“She’s delusional, of course. My cousins and I were hellions.”
“Were you?” Jess said enviously. She’d been a very well behaved little girl, introverted, which, in the social pressures of middle and high school, had turned her very shy. It had taken college for her to grow back into a certain confidence, and Spoiled Brat had been her first real act of defiance. “It’s not necessarily a contradiction in terms.”
He looked at her a moment, and then a smile broke across his face unexpectedly. Wow, he had a crease in his cheeks when he smiled that was close to a
dimple.
“I was a cute, sweet hellion?”
“You should really smile more often,” she said involuntarily. “It looks
good
on you.” Human. Alive. Happy.
The smile faded as he gazed at her, his eyes growing serious and searching. His fingers stretched to touch her knuckles. The graze of callused fingertips shivered through her. “I could say the same of you. I just realized how little you’ve smiled for me.”
“I think I might be kind of serious by nature.”
“How would you know? If you spent two years watching your father die, it might take you a while to recover your sense of humor.”
Oh.
The sweet pain of his understanding. It shot through her and then eased her more open as that pain relaxed, like a deep massage that had hit on her most knotted muscle.
“What happened to your mother? You said you were all alone.”
“I had friends,” she hastened to correct herself. “And he had friends. There were people at the funeral. I wasn’t
all
alone.”
He didn’t argue with her, but he didn’t make any noise of agreement either. He just watched her, his fingertips rubbing gently back and forth over her knuckles.
“I don’t really remember her at all,” she said wistfully. She’d constantly invented mothers for herself as a child, tried to throw her father in the path of every woman with a kindly smile in the park, whether the woman had her own kids or not. She’d have stolen a mother for herself right out of a happy family without a second thought, she’d been so single-minded about it. And if siblings came with, so much the better. “I was so little—only two.”
He lifted her hand and kissed it.
Oh.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she whispered.
He turned her hand over, and kissed the palm. “Why?”
“It—I don’t know how to handle it.” She pressed her free hand to her stomach.
He smiled. That faint, rather dangerous smile. “You know, Jasmin, you really shouldn’t tell me your weaknesses. I’ll find them and exploit them fast enough without your help.”
Oh, yes, he definitely would.
“I told you I was out of your league. What am I supposed to do that throws
you
for a loop?”
He considered a moment. An eyebrow went up. “Breathe?”
At which, of course, she forgot how to. Her breaths caught high in her chest.
“Breathe
deep
,” he said, with that secret flash of humor. “I particularly like the deep breaths.”
Her breath came in fast and deep.
He smiled.
“
And
you know how to
flirt
,” Jess protested. “It’s not
fair.
”
“I’m the mean one. I don’t play fair.”
He’d played fair that night. Clear and sure in his attraction to her, in his approach, but careful of
her
—her right to say no, to withdraw, to be cautious. And with that care, he’d let her forget all caution entirely—she’d felt entirely safe in his hands.
“You’re the mean one?” The mean one of whom? His cousins? “What are the others? Teddy bears?”
He tilted his head just a little, a wry smile curling one side of his mouth. “Maybe one of them.”
“You’re not very good at it, being mean.”
Both his eyebrows shot up.
“I mean, you try, but you’re really inconsistent. You forget all the time.”
He just stared at her.
“What, I’m the first person to ever tell you that?”
“Other than my mother,” he said wryly. He shook his head. “Pépé is going to be so disappointed in me.”
“Pépé. Your grandfather? He likes you to be mean?”
“He’s counting on it. That’s why he hasn’t sent another of my cousins after you. I’m the one he can count on not to go soft over a pretty face.”
Jess tried to digest that. The whole idea had such an odd, pointy shape, she wasn’t even sure where to take the first bite of it. “Your grandfather sounds kind of…tough,” she said eventually. She wasn’t touching the “go soft over a pretty face” bit.
He gave a little crack of laughter. “Ah…yes. I believe that’s been mentioned about him before.”
Jess waited. She liked getting him to talk to her just by waiting. They’d used that technique on each other quite a lot, that first evening.
“He and Tante Colette have been feuding, or pretending to feud, or God knows what with them, for a good seventy years. They got those thirty-six children over the Alps, and they held their cell together, and blew up supply depots and more things they won’t ever tell us. But once the war was over, they took their energies out on each other, I guess. Maybe they had to take all that post traumatic stress disorder out on someone, and they could only count on each other to be tough enough to handle it.”
Jess gave that some thought. “So he and your aunt are so tough and hard…that they saved thirty-six children? Risked torture and their lives for strangers when most people were keeping as low a profile as they could?”
“They smuggled a lot of those kids out in wagon loads of rose petals.”
What a heartbreaking image. “I see where you got it from then.” The toughness, but also that care.
Damien was silent for a moment. “You, too, in that case.”
“What?”
“Both your adoptive and your biological great-grandmother were doing it, too.”
“
I’m
not tough.” When she’d met him, she’d felt as fragile as a match flame, like any rough breath could blow her out before she could even light a candle. Funny to realize, even as she thought it, how much stronger she felt now. As if that flame wasn’t a match after all, but embers, huddled under ashes, ready now, after a few warm breaths, to catch on some good, seasoned oak and flare alive again.
“Élise did it from sweetness,” Damien reminded her, with a squeeze of her hand. “Her heart was too tender to let her just watch others suffer. That was her courage.”
“I’m not sweet either,” Jess said, confused.
Your Tante Colette and your grandfather must have had sweetness, too, to save children. They just learned to be too tough to show it. Like you.
One of his eyebrows went up a little, and he gave her an odd, searching glance. “Ah.”
The waiter brought their wine, and Damien tasted it and then handed his glass to Jess. Apologetically, the waiter moved to pour a sample into her own glass, too, but she was already drinking from Damien’s. Crisp and light, a rosé perfect for the summer evening and the Provençal air. She nodded. The waiter glanced involuntarily at Damien, who seconded her nod, and the waiter poured.
They sipped good wine and ate good food and talked, surrounded by lively happiness and the age of the town.
Damien had beautiful eyes. Every time he smiled and that crease showed in his right cheek, she wanted to kiss it. Between courses, his hand always came to rest strong and sure over hers, those callused tips brushing the back of her hand, stirring all her nerve endings.
The walk through the old, stone streets to the little shop was quiet, like their move from that terrace to his apartment that night. He still didn’t take her hand, but his breathing roughened, out of all proportion to the easy pace.
When she turned to face him at her door, he was very close. Close enough that only his hands on the door to either side of her face kept him from brushing her body.
His deepened breathing made her prickle with hunger and nerves. In the lamplit street, his eyes were dark.
“What do you wish now, Jasmin?” That dark, deep voice, like a brush of velvet night. A scent of jasmine reached her, from vines climbing up the wall between her shop and the next.
“I—” She shook her head.
I can’t wish it out loud. I can’t say it.
A flicker of anger in his eyes.
“Nothing you want?” His hand slid down her arm and took that big iron key from her.
Not that I can
say.
“Nothing at all?” His thigh brushed hers as he unlocked the door behind her and pushed it an inch ajar.
Why was he doing this? Challenging her? Everything had been flowing so smoothly. Why wasn’t he making it all easy for her, as he had that night, so that the move from conversation up to a bed flowed like thick, inexorable desire, uninterrupted by any thought?
She stared up at him. His lips compressed, and then were deliberately relaxed.
“I want something,” that dark panther voice said. He pressed his palm against her midsection, just below her belly button, just above where the touch in public would have been obscene. And then he ran that hand slowly, slowly, slowly, up her ribs, bunching her top until it wrinkled against her breasts. His hand stopped on the last rib, the edge of his palm barely grazing the underside of her breast.
Her heart beat so hard it rang in her head. Her breasts hurt, and her sex clenched.
He bent his head to her ear, nestling it into the fall of her loose curls. A deep breath drawn close to her ear, the slow release of air that brushed over her lobe and the side of her throat. When he spoke, his voice was the tenderest caress, like black silk sliding over her body: “I want to fuck you.”
The verb penetrated, just
penetrated
, like it was meant to do, as if she was being held back up against this door by his hot body and being very tenderly fucked.
“I want to push you back on those lavender-scented sheets my aunt gave you and stamp my scent all over them.” His hand stroked down her body, over her butt and thigh, pulling her into him. His voice got even lower, till it vibrated in her fingertips and her toes and between her thighs.
“I want to rip that damn skirt off you, which I hate, and slide my fingers under your panties and straight up into you.”
She jerked, as if he’d done it in fact. Her thighs pressed together, and her nipples ached, all her pink parts waking with erotic panic. His words took possession of her. Tied her up in the black silk of them, held her still for whatever he wanted to do. And she
liked
it.
His mouth brushed back up to her ear. That delicate, delicate caress of breath there, his voice the absolute of darkness. “And I want to fuck you with them until you have lost your mind.”
She sagged against the door. His lips followed the curve of her ear. “I want to wrap my hand in these curls of yours and hold you down to the bed with them and kiss you so deep it’s like I’m fucking your mouth.”
She made a little sound, turning her head into his shoulder. Black silk everywhere, running all through her, caressing and binding every part of her body.
His fingers stroked down her thigh, lifted it to his hip, as he rocked his erection so-much-too-gently against her. “I want to spread your legs so that you can’t squeeze them together while I do whatever the hell I want to you.”
Her head fell back against the door. His lips grazed across her bared throat. “And when you’ve come enough”—his hand flexed into her thigh—“when you’re exhausted from coming”—his teeth grazed against her collarbone—“when you’re limp and vulnerable and all mine”—his fingers threaded through her curls and spread them over her breast as he straightened away from her—“maybe, maybe I won’t be so damn pissed about the way you treated me the morning after.”
He drew back, his arms bracing him off her.
Jess stared up at him, shocked not only by his words but by how much she had liked them. She ached so badly it was all she could do not to grab him and rub herself against him to try to satisfy that ache, there in the public street.
“I’m sorry, Jess. I know you had your reasons. But I can’t do the same damn thing I did last time and still lay myself out there, while you don’t even trust me enough to say what you want out loud. While you still think I’m—this.” He touched his throat where she had sprayed that steel and stone scent. “Part of me is still angry. And if I went upstairs with you right now, I’d make you beg.”
He pushed the iron key into her hand and closed her fingers around it. Then he turned and strode away into the night.
Fuck. Damien gripped the edge of a stone fountain in the dark street, drops of water from the stream into the basin cold against the back of his hand.
What the
hell
was that all about? You idiot.
Reacting on emotion. No strategy, none of that cool assessment that made him feel like some Hollywood superspy, scanning a situation and spotting every single weakness that left him a path to victory. Just a fucking emotional loose cannon, careening across a deck in self-destruction.
What the hell did he expect to accomplish that way, acting how he
felt
?
Not even any properly rational feeling, either, just gun-shy cowardice.
I get it. I get that she was going through a rough time. I get that my reputation preceded me. Or followed me. Whatever.
But I’m still so damn pissed.
Not always. Not constantly. It had been going so damn…beautifully. Just like the last time. Everything flowing so easily, he’d had her in the palm of his hand. And it was just his own stupid fault that this time, it hadn’t felt like this wondering reveal of his heart to this magical stranger who would keep it safe. It had felt like stripping the bandage off a raw wound and trusting her not to pour salt on it.
So that when he’d locked her back against her door and thought about that bed of hers upstairs, so intent on her when she couldn’t even trust him enough to tell him what she
wanted
, damn it, after that whole evening of careful courtship…when he’d done that, the memory of waking alone in his own bed, of the dull, blunt shock when he’d met her again and she’d brushed him off as if he was nothing, had kicked rage alive to stop him.