Oh.
His hands rubbed over the shape of her skull, tracing the curve of her ears, shaping her cheekbones. “And deserves the best I can be.”
The texture of his palms against her cheeks caught her, lured her in past argument. That texture made it seem as if he wasn’t some great granite rock rising out of a sea—glorious and obdurate. The sea dashed against a rock like that, but the waves didn’t penetrate, and it didn’t change. Not in a human lifetime.
And the touch of his hands, the look in his eyes … none of that was like a rock at all. Strength and warmth and tenderness.
All given to her.
“You deserve the best I can be, too,” she whispered, before she’d even thought it through. But the whisper ran through her: he really did. So did
she
deserve the best she could be. That was why she had tried to become it.
Actually, why she was still always trying to become it—every single day in that
laboratoire
, pouring her all into being ever better.
Exactly like him.
“Joss,” she sighed, soft as wistfulness.
Soft as wanting.
You’re not a rock. All those muscles, as hard and strong as they are, have a little human yield in them. They’d take the pressure of my fingers. That pressure would change you, you’d respond to it, your body would be mine.
And I wouldn’t feel anything at all like a sea trying to get a rock to change.
His thumbs ran over her cheekbones, and he bent and kissed her, as if he couldn’t resist a taste.
Velvet heat spread through her body, this fuzzy heat that softened all the sharp edges of hurt, that turned off her brain. She found her hands climbing up his arms, and she was right—those hard muscles were warm and alive and human. They responded to her hands, not as if he was a rock against which she beat herself but as if her slightest touch could change his entire existence.
I don’t want to be up on a glass mountain or in a tower waiting for you, Joss. I’ve always wanted to be human and real to you.
So she kissed him like somebody real.
Eager.
Melting.
His lips shaped to hers, his hands pulling her hard up into his body, harder and harder, more and more eager. His palm ran up her back, his fingers cupping her butt. The press and shift of his lips, the graze of his teeth, the touch of his tongue …
The jazz band busking on the bridge started playing them a love song, and Joss lifted his head. “God, this hurts. Kissing you and … only kissing you. I love it, though. I’ll do it as long as you want.”
She didn’t know quite what he meant. She didn’t think any man she had ever dated had ever
hurt
for her. The couple of sexual relationships she’d tried in the past five years had been, well …
friendly
. That was, she and the guy had started out getting along, hitting it off, and he’d nudged for sex, and she’d thought,
Well, I should try it, he’s a nice enough guy
, and … it all felt really, really limp and tepid compared to this, like the hot chocolate some cafés in this part of Paris tried to pass off on tourists.
Like somebody shouldn’t have forced her to try to make do with that shit instead of him.
She scowled at that somebody.
“What?” he asked. “I mean it. You set the pace.”
“Sometimes it’s so hard not to hit you.”
His lips curved so wryly it was all she could do not to kiss them again. “What did I do this time? Too greedy?”
“No. Not greedy enough.”
He drew a hard breath that she felt through his entire body still brushing hers, and then pulled her in close and kissed her again, ignoring the jazz band and their public exposure, ignoring everything but her.
Joss lifted his head and swept a hard look over hers. She blinked at the four men hovering near them, each with a lock held up for sale, each trying to be the first to catch their attention. At Joss’s look, they all took a step back, hesitated, then moved away.
Célie squinted her eyes and tried to pack her own gaze with power that way, practicing on Joss’s chest this sweeping
back off before you die
look. He didn’t even have any meanness in it. No squint, no effort, just this relaxed swing of a blade. The sweep of a sharp sword wasn’t mean, it was just a fact that you’d better be out of that blade’s way when it swung in your direction.
“What did I do this time?” Joss sighed, and she hastily tried to smooth her expression.
“Oh, just, you know … practicing.”
His eyebrows went up. “Practicing?”
She sighed. “It’s never going to work the same when I do it.” She tried her approximation of his look on him, her face scrunching into it.
He smiled. He tried to press the smile out, but this rumbling started passing through the chest on which her hands still rested, and then it escaped out of him, as he started to laugh. He laughed so hard he had to sit back against the bumpy locks along the railing. “You’re so damn cute.
God
, I’ve missed you.”
She put her hands on her hips. But she could only pretend to be minatory. Because the sight of Joss laughing, his big, lethal body framed by the Seine, the Eiffel Tower glowing in the distance beyond him … just that
laughter
, it … “
You’re
so damn cute,” she said helplessly. “Damn you. I’ve really missed you, too.”
He caught her fist and thumped it twice against his chest in pretend punches, then reeled her in with it, tucking her between his thighs. “I want to take you somewhere private,” he breathed, this rough, sand-grained sound. “But if I did, I’d kiss you all the fuck over, Célie. And squeeze you and…” His hands flexed into her hips, too hard. “
Hell
, but I want to do things to you. You have no idea.”
She stared at him, her jaw dropped, heat flaring through her. “No, I don’t!” she said, indignant. “How would I have any idea, when you would
never even flirt with me
before?”
“Now the trick is to get you to want to do all kinds of things to me.” Again his fingers flexed into her, a little gentler this time, but still harder than he must realize. “Besides punch me, although honestly, at this point … any excuse to get your hands on me works for me. Besides”—he smiled a little and lifted her fist to kiss it—“punches from this thing would probably feel like a massage.”
Okay, that was just flat-out … annoying, that was what that was. She glowered at her fist, which did indeed look extremely little and incapable, in his big one. She’d put a hell of a lot of effort into making her hands capable of everything amazing. She transferred her frown to his face.
He smiled. “Kiss me or kill me, sweetheart? Which one do you want?”
So she kissed him because … well, he really was that infuriating. A woman had to do
something
. Killing him out here in public like this would get her arrested.
His arms wrapped around her, pulling her in tight, hand sliding to her butt to press her hips against his, now level because of his half-seated position against the rail. Fire ran through her everywhere, this hunger for more and more and more—rubbing, contact, heat, texture, skin—more of
everything
.
She twisted her mouth away with a gasp. “I think that … even for the Pont des Arts on a Friday night, we might be getting a little out of hand.”
“Are you telling me to stop?” Joss asked roughly. “Or are you telling me to take you somewhere more private? The only thing is, if I get much more out of hand than this and no one can see us, I’m going to start ripping your damn clothes off.”
Every deep, fast breath Célie took felt as if she was inhaling a drug, this intense rush.
I want to be real. I don’t want to be your damn goal anymore. I want to be
with
you.
“Do you … do you want to go back to my apartment?”
Joss’s hands yanked from her body to catch fistfuls of locks and railing, holding on to them as if they were all that kept him from falling into the river. “The apartment that’s
all bed
?”
Célie’s cheeks heated deeply. “It’s the only one I’ve got.”
Joss jerked upright. “Hell. Fuck.
Yeah.
”
Célie took a step back, licking her lips, her body on fire. Awkwardness and embarrassment and want, all aflame.
Joss shoved a hand over his face and over that buzz cut of his. “Oh,
merde
, am I supposed to try to survive riding on that little moped pressed up behind you to get there? Do you mind instead if I just run?”
But he did ride, squashed behind her, that easy, firm balance of his body against all her movements of the moped, his thighs pressed hot the length of hers, his hands trying to rest lightly on her hips and entirely failing—kneading and kneading until her driving fell all to pieces, until all she could think about was how much she wanted one of those hands to slide across her pelvis and settle its hard heat between her thighs.
Right in the middle of Paris traffic
, she scolded herself.
But she almost didn’t care.
She wanted him to do more—slide both those hands up under her jacket, cup her breasts through her silky top …
“Watch out!” Joss yelled, and she dodged away from a car changing lanes.
By the time she parked in front of her building, she was already going out of her mind.
“Are you crazy?” She jerked her helmet off. “Are you trying to get us killed? I have to concentrate when I’m driving!”
“What did I do this time?” A flush rode on Joss’s cheeks, his eyes dilated. All the muscles in his body strained, visibly fighting against his will to hold them in check.
“You—you—you—” Nothing. Just ridden behind her.
And she was a hot mess of hunger and nerves. He was her
friend
. He was the guy who had strolled off as if she was nothing more than some dumb girl trailing after him. He was—he was—
She wanted those callused hands to do things to her body. She’d always wanted him for hers, always dreamed about him. But how had her wants gotten so explicit, so fast? Not vague dreams of warmth and kisses, but hungers to be squeezed, rubbed, explored.
She pivoted and tapped in her code, her breaths short and shallow, embarrassed, as if she’d stepped across some important line in the sand.
Joss caught the door when it clicked and pushed it halfway open but stopped there, his own breathing hard and deep. “Maybe I should meet you at the top,” he muttered.
Meet her … ? “There’s only one staircase.”
“I could just climb up the outside.” A hard rise and fall of his chest, his hand fisting on the door he still held open. “It might be easier than trying to get up all those stairs behind you. It would give me something to do with my hands until we get to the actual bed.”
She stared at him, then up at her apartment window six floors up. “Are you like one of those guys who climbs the Eiffel Tower and all that?”
“No, I’m more like a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion. The Eiffel Tower has so many holds anybody could climb it.”
Célie was pretty sure that by
anybody
, he meant
anybody but the vast majority of the population including her
, but … but … she lost her train of thought before the intensity of his look.
Burning, she took a step back from it, her brain short-circuiting.
He licked his lips and gave his head a tiny shake as if to clear it. “God. I can’t believe this is actually happening.”
Her whole body itched. Standing so close to him but not quite touching made her feel like one giant frantic case of chicken pox. “Please just come with me up the stairs.” Her fingers flexed into her palms to keep from grabbing him and trying to haul him forcibly. “If you fell off the building, I’d kill you.”
“Climbing those stairs behind you without touching you might kill me,” he said roughly.
He got her mind and body so tangled up and confused with hot wanting. The Joss she thought she knew had been an honorary older brother, tolerant and quietly patient with her and subtly protective. He’d been the focal point of all her teenage fantasies, a safe place to put them, the only decent guy she knew. It hadn’t been reciprocal. He’d been the guy who had been able to leave her for his own dreams without a second thought.
To discover …
this
—this burning, flushed, taut hunger of his that pursued her up the dim staircase like a lion after its prey—was as if her whole world had been picked up and shaken until she fell out of it naked and wanting in front of a man who was half a stranger.
It felt real, though. It felt as if she was down out of her tower and aflame with realness. Or at least he’d finally invited himself into that tower instead of standing on the ground below.
She stopped just short of the top of the first flight. “Joss.” Her whole back burned, and her buttock muscles would not stop clenching and releasing even when she paused in her climbing. “You’re … looking at me or something. I can feel it.”
“Fuck, yes, I’m looking at you,” he said, low and strangled. “I can’t believe I’m finally going to be able to touch that ass.
Merde
, all the times you’ve twitched that thing at me and I haven’t grabbed a handful of it.”
She twisted her upper body cautiously, just enough to see his face. They hadn’t turned the lights on, so he was almost all shadow.
In the dark stairwell, his focus was intense, absolute, as if every flex of her body was being burned into him. All that rugged power was primed, ready. He had one hand closed around the railing, the muscles on his forearm standing out as he gripped it.
“You go first,” he said roughly. “I’ll try to give you a head start.”
She climbed three more steps and looked back down. He was so big and powerful and predatory just below her, held in check only by a clear effort of his own will. Half a stranger, half a friend.
What are you doing?
she thought.
Don’t let him in. Not in where he can break everything you’ve built of yourself down into nothing.
Her steps sped up.
Not
because she was running from a predator. Not at all. She was
naturally
this fast, that was all—a thousand times a day, she raced up and down the stairs at work, in a hurry to get everything done. She glanced back down. He still gripped that railing, staring up at her.