Chapter 10 #4
The curtains are open. The last of the evening sits over Le Marais rooftops, deep blue at the edges, gold fading from the glass.
The desk is scattered with my notes, my laptop, a glass holding the tarragon from the first market morning, and one half-finished bottle of water.
The room smells faintly of basil now, cherries, warm fabric, city heat, and the flowers from the courtyard below.
I set the basket on the small table beside the window.
Behind me, Damien closes the door.
The click is soft.
Final.
I turn.
He’s standing with his back against the door, one hand still on the handle, watching me. The easy banter is gone. The market, the canal, the wine, the walk, all of it narrows into the space between his body and mine.
My breath slips.
He notices.
I’m starting to understand that he notices everything.
Damien lets go of the door handle and takes one step toward me.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Certain.
I do not move away. He stops close enough that the front of his shirt nearly brushes my dress. The heat of him reaches me before his hands do. His eyes search mine one last time, and whatever he finds there makes his jaw tighten.
“Say it,” he says.
I swallow. “Say what?”
“That you want this,” he says.
The words move through me like a match struck in a dark room.
I could make a joke. I could tilt my head and ask if he always requires verbal confirmation in hotel rooms with women whose herbs he tries to steal.
I could give him something clever enough to protect the part of me that is already reaching for him. But I don’t want protection tonight.
“I want this,” I say.
His hand comes to my jaw. Not rough, but not gentle enough to be mistaken for uncertainty. His fingers slide beneath my chin, his thumb resting along the side of my face, and the first real touch of him empties every clever thing from my head. His eyes hold mine.
“Good,” he says.
Then he kisses me. The kiss is not tentative.
It is not polite. It’s not the careful first kiss of two people trying to decide whether attraction has been exaggerated by wine, weather, or proximity.
It’s the kiss of a man who has been waiting since the herb stall, since the wine glass, since the café doorway, since the walk back through Paris with his hand hovering at the edge of restraint and no intention of pretending he is made of anything softer than want…
than desire. His mouth takes mine, and my body answers before thought can interfere.
I reach for him. The movement breaks whatever restraint remained.
His other hand slides to my waist, and he pulls me against him.
My palms land on his chest, and the heat of him burns through the linen.
He is solid under my hands, all controlled strength and leashed hunger, and the sound that leaves me against his mouth is not measured, not careful, not anything I can claim as dignified.
He hears it. He steps into me. I step back.
My spine meets the wall beside the door, and his hand moves from my jaw into my hair, careful of the pins for half a second before patience loses whatever argument it was trying to make.
One pin slips free. Then another. My hair loosens over his fingers, and he pulls back just enough to look at me.
The way he looks at me steals the room out from under my feet.
Like I’m not a stranger.
Like I’m not a woman he met over herbs and wine and one reckless afternoon.
Like I’m something he has been hungry for longer than the day allows.
“You’re trouble,” I say, because I need words somewhere, even if they come out breathless and almost useless.
His thumb drags over my lower lip.
His eyes stay on my mouth.
“Yes,” he says. “I know.”
Then he kisses me again, and this time I stop trying to keep any part of myself separate from the heat of it.
My hands slide to the back of his neck. His body presses into mine.
The room turns warmer, smaller, alive with the sounds we are no longer careful enough to swallow.
Paris is outside the window, blue and gold and indifferent.
My laptop is open on the desk. My notebook waits beside it.
The tarragon stands in its glass like a witness.
His hands find my leg and lifts it slowly, his mouth never leaving mine.
My body responds before my brain does — my leg wraps around his waist on instinct, pulling him closer, and the contact sends a current straight through me.
His hands squeeze the flesh of my thighs, warm and deliberate, and I feel the hem of my dress sliding upward as he gathers the fabric in his grip.
My hands move across his shoulders — I can't help it.
I need to feel what's underneath the linen.
The tightness of him, the broad span of muscle, the controlled strength that is somehow even more overwhelming up close than it was at a distance.
I work my fingers to the bottom of his shirt and slide underneath it, and the skin I find there is warm and taut, his abs rigid under my palms in a way that makes something low in my belly pull tight.
His mouth drags from mine and buries itself in my neck. The sound that leaves me is embarrassing in its honesty.
His lips move across my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder, and his hands are still moving under my dress — sliding upward, unhurried, deliberate, like a man who has decided exactly where he is going and sees no reason to rush getting there.
His fingers graze the fabric of my panties and my breath catches hard enough to make him pause.
He doesn't pause long. His head lifts, his piercing blue eyes finding mine, and then his fingers move my panties aside.The air hits me and I bite down on my lip so hard I nearly taste blood.
"You're so wet," he says. His voice is low and unhurried and devastating.
He slides his fingers across my entrance, slow and deliberate, and I feel my arousal coat his fingertips like he already owns this part of me.
Then he lifts his hand and brings his fingers to his mouth, his eyes never leaving mine, and sucks them clean with a focus that makes my knees genuinely threaten to stop functioning.
I’m trying to unbutton his shirt. My hands are on it — I have two buttons free — when he drops to his knees in front of me.
The sight of him there, six feet three inches of contained, commanding man folding himself to the floor in front of me with that expression on his face — something between hunger and certainty — short-circuits every remaining coherent thought I have.
His hands reach up under my dress and grip my panties, pulling the fabric down in one firm motion to my ankles.
I step out of them before I've consciously decided to.
He tosses my panties aside without looking at it.
He looks up at me instead. That look. That specific, devastating look — like I am the only thing in this room worth his full attention, which is the most dangerous thing about him, I am beginning to understand. He hooks my leg over his right shoulder.
God.
He spreads my thighs and lowers his head, and the first contact of his mouth against me pulls a sound from somewhere I didn't know I kept sounds.
He takes his time — drawing his lips across my wet pussy entrance, tasting the juices from my arousal, looking up at me while he does it with an expression that makes it clear he finds the experience as satisfying as I do.
He parts my folds with his tongue, and moves through me slowly, finding his way to my clit with the focused precision of someone who is very good at everything he does and knows it.
Then he closes his mouth over the hardened bud and the world goes sideways.
He is not gentle. He does not appear to believe in gentle, or at least not right now, not with me — he sucks hard and deliberate and relentless.
I grab his hair with both hands because I need to hold onto something or I’ll slide down this wall entirely.
My hips push forward without my permission.
He makes a low sound against me that vibrates through every nerve ending I own.
Then two fingers thrust inside me — not gently, not gradually, with a twisting rhythm that finds the exact right angle on the first try — and I stop being capable of forming words.
He works me with both — his mouth on my clit, his fingers moving inside me in that precise, devastating rhythm — until my thighs are shaking and my grip on his hair is tight enough to hurt and I am making sounds I will never be able to claim as dignified.
The sensation builds in my belly like something structural giving way.
It spreads outward in waves I can’t contain.
When I orgasm, it happens completely and without warning.
My whole body pulls tight, then my orgasm releases in a rush that leaves me breathless, trembling, and still gripping his hair while he stays exactly where he is, unhurried, lapping up my squirt with his tongue, and taking everything I give him.
He eases my leg down from his shoulder and rises to his feet. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, his piercing blue eyes on mine, and I’m still trying to locate my breath somewhere in this hotel room.
He presses himself against me and I feel exactly how much he wants me — the hard, insistent weight of cock against my hip — and something in me that had just begun to come down spikes right back up.
I grab the front of his shirt. My fingers find the buttons I started earlier and I work through them with considerably less patience than I had sixty seconds ago, nearly pulling two free from the fabric entirely.
My palms land back on his chest — bare now, warm, the muscle shifting under my hands as he reaches for the strap of my dress.