Her body tensed, anticipating him.
In minutes, she was moaning against his mouth and gasping as he sucked on the peak of each of her breasts, while his knee between her legs pressed against her in the same rhythm as her breathing.
He accelerated his onslaught, bracing himself on his knees and the hand pinning her wrists to the bed. His other hand stroked, grasped, and pinched her while his mouth plundered hers, his tongue stroking hers with the rough side of his. She was writhing under him, each breath a moan or a gasp as he found new ways to torment her while she waited for him to decide it was time to take her.
He’d unzipped his pants at some point because his erection pushed against her, his stiff shaft stroking between her folds even through her chiffon panties.
When he bit her breast around her nipple and then pulled back, sucking hard, the sting so intense that she nearly had an orgasm right then, she cried out, and Maxence released her hands.
Dree grabbed his shoulders, ducking her head and clinging to him, nearly crying.
The tattoo on the skin of his back was pebbled under her fingertips, the fibrous tissue pocked and contracted into ridges.
She was so wound up, wanting to die or scream if he didn’t take her hard right then, that her fingers began to curl over his skin.
Her fingernails were already pressing into his flesh, pushing back into her nail beds as she began to dig in.
His breath in her ear stuttered, and his back bowed, pressing back against her nails.
With the black fabric of his bow tie over her eyes, the texture of his skin under her fingertips felt exaggerated, like the lumps and cords of keloid tissue.
Keloid?
Those were scars.
And they couldn’t be underneath the tattoo. The tattoo ink would have gone over the scars if they’d been first. The scars had happened after the tattoo, after the artwork had been finished.
That was why white furrows—some thick and some deep, and some of them very recent—shattered the perfectly shaded lines of the feathers and bones of the angelic wings Arthur had drawn on Maxence’s skin.
The shockwave rippled over her body. Dree froze, her skin clammy.
She sucked in a breath. “Code black. Code black. We need to stop.”
The warmth and weight above her were gone as the mattress bounced around her.
Maxence asked, “What happened?”
Dree curled and sat up, tearing the blindfold off her face.
As the black silk slipped off her eyes, Maxence was sitting back on his heels, his trousers zipped up and buttoned, and his hands open at the height of his shoulders. “Dree, talk to me. What’s going on?”
His mouth was a flat line of concern and his dark eyes were solemn, not making fun of her for freaking out.
So much swirled in her head that she couldn’t find the end of the tangled skein to yank on.
What Mairearad had said.
What Dree had done.
What Maxence had driven her to do, even though her fingernails were her own responsibility.
Dree turned over her hands, staring at her palms and fingers. She was meticulous about cleaning under her nails with a brush, a habit left over from her surgical rotations but also crucial in the ER. As always, her fingernails were scrupulously clean, but she’d scrubbed blood out from underneath them more than once after sex with Maxence.
And even though it felt like puzzle pieces were snapping together in her head, she might be wrong.
She wanted to be wrong.
Dree didn’t want to go down this path and have this discussion if she was wrong.
She asked him, “That very first night in Paris when we met, what had happened right before that?”
He blinked, his thick black eyelashes batting down over his eyes. “What?”
“When we met in Paris a couple of months ago, what had you been doing that day?”
He blinked at her again, and his hands slowly fell to his thighs. “If that’s what you were thinking about during foreplay, I must not have been doing something right.”
She smiled at him a little. She wasn’t mad at him, so there was no reason to frown at him. “You were doing everything right. I just—there’s more to this. I’m worried about something.”
He ran one hand through his hair and sat back on the bed, crossing his legs. “I’m not following where you’re going, but that might be because my blood isn’t reaching my brain right now.”
Dree leaned back on her hands. “Mine, either.”
“A safe word is only supposed to be used if someone crosses hard limits. You’re not supposed to use it lightly. If you just wanted to slow down or talk, you can just say so. You don’t have to resort to the safe word.”
She bit her lip and then said, “Oh, Max. I just—I just want to know. So, in Paris. What were you doing that day?”
He flipped one hand in the air, impatient. “Does it matter? I’m with you now. Nobody else matters to me. I mean, I have friends of all genders, but I proposed to you because I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. What do you care about somebody I was with several months ago, before we met?”
“Please, just tell me.”
Max looked down and ran his hand through his hair again. “An old school friend of mine, Simone Maina, was being abused by her husband, and she found me when we were both in the casino in Monte Carlo. I helped her escape.”
He’d been rescuing a woman, every bit as much as he’d saved Dree in Paris.
Because Maxence rescued people; that’s what he did.
She said, “Tell me more about this rescue operation of yours.”
“I commandeered one of the yachts that belongs to the Grimaldi Trust to take her from Monaco to Genoa—”
“A yacht?” Dree asked.
“Yeah.”
“A boat. You were on a boat.”
“It was the most expedient way to get her out of Monaco without being seen,” he sighed.
He’d forced himself onto a boat to rescue Simone. Oh, jeez, the poor guy. He did have a Galahad complex. “Keep going.”
“On the way from Monaco to Genoa, we were on the yacht for a couple of hours. I was just generally making sure she was okay, and—there was a lot of adrenaline. She had been scared, but then we were safe for a while. She was pregnant, and you know how those hormones mess with a woman’s body and probably her judgment. She came on to me. I didn’t stop to think, ‘Hey, I might meet the love of my life at a bar in Paris tomorrow night. Maybe I should save myself.’ So yeah, I slept with her.”
Dree rolled her eyes. “I don’t care that you slept with her. I hope it was really good for both of you. Not quite as good for you as when you’re with me, but still very good.”
Maxence stared at her. “Then why are we having this conversation?”
“Humor me.”
“I need a cold shower or something,” he grumbled.
“And then what happened?”
Maxence heaved a long sigh. “I took Simone to Genoa and put her on a plane for Mauritius, which is where her family is. They’ll take care of her there. She texted me and told me she got there, so I know she’s safe. Estebe—that’s her husband—threatened to cut off my head and feed it to the sharks, and his goons nearly grabbed me in Genoa. They would have gotten me except that Arthur and Caz had come looking for me and dragged me onto a different yacht.”
Another yacht. Two boats. And an attempted kidnapping. “Did it, um, get kind of rough?”
“It was before I met you!”
“It’s not that. Just—did it?”
“She was a bit pregnant. I wouldn’t get rough like that with a woman who’s carrying. It might not be safe.”
So, he hadn’t gotten what he’d needed from Simone, and then he’d met Dree, and they’d— “Oh, Maxence.”
Maxence scooted on the bed so that he was leaning up against one of the thick pillars on the corners. He drew his legs up and rested his forearms on his knees. �
�Why are we having this conversation?”
“I went to lunch with Mairearad today, and she brought some things up.”
Maxence’s jaw went slack, and his eyes widened with utter shock. “You talked to Mairearad, and she talked to you?”
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. I thought she was your tattoo artist. And also, she’s the only person I know of on this whole continent who’s from Phoenix and I can talk to about how the pavement gets squishy in August and where to get the best salsa. I don’t want to go back, but I just wanted somebody to talk to about it.”
Maxence dropped his head into his hands. “But you weren’t talking about the goddamn salsa, were you?” Without waiting for her to answer, Maxence twisted and rolled off the bed, striding away toward the bathroom.
Dree bounced over to the edge of the bed and followed him to the bathroom, calling after him, “Don’t you get mad at Mairearad, and don’t you fire her! It’s all my fault. I didn’t mean to, but I think I got her a little drunk. I encouraged her to talk too much because I didn’t realize who she was. I seriously thought she was your tattoo artist, and I wanted to hear her side of the story.”
“She’s not a tattoo artist,” he growled without turning around.
“Well, I know that now. I didn’t actually ask her if she was a tattoo artist, but everything she said made sense if she were, right up until it stopped making sense and I realized what she was talking about.”
“You don’t know what she is.”
“I know she worked at a place called The Devilhouse, and I think it was a BDSM club or other type of place.”
“Dammit,” he muttered.
“I’m not judging you at all. Not at all. I wouldn’t have asked her about it if I’d known. I thought we were just talking about your tattoo.”
“What about my backpiece?” Maxence demanded. “It’s my skin. I can have anything on my skin I want to.”
“Of course, you can, but you told me the tattoo on your back was of a fallen angel’s wings, a demon, maybe even Satan himself. I didn’t know why anyone who was a friend would design a tattoo like that for your back. That’s what you’re most afraid of about yourself, because you think you’re like your brother or some of the other members of your family, like Jules and Marie-Therese, but you’re not. Arthur designed your tattoo to be the wings of an angel because that’s what your soul is.”
He turned back and towered over her, glaring down. “And how do you know that?”
Okay, time to come clean. “Because I cornered Arthur on the plane going to New Mexico and chewed him out for putting devil wings on your back.”
“Well, that explains that weird conversation in the barn.” Maxence spun away from her and rested his forearms on the sink countertop with his head in his hands. “Is there anything you didn’t pry into?”
“Probably not, and I’ll probably never stop doing it. Nurses are trained to ask all the questions. I walked into rooms with people I’d never met before and asked them if they like to sleep with men or women or both or neither. I looked one guy straight in the eyes and asked him if he’d been screwing a sheep or a goat because it looked like he had ringworm, and that’s the only way he could get wool embedded in his pecker and a hoofprint-shaped bruise on his chest. I asked so many people how that particular item had become lodged in that orifice, and I looked them right in their eyes to see if they were lying. I’ll ask anyone anything because I love you and want to know every corner of your soul. And if what’s there isn’t perfect, I’ll love you anyway. But I’ll think you’re perfect, no matter what. Arthur put angel wings on your back, not demon wings, and that makes perfect sense to me.”
Maxence mumbled from where he crouched with his head on the counter. “Arthur designed it that way because he doesn’t know me. If he had, he would have made them Satan’s wings.”
Dree flung herself over Maxence’s back, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek to the tattoo ink and scars on his spine. “That’s not true. If anything, he knows you better than you know yourself. You’re all wrapped up in the bull hockey Pierre told you all your life, but Arthur knows you. I know you, and you should never have satanic wings on your back. You should have had the wings of Archangel Gabriel on your skin because that’s who you are, and I know you.”
Maxence’s hand stole down and pressed her arms around his waist more firmly against the hard, stacked bricks of his abdominals.
Dree continued, “Mairearad said that she couldn’t and would never pursue a relationship with you because it’s unethical, and I believe her. At first, she talked in generalities, saying that clients did this and clients did that. That’s why I thought she was a tattoo artist. But then she asked if you were all right, and she asked if you were ‘getting what you needed’ from me.”
Under her arm, thick muscles under Max’s skin expanded as he sighed.
“Mairearad said that the first day you came in where she worked, you’d slashed your arm with what looked like a razor blade that morning, and it broke her heart. It breaks my heart just thinking about it.”
Maxence curled his fingers through hers, holding on, but he didn’t lift his head. Dree would’ve felt it where her cheek pressed against his warm skin.
She said, “I’m not going to threaten to leave you. I told you I would always come back for you and I would always be there for you, and here I am. But I’m your friend, and I’m a nurse practitioner, so I’m telling you this isn’t healthy. You need to talk to someone about why you’re cutting.”
“I’m not cutting. I’m not a cutter,” Maxence whispered.
“We don’t have to make a noun out of it. But you’re doing it. Cutting is usually a sign of depression or anxiety, or both, or a couple of other things. The pain releases hormones to overcome shock and suppress cortisol and other stress responses. You’re doing it for a reason, and you’re making me do it.”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything,” he whispered.
“Maxence, you’re good at manipulating me into getting too rough and tearing into your skin, but I don’t want to be manipulated anymore. You don’t have to. You can tell me that you want it rough, and I’ll give you what you need. You don’t have to trick me. You just have to tell me.”
Maxence lifted his head and tilted it like he was looking at her where she stood behind him. Over his back, she could see how his head moved in the wide bathroom mirror. “But you wouldn’t want to do that.”
Dree bit her lip, thinking. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you just to hurt you, but when you drive me crazy like that, I can’t help myself sometimes. You get rough, and then I do, too. And then I feel so guilty afterward. I’ve been scrubbing blood out from underneath my fingernails and feeling like crap about it. I hated myself. But if it’s what you want, then I don’t have to feel guilty about being so out of control that I’m clinging to you, and my hands clench.”
He straightened and turned around, his body twisting in her arms. “But you don’t want to do it. Surely, you don’t.”
“You kind of taught me to do it, or conditioned me, but you brought out something that was always there. I’m an ER nurse, buddy. I feel no remorse about sticking needles into people, or manipulating their broken limbs, or sewing their skin back together, or yelling at them over their screams. We hurt to heal, Max. It’s part of my job, and you can’t shock me. Trust me on that one.”
He watched her, not speaking.
She continued, “I grew up on a farm. Farm work takes mental fortitude. I fell into a snarl of barbed wire once, untangled it and pulled the rusty barbs out of my arms and legs, and told my mother to take me to the free clinic for a tetanus shot. When a sheep bites you, you get faster about moving out of the way. I was always the one who had to stick my hand into a ewe who was having trouble lambing because I’ve got skinny little arms. I’m not queasy about anything. As long as you’re not abusing the sheep or doing stuff to people who haven’t consented,” she shrugged, “yeah, sure. Whatever. I�
�ve seen more.”
“But that doesn’t mean you want to,” Maxence said.
“If I didn’t want to, if I weren’t up for it, it would have never happened in the first place, ever. They’re my fingernails. When you get rough, I like it, and then I get that way, too. I like the intensity. If we agree and we understand, neither one of us needs to feel bad about what we both like.”
Maxence stared at her, then blinked and looked at the bathroom walls and ceiling, breaking their eye contact and the shocking intimacy of the moment.
Dree held him more tightly around his waist. “The day before I met you, you rescued a woman who was in an abusive relationship, and you faced one of your worst fears to get her out of Monaco in the quickest way possible. When you found me in Paris, I needed rescuing, too, and you did it again. But even when we were standing under that streetlight by the Buddha Bar, I remember you looking at my hands. I’d just had a manicure because I was going to Paris for the first time. Your cortisol and stress hormones must’ve been sky-high after being on two different yachts for hours and hours and nearly being taken again. You needed it that night, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“And after we saw those guys following us near the Eiffel Tower that night?”
Maxence nodded.
“And after those goons almost grabbed you outside the Louvre? When they tried to shove you into the car, but you fought them off?”
Again, he nodded.
“And then a lot less in Nepal because we were safe there.”
Maxence closed his eyes again.
She said, “And then since we got back to Monaco, every day has been dangerous, but then especially after we were both kidnapped. When we got back to this room, you took me up against the wall, and you needed it then.”
Maxence nodded. “I always thought I was afraid of being kidnapped or being held prisoner again, especially on a ship. When it happened, I worked my way through it. I’d pretty much convinced them to turn the ship around and bring me straight back to Port Hercule when Casimir and Arthur arrived on a helicopter.”
Dree said, “I told you that if that happened again, you were probably going to end up as the Pirate King and be standing on the prow of the ship as it sailed right up to the Monaco Yacht Club.”
Reign: A Royal Romantic Suspense Novel (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5) Page 14
