by Noelle Mack
But she’d been a little evasive, taking advantage of his not-so-fluent French to avoid questions. She’d ordered a BLT too. He was right. The sandwich was very good and very much the sort of thing one could crave.
So was he. Bryan Bachman was exactly what she wanted right now, and she needed a fling.
On a mad impulse, she’d deliberately skipped the grand finale of her own show. Missed her bow. Done without the loud acclaim of the crowd in attendance and the kissyface insincerity of the well-wishers afterward.
Odette had realized in the moment when Bryan had asked her out that she needed a holiday from the hoopla.
After five shows, she knew only too well that buyers would buy. Sex always sold.
Her designs were flirty and fun, of no real consequence. Her collection escaped the criticism reserved for true haute couture: the deconstructionists of fashion who turned garments inside out, and the architects of fabric whose pleats and poufs made women’s bodies invisible.
Marc had probably seized the opportunity to take her bow for her, and accept the bouquets of roses like the beauty pageant winner he longed to be in his retro fantasies of glamour.
Bless Marc’s gender-bending heart. Her assistant would be the first to understand a mad impulse to have a bizarre but tasty sandwich with a stranger. And whatever happened next.
Odette straightened her pelican pin, touched up her lipstick, and went out the swinging door, back to Bryan.
He’d finished the sandwich and was tackling a plate of frites. He looked up when she slid into the opposite side of the booth.
“This place is great. They didn’t miss a trick.” He gestured with a frite toward the quilted steel walls and the mirrored tile above it that reflected the cakes and pies in a glass-doored cabinet behind the counter.
Odette took another frite from his plate and nibbled at the end of it. “I am glad you like it.”
He studied her. “I like the way you eat that.”
“What do you mean?” She set it down on her plate.
“Like it was forbidden fruit. But you eat it anyway.”
“It is.” She took a sip of coke. “I am in the fashion business.”
“Right. I haven’t even asked you what it is you do exactly. Or your name.”
“Odette.” She waved the napkin she picked up from the table again as if that were enough of an answer to the rest of it.
“Just Odette?”
“Odette Gaillard.” She watched his face. Her name didn’t seem to register with him one way or another.
“Pretty name,” he said. “But then everything sounds pretty in French.”
She hesitated, not sure whether to explain more and not wanting to at all. A fling was a fling. Explaining who she was would feel something like handing him a balance sheet or pulling up an e-file of press clippings on her company. For a little while longer, she wanted to be no more than herself.
“So what was it that you do again?” he asked.
“Ah, I am a stylist.” That wasn’t so very far from the truth.
“That means that you…style things?” He gave her a hopeful look.
“Yes.”
“Help me out here. I’m just a guy. What does that mean?”
Odette picked up another frite and ate it in two bites. Fried food gave her courage. “If I were to style an outfit for an American athlete, I would go to the flea markets and vintage clothing stores to buy exactly what you have on. A tank top from a famous beach and a wetsuit jacket—”
“Actually, neoprene is too hot to walk around in where I’m from, but Paris is cold in the spring, so it works. At home I wouldn’t be wearing it except when I’m actually in the water.”
She glanced at the faded letters on his tank top. “Newport Beach? I have seen it on that TV show. The harbor is huge.”
Bryan nodded. “Yeah. And filled with luxury yachts that the owners never sail. They make pretty good roosts for the pelicans.” He nodded at the pin on her lapel. “I like that. Made me think of them.”
“Ah. What else is there in Newport Beach besides pelicans?”
“Beach shacks that sell for two million dollars. Hamburgers that cost twenty dollars. The real people got priced out a while ago. But there are a few crazy kayakers left.”
“Not surfers?”
“Farther south you get surfers. Newport Beach doesn’t have big waves, as a rule.”
“Oh. I imagined you as a surfer.”
Bryan laughed a little ruefully. “Okay, you’re not wrong. But I had to hit Highway 1 to get anywhere worth surfing.”
“I have heard of it. In Le O.C.”
He made a wry face. “Not my favorite show.”
Odette nodded. “It is for teenagers, non?”
“That’s about right.”
She let her gaze move over his well-muscled body. Bryan was very much a man. “So what is it that you do?” she asked him at last.
“Short version?”
“If you please.”
“I’m twenty-five. No brothers or sisters. Raised by my mom. She’s a dressmaker—I can’t wait to send her the photos from before the show. She won’t believe I got to see Paris fashion on the runway.”
Odette raised an eyebrow. So the interviewer from Bonjour hadn’t been able to resist having photos taken of Bryan because of his raffle win. Not much of a story, that, but Bryan himself was delectable. No doubt the witch, as Lucie called her, had been all over him like a—like a wetsuit. And not just the jacket.
“Got a BA in marine biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, halfway through my master’s,” Bryan was saying. “I took time off to travel. Went up the Amazon for a while and did independent study in Belize. Right now the Scripps Institute has me waiting to hear.” He smiled at her puzzled look. “It’s in San Diego. The best marine lab in the US, outside of Woods Hole in Massachusetts. I applied there too. In fact, I applied to every university within swimming distance of a barnacle.”
“I see. So what brought you to Paris?”
“Last stop before my flight home.” He looked at her a little worriedly. “Not that I didn’t want to see Paris. But I’m not that much of a city guy.”
“How much of the city have you seen?”
He pushed the plate of frites away. “I’m ashamed to say it. Not much. The Eiffel Tower. The cheap tour of the Champs-Élysées. The back end of Notre Dame, from a tour boat on the Seine. And the depressing lobby of my budget hotel.”
“And how much time do you have left?” Odette asked.
“Two more nights. Which is to say that I have to check out by Friday. After that I don’t really have to be anywhere.”
“Then you can stay with me if you like.”
“What?”
Odette, per the unwritten rules of flings, didn’t explain her invitation.
“For starters,” she said airily. “Do you like jazz?”
“Sure. Anything but techno. No offense, Odette, because you work for whoever runs that fashion show, but the music was the pits.”
“Then we will go to the Bistrot d’Eustache or the China Club. They have wicked gin fizzes.”
“Sign me up. And lead the way.” She began to protest but he held up a hand. “You have to. I’m a stranger in a strange land, Odette.”
“How melodramatic,” she said with disdain.
“I can see I’m going to have to prove I’m the man.”
Odette felt a secret flush of excitement steal through her. His tone of voice was teasing, but there was an underlying edge in it that made it clear he understood what she wanted from him. No-strings-attached sensuality. Fast and furious. Clandestine—she had no particular wish to tell him who she was. No, she wanted an affair with no limits except time. Necessarily brief.
But intense.
Later…
It was well after midnight when they left the China Club. Odette had gambled on seeing no one she knew there, and she’d been right. Marc and Lucie and the rest of her staff had gone o
ff to a boîte in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Denis to celebrate—she’d received a text message from Marc that was a perfect combination of tact and innuendo as to the reason for her disappearance. The models had gone back to their hotels to collapse.
Giddy from one too many gin fizzes, they had hailed a taxi and come back to her apartment in the most exclusive arrondissement in Paris.
She hoped he wouldn’t realize that.
The elegant buildings stood in regular rows, their mansard roofs neatly aligned, their stone blocks punctuated by wrought-iron balconies. It was too early in spring and too cold for flowers to spill from them—and even with the old-fashioned street-lights, rather too dark to see much.
He made no comment. Perhaps he thought the neighborhood was old-fashioned. She was counting on his lack of knowledge of Paris—after not wanting him to know she was famous, she really didn’t want him to know that she was rich.
It would change the mood of this brief affair, from the happiness of a man and a woman without a thought for anything but their delight in each other and their mutual desire for each other to something very different.
She unlocked the outer door of wrought iron and the inner one, then led him up the curving marble staircase to the third floor.
“Oh my. Watching you go up the stairs is serious motivation.” A few steps behind her, he reached up to stroke the inside of her thigh. Odette paused, thrilled by the sensual tickle of a male hand on her silk stockings.
But Bryan didn’t reach all the way up. Or grab. He sighed and let his hand trail down, then patted her calf. “Keep going or we’ll never get there.”
Odette giggled and continued to mount the stairs, knowing that her short skirt was swishing provocatively only inches from his face.
She wouldn’t mind if he lifted it and pressed kisses on her bottom, which was mostly bare. He didn’t know that because he hadn’t touched it.
A young man who wanted to wait, was able to wait, could savor every moment of the foreplay—sex with Bryan Bachman ought to be good. Very good.
She opened the door to her apartment and motioned him in, switching on a light.
“Wow. Nice place.” He looked around at the furnishings. “You have interesting stuff.” He ran a hand over an armchair made of slabs of clear lucite that had red roses embedded in it, stems and all. “Is this for sitting in or is this a work of art?”
“You can sit in it if you like.”
“That didn’t answer my question.” He turned around and settled himself in it. “Not very comfortable. I prefer upholstery.”
Odette pointed to a sofa thickly padded in dark green velvet. “Then sit there.”
“Only if you do.” He looked at the naked nymphs carved on the legs of the low table in front of the sofa before he stretched out. “Now that’s something you generally don’t see on an American coffee table.”
“Why not?”
“No bare breasts allowed on the furniture, I guess. They seem to be everywhere in Paris. Even on the billboards.”
Odette held her breath. The taxi had passed a huge ad for her company screened onto vinyl and attached to the side of a building. Had he noticed the Oh! Oh! Odette logo?
Apparently not.
“I just have to get used to it,” Bryan was saying. “I bet you don’t give bare boobs a second thought, not with a job like yours.”
“Not really, no.”
He gave the table an admiring look. “So where’d you get this thing?”
“Les Puces. The flea market. It’s a Victorian piece. Not valuable. I just liked it.”
“Okay.” He leaned back against the cushions and looked around at the rest of the room. “Works with everything else. I like your style, Odette. I like everything about you. Come here.”
For some reason, the exuberant compliment and the command that followed it made her nervous.
“In a moment.” She sauntered into the kitchen, feeling very hungry and needing something to eat that would soak up the drinks they’d downed.
There was bread, plain bread, but it was exactly what she wanted. Odette extracted the long, uncut baguette from its crackling paper bag and went back into the living room with it, along with a corked, half-full bottle of wine and two glasses held dexterously in her fingers. He’d moved to the couch.
“You look like an ad for Air France,” he chuckled.
“Do I? The bread is very good. Still fresh.” She extended the long loaf to him. “Feel it.”
He gave it a squeeze and looked at her, laughing. “Is this some kind of crazy French sex ritual?” he asked, after she plopped down next to him. He accepted the morsel of bread she tore off and put into his mouth, and didn’t talk for a little while.
“Yes,” she said. Odette had several bites and so did he before he took the baguette away and set it on the coffee table.
“Mmm. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou. And a naked table. It doesn’t get better.”
She planted a kiss lightly dusted with flour on his cheek. “You must be part French.”
He nuzzled her neck. “Don’t think so.”
“What are you then?” she asked. What he was doing felt very good.
“A red-blooded, all-American man,” he growled. “That okay with you?”
“Bien sûr,” she murmured.
His lips pressed against the side of her neck for several sensual kisses before he opened his mouth and nipped her. The contact was immediately erotic, almost dominating.
Odette arched her back and let him do it, wanting only to melt into his arms and let him take over.
2
B ryan’s hand rested easily on her thigh and the sensation warmed her flesh all the way up to her pussy.
Odette wriggled, settling more deeply between his spread thighs. His old jeans were soft against the sheer silk of her stockings, and she found herself wanting to rub her bottom upon those strong thighs while he still wore them.
Of course, he still didn’t know that only narrow garters covered that part of her. The scrap of silk that served to cover her labia—barely—was held on by the thinnest possible straps that curved over her hips and slid into the crease of skin where her thighs ended.
The thong ended there.
Bryan gave a sexually charged sigh as her ass, still confined by the short, hot pink skirt, pressed against his fly.
She could feel his erection. Ahhh. Long. Getting longer. She wanted to rip the already torn jeans open and see exactly what he had. But she had a feeling they were the only pair he had. Besides, they were probably irreplaceable. With him inside them, they were irresistible.
Odette wriggled out of her jacket and flung it aside. She still had on her black lace cami top, what there was of it. Her breasts were nearly overflowing it, thanks to the black lace bra underneath, which took the concept of push-up to a new high. She stroked his face, then began to kiss him the way she liked to kiss: deep and slow. And then she began to rub herself in his lap.
Bryan gave a soft groan that she captured, sucking it away along with his breath.
Poor man. He was having a hard time letting her pleasure and stimulate herself. She broke off the kiss and let her hands drift down, feeling his biceps under the neoprene jacket.
His hands were still holding her, but the muscles in his arms bulged, then released, then bulged again from the sexual tension that her pleasurable frottage was causing.
She whimpered sensually into his ears. “I like to rub this way. May I?”
“Jesus.” He gritted his teeth as the sacrilegious epithet escaped. “Do whatever you want. Just don’t stop.”
Disobeying just to see what he would do, Odette rose slightly, bracing her hands on his broad shoulders, but she wasn’t quick enough. Bryan grabbed her hips and pushed her back down, hard, groaning as the soft, feminine flesh of her bottom hit his hard cock.
And he still hadn’t seen it, still didn’t know her ass was, for all intents and purposes, naked and available.
Wantonly
, Odette pulled up the hem and showed him what he’d been missing. First the front of the thong. And then she took one of his hands and moved it behind her.
He touched the bare, heated flesh with a look of mingled lust and wonder. “You mean you weren’t wearing anything but this?”
“No. I wanted you to reach up and find that out for yourself.”
“Oh, Odette.” He made up for lost time, using both hands to fondle her behind.
“I like to be stroked while I rub a man’s thighs,” she whispered into his ear.
“God. Do it then.”
Odette rose again but this time he didn’t stop her, just kept his hands where they were while she stepped into a straddle that encompassed both his legs. She used hers to push his thighs together, despite their heavy muscle. Holding the hot pink skirt up to her waist.
His eyes widened and he seemed to be looking at something behind her. Odette smiled before she sat back down in his lap. The mirror on the opposite wall gave him a good view of that XXX-rated pose: seamed stockings, their wide tops pulled into points by the thin garters hooked into them.
Skirt up. Bottom bared. His hands on it.
Yes. She knew he saw exactly that because she felt his hands begin to spread her buttocks.
“Bend over,” he said hoarsely. “Like you’re going to tease me with your beautiful big breasts.”
This time she obeyed. But she waited to hear what he was going to say next. He was still looking over her shoulder at the back view of her in the mirror.
Then he suddenly spread her ass cheeks completely apart, not gently, and she gave a little cry. He held her that way. She strained a little, tightening anally as her labia parted with a juicy noise. Odette began to pant. His unexpected but controlled moment of roughness excited her.
“Now I see pink,” he growled. “Your pussy is swollen. All that rubbing does you good.”
“Yes.”
“Put your fingers in yourself, mademoiselle.”
She rested her head on his shoulder and gave him a hot little show. One finger slid in, then two. He kept her behind fully spread and didn’t say a thing.
