All for You (Paris Nights #1)(48)

“I’m going to screw this up,” he said hoarsely, big hands flexing against the door. “I want it too damn bad.”

She squeezed her eyes tight against her own wanting. “Me, too,” she whispered. It confused her, because she hadn’t known that her body could want sex this intensely. Sex had always made her feel anxious, naked, wishing the guy would quit touching her because his touch felt so totally wrong against her bare skin. She hadn’t done that much of it, in fact, and she’d always felt guilty about how rare her efforts were, as if she wasn’t properly trying.

“Merde.” A rough expulsion of breath. Joss’s hand left the door, lowering to just above her breast and hovering there a second, open. She tried to breathe deeply enough to lift her breasts to his palm. “God, Célie.”

His hand shifted enough to finally cup her breast.

Both of them stilled at that claiming. The first time Joss had ever touched her there. The first time Joss had ever touched her anywhere a man could only touch in private and with permission.

His hand felt so hot and big against that fragile, intimate part of her. Within seconds, he had lost his paralysis, and his hand was shifting, massaging, his body pressing in closer to hers.

“Hell,” he said. And then a string of curse words in this mix of languages that must be the way he had learned to curse in the Legion. But he said all those profane curses in this wondering, incredulous tone, his hands squeezing her breasts, sliding down her ribs, rubbing back up to her breasts to squeeze again.


She shivered and flexed against that door and dragged her hands over his torso. How could anyone be so muscled? This lethal, intense strength of a body that could meet any demand anyone made of it.

Except, perhaps, hers.

Because that body flinched and tightened under her touch. His breathing grew labored. His hands slid down her body and grabbed her ass, gripping too hard. He lifted her until he could press his hips against hers, driving her back against the door. “Tell me to slow down,” he said roughly. “I’ll do it if you tell me. You have to keep telling me and not let me forget.”

“God, your shoulders are hot,” Célie whispered, dragging her hands over them and down. She found the hem of his T-shirt and shoved it up so that her hands could slide bare against those muscled ribs. “Merde, Joss, your body.”

Ripped, hungry strength. As if every ounce of fat had been sacrificed to maximize its power.

“Give me your keys,” he muttered against her mouth.

“It’s”—she gasped and pulled her mouth away—“It’s not my door.”

He turned toward the other door on the landing.

She pointed upward, desperate. “One more flight.”

A far more violent stream of mixed-language curse words erupted. He dipped down and caught her jacket in one hand.

And then he just scooped one big hand under her butt and lifted her up to him, starting up the stairs. She wrapped her thighs around his hips instinctively, for security. “Joss”—the shifting pressure of his erection against the crotch of her jeans rocketed through her—“you can’t carry me up the stairs.”

“You really have no idea what I can do, do you?”

His strength and agility didn’t seem challenged by carrying her up those stairs one-handed, but his control did. Hunger built with every step. She felt halfway to being devoured already.

“Keys.” He set her down in front of her door. His hand pressed against it, and he put all his weight against that arm above her as she twisted to try to unlock it. “Honest to God, I could tear this door down right now, Célie, if you fumble too long.”

She got it open and stumbled in.

He closed it with too much of a slam behind them, and she looked back as her fourth step away from it brought her to her bed. He pressed himself back against the door as if he was afraid to leave it. “I’m going to screw this up,” he said again, his eyes eating her alive. “I’m not going to get this right. You’re too—I’m too—”

She felt as if she was burning up, frantic with the itch to be touched, handled, squeezed. “It’s all right.” It won’t be the first time a guy has screwed up sex with me. But she realized just in time that the wry comment would not go over well at all and kept it back. “It’s not really about the sex.”

“Hell. It’s not? That’s all I can think about. My brain is going to explode. Or something else.”

She hesitated a nervous second. And then she just caught the hem of her silky top and pulled it over her head.

Joss made a sound as if she’d punched him in the stomach. “Célie.” His hands flexed against the door behind him. He took a harsh breath. “We should slow down. It took me much, much longer to ease your shirt off in my fantasies. A month, I think.”

“That’s because in your fantasies I must not have been helping,” Célie said dryly. “Real, live women, we do all kinds of things on our own.”

One corner of his mouth twisted. “Right.” He left the door and came toward her, carefully, as if he suspected land mines.

“We might be different,” she said defiantly, “in real life than in fantasies. We might have minds of our own.”

“I got it, Célie,” he said, very evenly. He stopped only a few inches from her, his fists at his sides, clenching and unclenching as he stared down at her breasts, pushed up by her bra. “Trust me, I know the fantasy was a poor man’s substitute for the real you.”