All for You (Paris Nights #1)(45)

If she didn’t know better, she’d say Joss was flushing a little. It must be a trick of the glowing lamp under which they stood. Or … oh, Good God, he had used her as a Playboy bunny, hadn’t he? He’d even said something about it. That was … he must have … Her eyes grew wider and wider as she tried to imagine all the ways he might have imagined her, in his head.

They might have been way more explicit than her dreamy cuddles.

And she couldn’t figure out whether her body was flushing with annoyance at that or … curiosity.

“Célie. I’m trying to listen to you, but I don’t even know what you mean. In my entire life, you’re the most real.” He lifted his hands and framed her face. “Everything about you is true.”

Oh.

His hands rubbed over the shape of her skull, tracing the curve of her ears, shaping her cheekbones. “And deserves the best I can be.”

The texture of his palms against her cheeks caught her, lured her in past argument. That texture made it seem as if he wasn’t some great granite rock rising out of a sea—glorious and obdurate. The sea dashed against a rock like that, but the waves didn’t penetrate, and it didn’t change. Not in a human lifetime.

And the touch of his hands, the look in his eyes … none of that was like a rock at all. Strength and warmth and tenderness.

All given to her.

“You deserve the best I can be, too,” she whispered, before she’d even thought it through. But the whisper ran through her: he really did. So did she deserve the best she could be. That was why she had tried to become it.

Actually, why she was still always trying to become it—every single day in that laboratoire, pouring her all into being ever better.

Exactly like him.

“Joss,” she sighed, soft as wistfulness.

Soft as wanting.

You’re not a rock. All those muscles, as hard and strong as they are, have a little human yield in them. They’d take the pressure of my fingers. That pressure would change you, you’d respond to it, your body would be mine.

And I wouldn’t feel anything at all like a sea trying to get a rock to change.

His thumbs ran over her cheekbones, and he bent and kissed her, as if he couldn’t resist a taste.

Velvet heat spread through her body, this fuzzy heat that softened all the sharp edges of hurt, that turned off her brain. She found her hands climbing up his arms, and she was right—those hard muscles were warm and alive and human. They responded to her hands, not as if he was a rock against which she beat herself but as if her slightest touch could change his entire existence.

I don’t want to be up on a glass mountain or in a tower waiting for you, Joss. I’ve always wanted to be human and real to you.

So she kissed him like somebody real.

Eager.

Melting.

His lips shaped to hers, his hands pulling her hard up into his body, harder and harder, more and more eager. His palm ran up her back, his fingers cupping her butt. The press and shift of his lips, the graze of his teeth, the touch of his tongue …

The jazz band busking on the bridge started playing them a love song, and Joss lifted his head. “God, this hurts. Kissing you and … only kissing you. I love it, though. I’ll do it as long as you want.”

She didn’t know quite what he meant. She didn’t think any man she had ever dated had ever hurt for her. The couple of sexual relationships she’d tried in the past five years had been, well … friendly. That was, she and the guy had started out getting along, hitting it off, and he’d nudged for sex, and she’d thought, Well, I should try it, he’s a nice enough guy, and … it all felt really, really limp and tepid compared to this, like the hot chocolate some cafés in this part of Paris tried to pass off on tourists.


Like somebody shouldn’t have forced her to try to make do with that shit instead of him.

She scowled at that somebody.

“What?” he asked. “I mean it. You set the pace.”

“Sometimes it’s so hard not to hit you.”

His lips curved so wryly it was all she could do not to kiss them again. “What did I do this time? Too greedy?”

“No. Not greedy enough.”

He drew a hard breath that she felt through his entire body still brushing hers, and then pulled her in close and kissed her again, ignoring the jazz band and their public exposure, ignoring everything but her.

Joss lifted his head and swept a hard look over hers. She blinked at the four men hovering near them, each with a lock held up for sale, each trying to be the first to catch their attention. At Joss’s look, they all took a step back, hesitated, then moved away.

Célie squinted her eyes and tried to pack her own gaze with power that way, practicing on Joss’s chest this sweeping back off before you die look. He didn’t even have any meanness in it. No squint, no effort, just this relaxed swing of a blade. The sweep of a sharp sword wasn’t mean, it was just a fact that you’d better be out of that blade’s way when it swung in your direction.

“What did I do this time?” Joss sighed, and she hastily tried to smooth her expression.

“Oh, just, you know … practicing.”

His eyebrows went up. “Practicing?”

She sighed. “It’s never going to work the same when I do it.” She tried her approximation of his look on him, her face scrunching into it.