Kiss the Bride

by Deirdre Martin

  Night fell very late in July in Paris, almost ten before it was dark enough to qualify, and yet it being a warm Friday evening, many people were still out, strolling or skating or biking or sitting on benches or in the sand, conversations floating frequently across each other, in and out, as groups continued their separate ways. The lights illuminating all the great monuments, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the bridges, felt warm and almost affectionate, as if the city were telling a magic bedtime story to tired children.

  Ellie was so happy she had followed her dream to this moment that it squeezed her panic at that dream-following almost out of existence. She might have left friends, family, cultural comfort, and job security, but still ... you could not get very much better than this.

  They rode/ran all the way to the Eiffel Tower and back. Whenever she asked whether Simon was tired, he looked surprised and shook his head. Slightly embarrassing, because Ellie was getting quite tired by the end of the trip, in a happy way.

  “I’ll see you back to your apartment,” Simon said, when they reached the Pont Neuf again. The bridge’s grotesque faces grimaced down at her, and she wanted to thumb her nose back at them, because she was happy, and they were just pale silly stone.

  She started to fish for her smartphone. “I’m not sure I remember how—”

  “It’s this way.” He headed north through the more crowded streets, full of lit bars and bistros and shop windows, finally slipping into the street she had chosen in part because of its name, Rue de la Lune, past the little church and the tiny children’s park to her green building door. He helped her find a Vélib station to return her bike, and she watched it go in its slot with a forlorn little squeeze of her heart. That was it. The evening was over. “Have you eaten?”

  She brightened, excited and alarmed all at once. If the evening wasn’t over, then ... this was getting seriouser and seriouser.

  “I’ll be starving in about fifteen minutes. Most places will have stopped serving, but we could find un Grec.”

  Her stomach was too full of butterflies for hunger, but she nodded happily.

  He looked down at her from the other side of the bike in its station. He wasn’t invading her personal space right now. He was keeping several discreet feet away. “Do you mind if I use your shower first?”

  And, given that he had just said he was starving, it never once occurred to her that he didn’t have a clean thing to wear when he got out of the shower.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It didn’t occur to her until she was lying on her little white bed—it was either that or the little straightback chair in front of her easel—listening to him shower. The window was open, for there was no air conditioner and the tiny space would have been stifling without it. The street was rather quiet, with occasional sounds of cars, motorcycles, footsteps. All that lit the room now were the lights from the street, not too many here, and the soft glow of the one lamp she had bought since she’d moved in.

  He didn’t have a thing to wear, she told the ceiling, which she was thinking of painting with a moon. Not a thing. Surely he wouldn’t put those sweaty running clothes back on.

  Surely he had only invited himself up to her apartment for one reason.

  And the reason ran through her, silky and warm and stealing her breath, while the water ran over him.

  He took the shortest shower on record. And when he came out of it, she couldn’t breathe. Carelessly dried, beads of water curled lovingly down a hard lean chest with no ounce of softness on it. His shoulders looked like a swimmer’s, broad, muscled, his torso tightening to narrow hips. Curls of dark hair narrowed to a fine, discreet arrow disappearing under the blue towel at his waist.

  She tried to swallow, but her mouth was so dry. She dragged her gaze back up from that towel, up his taut belly, the powerful shoulders, to ... his eyes.

  They caught her. She couldn’t look away.

  Dimly, she realized she was just lying on the bed in blatant invitation, and she forced herself to sit up. “I don’t—I don’t have any food.” Her voice rang dimly in her ears, some idiot talking about nothing.

  “I know.” He came toward her. There was almost no distance to cross in the tiny space. “I’ll just have to starve.”

  He leaned over her, and the first touch of his warm hands stole her mind. Focused all her being on sensation. He closed his hands over her shoulders and rubbed them in one long stroke down her arms. His stroke ended at her fingers, his own curling into hers, holding on as he kissed her. He kissed her until she was shivering and clinging to his damp skin, and he was making little hungry sounds, his hands petting her everywhere as if that was her reward for her yielding.

  He lifted her left hand and kissed up the inside of her forearm, sending frissons of pleasure and naked vulnerability all through her. She curled her other arm around him, holding him as hard as she could to her. Like her safe harbor in a storm, so very ironic, since he was the storm.

  He pressed his mouth into her open palm, holding it there, and with his other hand stroked her ring finger out straight. “Let’s just take this off, shall we?” he murmured, pulling on her ring.

  It tugged against her skin. She stared at it as he put it in the trough of her easel, as if she was watching him tuck a life preserver out of reach. Just before the iceberg collision. She had just moved here. How hard was she going to fall for someone, how fast? How much more overturned could her life be?

  He kissed the spot the ring left bare, watching her over the edge of her palm. “Don’t think of him,” he said roughly, sinking his hands into her thighs and using them to pull her lower on the bed so that only her stack of pillows angled her up. “Think of me.” His hands sank into her hair, wisped by the ride. His thumbs slid over the wiggly confined waves until they slipped under the elastic. His eyes glittering fiercely, he jerked his thumbs apart, still keeping his palms curved over her head.

  The elastic snapped. Her hair spilled free over his hands with a little ache in the repositioning roots. His fingers sank into it, spasmodic fists. “Mine,” he said, and held her with his fists under her skull, caught in her hair, for his kiss. It was very deep, a transference of starving. “You’re mine. I want you.”

  He didn’t say it like a declaration of sexual desire, although desire was in every line of his body. He said it like someone staking a claim on what he knew was the flimsiest of bases. Only in a spoiled childhood did wanting something ever give you right to possession.

  But he was all adult. All hungry male. He pressed her back into the pillows, kissing her as if he could not sink far enough into her. His body rubbed back and forth over hers as he kissed her, rocked minutely on his elbows, maximizing the feel of their bodies against each other.

  She wrapped her arms around him, up over his back to grip his shoulders, pulling herself up into him, writhing her own body in response. The feel of him was so gloriously hard, so immutable. He lifted his head for air, and she pressed kisses over his shoulder, over his collarbone, over the curve and tightness of muscle.

  He pulled back enough to stare at her. “You do think I’m hot,” he whispered wonderingly.

  She laughed involuntarily as she rubbed her face into the join of his shoulder. Such a strong shoulder. Where was his softness? Didn’t he have any anywhere? “Now what gave that away?”

  “You.” He slid his hands under her top. Both her muscles and his flicked at the first contact of his palms against her bare ribs. They stared at each other, caught by that second, that promise that she would soon be naked. “You don’t hide anything.”

  Her tummy flinched with guilt, muscles tightening under his hand. Her cover story was hiding everything about herself.

  Except how hot and weak and hungry she felt.

  She had given up falling for men. It was so bad for her. But he certainly felt like a man who could catch her no matter what height she fell from. Maybe even let her down gently, back to the ground.

  Maybe—maybe?—never set her down at all. Sh
e flinched her face into the nearest place to hide it—his biceps—at the thought. Please don’t get your hopes up. Ellie, remember what we said, that you could dream big about Paris, but no more dreams built on men.

  He rubbed the knit waist of her skirt down, traced his thumb over the edge of her little white panties. She had known she would regret not making the purchase of sexy underwear a top priority. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. “Are you sure you want to let me be the one who gets to eat you up?”

  Her lips parted. He brought up a hand fast to cover them. “Forget I said that.” He pushed her back into the pillows with his hand firm on her mouth while he bent his head to her breast. “Sois sûre. Tu es sûre.”

  Be sure. You’re sure.

  She nipped at the inside of his palm to free herself. He slid it slowly off her mouth without lifting his head from her breast, the palm drifting caressingly, until only his thumb kept tracing over her parted lips. Drifting inside them. Invitingly. He wanted her to take it into her mouth and suck it.

  So she did, and he made a little hard sound, his body tightening everywhere against her. “You’re the one who tastes so good. All chocolate and sugar.”

  The smile against the curve of her breast was wry. “But in real life I’m all stringy muscle. No flavor.” His hand ran possessively over the curve of her hip.

  She laughed out loud, her hands stroking over all that lean delineated muscle. “You’re kidding.”

  A fractional pause of his face rubbing between her breasts. As if he wasn’t kidding and was thrown for a loop by the fact she could think so.

  “You’re perfect.”

  His head lifted, his eyebrows quirked. “I don’t think so.” But there was a hunger in his eyes, as if he wanted to know why she did.

  “Look at you.” She stroked her hands over the swimmer’s shoulders and back, over the tight, lean muscles at his waist, slowing at the loosened towel and growing shy, although at a guess from all that running, the muscles of his butt and thighs must be even more defined. Even more tempting ...

  A little shiver ran through him and all those muscles stretched into her touch. He blushed. “You mean—physically perfect.” His blush deepened as he forced himself to say it out loud.

  “I thought you were perfect before I even saw you,” she confessed, her fingers flexing into his waist right there at the edge of the terry cloth. Sneaking it down with just a little nudge of her fingertips. Loosening it just a little further.

  He shook his head bemusedly. But waited eagerly for the reason.

  “Your art. The patience, the discipline, the time you’re willing to spend to make something that’s always only temporary, always to be eaten, always to delight everyone who sees it in almost every sense they have. And it’s so beautiful. Your sculptures—it’s like you have this magic imagination inside you. Each one is this exultant, triumphant dream.”

  His blush was adorable. Who had ever seen a dark-haired tan man blush so deeply. Just because he had a half-naked worshipper trapped beneath him. He shifted uneasily, and the movement rubbed his towel farther apart and his skin against hers. “I’m really just—technical. Like an engineer. And anal enough to make sure that everything I work with is exactly, to the last millimeter, perfect.”

  She began to laugh, as visions of those sculptures and chocolates and pastries danced through her mind. The colors, the perfection, the dazzling flights of gravity-defying whimsy. “A technician. An engineer. You really think that? Oh God, you’re so cute.” She wrapped her arms around those shoulders to lift herself up and kiss him.

  The feel of her arms flexing, pulling her weight up off the mattress to be closer to him, as his own strength braced to carry it, that undid him. He held himself off the bed a moment longer just to savor the strength with which she held herself to him, her mouth seeking his, open, like an offer. He could take it and drink his fill.

  He closed his arms under her back and lett her sink slowly into them, feeling him holding her, as he took the offer, took her tongue, her lips, in a twining battle he couldn’t get enough of.

  I’m not cute, he wanted to tell her. I’m not. It’s you. But his mouth was too busy, suckling and being suckled, as if they were battling to see who could take the most of the other.

  Her body felt so soft under his weight, which was gently crushing her, as if her curves gave all his unpadded muscles a resting place. He loved that softness. She wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t skinny either, as if she didn’t spend one damned second of her life obsessing over anything. Her body was—happy. She was happy in it, like it could be just whatever way it happened to become while she was busy having fun.

  His hands kneaded over her like a great cat finding and testing that perfect spot where it would curl up forever. When her hands ran over his head, found the faint dusting of fine hairs down the nape of his neck, he shivered, arched, and his hands dug into her too hard, until he thought she would pull them off her, cast the cat with its unsheathed claws from her lap.

  She didn’t, though. She shivered, too, and arched into him, and dragged her hands over his ribs and back, letting her nails flex in just a little. Little bitten-to-the-quick nails.

  He sank too hard into her mouth at that, seizing it as if it was his last hope, and then had to drag himself away, twist his head to bury it in her shoulder where he couldn’t steal all her breath.

  “Wow,” she whispered. Her hands were tracing over his shoulders, the muscles of his back, down to his waist, as if she couldn’t get enough of his contours. Her fingers grew greedy, pushed past the towel to curve over his butt, and his hips jerked involuntarily into hers. Her fingers caressed him all over and then sank as deep as they could. There wasn’t much yield to him, and even less than usual at that moment. “Oh, wow.”

  “I love it,” he whispered to her breasts, hiding his face in her. “I love the feel of your fingers trying to make me yield. Dig as hard as you can.”

  But her hands were running down over his buttocks to his thighs, gentle now, hopelessly small against him. “J’adore ça aussi,” he groaned against her breast, licking at the edge of her bra in frantic little laps, teasing his tongue under it. He found the clasp at her back and opened it easily. Control of his fingers was never really an issue.

  Not even now. His fingers teased back around her chest, following the line that the bra had printed on her flesh, loosening it, easing that confined skin. She made a little moaning sound, as if his touch felt just right. He slid his hands up under the loosened cups, cotton grazing against his knuckles as he caressed that full softness. Made it peak to him. Made it beg.

  He pushed her bra straps down her arms, tossed it somewhere, brought his tongue to those tight nipples. You don’t have to beg me. But I like it. I like it.

  He suckled her in lavishly, almost an apology for how very much he liked it. She was turning him into gold at her touch. He had exclamation points raining down all over him, a storm of them, bright, shining, pelting him like a pulsing shower, just right, just right, it was better than a massage.

  Worlds better. He pressed one hard thigh between her legs, drew the other up so that he could feel her hip twisting against it. She was his massage. God, but she rubbed him just right.

  “You and your putain de fiancé,” he muttered, dragging his face down over her belly, which enchanted him utterly by having some flesh on it, not being some concave stretch of skin over bones and muscles like his was. He drove his thumbs under the band of her panties, stretching the elastic away from her skin as he rubbed his hands over her hips, her bottom. “You couldn’t let me have five seconds to think of a way to start hitting on you before you threw that one out.”

  She was tracing all the contours of his body, hands sliding and gripping, following the lines and indentations of muscle with utter absorption. “I didn’t know,” she whispered, probably with no thought at all to what she was revealing. She couldn’t even keep in character when she was fully focused on her fiancée role. “I did
n’t know you would let me in just for me.”

  “Who would want to keep you out?”

  She shook her head hopelessly, but with a kind of pleasurable hopelessness as her hands ran all over him, as if she abandoned herself to her fate. “You’re so cute.”

  Those little palms sliding everywhere over his skin—they might be remaking him into golden silk, but under that veil, he was becoming all steel. He tensed with delight everywhere, wanting to just close his eyes and concentrate on the feel of it—except then he wouldn’t be able to see her.

  Cute. There was that word again. He lifted his head to study her. Maybe it was the language barrier. French wasn’t her first language, as her delectable little drawl showed. Did he sound like that when he spoke to her in English, all exotic and adorable? He was never speaking in English again. “I’m not even remotely cute,” he said incredulously.

  She smiled in a mysterious, cat-licking-her-chops way, as if she knew far more about it than he did. “And you’re Simon Casset.”

  Why did she say his name as if he was God? Awkward, reticent pleasure uncurled in a cramped space inside him. He didn’t believe in flattery. Growing up, the best comment he received on anything he did was what he could do better, and it was only as an adult that praise had started being heaped on his head. And even now, his peers and critics were quick to point out what could be improved by a millimeter of difference in the fold of a ribbon of cream, the faintest degree more or less of shine in a glaçage.

  But if it made her happy, he would make an effort to get used to it. Merde, who was he kidding, he could definitely get used to it. “And you’re beautiful,” he said because it wasn’t flattery at all. He brushed his lips over those faint, faint pear-speckles on her cheekbones.

  She shook her head, but she was glowing with happiness. “Do you really think so?”