All for You (Paris Nights #1)(47)

She pivoted and tapped in her code, her breaths short and shallow, embarrassed, as if she’d stepped across some important line in the sand.

Joss caught the door when it clicked and pushed it halfway open but stopped there, his own breathing hard and deep. “Maybe I should meet you at the top,” he muttered.

Meet her … ? “There’s only one staircase.”

“I could just climb up the outside.” A hard rise and fall of his chest, his hand fisting on the door he still held open. “It might be easier than trying to get up all those stairs behind you. It would give me something to do with my hands until we get to the actual bed.”

She stared at him, then up at her apartment window six floors up. “Are you like one of those guys who climbs the Eiffel Tower and all that?”

“No, I’m more like a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion. The Eiffel Tower has so many holds anybody could climb it.”

Célie was pretty sure that by anybody, he meant anybody but the vast majority of the population including her, but … but … she lost her train of thought before the intensity of his look.

Burning, she took a step back from it, her brain short-circuiting.

He licked his lips and gave his head a tiny shake as if to clear it. “God. I can’t believe this is actually happening.”

Her whole body itched. Standing so close to him but not quite touching made her feel like one giant frantic case of chicken pox. “Please just come with me up the stairs.” Her fingers flexed into her palms to keep from grabbing him and trying to haul him forcibly. “If you fell off the building, I’d kill you.”

“Climbing those stairs behind you without touching you might kill me,” he said roughly.

He got her mind and body so tangled up and confused with hot wanting. The Joss she thought she knew had been an honorary older brother, tolerant and quietly patient with her and subtly protective. He’d been the focal point of all her teenage fantasies, a safe place to put them, the only decent guy she knew. It hadn’t been reciprocal. He’d been the guy who had been able to leave her for his own dreams without a second thought.

To discover … this—this burning, flushed, taut hunger of his that pursued her up the dim staircase like a lion after its prey—was as if her whole world had been picked up and shaken until she fell out of it naked and wanting in front of a man who was half a stranger.


It felt real, though. It felt as if she was down out of her tower and aflame with realness. Or at least he’d finally invited himself into that tower instead of standing on the ground below.

She stopped just short of the top of the first flight. “Joss.” Her whole back burned, and her buttock muscles would not stop clenching and releasing even when she paused in her climbing. “You’re … looking at me or something. I can feel it.”

“Fuck, yes, I’m looking at you,” he said, low and strangled. “I can’t believe I’m finally going to be able to touch that ass. Merde, all the times you’ve twitched that thing at me and I haven’t grabbed a handful of it.”

She twisted her upper body cautiously, just enough to see his face. They hadn’t turned the lights on, so he was almost all shadow.

In the dark stairwell, his focus was intense, absolute, as if every flex of her body was being burned into him. All that rugged power was primed, ready. He had one hand closed around the railing, the muscles on his forearm standing out as he gripped it.

“You go first,” he said roughly. “I’ll try to give you a head start.”

She climbed three more steps and looked back down. He was so big and powerful and predatory just below her, held in check only by a clear effort of his own will. Half a stranger, half a friend.

What are you doing? she thought. Don’t let him in. Not in where he can break everything you’ve built of yourself down into nothing.

Her steps sped up. Not because she was running from a predator. Not at all. She was naturally this fast, that was all—a thousand times a day, she raced up and down the stairs at work, in a hurry to get everything done. She glanced back down. He still gripped that railing, staring up at her.

Her steps managed to speed up a little more. Adrenaline raced through her. When she glanced down from two flights up, he still hadn’t moved, straining against his own hold on the railing. Their eyes met. His locked with hers from two flights below. She licked her lips.

And he let go of that railing and surged up the stairs, in an explosion of lethal power. He barely made a sound, taking the stairs two at a time, in this smooth, clean burst of a predator in pursuit.

Her heart kicked into overdrive, a terrified prey but with this surge of laughter through it, too. It was a challenge now. And she’d always loved challenging Joss, teasing him.

Now she had to beat him. She raced up the next flight. A sixth-floor apartment and running up and down the stairs at work a thousand times a day left her in excellent stair-climbing shape. And gazelles were faster than leopards. She could do this. She could—

She tripped in her rush and started to fall, just as that dark pursuit surged up and caught her. A hard grip pulled her in.

“Joss,” she whispered.

He pressed her back against the door. “Merde, Célie.”

The jacket she’d been holding in her hand had fallen when she tripped. Without it, she could feel the nakedness of her arms, the bareness of her shoulders, how thin and fragile her silky top was against that strength and that gaze. He braced both hands on the door on either side of her.