"You might," he concedes.
Then he leans in.
The movement is slow. Intentional. Giving me every opportunity to step back, to redirect, to establish a boundary that he will respect without hesitation. But I do not step back. I stay rooted to the mat, my heart pounding against my ribs, my breath catching in my throat, and his lips brush mine with a featherlight pressure that is not a kiss. It is a promise.
"But if you last," he murmurs against my mouth, his breath warm, his voice dropping to a frequency that I feel in my spine, "not only will I take you to dinner, but we can absolutely return to these mats so I can do what I have been envisioning since I walked in here and found you dripping in sweat and fury."
My jaw drops.
Literally. My mouth falls open. My eyes go wide. The blush that erupts across my face is so violent and immediate that I am surprised the sweat on my cheeks does not evaporate on contact. He did not just say that. He did not just stand in the Omega training room, in his hockey jacket, and tell me with complete sincerity that he wants to bring me back here and...
He chuckles at my expression.
Then he presses his lips to my neck. Soft. Warm. A brief, devastating contact against my pulse point that sends a shiver cascading from my throat to the base of my spine, his sandalwood scent flooding my senses at point-blank range until I forget what breathing feels like.
"Go shower," he says against my skin. "Etienne mentioned you like that dessert place. I called them and asked if they wouldstay open late for us. The owner owed me a favor from a previous visit, and I intend to collect."
He pulls back.
Steps away.
Turns toward the door with the casual authority of a man who has just rearranged my entire nervous system and is now exiting the premises like he committed no crimes.
"YOU ARE A SWEET-TALKING ASSHOLE!" I shout at his retreating back.
His chuckle echoes down the hallway, low and warm and infuriatingly satisfied, the sound bouncing off the corridor walls and filtering back into the training room where I stand, flushed and trembling and unable to determine whether the trembling is from the boxing or the man or the lethal combination of both.
I press my hands to my burning cheeks.
He called the dessert place. He tracked me down in a training room. He told me my passion matters and then followed it up with the most shamelessly explicit promise I have ever received from a man who was not already horizontal.
I do not know whether to be excited about the dessert or thrilled at the prospect of being tousled onto training mats by a man whose flirtation style should be classified as a weapon. Both options are appealing. Both options are terrifying. Both options exist in a reality that I would not have believed possible two weeks ago, when dessert was a luxury and physical intimacy was a transaction and the idea of a man pursuing me for reasons beyond convenience was a fantasy I had retired from active duty.
And then it clicks.
The slow, spreading realization that settles into my consciousness with the warmth of a sunrise illuminating a landscape I have been navigating in the dark.
Each of them is different.
Etienne gives me slow, progressive love. The kind that builds one gesture at a time, one quiet moment at a time, one shared silence at a time. Patient and deliberate and steady, the love of a man who writes romance because he understands that the best stories are the ones that take their time arriving at the destination.
Cal is the balance between slow and bold. Earnest and impulsive, his affection arriving in bursts of sincerity that catch me off guard because they come wrapped in sarcasm that I have to unwrap before I find the tenderness hidden inside. He is learning as he goes, adjusting his rhythm with each interaction, figuring out the man he wants to be by paying attention to the woman in front of him.
And Raphaël throws every rule out the window.
No preamble. No gradual escalation. No careful navigation of boundaries that he approaches with polite uncertainty. He walks into a room and states his intentions with the blunt precision of a man who has decided what he wants and considers ambiguity a waste of everyone's time. He flirts with the confidence of someone who has earned the right to be direct and trusts the recipient to match his energy or redirect it.
Which explains, now that I think about it, why he never wanted to agree to my rules in the first place.
Because Raphaël Calder does not operate within frameworks that other people design. He does not follow scripts. He does not perform the expected beats of courtship in the expected order because the expected order bores him, and boring a man who got his ass kicked in a Parisian alley and came back nine months later as a medal-winning fighter is a tactical error he does not intend to make with me.
I shake my head, a grin spreading across my face that I cannot suppress and do not want to.
Sneaky fucker.
CHAPTER 32
Pucking Valentine
