All for You (Paris Nights #1)(33)

Her fingers flexed into her palms, in this hot, still panic that any move she made might be the wrong one, might tell him no.

And she was supposed to be telling him no. She was supposed to be saying stop. Stop, go away, leave me alone … her insides whirled in fear that he might hear the attempted thought, might do it.

He’d left her alone before, after all, without her even asking.

His palm ran down her arm, a strong rub of warmth, until he reached her hand. He lifted it and set it against his shoulder. “I’m right here.” His breath brushed her lips, every line in his body taut with barely restrained energy. “If you need to shove me away.”

And then he kissed her—this sweet, firm closing of his lips over hers, this rushing, thorough heat as he lost control almost instantly, his kiss deepening, his hands gripping the tree hard on either side of her head, his body pressing into hers. Arousal and heat, hard strength, this intense, starving hunger.

She’d dreamed of kissing Joss so many times, and it wasn’t like any of them. It wasn’t dreamy. It was so damn physical and hot and real. The bark pressed against her head, and his hard body surged into hers, so obviously wanting more, and she couldn’t stop kissing him back. She just couldn’t stop.

She kept climbing into him, trying to eat him up, trying to make him hers, take him inside her where he could never get away from her again. Kissing and kissing, seeking the texture and hunger of his mouth, his tongue, the strength of those shoulders as she dug her hands into them, as she dragged her fingers down to squeeze his arm muscles, too, as she slid her hands around to climb up the hard, broad muscles of his back.

“Hell.” He shoved away from her and staggered to the next tree over, pressing a hand against it and hanging his weight against that arm. A flush ran over his cheekbones, his lips damp and full as if somebody had just tried to eat him up.


She held herself back against her own tree, trembling with the need to go after him, to not let this stop, and weak with the fear that she had already drowned in him. That she wouldn’t find her way back to herself.

“Holy shit.” Joss pressed his forehead against his tree so hard that the muscles in his neck stood out. “You’re going to have to shove me really hard, if you kiss me that way. That’s almost too much for me to handle. I shouldn’t have—hell, I shouldn’t have tried this in public.”

Thank God it had been in public. If he’d kissed her like that in her apartment, they’d be … right this second, they’d be … She covered her face, pressing the heels of her palms into her forehead to drive in sense. “I told you I couldn’t let you come up to my apartment.”

He turned his head against the tree to look at her. One of his arms looped around the tree and tightened, holding himself there. “That was for you? Merde, Célie, I thought … I thought it was for me. Because you could guess how hard it is for me to hold back and didn’t want to torment me. Or maybe didn’t trust me.”

Torment him. Her thighs squeezed along with all those inner muscles right above them. “For both of us, I guess. Mostly, um … me.”

“Oh, hell, sweetheart. Célie.” He turned back to her.

She backed away, holding up her hands, eating his body hungrily with her eyes over the barrier. She wanted him so badly that hunger made tears well out of her eyes, and she didn’t realize until she was sobbing. Oh, God, not again with the crying. When was she going to get this all out? She covered her face, but the tears kept coming, until she had to sit down on the nearest bench. “I can’t do this, Joss. I can’t do it. It hurt so much when you left.”

A big body dropped down in front of her. She dragged her hands far enough from her eyes to see him. That corded strength knelt beside her thigh, Joss taking her hands, his eyes intense. “I’m sorry, Célie.”

How could somebody whose whole body communicated lethal power apologize? To her?

“I know you are,” she whispered. “I just … can’t get over it this fast.” She gestured to the box of chocolates. And suddenly, bitterly, it burst out of her: “You don’t deserve me.”

Not the her she had made without him, happy and energetic and most definitely independent, not needing any man. Because a woman couldn’t let herself count on any man. Not her father, whom she’d never even met, not her marijuana-smoking, dog-fighting cousins, not her older brother, and most definitely not her older brother’s sexy friend, who might run off and join the Foreign Legion without even warning her, as if she didn’t matter at all.

Joss’s body tightened, and his arm went out to press across the bench just beside her thigh, gripping the opposite edge. Anger flared through every line of his body, locking his lips into a tight line. The way he’d looked at Ludo when he first realized Ludo was dealing. “I did all this to deserve you, Célie.” His arm tightened on the bench, his voice dropping low and harsh. “Do you have any idea how much I did?”

Her eyes widened as she stared at him, and she wanted to pet those broad shoulders just in front of her, to pet down over those straining arms. That must have strained so much more than this, over and over and over. Up cliffs. In two hundred push-ups because some sergeant was pissed. Hauling himself on his belly through the mud in training. Training the whole purpose of which was to teach him to handle the next four years of his life, when any cliff he climbed or mud he dragged himself through would be for life or death.