Revealing Us (Inside Out #3)(54)

I gasp and arch my hips, shocked as my sex clenches around his ingers without warning. Ripples of pleasure radiate to the rest of my body, and Chris uses his skillful ingers and tongue to bring me from the peak to the valley. Slowly, the scream of pleasure within me becomes a hum, and I’m panting from the impact.

Chris kisses up my thigh to one of my knees, then gently lowers my legs to the loor. He wraps his arms around me and presses his cheek to my stomach, holding me there as if he feels like he’s about to lose me.

As seconds tick by, he starts to scare me.

“Chris?” His name is a whispered plea.

His hands begin traveling upward as he stands, cradling me to his body. “I can’t breathe without you, either, Sara,” he says, in a low, gravelly voice, replying to what I’d said in the bar. “And that’s the problem.”

“Just stop trying,” I whisper. “Untie me. Please. I need to touch you.”

He kisses me instead, unwilling or unready to give away control, but there’s a softness about him, about how his tongue caresses my mouth. I taste his passion, his hunger, but there’s something more. Something that still tastes like good-bye.

I stroke his tongue with mine, trying to kiss it away, but it doesn’t work. I try to burn it away with heat and ire, but it won’t fade. So when he tears his mouth from mine, I don’t give him time to speak.

“I’m not going anywhere. You can try to send me away, but I came here for a reason. I believe in us and I’m not going away.”

His hands frame my face. “If you tried, I’d come after you.”

His rough-edged tone is delicious friction to my nerve endings. “No matter what you show me or what happens, I won’t leave, Chris. If that’s why you want to leave, it’s the wrong reason, and the wrong thing for us.”

He stares down at me, the seconds ticking by, his expression unreadable, before he steps up onto the sill and unties my wrists.

Before I have time to lower my hands, he’s stepped of the sill and is walking away to the other side of his canvas. He returns with a shirt in his hand.

“Put this on or we won’t talk, and we need to.” He holds it up so that I can slide my arms. Disappointingly, it smells of fabric softener, not Chris.



He leans on the wall and pulls me against him, his hands gliding up my back and molding me to him. “I don’t want to leave.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said, and I meant it at the time. My irst instinct when you were in danger was to get you the hell away from anything and everything that could steal you away from me.”

“Including your past.”

“No, Sara. When I brought you here, I was all in, and I still am. My need to do things at my own speed isn’t about hesitation, it’s about how I have to deal with certain events in my life.

Wanting us to leave Paris was about keeping you safe. I don’t like this Neuville and Ella situation.”

“We need to stay and see through what we’ve started.”

“I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve spent the past two hours battling my need to protect you, and the many reasons I wanted us here now. Next week . . .” He looks away, his jaw tensing, before he turns back to me. “Nothing is as important as your safety.”

What happens next week? I open my mouth to ask, but his ingers snake into my hair, and his eyes glow with determination.

“I have people working on this Ella and Neuville situation, digging up information. If I ind out anything that I think puts you in danger, we’re leaving. Period.”

“Chris—”

He kisses me, hard and fast. “Nonnegotiable. And if you take unnecessary risks, or try to play investigator yourself, I swear to God, I’ll drug you and put you on a plane, if that’s what it takes to get you out of here.”

Storm clouds lurk in his eyes, threatening to consume him again; something about next week has set him of again. So we’ll deal with it next week. Right now I just want him to smile, so I smile and run my ingers over the newly forming stubble on his jaw. “Good thing you’re so sexy when you act like a caveman.”

He stares at me for a minute and then scoops me up and heads toward the door. “I’ll show you caveman.”

I bite my lip, pleased with his reaction. He’s not smiling, but I’m pretty sure we both will be soon.





Eighteen


Chris and I spend the rest of Friday in various ways of being naked together, breaking only for food and conversation. Saturday starts just as wonderfully. Chris and I wake up together, eat together, laugh together. We dress casually and plan to hit some museums in the afternoon.

Midmorning, he heads to his studio to paint while I settle into my favorite chair in our bedroom, chatting with a worried Chantal while I watch the unending drizzle outside the window. Afterward, I have a chat with the business attorney about my venture. Though Chris set it up for me, he knows how important my own identity is to me, and that was the end of his involvement. I fall more in love with him every second.

When my call ends, I rush to Chris’s gallery to share my excitement over how easy it will be to ramp up my new business. I’ll need a name for it and already ideas are popping into my head.



I hear his murmured voice to the far right of the gallery and I follow the sound to a short, enclosed stairwell leading to another room. I head down and see Chris sitting behind a silver and gray desk. There’s a massive mural of a dragon behind him on the wall, and I gape at the amazing work he’s created. I can’t believe I haven’t asked to see the dragons he’d painted early in his career. He’d told me he keeps them here in Paris.