Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(63)
Lina patted him consolingly. “Maybe if you're nice to me I’ll bestow honorary Frenchness on you.”
Jake’s heart gave a weird, hopeful jump. He was pretty sure the Navy would frown on him accepting a second citizenship, but the only way she could bestow legal Frenchness on him was through marriage. And if that idea ever drifted through her visions of possible futures for their relationship…well, that was scary, but talk about a giant wave worth taking.
Although she still hadn’t even introduced him to her family. She’d finally talked them into leaving on a short vacation in Brittany last week, mostly on the grounds that she would join them there this coming week for her ice sculpting contest, and all she’d said when he asked about meeting them before they left was, “Don’t borrow trouble before you have to.”
What did that mean? That she didn’t think that they were that serious? Or that she just didn’t want family nosiness? He sure as hell wouldn’t be the first soldier to start dating a local girl whose family didn’t exactly have positive views of the American military. Or any military, possibly, depending on her grandparents’ experience of the Algerian war.
“So why do people date?” Lina asked.
“So they can have someone to kiss,” Jake said and did that, for the intense happiness it gave him, every time. This part he was very sure about.
It seemed to make Lina happy, too. She laughed a little when he raised his head and rested her own on his shoulder. “I should have known the other fifty percent was about sex.”
He shook his head. “No. That was about romance. There you go again, rushing the conversation straight to sex.”
Lina smiled, letting her head slide down his chest until it was resting against his thigh as a pillow, while he braced on his hands. “You know, you are very inconsistent in how much you complain about that.”
He twined one of her curls around his finger, taking the high road on that one rather than trying to argue. Lina’s strength and generosity and laughter, her defiant embrace of life, her sugar and lots of spice but fundamentally nice nature, her irony and complete conviction that she could get her own way if she set her mind to it, and layered over that the fact that she was so damn pretty…it made all his insides knot in anticipation every day, as he showered and shaved and headed to her place.
The knot would get tighter and tighter with every action that brought him closer to her, with the opening of her building door, with the couple of minutes speaking to whatever police officers were on duty for her there, with the climbing of her stairs, the knock on her door.
And then…
“You unknot me,” he said quietly.
Lina searched his face quickly, a surprised pleasure in her eyes. Then she spread her fingers over his arm, kneading gently. “Me, too.”
Yeah? As well as she did him, though?
Because sometimes it only took two seconds for her to unknot him. The touch of her hand on his chest, her kiss, all that tightness in him loosening and smoothing out. Sometimes just the scent from her apartment as she opened the door would do it. The fresh smell of her shower or maybe of mint tea, which she knew he liked because it reminded him of the better human moments in Iraq and a few other countries he wasn’t supposed to admit he’d been in, those moments when he felt as if the West and the Middle East didn’t have to be at war forever, that they might actually be able to sit down and talk. And she said it reminded her of her grandmother and moments of warmth and comfort, so he liked what it represented, when she curved her hand around a pretty glass of tea and handed it to him.
Sometimes he meant to take her out and what he ended up doing was turning her right back against the wall nearest her door, sinking more and more into that first kiss of greeting, unable to stop, until she was ripping off his clothes, arching up into him, sinking into him, too.
He was pretty sure he would be dead before he ever got tired of being greeted like that.
So a lot of times they didn’t make it farther than the bed—or the wall, or the couch. But mostly the roomy bed was his favorite, because Lina liked sex. With him. She acted as if he was one of the sexual wonders of the world or something, and she had to get her hands all over him. She liked to sink that strong grip of hers into his muscles—or around one non-muscle—and feel him.
And when their greeting was so urgent, she liked it the second time, too, when everything slowed down, when her stroking was slower and sleepier, when his was gentle and lingering, wondering. She liked taking long slip-sliding showers after, she liked to lie on her side facing him on the bed and let her fingertips touch here and there and there on the nearest part of his body, claiming she was working her way slowly through all his freckles.
He thought he might have a lifetime of freckles to touch at that rate, and sometimes he almost said that, but bit it back on the rush of fear that woke at giving himself that much to hope for.
Stroking down her arm at the thought, he took her hand and touched her index finger to one of the freckles revealed by the inch his T-shirt had pulled up. Then to another. It felt like a spell, every freckle she touched, like if she did manage to touch every one, he would be covered in some magic invisible armor and could never really die.
Not in a way that mattered anyway. Not in her heart.
He angled his head enough to gaze at her black curls against his shoulder. Her head had snuggled against him until it rested nearly over his own heart.