All for You (Paris Nights #1)(32)

Joss’s eyes focused on her mouth and stayed there. Her lips started to burn, this soft, buzzing burning that made her want to lick them, made her want to swallow. “Do you like it?” he asked. “This dark.”

She nodded slowly. “I have to savor it. I … need to.”

“I like it, too.” His rough voice was like being grazed with quiet. As if quiet had rubbed its five o’clock shadow all over her skin. “It’s as if you made it just for me.”

Well … yeah.

“If I eat it all up, will you be mad?” He touched the edge of another square hungrily. Shadows and light played over his face from the shift of leaves above them and the angle of the afternoon sun across Paris.

“I—I don’t know,” Célie said, mesmerized by his mouth, by the thought of more bitter-dark chocolate melting so easily. “I—I didn’t expect for you to make it all disappear this fast.”

“Maybe just one more.” Her skin prickled with the texture of that quiet voice. He loosened the chocolate from the box and brought it to his lips. “Or maybe two,” he murmured as the chocolate disappeared. An expression of concentrated pleasure suffused his face, his eyes closing.

In that instant his eyelids protected her, Célie stole a lick of her lips. When his eyes opened, she was somehow closer to him. Able to see all the flecks of hazel and green in his eyes, locking with hers. The afternoon sun kissed one side of his face. She followed that kissing light with her eyes, helplessly, wanting to press her lips to the corner of his, there where the sun touched.

“I need to warn you about something,” he said.

She waited, while children laughed out of sight in the distance. He didn’t chatter much, Joss. He would answer her questions, but if he told her something gratuitously, it was always because he thought she needed to know.

“Before I left, I tried really hard to be your friend and your brother’s friend and not to touch you. I tried not to go after you. I succeeded.”

She scowled, reached for one of her chocolates, and ate it herself. The bitter darkness stung her tongue even as it melted.

“But you’re all grown up, and I’ve become someone closer to the man I wanted to be for you.”

“I’m going to hit you if you say that one more time,” Célie said between her teeth. And licked chocolate off her lips. It tasted bitter. And sweet.

“So it’s going to feel different to you. Because now I can try for you. And you don’t actually know what that’s like, when I try.”


She struggled to stay stiffened against him. But she felt like her own stupid chocolate, vainly struggling not to melt at the temperature of touch. “What’s it like?”

She’d better get him to tell her, because he might never get a chance to show her. The odds of him having to actually exert himself to get her seemed woefully low right then.

He searched for words like an alien trying to convey his world so that an Earthling could understand. “I don’t give up. I don’t let go when the going gets tough. I’m not very crushable by even the worst insults, and you could strip me naked and humiliate me and I’d still keep going even if I had to crawl through the mud to my goal. I can be patient, and I can be persistent, and I can endure, and if something hurts, it doesn’t stop me.” A slight, wry twist to his mouth. “I suppose you could get a SWAT team to bring me down, though. I’d eventually respond to enough bullets.”

She put her hands on her hips. “And that’s not the least bit creepy.”

That straight, serious gaze. “Is it? I may not have very good judgment anymore, about what average people think is acceptable effort.”

She rubbed her arms, which kept missing his warmth despite the summer and her leather jacket. “It would be nice to have a stop button on you, short of shooting you.”

A tiny, perplexed wrinkling of those stubborn eyebrows, a search of her eyes. “You are the stop button, Célie. You can say no.”

She frowned, in a sudden surge of panic at that ability.

Energy ran through all the hard lines of his body. His focus honed in on her. He took a step closer. “Do you want to say it?”

She bit her lip, unable to look away from his eyes. She felt like a kitten, begging him not to drown her. And utterly mute. If she tried to speak, she might only manage a whimper of a meow.

His hand lifted and touched her face. She gave a little gasp. The last time her cheek had felt the gentle, callused warmth of that hand had been in some teenage bout of furious tears over her brother, when Joss was trying to coax her out of it. “No, Célie?”

She swallowed.

He shifted in, this unhurried, gentle motion, easing her back against a tree, leaning over her, closing her in. “Not one little ‘stop’?” His hand slid to cup her head, his other hand bracing against the tree above her.

She licked her lips, her breath coming in hard and deep. She had to grab enough oxygen before she went under.

“Not one little ‘no’?” His head bent closer to hers, this hot, strange hunger flaring in his eyes, as if all that steady hazel had been hiding a wild creature.

She tried again to speak and could only swallow. His lips were so close …

“Maybe a hand raised”—his leg shifted so that now a thigh framed her, too—“to push me back?”