He retreated, listening to her pant with a tortured rasp at the beginning of each breath.
Ah, nice.
Gently, he rolled her over on her stomach and let her curvy, female legs splay off the side of the bed.
Her hands swiveled behind her back, where his tee shirt was knotted around them.
The blonde’s dress was a red band that tightly cinched her waist, almost like a corset, and her round, bare ass made him want to come on every inch of her skin. He stroked her ass cheeks, watching his hands and fingers splay over them, taking his time.
She lay limply on the bed, her head turned to the side, still breathing harshly with her eyes closed.
He leaned forward and rested his erection between the cheeks of her ass, feeling her sweet flesh with his dick, too, and his voice was a deep, bass octave when he asked her, “You ready to be fucked?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”
Maxence had kept his pants on for a reason, and he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and opened it. He’d stopped by a corner pharmacy on the way from the hotel to the Buddha Bar earlier that night to restock. He rolled the tight sheath onto his erection.
Maxence held his engorged cock to her folds, running the head through her juicy flesh, becoming slipperier with each pass. She moaned, and her hands rolled in the tee shirt where he’d tied them.
He glided his head over her clit until she moaned harder, her pale eyebrows furrowing in the middle. Her cheek was mashed against the bed, and her mouth hung open.
He pressed himself inside her, just his tip at first, slowly easing his way in and holding back from ramming himself into her like he wanted to.
Her moans turned to little grunts as he pressed inside her, feeling how much she could take and waiting for that soft resistance that meant he should go no farther.
His cock slowly slid inside the woman up to the hilt, and he was balls-deep in her. She was breathing hard, each exhale a catch in her throat.
He leaned over her and kissed her shoulder before he whispered against the back of her neck. “I’m going to fuck you until you come.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “One and done. Just do what you want to.”
Maxence’s voice fell even lower into his throat, nearly a growl. “I said, I’m going to fuck you until you come. It was a warning.”
Her eyes opened when he said that, fear filling the blueness again.
It might be a little too much, he knew, but she hadn’t asked for a man to take her to bed and gently make love to her. She’d asked him to fuck her to start a new life.
And at that point, Max couldn’t do anything less.
He stood and palmed the gorgeous swells of her hips, feeling her pliable flesh in his hands, and he pulled her back slowly to sheath his cock inside her.
Her soft whimper made him swell harder. Fucking her until she came might take hours, and he was going to make sure she wasn’t disappointed in this first night of the rest of her life.
He worked her body onto his cock, dragging her back with her hips. When she was becoming too complacent with that, he grabbed her wrists where he’d tied them together and pulled her back, slapping his hips against the generous flesh of her ass and burying himself deep inside her.
Her cry that time was sharper. It wasn’t pain but shocked pleasure, just like he’d thought.
He rocked back and yanked her back onto him, slapping their bodies together.
Her breath became more strangled, and her core was beginning to tighten around him.
He fucked her from behind and watched his cock pumping inside her, the swollen veins and engorged flesh slamming into her softness harder every time he wrenched her arms backward and thrust inside.
She was crying out again now, her head tucked down to push herself back harder. His balls swung as he pounded into her. She was lifting her hips, and he let her do it for a while before he pushed her ass down and ground her against the side of the bed, pinning her in place with his cock like a butterfly he’d spiked in a collection. The pressure forced the inside of her clit to rub his cock just like he knew it would, and her body vised down on him as she arched backward, her eyes squeezed shut, and her flesh turned to flutters and tongues squeezing his cock.
Maxence couldn’t stop himself and speared his cock into her, impaling her soft, wet flesh with his maleness, and the world fell away into that moment of stillness and bliss with her all around him, every heartbeat an eternity, and his balls pulsed while he held her body under him.
His skin was exquisitely sensitive, and yet he was flayed alive.
Exhaustion took him, and he fell.
Maxence rested his forehead against her spine, gulping air while his heart slammed in his chest.
A bead of sweat—hers or his, he didn’t know—wandered over her skin and trailed down her side.
Hers or his.
He still didn’t know her name.
Remorse settled over him. He should have found out what her name was. He should have been more restrained.
He shouldn’t even be here.
Her sides heaved, and her breath rasped in her throat. “Oh, my God. You did it. Twice. I think I’m going to die.”
He whispered, “What’s your name?”
Her shoulder was a curve of pale skin on the dark blue duvet. “Dree.”
Odd name. Must be short for something. “I’m—”
“Don’t tell me,” she said, still panting. “Or lie to me. Don’t tell me your real name. Any name but your real one.”
The orgasm still reverberated in his mind, making a muddle of his thoughts. “What?”
“Not your real name. And remember that you have to leave before morning.” She was murmuring drunkenly into the duvet. “I’m supposed to have a one-night stand with a beautiful man who I’ll never see again. It’s on the list. I don’t want to be able to find you, even if I wanted to. So, not your real name.”
What a weird little girl. Maxence pulled back and kicked his pants off his ankles while he got rid of the condom. He yanked his shirt off her wrists, untying her. His mind was still a blurred mass of smudges.
Dree, for that was the blonde’s name, was wiggling, trying to free herself from the tight, red dress like she was fighting her way out of a cocoon. She’d gotten her elbows inside the red roll of elastic around her waist.
He helped her, pulling at the straps and finally locating a zipper.
She popped out of it like a sausage splitting its casing, sucked in a few panicked breaths, and tossed the red fabric over the footboard and onto the floor.
The bed was a four-poster. Damn. He really should have made use of those.
Four posts.
Three.
The Trinity.
“Augustine,” Maxence said, almost chuckling with the rightness of it. “My name is Augustine.”
“Like, St. Augustine?” Dree asked, rolling and wriggling to get under the covers. “Like, The City of God, that St. Augustine?”
The City of God was St. Augustine’s most famous book, yes.
Maxence rolled naked onto the bed and pulled the duvet over himself. The room had turned chilly in the December night. “More like when Augustine was younger. Like his prayer, ‘God, grant me chastity and sobriety, but not yet.’”
Her chuckle was slow at first but sped up to a laugh. “‘But not yet.’”
The double bed had two pillows, so Max commandeered one and grasped the voluptuous Dree, pulling her against himself and spooning her. “‘Not yet.’ Maybe someday, God will grant me chastity and sobriety, but He has not done it yet.”
“Well, I’m glad God hasn’t answered your prayer for chastity yet, Augustine, because that was spectacular.”
Damn, that was gratifying.
As he was drifting off, she asked, “What’s that tattoo on your back? Or your arm?”
But Maxence was already descending into sleep, and he couldn’t make his mouth move.
Rescuing two women in tw
o days and then satisfying each of them didn’t leave much time for sleep, and he was damn tired.
Chapter Three
Plan
Dree
Sunlight bouncing off the sunny yellow walls glared on Dree’s face and stabbed her eyes, so she squeezed them more tightly shut.
The DJ from the night before at the Buddha Bar had crammed the nightclub’s enormous speakers inside Dree’s skull and turned up the pulsing bass to full volume.
Her shoulders were sore.
So were her boobs.
Not to mention between her legs.
She might have a hangover, too, but that guy, “Augustine,” had been amazing in bed. She had been well and truly fucked. Last night was exactly the sort of thing that she’d needed to draw a bright line in the sand between her old life and her new one. She’d needed a fantastic night with a gorgeous, gorgeous man whom she’d never see again.
She was never going to see him again, right?
He had left during the night, right?
Dree held her breath, and despite her hangover, she squinted and rolled over, hoping like hell that he had done as she’d asked and taken off during the night.
The other side of the bed was empty. The sheets were rumpled, and the pillow lay askew.
Oh, thank goodness. Dree did not need to explain herself to anyone in the light of day just then. Her life was a godawful mess. Putting it back together was going to take a hell of a lot of work, and she didn’t need some hanger-on bugging her for ass while she was trying to deal with it.
Besides, she had a “Bucket List” to attend to. She had a hundred more things she wanted to experience in Paris before she caught that plane in four more days.
She swung her legs around and hopped down to the floor, smiling a little at the edge of the bed.
Her legs wobbled as she tried to walk. Man, Augustine had gone at her so hard last night that she might have sprained something. She should have stretched before a marathon like that. Her muscles had locked up so tightly when she’d come that second time that tears had leaked out of her eyes and she’d thought she might get a migraine.
It had been spectacular.
Augustine had been spectacular, and as a part of a last, hedonistic few days before she changed her life, he had been perfect.
She could limp around Paris and do the next couple of things on her napkin-based bucket list with a grin on her face.
The plan had been one night, and then he would leave.
She was not going to feel bad about it.
Even if she kind of wanted to see him again, hear him talk again, and lick his hard, hot skin again.
But no. That was not the plan.
She would stick to the plan.
She stumbled to the kitchen area and chugged a glass of water straight out of the tap, then another. Dehydration was the enemy. Getting over a hangover migraine required water.
Back in nursing school, she and her friends had given each other the ultimate cure for a hangover: eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, a liter of lactated Ringer’s saline solution delivered intravenously, and ten minutes of breathing pure oxygen. In half an hour, that would entirely cure even the worst hangover.
Damn, she really needed an IV and some O2 just then.
A can of coffee grounds stood beside the coffee maker, and she thanked St. Augustine and all the other saints that the B and B had supplied her with coffee. Last night, after she’d gotten off the plane, ridden the subway, and found her room, she’d just kind of dumped everything and thrown on her one good dress to go to the Buddha Bar in a fit of blind rage and despair.
Packets of sugar lay on the counter beside the coffee pot, so she dumped three of them into a cup and added coffee to it. No milk, but she wasn’t picky.
Maybe that’s what Dree’s problem was.
Maybe she should be pickier.
Or at least a whole lot less gullible.
At the thought of just how damn gullible she was, another horrible possibility occurred to Dree.
Shock slammed her, and her heartbeat battered her temples.
She grabbed her purse, frantically praying that even though she’d been hopelessly stupid and naïve, maybe she’d escaped the consequences this time.
Probably not. Probably not.
She opened her purse and shook it hard.
Her wallet fell out with a heavy plop on the kitchen counter. She scrambled while opening it anyway, and a wad of pastel-colored euros scattered on the white Formica. She spread the bills out, frantically counting them, but it looked like all her one hundred fifty-two euros were still there.
Her heart was still slamming in her chest, and she braced her arms on the counter and gulped air with relief.
How stupid was she for picking up some guy, bringing him back to her hotel room, and then passing out drunk while he was there? He could have stolen all her money—which was everything she had left in the world—and walked out while she’d slept it off.
With her luck, she was surprised he hadn’t stolen all her money and her clothes and left her literally naked without a shirt on her back.
But she was okay.
She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
No more trusting people with her money or her heart.
And today, her goal was to figure out how to put her life back together and go on. She was going to live a whole new kind of life, one where she was smart and had adventures and didn’t get taken advantage of.
Yep, today was the first day of the rest of her life, and she was a whole new person starting it. From now on, Dree was the kind of woman who would travel to Paris by herself or fuck a gorgeous man if she wanted to.
There was nothing she wouldn’t do.
She even had a napkin that mapped out her new life.
Dree picked up the cocktail napkin from the countertop and smoothed it out to look at what was written there.
A threesome.
A foursome with three guys.
A gang bang.
Three distinct feminine handwriting styles filled the fragile paper, forming a list of adventures. Some of the writing was her own, and some belonged to the two women she’d met at the Buddha Bar when she’d first gotten there. They’d insisted that Dree join them for supper and drinks so adamantly that Dree had suspected they were planning to dine and dash and stick her with the bill, but they hadn’t.
On the napkin they’d written:
Fuck a man against a wall in an alley.
An incredible night on the beach by the sea.
Ménage a whole bunch.
Dree laughed. God, she’d almost done it. She’d had so much tequila to drink last night that a gang bang had seemed like a good idea.
Instead, she’d had:
A one-night stand with a beautiful man who you’ll never see again.
She’d done it.
She’d done one item on the list.
Dree hunted through her duffel bag lying on the floor, which held three changes of workout clothes that needed washing, some random make-up products, her hospital ID badge, a set of clean scrubs, a curling iron with an American-style plug that wouldn’t work in France, and a cheap ballpoint with Good Samaritan Hospital stamped on the side.
Dree uncapped the pen and carefully drew a line through the item A one-night stand with a beautiful man who you’ll never see again.
One item down, about fifty to go.
She perused the rest of them idly because not all of them were sexual in nature.
Do fun and wonderful things.
Dance in a parade on the Champs-Élysées.
—London, Amsterdam, Monaco, and Nepal.
The countries were a list of places she should visit or, ideally, live for a while.
Dree couldn’t even imagine going to or living in those places, but maybe.
Maybe today she would make a plan so that it would be possible.
It was funny how losing everything had opened her up to new possibilities like
living in London or Amsterdam, maybe.
She continued reading down the list.
Buy a beautiful Hermès scarf.
Buy a Coach purse.
Eat at these restaurants: Le Cinq, Le 39V, Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée.
See the Louvre.
Dree sighed. Those would have to wait for her next trip to Paris. Those few euros in her wallet had to last her the whole trip. She needed to eat and, if she wanted to see the rest of Paris, buy Métro tickets to get there. She hadn’t realized that Francis had booked their FlyBNB room quite so far from the middle of the city.
She wished she could have done some of those things, though.
She drank enough coffee to feel human, brushed her teeth, and stepped in the tiny corner shower.
One of the complimentary soaps had been unwrapped and was lying in the soap dish, and it was clean. One of the room’s pink towels was damp where it hung over the towel bar.
Augustine must have taken a shower before he left, which she certainly didn’t begrudge him. That incredible body of his must require maintenance.
She only wished she’d gotten a good look at the huge tattoo covering his broad back before he’d left last night.
Or the one on his arm. That one seemed intricate.
Dree scrubbed herself raw and used some of the shampoo in the tiny bottle to wash her hair, which flipped around her head while she lathered it. She’d never had short hair before. If she’d had enough money, she should have had somebody even it out after her hasty chop job with surgical scissors right before she’d fled from the hospital to the airport. She pulled on an oversized gym tee shirt that, upon sniffing, didn’t need washing too badly.
When she got out of the bathroom, her phone was ringing an odd, octave-scaling ring.
That was weird. Dree didn’t even have cell service in Europe. She’d tried to get her phone to work when she’d been in the airport, but it had just roamed and refused to connect.
When she picked it up, the screen said the call was coming through one of her social media accounts, TalkBook, not her phone. At the top of the screen, the Wi-Fi symbol was lit up.
Rogue Page 4
