All for You (Paris Nights #1)(35)

He tried to call on it now, that guard duty training. Don’t move. Just hold. Don’t get aroused, damn it!

But he did get aroused. Her body felt so sweet and good and real after all those fantasies. His own body just pressed and pressed more insistently into her belly, against all his will, rising of its own volition. It was all he could do not to press even harder. Not to lift her so he could fit that pressure between her thighs, press her back against that damn kissing tree and have at it again.


Better yet, haul her back to her damn apartment that was all bed.

“I’m sorry, too,” Célie said suddenly into his chest.

He latched on to the words, trying to focus on anything besides what her body felt like pressed against his, besides what she would look like caught between him and white sheets, besides what should be the very first item of clothing he removed. Should he unbutton her jeans? Work down that zip? Slide his hands under her knit shirt first and push it up? Get this damn leather jacket out of the way …

“I know you had the right to live your own life and make everything you could out of it. I don’t mean to be this way. I just—can’t—every time you say you did it for me, it makes me want to pound on you.”

He did do it for her, though. So was he supposed to lie to her? Or just not talk about it? Célie was the one person he talked best to.

He gazed down at the fists that still clutched his T-shirt, the fists that wanted to pound on him. He knew her hands must be incredibly capable, to produce those chocolates, even more capable than when they’d kneaded dough and made croissants as a pastry apprentice in an average bakery in their banlieue, but … he covered one fist with his hand. Yeah. His hand completely engulfed hers.

It made him feel big as the universe, to be able to so completely embrace her within the size of his own body.

When she was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and he was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, his much greater size had always made him feel a breath away from being like every other loser, user guy in their cité to her. Literally a breath—that if he ever bent his head and breathed in the scent of her when she was teasing him, he would just grab her ass and pull her against his body and take every advantage he could of that cursed, so-tantalizing, so-flattering crush she had on him.

But now he felt made for her. Made by himself for her, through the crucible of the Legion, so that his size and strength and control, everything about him, now was just right. He could protect her hand from all the world.

He slid a thumb under her fingers to loose the clutch of his shirt and then gently struck his chest with her fist, again, and then again, in a pretense that she was pounding on him.

She turned her head suddenly and kissed his hand covering hers. The touch of her lips lanced through him in ways he didn’t have the words to describe. A heat and hunger and sweetness that went so far beyond sex.

He held both their hands very still, so as not to shake away that press of her lips.

“I wish I could touch you all over,” she whispered, and his whole body jolted. “You have the most amazing texture.”

Oh, yeah. Hers was amazing, too. “I can grant that wish,” he said, rough and harsh. Heat was rising in him like an inferno, engulfing him. “Hell, Célie.”

“But I’m still so mad at you,” she said fiercely into his chest.

“You could have mad sex. And I could have just … sex.” If she poured all her anger and hurt into sex, maybe she’d almost match the fierceness and intensity coming from him. He wanted to beg. Merde, Célie, please. His fingers flexed into her butt.

“And I don’t even know you anymore,” she said.

Merde.

She drew far enough back from his chest to look up at him. “You’re really a stranger. And I’m a stranger to you, too.”

No, she wasn’t. She was still exactly Célie, bigger, brighter, stronger, more accomplished, but as vibrant and gutsy and beautiful as she had always been.

Fuck.

He drew a deep breath and then another. And managed to ease his hips far enough away from hers that he wasn’t grinding his damn erection into her in a vain, desperate pressure for more. He braced his arms on the tree by the bench to help him, framing her.

She looked smaller and more vulnerable than usual, vulnerable like when Ludo had been arrested, vulnerable like when she’d pressed her face into his thigh there on that bridge over the Canal St. Martin. In both cases, she’d trusted him with that vulnerability. He’d been the man she turned to with it.

The man who had never taken advantage of her vulnerability. Never used it to lure her into anything she thought she was ready for when he knew neither of them really were.

“Maybe we should date,” he said. His hand left the tree to frame her face. She looked startled, as if her cheek had no idea what a man’s hand felt like up until that very moment.

Or maybe just not what his hand felt like.

Her face crinkled up so funnily, happiness and wonder and fear and the threat of more tears. “Date? Like … like we might have done if you hadn’t saved me for later?” Her eyes flashed on that phrase, but the flash faded into a curious hunger. “As if … as if you wanted me to be your girlfriend?”


He stroked his fingertips over the curve of her ear, gently rubbing those two piercings. “Exactly like that.” Exactly what he had always wanted her to be. “Does that work for you?”