So yeah, exhausted enough to curl up beneath the covers and sleep.
Olivier seems just as exhausted as I feel, probably even more so.
He stops at the foot of the bed, the light from the hall illuminating him from behind as he starts to undress. “Désolé,” he whispers, his voice sounding gruff. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I thought you would still be up.”
“I’m tired.”
“You aren’t alone,” he says, pulling back the covers and sliding in beside me. Naked, as he usually is at bedtime.
I don’t read much into it. We haven’t had sex since before the ball. It hasn’t been on my mind, and I can guarantee it hasn’t been on his.
He sighs and sinks back into the pillow, his eyes closed.
“How was work?” I ask softly.
He shakes his head slightly. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Isn’t that what you went to do?”
“Yes, I was there, and things were said, but I don’t remember any of it. I probably should have stayed here with you.”
“You would have seen your sister.”
He opens his eyes and fixes them on me, his hair mussed, forehead creased. “What do you mean? My sister was here?”
“You seem as surprised as I was. She dropped by looking for you. She needs to talk to you in a bad way.”
“What about?”
Really?
“What about?” I repeat. “How about everything? She’s your sister, Olivier, and you’ve just thrown her under the bus.”
His eyes flash at me. “Thrown her under the bus.”
“It’s a saying—”
“Yes, I know what it means,” he snaps. “I haven’t . . . You know why I had to do what I’ve done.”
“I know, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t understand. Says it’s not like you.”
“I’m doing what I need to do. I have no choice,” he grinds out. “You’re supposed to support me in this, I don’t have anyone else who knows the truth.”
“I do support you, but I just want you to know how the rest of the family is taking it. She’s afraid she’s going to lose her job.”
“She won’t,” he says. “Gautier doesn’t hate her the way that he hates me. She’s useful, more so than his sons. He’ll keep her around. Is that all you talked about? Didn’t she wonder who you were?”
“She said that I was the girl.”
He grunts in response.
“And,” I go on, “she has a theory, and it’s why you need to talk to her, because even I have a hard time telling you.”
“Tell me what? What’s the theory? Theory about what?”
He looks so pained already that I think telling him will only hurt.
“You’d better ask her yourself. She needs to talk with you, not through me.”
He sighs and settles back into the bed. “Okay, I will go see her tomorrow.”
“Promise me,” I tell him, holding out my pinkie finger.
He stares at it. “What are you doing?”
“Tell me you have pinkie swears here in France.”
“Children do . . .”
“Just touch your pinkie with mine.”
Finally, a smile cracks on his face, and for a moment I see the old Olivier. “Touching pinkies. I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”
I laugh and reach over, wrapping my pinkie around his. “I’m serious. Now it’s official. Promise me you’ll talk to your sister.”
“Don’t mention my sister when I’m thinking about the dirty things I want to do to you.”
I blush. “Dirty things! You got that from a pinkie swear?”
He shrugs lazily. “You must admit, there is something sexual about it.”
I shake my head. “I’m admitting nothing.” But I’m still giggling.
He brings my pinkie to his mouth and slowly sucks on it, his tongue warm and wet, immediately sending shivers down my back. I manage to swallow. Okay, so I’m never looking at a pinkie swear the same way again.
Olivier slowly pulls my finger out of his mouth, and all the thoughts leave my brain. He grips it tightly in his hand, another hand cupping my chin.
“I never told you how grateful I am that you stayed,” he says to me, his tone soft and rough all at once. “Never told you how much it means to me that you’re here. That you’re really here.”
“I’m here,” I whisper, kissing him softly on the tip of his nose. “I’m here.”
“I was so scared when I came back, I thought maybe for a moment you would be gone. I imagined what that would be like, to come in and see your backpack missing and the bed empty, like you decided to catch your plane after all. And I was paralyzed from the fear. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. It was like my heart stopped, and that’s when I knew that my heart no longer belonged to me. My heart belongs to you.”
Oh, damn. There’s a nest of hummingbirds inside my chest, just taking flight for the very first time. I’m almost afraid of what he may say next, afraid because to say it is to feel it, and what if the feeling is too big for my soul to contain?
“Sadie, mon lapin, je t’aime, I love you,” he says. “I love you so very much that I don’t even know if you can feel it from these words, because there are no words really to explain it.”
He loves me.
I love him.
“I love you,” I whisper. “You don’t have to explain it. I know it. I know it like I know your heartbeat. I know it like I know the breath you take, the world you see. Since the beginning, I thought I was crazy to feel the way I felt about you.”
“And how did you feel about me, ma chérie?” he whispers, his hands disappearing into my hair.
“Like . . . there was something deep inside me that saw something familiar deep inside you. Like my very being recognized yours, and like your cells and my cells were almost the same.” I look away, grateful for my hair falling over my face. “It sounds so stupid to say it out loud, but it made sense before.”
“It makes sense,” he says roughly, pulling my chin up to meet his gaze. His eyes are so deep and rich and burning, I can’t look away. “You’ve always made sense to me.”
He kisses me with more passion than I’ve ever felt before, the kind that steals your breath, ignites your heart, makes your body and soul burst into flames.
He kisses me and kisses me, and all I feel are his lips and tongue and heart. I feel his heart, I feel his love.
I feel how fucking hard he is.
I grin as he moves back down the bed, and his head goes lower, licking down the center of my stomach until he gets between my legs. He loves to take his time there, and usually I have no complaints, but now, with my heart brimming with my love for him, our love for each other, I want him inside me.
He kisses and nibbles down the V of my hip bones; then he slides his long, wet tongue along where my legs and pelvis meet. The skin there is so sensitive I nearly cry out as he gently laps at it, teasing up the sides, coming close to my clit and then backing away.
“Please,” I can’t help but moan, “come inside me, Olivier.”
He ignores me. His tongue snakes along my clit, and I suck in a sharp breath, trying to compose myself. I’m seconds from coming, and he knows this. He just wants me to come any way possible, and I suppose since we haven’t been with each other like this in a while, I might as well take everything he’s offering.
He works me fast, his tongue flicking rapidly and so hard as I swell beneath him, the pressure in my core building and building, hotter and hotter.
Then he withdraws, and I’m left gasping for him.
Bereft.
Desperate.
“You better get your cock inside me or your tongue back down there, or there will be hell to pay,” I tell him.
He grins at me, cocky as all get-out. He knows he’s got me panting for him.
“Have I told you how much I love it when you beg?”
“Yes, you have,” I say pointedly, full of impatience.
He straddles me with his heavy thighs, and I feel himself position the hard tip of his dick onto me. With slow ease, he pushes himself inside as I widen around him, my body needing him, craving him. In seconds he’s in to the hilt; he’s a part of me, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so beautifully stretched before.
“Sadie,” he groans as he pulls himself out and thrusts in again, his rigid length dragging along all the right spots. “You feel so good. So beautiful. You save me, you know? All the time. You make everything around me easier to bear.”
My heart skips three beats at once at this admission.
That’s all I want.
I just want to make him happy.
Loved.
Then I gasp as he drives in harder and then pulls out, achingly slow for a few beats before he starts pumping into me faster, and I reach up for his ass, digging my nails in and shoving him in deeper.
The moan that comes out of his lips is the most erotic sound I’ve ever heard.
Sweat drips from his body onto mine, and I’m surprised I’m not sizzling from the heat. He slips his hand down, making a fist over the base of his cock as it slides into me, and in his breathless, low voice, he tells me how good I feel, how he doesn’t want this to ever end.
He tells me how much he loves me.
My heart responds in kind, swelling over his words while the rest of me burns for his body.
His fingers then slide over my clit, in rhythm with his merciless thrusts.
And that’s it.
I come, moaning loudly, calling out his name as starbursts form behind my eyes and my body explodes in a hot wash of nerves, like bubbling champagne. I’m writhing, bucking, floating into pure bliss, out of this bed and into the stars.
He’s coming too, groaning my name as the bed shakes, and he comes inside me. I’m so glad we decided to get tested because having him fill me up like this, feeling his come hot inside me, is more intimate than anything else.
Eventually we regain our breath, and the room stops spinning.
But my heart won’t stop spinning for him.
It’s his now.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
OLIVIER
It’s taken ten years to actually know what it’s like to fall in love.
Perhaps that’s normal.
Perhaps it’s not.
All I know is that when I thought I loved Marine, I was just in love with the intrigue, the forbidden, the adoration, and, of course, the sex.
When I first met Sadie, I expected it to be more or less the same thing.
I was ready for it.
Yes, she was different, but more than that, she made me feel different. But I didn’t know what it meant, what it could mean. I always thought in the back of my mind that no matter how passionate our lovemaking was, that’s where it would stay. In the bedroom. And when it was her time to go, I would be prepared and ready. That she would fly away, and I would chalk it all up to an American girl I knew once.
But that wasn’t the case at all. By the time I invited her up to Paris, I knew I had it bad for her. That I was in deep, like it was a place I couldn’t escape, and if I did, I would be on my hands and knees.
That’s where I am now.
On my hands and knees.
My heart belonging to her.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I was so wrong about love, so quick to avoid it, so effortless in passing it off.
But that was never the true me.
Only with Sadie have I finally felt my mask slip away and the shackles falling off my feet, no longer tying me to the person the world needs me to be.
Just the person that I need myself to be.
The person she needs me to be.
I love her, and that has changed my whole world at a time when my whole world has just changed.
It makes me realize the lengths I will go to protect us, to keep her safe.
I don’t want to go to the office today. I don’t care a bit about the heat or the traffic or even the reporters who are more on my trail these days because of my father’s death and the recent announcements in the company. None of that really matters now.
I just don’t want to be away from her.
And yet she made me promise to see Seraphine, and I do love my sister. I’ve felt nothing but guilt at the position I’ve put her in, knowing I’m lying to her, knowing she doesn’t understand. She thinks I’ve turned on her. She thinks I’ve become one of them.
When I get to the office, narrowly missing a downpour, I’m surprised to see that everything looks exactly the same. I would have thought that when Gautier finally got his bloody hands on it, he would have changed buildings, changed logos, changed staff.
But when I walk inside, all the familiar faces are there: Nadia the receptionist and a bunch of people who work for marketing and sales and the different departments. There are some people who look new, but in a company like this, it’s always growing.
I do have to say that the vibe has changed.
Though it may still be a mixture of white and black and glass, all the calm elegance is gone. It seems tainted somehow, like if I looked closely enough, I’d see shit smeared in the grooves.
“I’m here to see my sister,” I say to Nadia, watching her carefully. Though they’re always overlooked, the receptionists are often the backbone of the company, the skeleton off which everything else hangs.
Nadia’s eyes seem to swell with relief when she looks up at me.
That is not a good sign.
I should never be anyone’s relief.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she says to me quietly, her smile wavering. “When I heard the news . . .”
“The good news, you mean?”
My uncle’s voice booms across the office, rich as a barrel of tar.
I meet Nadia’s eyes for a second, and there’s a flash of pure fear in them. Fear that she’ll lose her job for no reason, fear that there’s worse.
I try to convey that everything will be all right.
But I can no longer make promises.
I’ve handed this man the reins.
I turn to face my uncle and offer up the fakest smile I can muster.
“Uncle,” I say to him.
My uncle isn’t an ugly man. In many ways he resembles my father—not as tall, but still of athletic stature. His chin is more pronounced, enough that I think it bothers him, but his hair is thick and dark, black as night, with only the tiniest wisps of gray at the temples, and I don’t think he’s ever touched a box of dye.
His widow’s peak is commanding, and his brows are even more so: sharp, like they’re painted into perfect arches with thick strokes of permanent marker. It’s a long face, an odd face, yet beguiling and charming all at once.
If you don’t know him, that is.
I know him, and I see right through the charm, and I see right through the cold, fathomless depths of his eyes, and I know this man is everything that’s rotten in the world, and it disgusts me that the same blood that’s in his veins working its way to his heart like black sludge is the blood that’s in mine.
I hate that I’m looking at his face right now.
I should be looking at my father.
It takes everything inside me to keep from breaking down right here.
“Olivier, I didn’t expect you to be here,” he says, and his tongue is sharp, his words honed like razor blades. He thinks I’m here to fuck shit up, I’m sure.
“I’m just getting Seraphine,” I tell him. I don’t have to tell him any more. He isn’t owed it.
“I see,” he says. “She’s a wonderful girl, isn’t she?”
“Your niece? Yes, and she’s going through a lot at the moment.”
“Aren’t we all?” he asks smoothly, with a hint of a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
“I am, yes,” I say. I make a move to pass him. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
But he steps in my way, blocking my exit. I glance up at hi
m, trying to control my breath, my fists curling.
“Are you sure you have a right to be here, Olivier?” he asks, his voice so low now that I don’t even think Nadia can hear him. “Perhaps you need to be reminded of your place . . . the place you exited.”
My jaw clenches, teeth grinding until they hurt. “I’m aware of my place. But we are still family, aren’t we?”
His stare doesn’t falter. “We are.”
“Then I’m just going to see my sister.”
I don’t know why the fuck he’s so suspicious of my seeing her. He should know that I’m not about to back out of the agreement. He should know.
And maybe that finally lights up in his head, because he nods and steps aside.
“Of course.” He gestures for me to continue.
I walk as confidently and quickly as I can down the hall to Seraphine’s office, my heart pinching at the sight of my father’s still-empty one, and I don’t even knock on her door. I barge right in.
She’s not alone.
Blaise is there. He’s sitting at her desk. She’s standing up and looks about ready to throw a cup of water at him.
“Did I come at the wrong time?” I ask, pausing in the doorway. “Or the right time?”
Both of them glare at me in unison.
“Shut the door.” Seraphine sneers.
I raise my brows but do what she says. I shouldn’t be surprised these two are at it like this; without my father as a mediator, they have no boundaries. And Gautier couldn’t care less—in fact, he probably sent his son in here to antagonize her. He wants them to eat each other alive.
“What’s going on?” I ask, folding my arms.
“Your sister is fucking crazy,” Blaise says. His collected demeanor has dissolved for once, his eyes wild as they dart from her to me.
“I won’t argue with that,” I say. “Seraphine?”
“He knows,” she says, pointing her finger at him. “He knows what happened.”
“What happened?” I ask carefully. I feel like I’ve stepped right into a bullring, and I’m not sure who’s winning or what the outcome of the game is supposed to be.
“I don’t even want to repeat it,” Blaise mutters, shaking his head. But for all the ways he’s dismissing her, whatever she said has rattled him. The tops of his hands are sweating, and his hair is slightly disheveled from his hand constantly combing through it, something he does when he’s nervous. Aside from when he loses his temper and blasts off like a rocket, obliterating everyone around him with the most vicious insults, he’s usually as cool as a cucumber.
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