The shockwave rippled over her body. Dree froze, her skin clammy.
She sucked in a breath. “Code black.Code black.We need tostop.”
The warmth and weight above her were gone as the mattress bounced around her.
Maxence asked, “What happened?”
Dree curled and sat up, tearing the blindfold off her face.
As the black silk slipped off her eyes, Maxence was sitting back on his heels, his trousers zipped up and buttoned, and his hands open at the height of his shoulders. “Dree, talk to me. What’s going on?”
His mouth was a flat line of concern and his dark eyes were solemn, not making fun of her for freaking out.
So much swirled in her head that she couldn’t find the end of the tangled skein to yank on.
What Mairearad had said.
What Dree haddone.
What Maxence had driven her to do, even though her fingernails were her own responsibility.
Dree turned over her hands, staring at her palms and fingers. She was meticulous about cleaning under her nails with a brush, a habit left over from her surgical rotations but also crucial in the ER. As always, her fingernails were scrupulously clean, but she’d scrubbed blood out from underneath them more than once after sex with Maxence.
And even though it felt like puzzle pieces were snapping together in her head, she might be wrong.
She wanted to be wrong.
Dree didn’t want to go down this path and have this discussion if she was wrong.
She asked him, “That very first night in Paris when we met, what had happened right before that?”
He blinked, his thick black eyelashes batting down over his eyes.“What?”
“When we met in Paris a couple of months ago, what had you been doing that day?”
He blinked at her again, and his hands slowly fell to his thighs. “If that’s what you were thinking about during foreplay, I must not have been doing something right.”
She smiled at him a little. She wasn’t mad at him, so there was no reason to frown at him. “You were doing everything right. I just—there’s more to this. I’m worried about something.”
He ran one hand through his hair and sat back on the bed, crossing his legs. “I’m not following where you’re going, but that might be because my blood isn’t reaching my brain right now.”
Dree leaned back on her hands. “Mine, either.”
“A safe word is only supposed to be used if someone crosses hard limits. You’re not supposed to use it lightly. If you just wanted to slow down or talk, you can just say so. You don’t have to resort to the safe word.”
She bit her lip and then said, “Oh, Max. I just—I just want to know. So, in Paris. What were you doing that day?”
He flipped one hand in the air, impatient. “Does it matter? I’m with you now. Nobody else matters to me. I mean, I have friends of all genders, but I proposed to you because I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life withyou.What do you care about somebody I was with several months ago, before we met?”
“Please, just tell me.”
Max looked down and ran his hand through his hair again. “An old school friend of mine, Simone Maina, was being abused by her husband, and she found me when we were both in the casino in Monte Carlo. I helped her escape.”
He’d been rescuing a woman, every bit as much as he’d saved Dree in Paris.
Because Maxence rescued people; that’s what he did.
She said, “Tell me more about this rescue operation of yours.”
