All for You (Paris Nights #1)(69)



Except that she really didn’t want to give up her moped and change into that girl again. The one who depended on him.

He started to smile a little bit. “It is. I tested it out. You’re going to love it.”

“I’m sure I will!” And she was sure. She’d have liked to be involved in the decision, but … she could kind of get used to the idea of herself, all sleek and sexy on a bike instead of cute and determined on a moped. She might have to get a sexier leather jacket.

“Hop on it.” Eagerness slipped back out from behind his neutral shield. “I’ll hold it to make sure you can balance.”

So she straddled it while he held it for her. The weight compared to her moped and the sleek power between her legs gave her an exciting sense of slipping into some other role—Black Widow, maybe. Ha! No one will mess with me now. Maybe she should take martial arts. Whatever Black Widow did to get so tough.

Of course, Black Widow probably never needed any man to hold her bike to make sure she could handle it. She looked up at Joss. A grin had escaped that control he kept on his expression. He looked like a boy.


Actually, she kind of felt like a girl, receiving from that excited, proud boy his precious present of a snake.

Something she wasn’t sure how to handle, and he really should have checked with her, but … the intention was so sweet.

She smiled at him, her resistance melting. “Thank you.”

“You really like it?” he checked, the doubt her initial reticence had instilled not quite ready to fade.

“It’s beautiful. Do you think I look like Black Widow?” She leaned into the handgrips, trying to make herself look lethal.

He smiled and touched her flyaway pixie cut. “Maybe with a helmet. One without flowers all over it.”

Yeah, but … “I like the flowers.”

He smiled, petting her hair. “Me, too, sweetheart. Maybe Célie is already the perfect, amazing person for you to be.”

Aww. Damn it. She hopped off the bike and hugged him, hard. “Thank you.”

“You really like it?”

“I love it,” she said firmly. And she swallowed her deep reluctance when she added: “But I think for now you’ll have to drive.”

***

“Joss.”

Joss startled out of a daydream in which his fingers were slick and deep inside Célie, and she was twisting naked under him, her breasts lifting toward him in pleasure, and … he shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, incredulous. He never really lost his alertness in public these days. “God, your world is peaceful. Great park. Also, riding behind you on a motorcycle is really not that much better than riding behind you on a moped, in terms of its effect on my … what did you call it?.. Sexual starvation.”

“You can’t still be sex-starved!” Célie said indignantly. “After last night!”

“Oh, you have no idea.” He tucked his hands behind his head to make them behave and tilted his head back against the tree, gazing at the sky.

She knelt on the grass and put her hands on her hips. “What would it take to make you not sex-starved?”

“Uh …” His brain fused at all the possibilities that shot awake in it, all at once. They could … and she could … and he could … or she could … he finally managed to shake a couple of his synapses back to the purpose of producing speech. “I’m not sure that’s possible?”

She tried to give him one of her minatory looks, but the blush on her cheeks and the way her eyes flicked over his body gave him a little bit of hope that she didn’t mind his sex obsession nearly as much as she wanted to pretend. So he smiled at her and blew her a kiss. Hell, that was fun. To finally be able to flirt with Célie, to tease her and stir her up.

Thank God Dom Richard had stepped in to be her damn big brother instead of him.

“How’s Ludo?” he asked suddenly. “In America? How’s he doing?”

Célie’s face closed. She shrugged her shoulders sullenly. “I don’t know. He did the same thing you did, just went off without warning and never wrote.”

Shit. That was pretty f*cking crappy, to have betrayed her as badly as her real shit of a brother had. Actually, merde, he’d probably inspired Ludo to run off dramatically, like he had.

Personally, he thought Célie was way better off without Ludo, but still … it was going to be a real damn trick, to teach Célie that she could depend on him again, like teaching a person who had spent her entire life walking on shifting sands that there was such a thing as rock.

He itched to get back to work on the apartment. He could see its building from here. That would help convince Célie. A man who bought a home for them, who built it into the best possible space for them … that was solid. That was permanent.

That was what she most wanted, right? Permanence from him.

He reached out and caught her hand, putting it on his chest in lieu of the still-in-process apartment, just so she could get an idea of how solid and rocklike he was these days.

She leaned enough into him to rest a little of her weight on that hand, and he smiled.

“Were you going to start talking any time soon?” Célie asked.

Talk to her. See what she says she needs from you.

“Sex is really a much more compelling subject for me.”

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