by Stella Rhys
Soon enough, I could hear a low, male voice joining hers just outside the door.
It was a mutter I couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded too low to be Colin. Lying naked on that table, I stiffened at the thought of who it might be. My stomach tightened with a dark suspicion, but before I could analyze further, the door slid slowly back open.
Eyes on the floor, I froze.
I was staring at men’s shoes walking in. My heart slammed like a rock against the table, and before I knew it, a hand was lifting the towel off my naked ass.
From the mere graze of the fingers, I knew it wasn’t Turner.
“Oh my God – asshole!” I hissed, lifting my head to find Julian standing over my body, a crooked smile on his lips.
“Lay down.”
His command was a low murmur, but it still packed more authority than I could deny. Lying back down on the table, I peeked up to watch Julian gaze down at the coconut oil.
“Are you going to finish my massage?” I smirked. “I did have twenty minutes left.”
“You’ll get your twenty minutes,” Julian said as his dexterous fingers flicked down the front of his shirt to unbutton. When it fell open, I got a delicious, two-second view of his six-pack before he said, “Head down.”
Biting my lip, I put my head down, watching his feet round the table to stand at the very front, just above me. I was still giggling as I heard him oil up his palms.
But I closed my eyes and moaned when I felt his strong hands press down on my shoulder blades. My mouth parted as he began rubbing down to my back, then the small of it before he leaned over enough to grab handfuls of my ass. Though he squeezed a bit for his own pleasure, he still massaged me, pressing the heel of his palm against all the right places.
His touch was distinctly different than the masseuse’s. It was firm, relaxing yet undeniable sexual. The pads of his fingers stroked me in slow, almost circular movements – like he was savoring my skin.
Oh God, this is too good.
Lifting my head, I could see Julian getting hard through his slacks as he hovered over me. I parted my lips. I was only inches from being able to cup his package with my mouth, and the thought alone made me so incredibly wet.
It also made it particularly torturous when Julian started massaging my thighs.
Sliding his hand between them, he gave long downward strokes, scooping my pussy on the way up every time.
“You’re so ready for me,” Julian murmured, gathering more and more of my wetness on his palm with every stroke of my thigh. I bit the edge of my fist as I tried to muffle myself, but the anticipation was killing me.
“Put your fingers inside me,” I whispered pleadingly.
“I thought you wanted a massage,” he teased as he spread my legs, propping one knee slightly up to expose my pussy. Then with just his index and middle fingers, he rubbed between my thighs, teasing my slick folds and getting them impossibly hot with every stroke. “Your ass looks so fucking good like this,” he murmured. I gasped when he spanked it, his other hand still massaging my pussy. “Look at how hard you have me.”
I tilted my head up again, gasping at the steel rod straining against Julian’s slacks.
“Take them off,” I begged softly.
“Lie on your back,” Julian countered as he rounded to the side of the table, presenting me the delectable view of his shirtless body.
I felt another surge of wetness in my pussy as he gave those three swift jerks to undo his belt. I’d become addicted to that sight.
“Massage the oil onto your tits,” Julian said as he unbuttoned and unzipped his pants.
I reached over to dip my fingers in the oil, holding my hand above my chest to watch the liquid drip onto my hard nipples then slide down my naked curve. The sight was tantalizing even for me. I had to gaze down and watch as I rubbed my own breasts, letting out a giggle for the fact that I was practically shining them for Julian.
But he didn’t share in my amusement. In fact, as he watched me, his jaw tightened. He actually looked turned on to the point of being pissed off when he approached me, running his hand over the length of his clothed erection.
“I don’t think you realize, Sara,” he pulled my hands away from my body, “just how much of a fucking animal you turn me into,” he finished in a murmur, pushing my tits up and together. They were so round and reflective they looked almost fake, and I never in a million years thought I’d find that arousing, but right now, I was so wet I was pooling onto the table. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to carry on with a meeting when all I can think about is you? When all I can see is your perfect fucking body getting rubbed down by hands that aren’t mine?”
“I’m sorry I ruined your meeting,” I smirked.
“You’ll make it up to me,” Julian said, sending a chill over my skin. With gravel in his voice, he murmured, “Spread your legs for me.”
As soon as I did, he cupped under my left thigh, pulling me to the edge of the table and lifting my leg. Resting it on his naked chest, he pulled out his cock, stroking it twice in his hand before sliding it into my pussy.
“Oh my God.”
I clawed the silky sheet on the table as Julian leaned forward, penetrating me fully. His eyes were like steel as they took me in. He looked so unbelievably gorgeous in the warm lighting, yet so dauntingly serious. His lips were pressed into a line even as he wet them. But he allowed himself a low growl when he leaned forward to play with my breasts again, squeezing and pinching as he pushed in deep.
I could barely make a sound. I was filled to the hilt, my pleasure tinged with just the right amount of pain as Julian furiously pumped his hips. His every muscle flexed, and his every tendon twitched as his tempo steadily increased inside me.
“Tell me how that feels, baby,” he whispered, his electric stare shining bright in the dark room. I struggled to speak. “Does that feel good?”
“Too good,” I breathed in awe, my eyes following his every move.
I felt more exposed than ever as he lowered my leg from his chest, gripping under both my thighs and holding them apart to give himself an unobstructed view of his cock driving into my pussy. His bottom lip tucked just under his teeth as he watched himself fuck me. Holy shit. There was something so carnal and erotic about his rapt focus on the image. It felt as if he were claiming me – showing himself that when he had me like this, I belonged to no one but him.
He looked absolutely entranced by his view.
But when I came, his mouth was promptly on mine – like he wouldn’t miss my orgasm for the world. His kiss was deep, fast and lush, and with his cock still buried inside me, it felt like he was devouring me. Owning every inch of me.
And I wanted him to.
I watched with wild-eyed fascination when Julian gnashed his teeth and finished inside me, his fingers digging into my body, his hard muscles slowly relaxing as he groaned my name. As we caught our breaths, it felt as if I breathed in what he exhaled.
It was a miraculous feeling.
I didn’t ever want to let it go.
31
JULIAN
The first meeting of our second day in Biarritz was streamlined to include only Colin, two advisors and myself. It was just before noon, so as far as I knew, Turner and Carter were both asleep. Sara was on another drive around town that I’d arranged in the same green Eldorado.
I knew she was displeased when I left for the meeting this morning from my hotel room. As I knotted my tie, she sat at the edge of my bed in a yellow dress that went off her shoulders. She had her ankles primly crossed and her hands folded in her lap while looking thoroughly pissed at me. It was oddly charming, and I couldn’t stop glancing in her direction, but I didn’t change my mind.
I wanted to go to this meeting without her. The topic of discussion for today was well beyond the study materials Colin and I had given her about the resort, and it didn’t make sense for her to attend.
On top of that, it was probably time to start se
parating her from the project.
So I sent her on a little adventure for the day, hoping that by night, I could listen to her talk breathlessly on and on about it.
“Now this is quite the view,” Turner’s advisor, Irv, said as we sat on the wide terrace of the resort’s fine dining restaurant overlooking the coast. “To be frank with you, Julian, the Roths have long made up their mind. I think you know that,” he chuckled, holding his hands up in slight apology. “At this point, we really only need to go through formalities. Then we’ll get into the extensive paperwork, but as you know, we’re all very pleased with how well this suits Turner and Carter’s endeavors. I realize it’s barely noon, but we should toast to that.”
“Just in time,” Colin remarked as the servers came back with the bottles of champagne I’d ordered.
“Of course, you’re always a step ahead,” Irv laughed, waving the server off to pour the flutes himself while his colleague, Robert, gazed out at the ocean. It looked particularly blue under this morning’s sun.
“Do you surf, Julian?” he asked.
“I do.”
“Ah, of course you do. What don’t you do?”
“I haven’t in a long time,” I admitted, squinting in the sun since I’d given my Persols to Sara. “I’m not sure how well I’d fare out there after so many years.”
“How many years has it been?”
However many years it’s been since I’ve seen Lucie.
“Probably five now. Maybe six,” I replied, peering out at the water.
I could see the exact spot where I’d spent dozens of mornings with Lucie. I could still remember those ridiculous golden pigtails wagging in the wind. Her hair was short. To her mother’s dismay, it refused to grow. But Lucie was never bothered by it. She loved ribbons and bows, so she still did her own hair in the morning, securing two inch-long pigtails at the top of her head that I called her hamster ears.
Every time I said “hamster,” she would oink. And every time I told her that wasn’t the sound a hamster made, she’d laugh. In that way, she reminded me a lot of Emmett. She did things just to amuse herself with my reaction.
Their sense of humor was such a striking resemblance that one morning I caved and called Emmett to introduce him to Lucie.
They talked easily and exchanged goofy stories for over an hour, which surprised even me. While still on the phone, Lucie asked me when she would meet her uncle, and Emmett and I looked at each other, took a breath and just like that, overlooked the wall between us to book him a flight to France. Lucie was so thrilled she darted off to make him a welcome card despite the fact that his flight was two weeks away. At least it was till he canceled it.
Two days after our great conversation, Emmett texted and said he couldn’t come, and not to call him anymore – that Mom was hurt over how he was trying to embrace the family I had replaced them with. I did my best to explain, and I think he tried to listen, but the call ended before any good could come of anything.
And just like that, another brick cemented itself to the ever-heightening wall between us.
So I spent as much time as I could with Lucie.
We loved watching the surfers together in the morning, before Liz even woke up. Despite how often she asked, I was hesitant about teaching Lucie to surf. But after seeing so many fathers out there with kids as young as two years old, I yielded. She was an absurdly good swimmer, anyway, with no discernible fear of the water. Paddling out was always my biggest challenge on a board, but Lucie aced it like it was nothing.
Staring out at the water this morning, I spotted a boy a little older than her out there, and I wondered how Lucie stacked up against him now. She had said in one of her letters that she still surfed when she could, but that was awhile ago. Realistically, she’d forgotten surfing the way she had English. Remembered the basics. Not well enough to want to practice.
“Hoult, Turner told me great things about the hot stone treatment here.”
Returning my eyes to the table, I eased smoothly back into the conversation. Irv and Robert were talking about the spa that Turner had apparently raved about. I offered to schedule them appointments there before our dinner tonight.
But despite my convincingly undivided attention on them, I was thinking about the distance.
I was probably an hour-and-a-half away from Lucie by plane right now. I could actually take the jet and be there faster than that. I’d ask a trusted member of the hotel staff to join me, and that person would serve as my translator, so I could explain everything to Lucie.
I had no idea what her mother had told her about me.
I didn’t want to think about it, but knowing Liz, it was something cruel – probably that I had willingly left them because I was too busy for a family. That I had asked them to move out. I could tell from the waning excitement in the letters Lucie sent that her image of me was changing as she grew. I imagined she could better understand the stories her mom told her. Whatever the French words were for “abandoned” and “unavailable,” she probably heard them a lot when Liz spoke about me. If Lucie badgered her enough, I wouldn’t put it past Liz to mention that she wasn’t biologically mine. She was ruthless when it came to hurting people. She said she’d learned that from me.
So I believed fully that she would hurt Lucie for the sake of dragging me through the mud. And for that reason, I wished badly for a chance to explain myself. I’d considered the short plane ride about a thousand times during this lunch alone.
But as much as I wanted to and technically could see Lucie, I knew well that reappearing in her life now would only hurt her.
In her letters, she mentioned friends and school, and all the new memories she was creating in place of the ones we once had. She was moving on. Kids did that well. They were quicker than adults when it came to looking at a different reality and accepting it as their new one.
It wasn’t to say Lucie didn’t hurt over me. There were probably many nights of questions and crying shortly after they moved out of the house. But over time, that heartbreak subsided, and by now, Lucie had hit her stride in terms of forgetting about me. The decreasing frequency of her letters, and the way they spoke happily of friends showed me that much. Now, she was simply focused on being a happy little girl.
So as I sat at this table with Turner Roth’s advisors, I decided to finally let her go.
If there was a bright side, it was that I had my own new chapters ahead of me.
32
SARA
I’d covered everything from the beach to the aquarium to the Musée Bonnat by the time I returned to the resort around five.
For excluding me from the meeting this morning, I was hell-bent on staying at least grouchy with Julian, but that didn’t work. He had texted me all day during my adventures, asking for updates on what I’d seen. After a good deal of badgering, he even caved to my request to download Snapchat, an idea he was fervently against till about 2PM.
But from that point on, I sent him picture after video after picture of where I was. And wherever I was, I stopped and grinned to read whatever he promptly sent back. For shots of scenery, it was usually “very nice” and a suggestion of something cool to see or peruse nearby. But for selfies, Julian’s replies grew increasingly urgent, starting with “you look gorgeous” to “damn it Sara,” before finally reaching “come back now so I can take your dress off.”
ME: If you actually have the time between meetings to do that, I will happily skip the Casino Barrière
JULIAN: Come back to me please
ME: Everything okay?
JULIAN: Not bad considering I haven’t had to deal with either Turner or Carter all day
ME: Not bad but not good either?
JULIAN: Everything’s fine. Just need you right now.
I stopped in the middle of the town square, my heart skipping a beat as I read that message. Then without wasting another second, I turned straight on my heel to go back to the resort.
I was on my way up to our floor
in the vintage elevator when it stopped halfway, opening to present me with Turner. His shirt was half unbuttoned and twisted askew, thanks to a similarly haphazardly dressed girl hanging off his body.
“Holy shit, enough,” he laughed, peeling her off of him before stumbling in and noticing me. “Oh, shit! Look who it is. Quick, press door close so she doesn’t follow me in,” he said, hitting me with the stench of sex and sweat as he jabbed the button.
“Hello, Turner,” I finally offered my greeting.
“Hello yourself. Jesus, look at you. I just wanna pull on this,” he said, tugging at the tie of my bikini top at the back of my neck. I shirked away.
“Please don’t.”
“That’s fine, I can see plenty as it is,” he laughed, looking down at the outfit I’d changed into for the beach – a white V-neck tunic dress over my light blue swimsuit. Turner kept his eyes pinned to my cleavage. “Listen, Sara, what can you tell me about the age demographics in this town?” he asked with a serious frown despite still staring at my chest.
“The residential population or the tourist population?”
Turner grinned. “Whatever.”
“Well, starting with the population on a regular basis, it’s about twenty-five thousand with a median age around – ”
“Honestly, all I really want to know is why I’m having trouble finding girls as pretty as you.”
Ugh. I stretched my lips in a smile to avoid retching in Turner’s face, which I really did want to do considering he’d just baited me with work talk for the sole purpose of leading into a shitty pick-up line.
“I think that’s above my pay grade, Turner.”
“You’re funny. Seriously though, Sara – what does it feel like to be the most beautiful woman in Biarritz right now?” Turner pressed on, almost buckling my knees with his sheer level of cheese. “Don’t laugh! Trust me, I’ve been looking around, I’ve given it a few shots here and there, but so far, the talent is surprisingly bleak for a surf town,” he said as the elevator approached my floor.
“You never pressed your floor, Turner,” I smiled as the doors opened on mine. I pursed my lips when he followed me out.
