. “I don’t know if you’re very good at it, using people.”
CHAPTER 16
“Guillemette,” Dom said to his maîtresse de salle, whose skill in English had been one of the reasons he’d hired her. They were alone downstairs, making sure the displays were all perfect to start the day. “What does boo-fool mean?” Something like that. The funny way English hit some syllables hard and swallowed the others made it difficult for him to pick them all out. Especially when they were mouthed against his skin.
Guillemette concentrated a moment. “Byoo-ti-fool?” she said finally. She flipped open one of their English-language brochures and pointed to its description of his salon. Oh, he knew that word. English had the strangest pronunciation.
“Beau,” Guillemette said, and tilted her head. “More really than beau. Beautiful is a much stronger word in English.”
He felt hands run all over his skin, a soft silken stroke.
Unlike his above-stairs team, Guillemette was far too elegant and well-mannered to make fun of him, but she busied herself quite briskly with organizing sacks and displays for the day, sneaking glances at him. On her subtly made-up cheekbones, a little blush showed. Suggesting she was guessing fairly accurately at contexts in which he might have heard that word recently.
Blushing himself, he ran up the stairs.
“Are you using me for a romantic fling with a Frenchman that you can write about in your travel journal?” Dom asked that evening, as they walked. She had come late in the afternoon, when he was ready to leave the salon in the capable hands of his evening responsable, and he had sat with her while she ate his newest tarte, taking great and erotic delight in every morsel he watched her lips close over. Then he had walked with her past the Place République up to the Canal St. Martin. He liked this neighborhood, on the border between upscale tranquility and energetic protest and diversity. He liked the iron footbridges and the dark water and how the bars spilled directly onto its banks, the life of the street so much closer to the water here than by the Seine. Nineteenth-century buildings lined the canal, built for laborers and occupied now by people like him, who had snagged an apartment just before prices went out of the stratosphere. He liked to think he and the area had something in common, built for labor and now revealing their beauty to everyone who had underestimated them.
A romantic fling was the height he had been aiming for, at first, and he should be satisfied with having qualified. But, as with most of his ambitions, a part of him was already reaching for bigger and better things. And a part of him was trying to slap his hand for reaching for them, but given his past history, he was particularly impervious to being kept down by slaps. Even his own.
Jaime gave him an annoyed look. “You’re rather aggressively persistent, aren’t you?”
Dom tried not to look smug. If she was only just now figuring that out, he had been disguising himself pretty well.
She rolled her eyes at whatever she saw in his face, but her mouth curved. She looked at the brown-black water of the canal again. They were leaning on the rail of one of the lower footbridges, in the rustling shelter of the spring-green trees to either side of the canal. “I’ve been here three months already, Dominique. I’m not souvenir huntin
g.”
Three months? She had only shown up in his life two weeks ago. “So whose chocolates were you eating before?” he asked jealously. After all those chocolates I made for you, Sylvain had said. Sylvain didn’t even have a salon. If he was feeding her his chocolates, it was somewhere private.
“I like La Maison des Sorcières,” she volunteered.
The place Philippe’s fiancée Magalie and her aunts had. Where they made chocolat chaud and dark chocolate witches and pretended to themselves they could ensorcel anyone who walked by. Which felt disturbingly like it might be true, sometimes; he could never understand why Magalie’s hot chocolate tempted him so much when he was the person who made the best damn hot chocolate in Paris.
Yes, he could see Jaime there, soaking up that witch-house atmosphere with the same concentration with which she had sat soaking up his. Drinking their chocolate. Nibbling on their witches. Damn it, now he was jealous of a lesbian couple in their sixties and their niece. He slanted Jaime a glance. “You’re not attracted to women, are you?”
“What?”
“I was just checking!”
“Good lord.” She sounded resigned, a little wary or tired. “Have most of the women you’ve dated been ambi-sexual gymnasts, or what?”
Kind of, yes. He considered the length of the canal for a moment, the little bridges marching away under the glow of the old lamps, such a tighter and more intimate chain of bridges than those over the glorious sweep of the Seine. “I haven’t actually dated them.” He kept his tone as neutral as he could.
She curled her hands around the metal rail. She didn’t give him a shocked, uncomprehending look again. She didn’t look at him at all. She just stood there, staring into almost-black water, digesting the information. “It’s almost the same color as your eyes,” she said finally, her tone a little dry, self-mocking.
He looked down at the still, deep water. Over on the far bridge from them, someone imitating the film Amélie tried to ricochet a stone, and the water trembled a little. Just like him.
“I don’t understand what you’re getting out of this,” she said suddenly, and he looked up to find her watching him sideways.
“Getting out of this?” Maybe something was being lost in translation.
She made a bleak gesture between herself and him.
“You,” he said, uncomprehending. And realized he sounded exactly like her the night before.
Her eyebrows flexed deeply. Her head stayed tucked down and away from him, but her eyes tracked up his body. She opened her mouth, closed it hard, and finally opened it again. “That makes no sense.”
His hands itched to close around slim shoulders, to trace her with his palms, even here in public, claiming every shape of her body with his touch. “How can’t it make sense?”
There was something she was not telling him, her face severe and frustrated. Something she could not stand to say. He, of all people, could recognize that. “Why not the brunette?” she finally said, brusquely, an obvious red herring. She pressed those full lips of hers together hard. “Because you already had her?”
He stiffened. It was true, he had. And it had been good sex, too. Rough and wild, the kind of sex that seemed to require a mutual tip shoved into each other’s pockets before they parted. The thought of Jaime imagining him that way—imagining herself used in that way—made him feel sick. Putain, was there nothing of him beneath the surface he presented to her, and the chocolates and pastries he fed her, that was good enough to deserve her?
He wished he could make himself table rase, erase everything of him up until the point he had met her, the way he swept an eraser across the whiteboard in his office at the start of a new week.
He was trying so hard to be different for her, to not be the man he had been before. And she couldn’t even tell. To her, he was still—a sordid, rough user of a man. He looked down at his hands, closing around the railing, half expecting to see them chapped from cold, bloody work.
No. Cocoa butter softened everything. The morning he had woken up, after a week working chocolate in the pastry kitchens, to discover how soft his hands were had been the morning that decided his future career path. But no matter how much he drowned them in chocolate, the scars and the size weren’t something he could ever change. And he kept the calluses on the palms on purpose. In case he needed them.
“I just want you,” he said, low. “I’m sorry.” That pissed him off, to hear himself apologizing for wanting her. Couldn’t it be just a little bit a compliment to her?
She looked as taken aback as if he had thrown cold water into her face. “Did you just apologize?”
He shook his head. Wishing desperately that he hadn’t.
“Why?” She searched his face, and he struggled to get his gentlemanly mask back in place. He had slipped up, there. She had spotted something. She was trying hard to see behind it.
“Why would you be sorry?” she persisted, probingly, a dog after a bone.
Putain d’imbécile, he apostrophized himself. What was the point of trying to convince her she should put herself in his hands if he was going to confess the truth at the first most casual interrogation?
His damn better half had seen a chance to warn her. Better half? Who was he kidding? A feeble ten percent, at best.
He threw himself back into the refuge of his more dominant selfish ninety percent as hard as he could. “For not having better words for it. You asked what I’m getting out of this. You. That’s all I want.”
All. And maybe a serving of moon and stars while he was at it. What a stupid thing to say.
“Why?” she asked incredulously.
He gave a funny little shrug, trying to slide this moment toward safer territory. “You still haven’t let me count all your freckles.”
She had an uncomfortably penetrating look when she wasn’t lost in a romantic daze. It boded ill for a long-term relationship. “So once you have, you’ll be ready to move on?”
His heart pounded too hard, that sick feeling resurging. He turned back to the canal abruptly, gripping the rail, staring down at the brown water. “Do you want me to move on?” Shit, why had he asked her that? She might say yes.
“I would understand it, if you did,” she said slowly, reluctantly.
His hands gripped harder. “Why? Because you want to, yourself?”
She gave him one of those incredulous looks. “No. Because I’m the one getting everything out of this.”
His lips parted in shock. Maybe his disguise as a nice guy was too good. He snuck a glance at her. If he told her what an idiotic thing that was to say, might her illusions shatter too quickly?
“You only get me, as you said.” There was a grim downward set to her mouth, her gaze internal. “What there is of me.”
She sounded like his own internal voice. As if herself wasn’t that much to offer. But his internal voice was justified. He tried a smile. “I like that. You.”
She studied him in puzzled frustration. “Not that this is the most important thing in the world, obviously, but that brunette was nearly as gorgeous as you.”
She thought he was gorgeous? A silly, pleased grin grew over his face, even as he flushed. No wonder his team couldn’t stop making fun of him. This was pathetic.
Gorgeous. He tucked his hands into his back jeans pockets, just to make sure they didn’t spoil the picture. “I like you,” he repeated. That had to be obvious by now. Surely he didn’t have to dig his entire dirty soul up and spread it at her feet right this second to prove it to her?
“Why?” she said again.
He looked at her, all freckles and bones that should be softer, and that tsunami of arousal and warmth flooded through him yet again. He was almost getting used to how very helpless he felt in its waves. “Every time I look at you, I want to lick you all over,” he breathed.
She blushed over every visible centimeter of skin, and he glanced involuntarily up the street to his apartment. She didn’t know how close it was, and he couldn’t d
ecide if he should tell her. What if he let her more deeply into him and she didn’t like what she saw? But if he could get her up there before the sun finished setting, even she couldn’t make him turn off the sun so she could hide. He would be able to see how far she blushed.
He slipped one hand out of his jeans pocket and curled it over hers on the bridge railing, almost forgetting the scars. “So how are you using me?”
“Not again.” He liked her exasperation. He had never been at a point in a relationship where the woman could roll her eyes and let him hold her hand at the same time. He wondered if she could roll her eyes and still let him make love to her, too.
“You’re married. Is that it?” Oh, God, that would be the most horrible thing anyone had ever done to him.
“No, I’m not married. Have you ever dated anyone with any morals or sense?”
He slanted her a dark, rueful glance and decided not to point out the obvious about his sexual history to her again. “I am right now, I take it?” he asked hopefully.
Her smile burst up like the sun coming up on a planet that had never felt a sunrise.
What?
Whatever he had said, it made her slip closer to him, tucking herself up in the arm he immediately, obligingly curved around her.
“So how are you using me again?” he asked, puzzled.
“Oh, for—” She let out a huff of breath. But didn’t pull away. He loved that. The not pulling away.
“I have to say, being used by you is a much nicer experience than you seem to think.” Keep using me. I could stay like this forever.
The terrible seizing of his heart when he even tried to believe he could have forever. The memory of that shocking free-fall terror when he realized his mother was gone. The freefall had seemed to go on forever, that whole next school year at the very least. And on. For years he would wake up with that sickening lurch in his heart.
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