Her mouth opened in surprise when his lips crashed down on hers, and he took the opportunity of her parted lips to stroke his tongue over hers. She was a limp drunk in his arms for a second or two, and then she came alive and wrapped both her arms around his neck, kissing him back and sucking at his lips. She twined one of her curvy legs around his thigh.
Desire raced through him. Maxence was all too easily tempted, and this amorous, soft, yielding woman was his favorite kind of temptation. Her mouth tasted of tequila and vanilla peaches. He wondered vaguely if she’d eaten dessert or whether that was just her, and he wanted to nip her skin to find out. He reached one hand lower, feeling the curve of her hip in his palm, and then pressing all of his fingers around one overflowing globe of her ass.
She gasped against his mouth.
Shit,grabbing her ass had been too much. He lifted his head.
Her eyes were misty, as drunk with desire as she was with tequila. “Seriously? A guy like you, andme?”
His whole body was responding to her, and the impulse to fight a man and then take her vibrated in him. His voice had dropped lower when he rumbled, “Let me take you home.”
“And you’re going to fuck me?” she demanded, her voice low like she was exacting a promise from him.
Odd, he’d always thought of Americans as rather Puritanical when talking about sex.
Your job, they’d natter on about for hours. They were obsessed with work, again, due to their Puritan founders.
But sex? He’d seen grown women sputter and refuse to discuss what they wanted.
Not that he was any better about his darkest desires that he never admitted.
Yet, the woman seemed to want an assurance, so he leaned over and whispered near her ear, his breath puffing her gossamer hair, “Yes, I’m going to fuck you until you scream and can’t move with exhaustion.”
She paused, but then turned away. “No, you won’t.”
He tugged her hand back and caught her in his arms. “I will fuck you in ways you haven’t dreamed of. I’ll be your sure thing for the nightif you will just get in the damn car.”
She drew back and examined his face, seeming to look for signs that he was serious, and then took his hand and walked toward the cab.
He dropped his jacket around her shoulders again and hustled her into the back seat of the cab, handing the driver the little paper on which she’d written her address.
The guy looked at the paper. “You’re sure this is right?”
“Yes, she’s rented an apartment there.”
“If you say so.”
The taxi drove through the Parisian night, speeding on expressways and making quick turns on city streets.
The woman snuggled against his side, and her alcoholic breath warmed his neck. He’d kept one arm around her in case she passed out and flopped over, but her fingers roamed over his tee shirt, tracing his hard-won musculature. None of that had been built in a gym. There had been no gyms for miles where he’d been living for the past several years.
The driver turned the steering wheel, and the car coasted to a stop at a dingy building emblazoned with neon-colored graffiti in at least three alphabets.
The part of town didn’t alarm Maxence any more than it had her. Though some people might have hesitated to venture into “District 93,” as the French social services ministry euphemistically called it, Max had lived in much more impoverished and violent areas of the world for most of the last few years.
The driver asked, “You sure this is it?”
Maxence jiggled the little blonde with his arm. “This is it,ma chérie?”
She turned and blinked at the building. “Yeah, this is it. I’m on the third floor. There’s no elevator. You okay with three flights of stairs?”
He almost retorted something, but she was obviously an American. Most Europeans and Parisians didn’t balk at climbing a few flights of stairs. “Yes, that’s fine. Let’s go, then.”
Max added a tip on his phone for the cab and thanked the driver, who sped away as soon as Max slammed the car door.
It was very late at night, past midnight, and several of the streetlamps farther down were broken. The cement-block buildings faded away into the darkness, and few trees had found root in the paved-over landscape.
Window boxes shadowed the barred windows. In the daytime, those might have some greenery.
