Her eyes caught on his, searching, almost wondering. Slowly, she arched her back to allow her hands room to lower the zipper.
Shit, the hunger that pressed through him at that position, at that act. Nerves were forgotten. His hand hurt against the stone around her door, ground into his palm. “Now lower it.”
She bit her lip harder, her breasts rising and falling fast.
“Shrug your shoulders, Bouclettes.” His growl grew more insistent. “Let it fall.”
She was panting now. But she still hesitated.
He tucked his jaw into the side of her throat, where it would rub when he growled in her ear. “I want to brush this over your nipples, through your bra, until you’re clawing at me. Do it, Layla.”
She gasped, arching her throat still more to him, and then let the dress slide down her shoulders. Already too big for her, it fell easily when she quit holding it up.
He stared down at that revealed body. Those breasts in black lace that she had just revealed for him, to him. Not confident that this would bring him to his knees. Vulnerable and shy, her eyes opening again fast to search his face, to see what he would think or do.
Merde, he wanted to kiss her breasts so bad. The need throbbed in him, throbbed in his lips, made his tongue curl against his teeth. He turned his head and nipped at her shoulder suddenly, under the cruel pressure to let some of that need out.
She made a soft, hungry sound.
He slipped one hand down to pull up the fallen skirt and cover the juncture of her thighs because if he didn’t cover it with something, his damn dick was more than ready to drive against it.
A hot dampness was seeping through her panties. He rubbed that dampness, and she made another little whimpering sound.
Her hips pressed into his hand, her body arching, her breasts lifting to beg for him. Some of those corkscrew curls had fallen over her forehead, catching against her lower lip. The angle of her head, a little away and down, her lips parted, made her face look so vulnerable, so his.
He brought that rose to one of those begging breasts and twirled it against the lace over her nipple.
All she could do was make little sounds. Her hands lifted to his shoulders, flexing and sliding, pulling at him and then growing weak again, as if he stole all her strength.
“Invite me in,” he breathed.
Her eyes flickered open, and then her head ducked. She tucked herself up suddenly against him, burying her face in his chest, and nodded.
Hell, yes. Everything in him surged—that she was shy about this, that she tucked that shyness against him for safe-keeping, and that she said yes.
“If you had your key tucked between your breasts, the turnabout from what you did to me for my key would be so much fun.” He squeezed her body into his, harder than he meant to.
“It’s too big,” she murmured, muffled, into his chest. “It’s in my purse.”
He stroked his hands over her butt anyway, en route to her little purse, found the big iron key easily, and opened her door.
She looked up at him as its solidity left her back, all that space opening behind her into a whole new adventure, a whole new place to get lost and fall without the backing of everything that was familiar. Her expression was nervous and hungry.
He picked her up. I’ve got you. Shh. Don’t worry.
God, the light, gorgeous weight of her body in his arms.
She wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’m scared,” she whispered.
Oh, her, too? She’d said that before. But why should she be scared? She was the one who had all the power here.
His arms tightened around her, lifting her more snugly against his chest. Strength expanded all through him at her need for it, deep from his center all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes, this deep, sure strength. “Don’t be,” he said and carried her into the house. “I’ve got you.”
Chapter 15
He was too sexy. It made a woman’s whole body want to explode with hunger and eagerness and this scrambling fear at how sexy he was. As if a whole cliff was giving out from under her, and she was going over. What was happening to her?
But he was so damn sexy. The muscles under her cheek, the strength of his arms, the careful, sure way he angled her on the stairs so she didn’t bump into a wall. Even through the borrowed tux, Layla could still swear she caught a hint of roses, or maybe it was the lemony, rich scent of the one he still carried in one hand, stem pressed against her skin. Her dress fell down around her waist, so that she was half-debauched already as he carried her, exposed except for those strong arms holding her tight.
He laid her on the bed and paused a second. She followed his gaze to the old jar she’d found in a cupboard and used to hold the rose he’d given her the day before, which sat on the heavy old stand by the side of her bed. “You took care of it.” His voice came out even rougher than usual, and he cleared his throat.
She took the fresh rose from his hand and slid it into the makeshift vase beside the first one.
“Hell,” he muttered and turned back to her. He gazed down at her a long moment, and then ran his hands down her body in a rush of warmth and calluses, slipping away the dress that was tangling her legs. He stepped away long enough to open her shutters, letting in the light of the full moon. A little laugh escaped him as he came down over her on the bed, having to work to find space for himself. “I’d forgotten how little the bed up here was.” He bent that black head to her in the moonlit darkness, with that low, sexy rumble. “We’ll have to see if you fit better in mine.”
Oh, God, they were going to do this twice? She still hadn’t survived once. She felt as if her skin was going to split with the itchy hunger to be petted and squeezed by hands rough with passion.
“Take off your jacket.” She pushed at it. She wanted to feel those muscles, holding his weight off her.
“I kind of like it like this.” He slid his clad thigh up between her bare ones.
She shook her head, crossing her arms over her breasts. “I don’t want to be all exposed while you’re dressed.” I’m always like that. I’m always the one with her heart stripped naked and held up for the crowd that sits on the grass, watching and judging and totally safe. She pushed at his jacket again. “Take it off.”
“You take it off,” he ordered, this low roughness that made her want to twist and arch with hunger. “You do it, Bouclettes.”
Funny, given how laughing and confident she had felt about threatening to help with his T-shirt out there in public, how shy and clumsy she felt now, to take off his jacket. “No, you.” She pressed her hands inside it against his chest. “Please?”
Braced close over her, he lifted a hand to her cheek, his thumb stroking as he searched her face. “All right.”
He kissed her once and then knelt back to strip the jacket off, watching her all the time as he worked the cufflinks, as he draped it over the post at the end of the bed. He was going to drive her out of her mind with how hot he was. How could any woman take this?
What the hell had happened to his previous girlfriends, had they just exploded? Their atoms dissipated out to the ether in one great glorious burst of arousal?
He came back over her, lifting her hand to the top button of his shirt. “You do this part.” His eyes held hers. “Please?” He gave that please back to her as if it was the first time it had ever been formed in his mouth.
So she did it, because no matter how clumsy and exposed it made her feel, she had to get that damn shirt out of her way. And she was definitely clumsy, fighting with those slippery silk-covered buttons. The panels parted slowly to reveal—oh, wow, wow, wow—too much strength and heat and flat hard stomach up so close to her now, where her fingers could touch it.
“I think I’m in over my head,” she whispered, her fingers itching, hovering over those muscles as if instinct kept insisting that so much heat, when touched, could really burn.
“I’ve got you,” he said again, and pressed her hand to his skin. A
jerk ran through his body. “I’ve got you, Bouclettes.”
“God, you’re hot.” Her fingers spread over those hard muscles, pressing across the ripples of them.
“It’s you.” He covered one breast with that big hand, its heat crossing instantly through the fine lace of her bra.
It wasn’t, though. Her looks were ordinary, she knew that very well. People loved her for her music, and he had never heard her sing. His attraction to her was so confusing and so sweet—as if there was more to her that mattered than whether or not she could perform.
Her hands slid around to that smooth, strong back, and she shivered again at the privilege of touching it. “It’s definitely you.”
He shook his head a little, thumb hooking in under her bra cup, rubbing. “Allow me to be the judge of how hot you are, okay? I don’t think you have any clue.”
She arched up into the rub of his thumb involuntarily. “Are you going to take it off?” she whispered.
He bent his head to rub his jaw gently against her cheek until his lips were close to her ear. His thigh slid up between hers, pressing them apart. “I liked when you took off your dress for me,” he said, rough and low. His hips replaced his thigh, surging, his erection hard against her panties. “I liked that a lot.”
This close, in this intimate and dark a space, the vibrations in his voice were utterly irresistible. She wanted to capture that voice, turn it into a fur coat she could wrap around her body against any chill. She arched again, her hands sliding under her back to the catch of her bra. “I think you could get me to do anything you want when you use that voice.”
“Yeah?” His eyes were fixed on her breasts, as her bra cups started to loosen. “I’ll keep that in mind. Merde, Bouclettes, you’re so…you’re…you…”
Apparently there wasn’t a word for her, there was only a touch. Both his hands, coming to cup her bared breasts, both his callused thumbs, rubbing gently over her nipples.
She couldn’t bite back the little moaning sound of pleasure, any more than she could stop herself from reaching for him, pushing at the panels of his shirt that fell to either side of her, finding his bare shoulders, then sliding up his neck to bury her hands in his hair and pull his head down.
“Yeah,” he muttered, bending willingly. “I’m on my way.” He opened his mouth over one nipple, kissing and sucking, gentle at first, then testing how much she wanted, until she writhed and gripped, until she said no, no, that was too much that almost hurt until she said…
“Yes.” Her head pressed back into the pillow, chest lifting up for more of this. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“I love that sound in your mouth.” He reared back, shrugging out of the white shirt and dropping it, revealing that tan, muscled torso and the white gauze still around his left forearm.
She came after him, his bared torso irresistible, stroking everywhere, testing muscles and smoothness of skin and the texture of his hair across his chest. It was all good. Every single inch of him was touchable. She pressed her ear into his chest and tried to think of a way to make him growl, but her brain was all fogged.
Finally she just pressed her hand down, down, down his stomach, flat and tense under her touch, and curled it over his jutting sex.
He growled.
Her hand squeezed in involuntary delight as she shivered, pressing her ear harder into his chest.
He growled again. She wrapped her other arm around his waist and hugged herself in closer to that strength and that sound and squeezed again. “I like this position,” she said mischievously.
“You’re asking for trouble.” He pulled her hand off him and then lifted it and completely unexpectedly kissed it before he stood free of the bed, reaching for his pants.
She curled her fingers wonderingly into that kiss of her palm, watching him as he unbuttoned his pants. He reached for the waist and froze. “Oh, shit.”
“What?” Layla sat up, wrapping her arms around her nakedness, startled and not very concerned. Right about then everything seemed fixable, as long as she had Matthieu Rosier in the same room with her, with that muscled torso bare.
“I don’t have anything.” He thunked his head against the slanted wall. “It’s Gabe’s tux, and I was right in the middle of a workday when this all started, and I…I can’t believe I forgot—” Thunk against the wall again. “Usually I would have—” He broke off abruptly.
Layla’s eyes narrowed a little. “Eternal optimist? Or are you just used to getting lucky?”
“It’s not that.” He turned his head, still pressed against the wall, to meet her eyes. “It’s just that—it’s my responsibility. To take care of you.”
She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, naked except for her panties. “Of course it is,” she said softly. “Everything’s your responsibility, isn’t it?”
“Will you give me ten minutes? I’ve got some at my house.” He winced. “That spoils everything, doesn’t it?” He closed his eyes.
She stood up, baring her naked body suddenly as easily as she sometimes bared her heart. “No, it doesn’t,” she said quietly and walked to him, sliding in under his bowed body and wrapping her arms around him, pressing her head against his chest. “You taking care doesn’t spoil anything at all. I like it.” I actually think I might be doing something way more than “liking” here.
His body curved around hers as the despair eased off his face into something intense and almost wondering. “Come with me,” he murmured, or that growly thing he did that passed for his murmur. “I’ll carry you all the way through the roses. You won’t even have to put your shoes on.”
“Oh.” She had been about to propose another solution, and now her original idea wavered. “That sounds incredibly romantic.”
“Really?” He looked completely surprised. “Not just desperate?”
She shook her head and went up on tiptoe to whisper a secret. “I have some, though.” She halfway wanted to not mention them, so she could get that ride through the roses.
He frowned a little.
She held up a finger. “Are you going to have a double standard?”
“No.” But that frown settled into a scowl.
“They were giving these out at a festival I was at in Paris.” She left him to dig around the edge of her still-packed suitcase until she found it. “And I thought the package was really funny, so I kept it as a souvenir.” She showed him the little packet of three condoms, stamped with the image of a very phallic Eiffel Tower covered with latex. J’aime à Paris.
He completely annoyed her by double-checking to see if the package had been opened and smiling when he found the box still sealed.
But he was so damn sexy standing there, with that light heating again in his eyes as he realized this evening could keep going, that her annoyance melted. “So you see,” she said. “Maybe once in a while, I know how to take care of things, too.”
He hefted the little package. “This wasn’t you taking care of things, this was your sense of play. And I got lucky.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “All right, if you’re going to start complaining about your luck right now—”
He growled and pushed her back on the bed. “No.” He came down over her. “No, I’m not going to complain about my luck.”
She turned her head away as snootily as she could. “I might be losing my sense of play.”
“Oh, no, you sure as hell aren’t. Let me fix that problem for you.” His hand ran down her body, leaving a path of pleasure and hunger in its wake.
“Maybe you can’t fix it,” she challenged, holding his eyes in provocation.
“Oh, don’t worry.” His eyes gleamed as his thumb taunted its way over that ticklish crease of her thigh, making her hips twist and jerk a little, half toward that tickle and half away. “I can fix anything.”
“Maybe,” she said haughtily, “you’ll get lost and need directions.”
Laughter and arousal leapt in his eyes in equal proportio
ns. She loved the blend of it. “I never get lost.” His hand slid unerringly to exactly where she wanted it to go, proving his claim, a firm cup of her panties and a press of the heel of his palm against her clitoris through them.
She turned her head away, a resigned princess. “Well, I suppose if you do, we can always find an app for this on your phone.”
He laughed out loud, this great shout of happiness and desire, and she turned her head back to him, grinning with triumph. His eyes were alight with humor and arousal as he lowered his head to her. “You’re going to pay for that, you know,” he growled, removing his hand from between her thighs. Uh-oh.
“God, your voice should be illegal.” She hugged him hard, trying to crush his body to hers or hers to his.
“Don’t talk to me.” He began to drag his body down hers. “I’m concentrating on the road.”
“Hey.” She grabbed for him, her fingers sliding through those glossy half-curls as he paused above her chest.
“Merde, I don’t know,” he said, with the most ridiculous semblance of anxiousness on that big and dominant a man. One large finger touched just above her breastbone and hesitated. “Should I go here?” His fingers walked their way up one breast, and then, just as he was about to reach the aureole of her nipple, his upraised index finger paused…and he turned and retraced his steps. “Or here?” He walked them up the other breast.
“Hey.” She tried to grab his hands and press them fully to her breasts, but he dragged them down her ribs as easily as if she hadn’t been resisting him at all, leaving her poor abandoned nipples quite desperate for that failed contact.
“I am so confused,” he said. “I definitely need a damn phone about now to tell me what to do. I mean, what the hell is this?” One flat palm paused dramatically just at the edge of her panties. “A road block? Where do I go from here?”
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