“Same team with me? I’m in Paris for a week and then I go back home.”
“And I’m a pilot who flies Paris to L.A. and back once to three times a week. You think I can’t tell you where to get the best authentic Tacos in L.A., or which sushi spots serve California rolls with real crab meat and which ones use imitation? Believe me I’ve tried them all, or at least all of the ones worth trying. L.A. is my second home, my adopted home in a lot of ways.”
She just stands there staring at me, unflinching like a wall. And just like any wall that’s in my way when I want something I’m going to keep chipping at it until I get what I want, and damn do I want her more than anything.
“How do I know you’re not crazy?”
“I am crazy, can’t you see. That’s my strength, not my weakness. I make the most of the once in a lifetime opportunities life puts in front of me. I don’t ask twice and I don’t ask for permission because by definition, you only get one fleeting moment to snatch up a once in a lifetime opportunity and make it yours.”
“And I’m a once in a lifetime opportunity?” she says, her head recoiling as she looks at me incredulously.
“Does this answer your question,” I say, grabbing her and pulling her body in hard and kissing her even harder.
The car rental agencies and tour group booking stands erupt in applause, but I pay them no mind.
If they want a show they can go to the movies. This is real life, and nothing is going to stop me from making our two lives become one.
CHAPTER 9
Marie
Thirty minutes later we pull up to my hostel.
I’ve calmed down a lot and even apologized for my behavior. It’s not an excuse but I guess with the holidays, me almost missing my flight, getting the V.I.P. treatment and then what happened on the flight, and then having some time to actually process it, my head just started spinning.
Add in the fact that I’m trying to squeeze in this once in a lifetime trip, that I’ve wanted to take for so long, around a holiday to avoid having to ask for time off, because I don’t have any, and I guess my stress levels were a lot higher than I thought.
As we rode into the city in his Toyota Land Cruiser it made me realize I’m not as grown up as I really thought I was.
Sure I live in my own place, pay all my own bills, and even have a really nice job, but it takes more than “achievements” on a checklist to make you an adult. Seeing life from that perspective made me realize that maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge all the guys my age. I’m still not attracted to them, but maybe I shouldn’t think that they’re below me in terms of their maturity level when I apparently can act childish as well.
I guess it really is true, age ain’t nothin’ but a number, as the slang saying goes.
That said, Gabriel is more mature in his numerical age, if that makes sense without sounding redundant, and simply more mature as a person.
And now I sure am glad he is a little crazy, or at least crazy enough to track me down like he did and to set things straight.
He flies into that airport one to three times a week so he has to face all those people again for the foreseeable future…all those people who saw him coming after me like he did. He told me the story just a few minutes ago and fortunately in hindsight we were able to laugh about it together.
“This is it?”
“Yeah, this is me,” I say reaching for the handle, but the door doesn’t open. “Are you going to unlock the door or take me hostage now?”
“That sign says ‘Michael’s Happy Hostel’.”
“Yeah, that’s the name of the place.”
“You’re not staying there.”
“What do you mean,” I protest, and it’s not a question. “I have a non-refundable reservation.”
“I’ll give you your money back.”
“It will be fine.”
“Fine? Michael as in Michael Myers, the crazy guy from the movie Halloween and the sequels that came after? And speaking of movies, wasn’t Hostel a movie about a bunch of kids staying in a hostel who are abducted by an organization where rich people to kill them?”
“They’re just movies.”
“And we’re just leaving.”
“You’re kidnapping me then? So you are crazy?”
“I’m taking you to a proper place that’s safe. A place where you won’t have a bunch of kids playing spin the bottle all night and then the people that work there trying to wait for all the foreign girls to get drunk so they can try and take advantage of them.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because there have been reports of exactly that happening here in town, and some of the flight attendants have tried staying in hostels when they have layovers in places where our airline doesn’t have an agreement with a hotel, and they’ve confirmed the same things I’d already heard. I can’t let you stay there.”
“I don’t have money for a hotel.”
“You don’t need money. You’re my guest.”
“At your place?”
“You’re my guest the entire time you’re in Paris, and my guests never reach for their pocketbook to pay.”
“But you are taking me to your place?”
“I have a spare bedroom that locks from the inside if you don’t feel safe.”
As I continue to get to know Gabriel more and more, and see his personality off-duty now that we’ve moved on from the drama I have to admit I needlessly created, I don’t know if I feel safe around him…safe meaning that I’m not going to be able to stop myself from doing something like what we already did…and a whole lot more.
CHAPTER 10
Gabriel
She’s been mine since the first moment I saw her, and there was no way I was letting her slip through my fingers.
I don’t care if I had to run through Charles de Gaulle Airport looking like a fool. The only fool would have been me if I’d let her get away.
And that wasn’t going to happen…not the only woman that’s ever made me feel this way.
Once I want something I go after it with everything I’ve got, just like I’m doing with her. If anything I’ve had to keep it toned down so as not to scare her. How could I tell her that I was sitting up in that cockpit just thinking about how she’s going to be my wife, the mother of my children, my everything. How one day we’ll move to the French countryside, maybe just outside of St. Tropez have a little place that we call home and where we can ride to the most beautiful beach in the world with our kids…just pull out our bicycles and ride down an old dirt path, parking our bikes in the reeds just back from the water.
Nobody will steal them, just like nobody will ever steal her away from me.
But damn has she ever stolen my heart. I shake my head as I take a sip of my wine on the couch. Stole my heart…words like these have never entered my mind…until now, until her.
I can’t keep holding back. I’m done waiting.
Once she wakes up from her nap I’m taking her out, showing her the city. Holding her hand and walking her through all the best parts of Paris so everyone can see that she’s mine. Damn right I’m gonna show her off, but if I catch any man trying to chat her up or looking too long I’m going to put an end to that right then and there.
Real men stay faithful. There’s no need to be looking at another man’s woman…ever. Those guys should be finding new ways to love their own, not looking at mine. And that’s exactly what she is…mine.
And to think she’s just on the other side of the door behind me, my little angel sleeping away in my T-shirt that is way too big for her and my boxer briefs.
My stomach tightens and my dick hardens even more just at the thought.
I should be catching a nap right now too, but I can’t. Knowing I’m so damn close to having her. Knowing that she’s here in my house has me on edge. And knowing that she’s going to make this house a home is everything, because family is everything.
I never had one growing up and knew I never
needed one. I’m a survivor. I can do it all on my own…everything.
Until her.
Now I realize all the hard work I put in to get to where I am today, all the shitty living situations inside those damn foster homes where the bigger kids would try and beat me up and everyone was out to steal your stuff…that was all just practice. That just hardened me and made me the man who can protect her like none other.
And she’s not the only one. It’s my job as a real man to protect our entire family. Damn…our entire family. Just the words running through my head sound so damn perfect. I’m gonna bring a whole boatload of boys into this world and the first thing they’ll learn is how to protect their sisters, because we’re going to make a lot of little girls too.
One of the best parts about being single and focused for so many years is that it’s allowed me to save up a lot of cash. It’s hard to spend your salary at thirty thousand feet in the sky.
My bank account is fatter than my cock is right now, and both are massive.
And now it’s time to finally make use of both. Time to spend that hard earned money on us. And time to finally experience the woman I never knew was out there waiting for me, until now.
Yeah, I don’t engage in meaningless hookups and stuff like that. I don’t get involved…at all. She probably won’t even believe me when I tell her I’ve never been with a woman, but it’s true.
And now am I ever glad I wasn’t, not that I was even ever close or felt like I missed out on something.
I mean, come on. Flight attendants and women that hang out in airport bars looking for pilots? How cliché.
That’s not how I live. Not before and certainly not now.
And yeah, I may have met my woman in an airport, but it wasn’t like that.
I took her by the arm, literally, and guided her in the right direction…right towards me.
But truth be told she’s the one who’s going to guide me…to the perfect life I didn’t even know existed for someone like me.
My cock jerks and I take another long drink of my wine, savoring its sweetness, but wishing I was tasting her sweetness because what she’s got is absolutely incomparable.
And that sweetness is just one of the many things about her that draws me in, makes my body know I have to breed with her, fill her with my seed and watch that beautiful belly of hers grow big with my child…our child.
And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
There’s a knock on the door and I’m quickly up from the couch.
I put a note on the door saying not to ring the bell. Nobody’s waking my sleeping beauty.
I open the door and sure enough it’s the other airline with her bag.
I tip the man and bring it inside.
Damn, I want to open that thing. I want to smell her panties and look at all those tiny things that she can somehow wear.
But no way. Those are her things, not mine…yet. Soon enough our things will all be intermingled and she’ll come to understand and know without thinking that everything of mine is hers, and that she is mine.
But right now I like the idea of her in my clothes. It’s sexy as fuck, the way my T-shirt hangs all the way to her knees and how amazingly beautiful her skin was after she got out of the shower…those water droplets visible on her face and upper back.
Fuck, I wanted to just grab her and take her to my bed like the savage she’s turned me into, or even better just to have joined her in the shower. If that had happened we’d still be in there now, and a week from now I’d have the biggest water bill in the city.
I already switched my schedule this week so I’ve got the entire week off. An entire week with her to show her that she can’t leave. I won’t let her.
A week to win her heart and for her to know I’m hers just as much as I know she’s mine.
I hear the door to the guest bedroom squeak as she slowly steps through.
My cock aches at the sight of her pebbled nipples trying to poke right through my T-shirt.
Fuck! I grit my teeth and try not to stare, but it’s no use.
“Hello, sunshine. Good afternoon,” I manage to say without sounding too much like a man possessed by her natural beauty.
“Good afternoon,” she says. “Is that my bag?”
“It is, but you don’t have to change right away.”
“I should. I need to give you your clothes back, although they are very comfortable.”
I need to give you my seed and that’s gonna be comfortable too because I know you were made to take my steel pipe, a perfect fit.
“You can stay in those as long as you like. I want you to have them as a matter of fact.”
“Have them? Why?”
“Because you look so damn amazing in them, better than I do.”
“That’s not true,” she says.
She doesn’t even know how beautiful she is.
“You must be starving. Let’s go get you something to eat.”
“You read my mind,” she says.
Yeah, and the whole world is going to read the announcement of our engagement and the birth of our first child real soon. She can count on that…and a whole lot more.
CHAPTER 11
Marie
“Oh. My. God.”
I bite into whatever it is and I swear I have the most intense foodgasm of my entire life.
I have no idea what I’m eating, but is it ever delicious.
I look out to the side taking in the courtyard of the Le Bristol hotel’s restaurant known as Epicure. Apparently it’s one of Paris’s best places to eat, and not only that, Wine Spectator has, for the last three years running, given it it’s “Grand Award.” I can see why, the wine is like nothing I’ve ever tasted.
I’m not a big drinker but a second glass is definitely in the cards today.
Wow, what kind of lifestyle upgrade is this? After booking a frequent flyer miles reward trip and planning on staying in a hostel, here I am eating in a three-star Michelin restaurant, and staying in an amazing apartment. And this is all after flying over on a much better airline and drinking champagne in first class…and that’s not even mentioning what happened in the cockpit.
I was expecting Paris to be romantic and beautiful, and so far it has been, but I never could have dreamed my adventure would be this incredible.
The only reason it is is because of him.
If he hadn’t brought me on his flight I would have gone back to my small studio apartment with my tail between my legs watching Christmas movies on TV over and over and over again for a week until I was about to go mad, and actually ready to go back to work.
That’s one of the one things I like about this city so much. It just seems like everyone is so relaxed and no one is in a hurry to do much of anything, except our waiter who is very much on top of things.
I feel like when I’m in L.A. I’m running everywhere, always late for everything. Here? Everything seems so much more effortless and instead of people blowing up with road rage like I see on a daily basis back home, things are sorted with a shoulder shrug, an apology, and an extension of the hand as if to say, “after you.”
Who wouldn’t want to live here and enjoy this year round?
“How do you like it?” Gabriel asks.
“It’s unbelievable, but I’m not sure I should ask what it is?”
“Why not?” he says with a curious smile.
“Because I’m afraid I might be shocked.”
“Shocked. Let me guess…”
I nod. “Yeah, the idea of eating snails doesn’t appeal to me,” I say.
“Me either, although I’ve been told more times than I can count that escargot is delicious, but I still won’t give it a try.”
“That’s a relief,” I say.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to trick you into something exotic or something I wouldn’t try myself.” He takes a sip of his wine so effortlessly and with such a chic sophistication that I can tell Gabriel knows his way around this kind
of social class. “So what you’re trying is line-caught wild turbot meunière glazed with pepper from Kampot,chestnuts and mushrooms with black truffles from Perigord.”
Possessive Parisian Pilot: An Older Man Younger Woman Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 90) Page 5
