Kiss the Bride

by Deirdre Martin

  His mouth met hers before she could even reach the balls of her feet. One hand ran hard up her back and pulled her into him. He dove into her like he had been waiting to strike for hours, just still and poised on his branch until the mouse finally exposed itself.

  No, the hawk metaphor broke down, those weren’t talons gripping her, but warm, hard hands, setting her on the desk, sliding over her, as his mouth rubbed and opened hers, wedded them together. She twisted and arched, the sketchbook barricade driving her crazy. She wanted it gone, but she couldn’t stand to let him go.

  He reached suddenly between them and jerked it away. Her breasts sprang to fill the space it had left, and his hand pressed up her back, crushing her harder to him.

  He didn’t seduce. He didn’t wait for her to melt. He didn’t show one iota of that precise control that let him create impossible sculptures out of fragility. He kissed her all out and open, like he was starving. His hands ran up and down her ribs, her hips and bottom and the sides of her breasts, kneading into softness. She wiggled into his hardness, loving the way she crushed against it. He smelled irresistible, like chocolate and sugar. Pressing herself to him seemed to release the scents all around her, hiding her in their perfume.

  She petted the back of his head, the silk of it, down over the whisper-faint scrape of his jaw, over and over, not able to get enough of his texture. She gave herself completely to his mouth, tangling with his tongue, getting lost in the kiss like something she could never find her way out of.

  He was the one who eased back, not breaking the kiss, but giving himself enough room that he could run his hands more fully up and down her body, find space to caress over her breasts. Slip his fingers under the straps of her top, cup her shoulders.

  She shivered at the slide of his palms over bare skin, caught between two forces, wanting simultaneously to press herself back against him and to lie back, give him all the access he wanted. She tightened her hands around his neck, and her engagement ring bit into her fingers.

  Her enga—oh ... merde. This couldn’t be good. He must think—he must just want—well, so did she, but—damn it, this was why she had had to stop going to bars and frat parties after the first couple of times in college. She was all-out, delighted enthusiasm, like a stupid, bubbling stream, and the guy would just cup that in his hands for the hell of it, splash his face with it, and drop the leftovers back into the river.

  She pushed away. Then pushed again when the first time failed to penetrate. He lifted his head, a deep flush mantling his cheekbones, his pupils dilated so much his eyes were more black than blue, his firm ascetic’s mouth all softened, crushed, open.

  It took him a long moment to come up. He blinked several times, shaking himself as if emerging from deep water. “Pardon. That—may have been a little fast.”

  Her eyes stung suddenly. Completely unexpectedly, as if he had opened up a wound she didn’t know she had. Just once she would like to have a man fall for her like she fell for him. Just—openhearted. She twisted more adamantly, forcing him to either hold her against her will or let her go.

  He let her go, moving back. But he set his back against the door, so she couldn’t just rush away. Was that on purpose? “I’m sorry,” he said again. He was breathing very hard and seemed still a little dazed. His gaze went down and up her body. He swallowed and shut his eyes, fisting his hands against the door and taking a long, deep breath that came out in a rush.

  That pissed her off, that he should be sorry. It made her want to stamp her foot in rage. Which was idiotic and juvenile, so instead she made sure her sandals hit really hard on the floor as she walked up to him and grabbed the doorknob, despite his weight against the door. Despite the fact that it made her arm brush his body and brought her right in close to him, nearly touching again.

  That bastard moved his weight off it. Leaving her free to escape. He had been trapping her by accident? Oh, the ... the salaud. He moved a little to the side, not exactly out of her personal space, but allowing more of it than she herself had. “You should be sorry,” she hissed at him, infuriated. “I’m engaged. But of course, you don’t care. You and your French morals.”

  His eyes sparked with surprise and then glittered crystalline suddenly with outrage. He pressed one hand against the frame of the door. Not against the door itself to lock her in, oh no, not him, he had to leave her just enough space to open it and get out. “I think my morals are better than yours,” he said icily.

  Which, of course, he would, since she was the one behaving so illicitly and finding that pseudo-infidelity ... just a little bit delicious.

  He bent his head as she yanked the door open, so that his breath curled warm over her ear, in direct counterpoint to the ice. “A lot better,” he breathed like a compliment.

  She managed to stalk out, but her ear kept trickling that whisper down through her body in little breaths of arousal for the entire rest of the day. How could an ear do that?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Merde. It took Simon a good five minutes after she had left to pull his hand off the door frame, palm deeply printed with the wood mark. He had pushed way, way too fast there. Just—the feel of her through her fine white peasant’s top, all soft and supple, and the scent of her and that wild happy hair he wanted to free, and—it had flooded him. He had forgotten all about control.

  She had, too, he reminded himself. She had, too. But he was pretty sure she had never known much about it in the first place.

  She threw herself into things. He wanted her to throw herself into him.

  He had to remind himself that she planned, too. Her blog had shown a desire to go to Paris for well over a year before she had prepared the way for her dream enough to actually come here. She hadn’t just gotten a whim and jumped out of her old life immediately, with no thought for how she would land. She had been in love with the idea of Paris, with the idea of tasting him, and, all right, tasting all its chocolatiers and pâtissiers, for years before she came. She could tell the whole world that he was HOT! and still need time to adjust to the fact that he wasn’t some safe, distant fantasy.

  If she thought he was HOT!, she could have him, good God.

  He sure as hell hoped that she really did want him, that this wasn’t just playful dramatics for her readers.

  No, she had kissed him. She had definitely kissed him as if she wanted him.

  But maybe deciding he was going to have her today had been a little ambitious, even for him. If it had taken her over a year to actually pack up her old life and move to Paris ... .

  Paris hadn’t really actively pursued her, though, he reminded himself. Just sat there existing. Maybe, with some concentrated effort on his part, it wouldn’t take her a year to move from dream to action where he was concerned.

  Putain, he hoped not.

  He went back to his desk and her sketchbook, full of all its delight in Paris. She just squeezed life to her in one big hug, didn’t she? Every part of it she could find.

  There was an address on the inside of the cover, an “If you find this please return it, reward,” an apartment in the Ninth. She had writing like a smile, rounded in all the right places, but with a little bit of angular, swooping drama, too.

  Showing up at her apartment with the sketchbook might push him over the line into creepy stalker. He suspected he wouldn’t really know if he was over the line. He tended to focus on so few things so completely and utterly, to the exclusion of all else. It worked fine with triathlon times and chocolate championships, but if a woman didn’t want that focus on her, she might find it unsettling.

  So he looked through the sketchbook one more time, smiling, because every drawing made him want to pick her up and kiss her again, sink into that eager happiness.

  Engaged. The nerve of her to pull that on him. In retrospect, why he had been so insulted at the aspersion on his morals, he didn’t know. The accusation was so extremely opposite to his one-track mind—if she let him keep her, he probably wouldn’t ever again even s
ee any women existed—that it should have been hilarious.

  He closed the sketchbook and pulled out his phone.

  I have your sketchbook, the first text said.

  Ellie jumped, and desire flushed through her body. It sounded so—menacing. Like I have your teddy-bear, from the neighbor boy when she was little, or I have the secret tapes from a blackmailer.

  She smiled vaguely at the parents and children with their little sailboats whom she was trying to sketch—in her newly purchased sketchbook—if only men would quit hitting on her. One of them had nearly sat on her lap. If this kept up, she was going to switch from pencils and watercolors to oils, so that she could squirt red paint all over the worst offenders.

  The phone burped again twenty minutes later. She turned crimson before she even pulled it out of her pocket. If you want it back, you know what to do.

  That made her body go insane with tension and arousal. What did she know to do? He probably wasn’t after a million euros in unmarked bills. Which left—whoa. She hadn’t realized her mind could come up with that many sexual possibilities in one swooping thought. Like, he could want—or he could want—or then again he could want—

  Oh boy. She brought her new sketchbook to her face, trying to get its paper scent to work like a paper bag.

  Because she was hyperventilating.

  An hour later, she had just finished eating pastries for lunch at Philippe Lyonnais’s, with its opulent nineteenth-century salon of which she had snapped exactly three photos before the waiter had started frowning at her, and was composing a tweet to entice her fans to her blog about it later, when there was another text. The offer still stands.

  What offer? The offer made on his office desk with his body pressed hard against hers? The offer to let her buy back her sketchbook with hundreds of indecent services? Oh wait, he hadn’t actually made that offer. He was—maybe her fiancé could just die of his wounds in the hospital and leave her a free woman. Hadn’t she read hospital infections were a major problem?

  She definitely couldn’t imagine herself looking Simon Casset straight in those penetrating eyes of his and confessing she had made the whole thing up as a way to infiltrate his laboratoire and tell the whole world about it.

  And then there was this other worry: Simon Casset might not want her to be a free woman. He was French, after all. She had heard about that whole French extramarital affairs thing. Maybe she was just supposed to be—spice.

  How bad was she, that part of her liked feeling—just spicy.

  To watch me work, said the next text.

  Oh. A few hours ago she had been ecstatic at the offer to watch him work, and now she felt as if he had just stuck a pin in her balloon. That offer. That would be—well, it would still be wonderful, but—

  I promise not to touch anything but chocolate, read the last text.

  Well, damn him. Who asked him to promise something like that? And why did she immediately imagine him marking her body with generous paths of chocolate?

  He had better go for a run, Simon thought, when the whole afternoon passed with no response to his texts and no russet-brown head appeared in his laboratoire, with her flirty blue skirt and little white peasant top. It was his day for a long run anyway, so he normally wouldn’t have even thought about skipping, but today he nevertheless had to force himself. Because her address seemed to stand out in neon Pigalle SEX SHOP letters in his brain, and ... he had better go for a run.

  Ellie grabbed a free Vélib bike for a sunset ride along the quays. Evenings were her most homesick time, when she noticed how very isolated she was in this city. But the plan to ride Vélib bikes through Paris with the wind in her hair had been one of her top one hundred reasons for moving here. After the patisseries and chocolate, of course.

  The hem of her skirt danced around her knees as she biked, as if she had slipped back into the 1950s. The road along the lower quay was closed to motor vehicles, leaving bikers and skaters and pedestrians free passage by the great stretches of sand and blue umbrellas that were Paris-Plage, the city’s summer transformation of itself into a would-be-Nice.

  Ellie grinned in delight. Biking between the Seine and sand, as the sun set beyond the Eiffel Tower in the distance, bathing the horizon in a soft pink light, the wind stirring softly in her hair and making the hem of her skirt stream poetically around her ... she was happy, and tomorrow she was going to take Simon Casset up on that offer of his—both of those offers of his, maybe.

  She would just—she frowned in concentration at the Eiffel Tower as its copper glow grew more pronounced in the dusk—just have to figure out a way to do away with her fiancé.

  If he died, though, wouldn’t she be grief-stricken? She didn’t know if she could do grief-stricken.

  She straightened on her bike, brightening enough to rival the Eiffel Tower. That was it. He could fall in love with a French nurse. Who wouldn’t? Perfect, perfect, perfect—

  She swerved just before she ran over Simon Casset.

  He dodged and grabbed her handlebars before she could fall over. “Pardon. I thought you saw me. I take it you weren’t smiling at me?”

  She stared at him. His black hair clung to his forehead, damp with sweat, and he was breathing with the deep, efficient, easy pants of a dedicated athlete out for a ten-mile jog. Under her gaze, he ducked his head toward his shoulder suddenly, dragging the sleeve across his face.

  “I think my fiancé’s been flirting with his nurse,” she blurted, and his head whipped up from his sleeve with a fierce, white grin.

  “Has he now? Quel salaud.”

  She toyed with the idea of throwing her ring in the Seine right then and there in some great dramatic gesture. But ... it was pretty. It had cost thirty-five euros, which was, like, a whole tiny box of Simon Casset chocolates. No small change, given the current unpredictable state of her income. And Simon might feel a lot safer if she was engaged.

  Although, come to think of it, why she should be interested in making him feel safe, she didn’t know.

  “Do you, uh, usually run on the quays?” She might need to start taking a sunset Vélib trip every day. “In the evening?”

  “I usually do a couple of rounds of them twice a week.”

  A couple of—her jaw dropped. As in fifteen miles or so? She had only gone a few miles on a bike, and she was already feeling it in her muscles.

  “And ... and this would be your usual day to run?” As in ... when could she catch her next sighting of the superhero?

  His smile faded, his eyes growing very intent. Although he had stopped running, his breathing seemed to be picking up. “Yes. I like the Seine in the evening. It’s beautiful, with all the lights on the bridges and the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Hôtel de Ville, the Conciergerie, shining off the water. Sometimes, just when you’re wondering why the hell you’re such a glutton for punishment, the Eiffel Tower will start sparkling in the distance. Just at the right moment. I love it.”

  She smiled, feeling happy to have that exact kind of evening stretch out before her, minus the glutton for punishment bit. Of course, maybe if she had ever been a glutton for punishment, she could be running along beside him right now, she thought wistfully. Physical misery versus emotional bliss. What an unfair trade-off.

  When all her marathon-crazy friends in New York had been trying to convince her that training with them would be good for her heart, they could have been a little more specific.

  “But you ...” he said slowly. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to be biking alone at night, dressed like that.”

  She gave a blank look down at her clothes. “What’s wrong with the way I’m dressed?” A skirt that came to just below her knees and a loose top in the middle of July? It was hardly overly revealing.

  “You look edible,” one of the most selective palates in Paris said matter-of-factly.

  Arousal jolted through every erogenous zone in her body.

  That arousal seemed to balance perfectly with the balmy,
soft summer night.

  His head tilted. His voice softened, to match the night. “You look as if you go around distilling everything that is best in life, and all a man would have to do is grab you to have all that best for himself.”

  Her lips parted. She sat staring at him. The summer night seemed to rush into her, rush all through her, like some magic breeze.

  He looked away a moment, at the darkening water as a barge slowly passed, looked back at her. His hand caressed the handlebars. “Why don’t you bike beside me?”

  Oh. That would be wonderful. But—“You’re going to run while I bike?”

  He coughed and maintained an oddly neutral expression. “It’s a heavy bike. I mean—you aren’t a competitive cyclist or anything, are you?”

  She looked at him blankly. That was hilarious. She danced for exercise, or another time she had tried rock-climbing, and she had even signed up for that pole-dancing craze but had felt ridiculous. Also, she was signed up to start trapeze lessons at L’École du Cirque in Paris next month. It seemed appropriate, that moving to Paris she would learn to fly. “Do I look like a competitive cyclist?”

  His mouth curved as he took the invitation to examine her body, from the set of her shoulders, all the way down her thigh muscles, to her toes. “You look delicious. And I think we’ll manage.”

  Not only did they manage, her coasting along dreamily as night fell over Paris and darkened the water beside them, but he barely seemed to exert himself. She had the occasional suspicion that he was actually slowing himself to her pace. He was coasting, too, only on foot at the same speed she could coast on the bike, relaxed, perhaps even as dreamy as she was.

  They spoke very little. Occasionally, he would point something out to her or she would ask about something. Mostly they floated, in silence, at peace, absorbing the night falling over the city and the company they kept as it fell.

  Oh boy, had she ever made a mistake in moving to a city where a man could tell a woman tu as l’air délicieux like that, as if it was a normal part of human conversation. But she would have to worry about keeping her heart safe later. A lot later.