His eyes flicked down to my lips.
“Frankie,” he breathed, “tell me no. If you want me to stop, tell me no.”
But I didn’t tell him no. I leaned in.
When he kissed me, slow and reverent and hungry all at once, it felt like stepping into the warm glow of the entire city. Paris itself softened around us. Maybe fairy tales weren’t such impossible things after all.
22
ALEX
“This way,” I said to Frankie, tugging her by the hand down a side street.
We’d stayed in the club longer than I meant to. Kissing lazily, stoking warm, candlelit desire in each of our bodies. It was low and slow enough that it could wait, but I knew now from her impulsiveness, from her fire that melted my ice, that Frankie didn’t just want patience. She wanted adventure, too.
And my body was humming with the desire to give her one in the hot, sensual way she loved.
Or hell, maybe I just needed it. To take her hard and fast against a wall because I needed to be sure this night was real. Another reminder she was still here.
I also liked the sound of taking a moment to claim her on my own before we went back to the strange life we’d been living lately, too. Tonight was just the two of us, but there were more in the mix.
Me, Frankie, and the other two men who cared about her. Two men who weren’t damaged enough to resist the feelings she evoked within their hearts.
“I need you,” I let myself rasp into Frankie’s ear as I swept her into my arms. We’d found our way to an alley, empty and dark enough that no one would see us without looking hard, though close enough to the streetlights that it felt safe. She belonged in the light always, but right now, no one else was allowed to see her.
Frankie seemed to get the picture faster than she would have only a week ago.
She knew instinctively how to fit our bodies together, how to give me pleasure in the same way I wanted to give it to her. She hitched one leg up around me, spreading those sumptuous thighs as her arms snaked around my neck.
“I need you, too.”
I kissed her like a man starved for once. I’d held back before, tried not to kiss her with too much feeling for fear of blurring lines, but now I was deep, hungry, and desperate in a way I’d never let myself be with anyone.
Her gasp lit something molten inside me, something that made restraint feel impossible.
She arched against me, her body warm and pliant, trembling with every brush of my hands. The alley felt like it held its breath around us, the whole world shrinking down to the heat of her mouth and the soft, needy sounds she made just for me.
Frankie clung to me, wild and unashamed, meeting every touch with her own urgency as I scrambled to release my cock from my pants, pull her panties down, plunge myself into her wet heat.
She wasn’t passive—she matched me, teased me, pulled me closer like she wanted to fuse our bodies together. I lost track of the city around us, lost track of anything except the way she whispered my name like it meant something sacred.
When she came from the force of my thrusts and my own release, she shook in my arms, and I held her through every moment, stunned by how deeply it hit me to feel her come apart just for me.
It wasn’t a graceful or slow first time—first time just us two, first time in public, first time since I’d admitted the way she made me feel anywhere but my dick.
But I took Frankie hard against that wall in the streets of Paris, and she came apart in my arms, then I crouched in the dirt of the street to lick her pussy. She was still dripping with the evidence of where I’d been.
When she finally softened, a second orgasm taking it out of her, boneless and breathless, I gathered her up, my heart thundering like I’d just survived a war.
She touched my jaw, still shaking, eyes huge with emotion I couldn’t even begin to decipher—but it was for me. Somehow, impossibly, for me.
It was far better than I fucking deserved.
It was time, at last, to head home.
Or at least to the hotel we’d called home for a few nights.
I kept walking with her pressed to my side, both of us flushed, messy, and breathing in uneven bursts.
