Around his waist, his flesh felt smooth under her palm, other than the hard rolls of muscle under his skin.
Examining his tattoo that way wasn’t going to work either.
Dree plastered a huge grin to her face and sat up on her knees, reaching for Max’s tee shirt hem.
Maxence’s smile brightened more. He grabbed Dree around her waist and tossed her onto her back.
Giggling, she reached for his tee shirt again to pull it off of him.
She snagged the soft cotton with the tips of her fingers and dragged it upward.
Maxence lifted his arms over his head, his rounded biceps bulging as his arms bent, and Dree hopped up on her knees to wrestle it off of him.
Maxence had put on a few pounds since they’d returned to Monaco because he’d been eating large portions at every meal, much more than he’d been eating in Nepal, but none of it seemed to be deposited on his body as fat. The rounds of his muscles had engorged, filling out his chest and arms with a more muscular physique, but his lean waist was still tight. Furrows cut between each set of muscles that wrapped his arms and torso. He looked like he was training to be a movie star.
Dree was momentarily too distracted to get around behind him and get a good look at that tattoo.
He stretched, crawling on his hands and knees to reach for the lamp beside the bed, and he clicked it off.
No way.
She asked him, “Are you sure? Usually, you like the light.”
“We can see the stars through the portholes,” he said, his deep voice rough with passion already.
Outside the rounded-rectangular windows set into the hull of the plane, pinpricks and smears of stars burned blue and purple in the deep night. They were flying over the Atlantic Ocean, as far from any light pollution as was possible, and the stars were even brighter than when she was a little girl out on the sheep ranch hundreds of miles away from civilization.
“Oh.” Dree was drawn to the long porthole window. She knelt on the bed and set her fingers against the cool plastic separating her from the deep space void outside. “It’s so pretty.”
Belts of stars and constellation clusters frosted the sky, and the occasional twinkle of another airplane in the distance raced through the glitter.
It was almost like being on a spaceship flying through a galaxy.
In the dark, Maxence’s warm fingers touched her shoulder and stroked down her arm. He lifted her wrists and pinned them against the wall of the airplane above the window. “Don’t move.”
His hands roamed over her body, his lips close behind, a soft exploration of her skin and secret places that sent shivers through her until she whispered, begging him to take her.
He did, still locking her wrists against the wall and pressing her breasts against the cool plastic of the window, his thick erection sliding up inside her and stroking, his other hand pulling her hips back over him.
When she was whimpering, almost crying out because her body had wound tightly and she couldn’t breathe because the tension was too tight inside of her, his fingers slipped around the curve of her pelvis to her clit and slowly rubbed long strokes of friction around where he penetrated her.
With her eyes full of stars and her body full ofhim,Dree climaxed like she was falling into the universe, and waves of heaven washed through her.
With a grunt, Maxence grabbed her in his arms around her shoulders and hips and thrust up into her blindly, a spasm of need before he throbbed deep inside her, and his body clenched with release.
They slid down into the covers, wrapped in each other’s arms, and slept for a few hours until an alarm from Maxence’s phone warned them that they had only two hours left before they landed.
Maxence sprang up and was in the bathroom to shower before Dree got her eyes properly open, and he was dressed in khakis and a blue dress shirt when he came out.
Darn it,Dree had missed her chance to check out his back tattooagain.
Chapter Seventeen
High Noon
Maxence
Maxence was in New Mexico to do a job, and he knew the job he had to do.
