His whole body was responding to her, and the impulse to fight a man and then take her vibrated in him. His voice had dropped lower when he rumbled, “Let me take you home.”
“And you’re going to fuck me?” she demanded, her voice low like she was exacting a promise from him.
Odd, he’d always thought of Americans as rather Puritanical when talking about sex.
Your job, they’d natter on about for hours. They were obsessed with work, again, due to their Puritan founders.
But sex? He’d seen grown women sputter and refuse to discuss what they wanted.
Not that he was any better about his darkest desires that he never admitted.
Yet, the woman seemed to want an assurance, so he leaned over and whispered near her ear, his breath puffing her gossamer hair, “Yes, I’m going to fuck you until you scream and can’t move with exhaustion.”
She paused, but then turned away. “No, you won’t.”
He tugged her hand back and caught her in his arms. “I will fuck you in ways you haven’t dreamed of. I’ll be your sure thing for the night if you will just get in the damn car.”
She drew back and examined his face, seeming to look for signs that he was serious, and then took his hand and marched toward the cab.
Odd, she wasn’t weaving when she walked, like she would have if she were that drunk.
He dropped his jacket around her shoulders again and hustled her into the back seat of the cab, handing the driver the little paper on which she’d written her address.
The guy looked at the paper. “You’re sure this is right?”
“Yes, she’s rented an apartment there.”
“If you say so.”
The taxi drove through the Parisian night, speeding on expressways and making quick turns on city streets.
The woman snuggled against his side, and her alcoholic breath warmed his neck. He’d kept one arm around her in case she passed out and flopped over, but her fingers roamed over his tee shirt, tracing his hard-won musculature. None of that had been built in a gym. There had been no gyms for miles where he’d been living for the past several years.
The driver turned the steering wheel, and the car coasted to a stop at a dingy building emblazoned with neon-colored graffiti in at least three alphabets.
The part of town didn’t alarm Maxence any more than it had her. Though some people might have hesitated to venture into “District 93,” as the French social services ministry euphemistically called it, Max had lived in much more impoverished and violent areas of the world for most of the last few years.
The driver asked, “You sure this is it?”
Maxence jiggled the little blonde with his arm. “This is it, ma chérie?”
She turned and blinked at the building. “Yeah, this is it. I’m on the third floor. There’s no elevator. You okay with three flights of stairs?”
He almost retorted something, but she was obviously an American. Most Europeans and Parisians didn’t balk at climbing a few flights of stairs. “Yes, that’s fine. Let’s go, then.”
Max added a tip on his phone for the cab and thanked the driver, who sped away as soon as Max slammed the car door.
It was very late at night, past midnight, and several of the streetlamps farther down were broken. The cement-block buildings faded away into the darkness, and few trees had found root in the paved-over landscape.
Window boxes shadowed the barred windows. In the daytime, those might have some greenery.
The woman was fumbling with keys for the iron-barred security door to the building. Her aim for the lock left much to be desired.
When she dropped the keys for the second time, Maxence scooped them up, picked out the key, and twisted it in the lock.
The whole door clicked as bolts retracted, and Max breathed a sigh of relief that this was indeed her address. He did not particularly like standing on this road in the dead of night, illuminated by one streetlamp, when other people were moving in the shadowed parts of the rutted street.
He opened the steel door inside the security gate, and they were inside a hallway illuminated by a bare bulb in the ceiling. The woman leaned against a wall and stared up at him. “You haven’t run away yet.”
“Why are you so worried about that?”
“Tonight is the first night of the rest of my life,” she said with a heartbreaking choke in her voice. “I don’t want to fuck it up.”
He reached for her again and pulled her into his arms, feeling the delicate narrowness of her waist and the softness of her flesh. He shoved her up against the wall and kissed her hard. Her mouth opened under his, and she ensnared him again with her arms and one leg. This time, she had a wall behind her, and he ground upward with his thigh, rubbing her.
The blonde moaned, and it was a soft and sexy sound that tightened his groin. He growled, “Where are the stairs?”
She flopped her hand toward the hallway, and he reluctantly lifted himself off her far enough that she could slip out and lead him to yet another locked stairway door that he navigated the keys for.
Max held her tiny hand while they climbed the three flights of stairs, just in case. She had seemed so intoxicated, but she’d had no trouble walking from the nightclub to the cab, and now she managed the three flights of stairs all right.
That was odd. Someone who was as drunk as she’d seemed shouldn’t skip up three floors of stairs without a bobble.
Though he liked her bobbles. He knew she was going to be on him like a vine as soon as her door closed.
His dick felt heavy and pulling in his tuxedo pants.
He did not have sex with women who were too drunk. He didn’t like a dead lay in the slightest, anyway. There was nothing exciting about a woman who didn’t scream his name and flay the skin off his back with her fingernails.
An image of her scarlet-painted fingernails drifted through his mind again, and he needed to adjust himself through his pants pocket because his underwear was dragging on it.
But anyone who found their hotel so easily, could climb stairs unassisted and without tripping, and chatter on as she was without so much as a slur was not dead drunk.
He considered that thought.
She argued coherently, even if her logic seemed twisted by a dark emotion flickering behind her eyes. Her trains of thought started with that napkin she kept referring to, but they reeled out logically after that.
She wasn’t dead drunk.
Had she been faking it?
And why?
Wariness crept into his mind.
He wasn’t afraid of the tiny blonde. He was pretty sure he could snap her slender neck or wasp-waist if she attacked him, but she might be leading him into a set-up.
Lots of desperate people trolled the Parisian bars, looking for an easy mark to isolate and rob. Some of them were organized enough to lure a man to a second location with a honeypot trap.
The neighborhood was the red flag.
Blue-painted door, yellow stain on the white paint down the hall, charcoal gray industrial carpeting under his black formal shoes, a man shouting behind one of the doors, the rustle of the blonde’s clothes as she walked beside him, the sour smell of humid mold in the walls.
The blue paint on her door was peeling. She plucked her keys out of his hand and unlocked the door. One of the three locks spun when she twisted the key, broken.
She hadn’t had any trouble sticking the key in those locks and twisting them, unlike the building’s front door.
Maxence warily pushed the door and let it swing open.
Inside the room, the darkness was silent and still. Pale light from a window touched square objects with gray lines.
If conspirators were hiding in there, they were doing an excellent job of not moving, speaking, or breathing.
Maxence flipped on the light switch by the door without walking inside.
Just a bedroom, done in blue, white, and yellow. The air smelled fresh enough, a mild hint of lemon and lavender.
White lace curtains surrounded one window, and an air conditioning unit jutted from the other. The walls were painted the same sunny yellow as the faded rugs on the blue cement floor.
Okay, no thugs.
It wasn’t a trap.
A memory of a small place and the scent of saltwater assailed Maxence, and he shut it out, hard.
Nothing about the room seemed personal. Indeed, it looked exactly like a substandard efficiency apartment purchased by an investor and rented out over the internet to tourists who didn’t know the shadier parts of Paris or were too cheap to care.
A nylon duffel bag lay on the bed next to a small pile of clothes and a toiletry bag.
Small hands grabbed his hips and tugged. He allowed himself to be turned around to face the woman, who shut the steel door and twisted the locks. She leaned against the door and stared up at him with huge blue eyes. “Are you still up for this?”
Max was so up for this that his cock ached. “Yes.”
The blonde balanced on one leg as she pried her delicate little shoe off her foot, then did the other.
If she’d touched her nose, she would have passed the drunk-driver test.
Why had she feigned being so inebriated when she clearly wasn’t?
She said, “And promise me you’ll leave in the morning. Don’t wake me up. Don’t say good-bye. Just go.”
She was just an odd little duck. “All right. Are you sure—”
Maxence was going to demand they discuss why she’d acted more intoxicated than she was and suggest perhaps they could do this tomorrow when she was in more of a mental state to make such a decision, but the little blonde said, “Good,” then reached up and grabbed fistfuls of his tee shirt right over his collarbones and jerked, trying to pull him down to kiss her.
Max considered letting her yank on him while he stood immovable until they had a cogent conversation, but that time had passed. At this point, his choice was to either have sex with her or defend himself.
Also, he didn’t want her to rip the shirt right off his shoulders. He didn’t need to try to hail a cab to drive him the miles back to his hotel, the Four Seasons Hotel George V, Paris, while naked to the waist. This tee shirt wasn’t even his.
Not that he planned to give the shirt back to Arthur. If Max wanted to mess with him, he’d have a case of tee shirts delivered just to piss Arthur off.
So Maxence allowed her to pull him down, then grabbed her around the waist, picked her up, and slammed her back against the door with her legs cinched around his waist. He tangled his fingers in her spider-silk hair and took her lips with his, sucking and jutting his tongue into her mouth.
She groaned against his lips and held onto his shoulders, and then she broke off the kiss, twisted her neck, and sucked and bit a path from his ear down his throat. Her teeth raked his skin.
Maxence’s mind flashed white.
The woman in his arms consumed his thoughts. Fire flashed over his skin, and he tightened his arms around her until she squeaked while he carried her toward the bed.
Testosterone roared in his veins and thundering heartbeat.
They crashed onto the bed. The clothes and duffel bag ended up on the floor, whether from the bounce of their weight on the mattress or if she had swept them aside, he didn’t care. He was a mindless beast enraged by lust and the desire to thrust inside her.
She stretched the neck of his tee shirt, pulling at it, and he stripped off his shirt and threw it aside. He heard her murmur, “Oh, jeez, will you look at that, and is that a tattoo?” as he fell back onto her, braced his arms by her ears, and kissed her until she panted into his mouth and squirmed under his body.
Her tiny fingers slipped inside the waistband of his trousers, plucking at his pants and tickling his ribs, but he wasn’t finished kissing her yet.
He grabbed her hands and stretched them above her head because her tickling his bare skin was driving him crazy. She moaned as he pinned her wrists to the mattress above her head and kissed her more deeply, sucking her mouth and tongue because he craved her taste. He moved away from her lips, letting her gulp air while he mouthed the undersides of her arms, her neck, and down to the tops of her breasts plumping above the low neckline of her red dress.
A tiny row of white lace lined the edge of her décolletage. He hadn’t even seen the lace trim until he licked it, and the surprise of that little feminine extra on her dress delighted him. He ran his tongue under it, feeling the roughness of the lace and the satin of her skin as she gasped and her skin rose to him.
Max held himself up on the knuckles of his hand that restrained her wrists and scooped one gorgeous tit out of her dress, and he sucked her pink nipple hard into his mouth.
She arched under him, and he sucked more of her breast. She was keening now, mewling with wanting him, too. He pulled hard enough on her to make her cry out before he yanked her dress below her other tit and went to work on that one. The stretchy dress acted like an elastic band, holding her breasts up and together so he could suck on one and then the other, biting and drawing on one until it became too sensitive and then surprising her by pinching the other one hard between his fingers.
Her breasts were so beautiful, firm and plump and round with femininity. He finally couldn’t stand just pinching and tormenting them and hearing her soft cries, so he dragged her off the bed and spun her to turn her back to him. Again, she uttered a squeak of surprise like the fluffy little animal she was, and it drove him into a frenzy of wanting to fuck her.
Maxence was quite aware that his body was being used for whatever her purposes were, so he was going to make sure she got whatever it was she was looking for, and then some.
He snatched his tee shirt off the floor, stretched it out into a rope, and tied her wrists behind her back with a quick knot.
He could push her over the bed and take her from behind, using her bound wrists to pull her back onto his cock.
Later.
“Oh, I—” she said.
He turned her back to face him and shoved her shoulders to force her to kneel at his feet, right by the side of the tall bed. “Open.”
Her blue eyes were wide, almost frightened, just the hint of tears on her lower eyelids but not quite enough to make him stop.
God, this woman was perfect. He could fuck her for weeks.
He unbuttoned his tuxedo trousers, lifting away the long flap that wrapped to his obliques. “I said, open your mouth, and lay back across the bed because I’m going to fuck your tits first, then your mouth.”
She eased herself backward, her eyes still wide and wary, and he pulled his erection out of his pants.
He hadn’t thought her eyes could get any bigger, but they did.
Her eyes grew to huge, startled pools of blue. Max didn’t need to give her the spiel about how he could hold back if he hurt her yet. Let her worry that he was going to force that monster inside her for a while.
He stepped forward to straddle her legs, flopped it on her chest, and pressed it between the fragrant globes of her breasts. The neckline of her dress he’d pulled under her breasts still pressed her tits tightly together, and he slid between them, the dry friction of her skin tugging at his foreskin and shaft. Slippery beads of precum leaked from his tip, wetting her cleavage with each stroke.
Pleasure rippled up his skin. He wanted to fuck every part of her, but he’d start with this.
Slow at first because he wanted to feel himself fucking her smoothness, he held those delicious tits more tightly and thumbed her nipples, then pinched them every time he slid through. She was half-lying back on the bed, arching her breasts harder into his hands as he kneaded and fucked them, and moaning with his hands pulling and pinching her.
The tension built in him, and he didn’t hold back because he was going to keep fucking her anyway. As his body tightened, he grabbed a handful of her hair and shoved his cock into her mouth.
Her tongue wrapped his cock, licking him inside her mouth, and he fucked her face until he came. He squeezed his eyes shut, crashing into the moment of mindless ecstasy and the electric, involuntary spasms slamming through his body. He held her on him while he spurted down her throat.
When he released her, she sucked his softening erection back into her mouth for a second and then licked the long, thick length of him with the sumptuous flat of her tongue so he could see her do it, and she looked up at him while her tongue ran up the length of him.
God, he got swollen and hard again, just watching her do that.
He grabbed her hair on the back of her head in his fist and guided her mouth down to lick his erection again, and then up.
She stared into his eyes while she worked his cock with her tongue.
Oh, this woman would be a handful.
He grabbed her under her armpits and easily tossed her back over the bed, her hands still bound behind her back. He tugged his pants up around his waist so he wouldn’t trip on them.
She flopped and rolled a little to one side as she shoved her dress up around her waist and yanked her panties down her legs with one hand. She flipped her arms over her head because he’d only loosely bound her hands. She could roll her wrists and reposition them easily within the stretchy and soft cotton of his tee shirt. He grabbed the whole coverlet, dragged her toward him, and buried his face between her thighs. He jammed his tongue deep inside her, fucking her with his tongue.
Her hips rose off the bed, and her gasp was a hard cry. He ate her out, sucking at her folds of flesh and the hard knot at the apex between them, and licking up and down her wet slit.
When she tried to roll away from him, crying out, “Not yet! I don’t want to come yet!” he wrestled her hips down with a full nelson around her thighs and sucked her into his mouth. She was crying and thrashing, her breasts jiggling when he glanced up, and he unwrapped one arm from her thigh and slid his fingers inside her to press up with his fingers and down with his tongue.
Indecent Proposal (A Contemporary Romance Story) Page 3
