B00CACT6TM EBOK Read online

  She was clearly getting addicted.

  Chapter 17

  It was amazing how much energy and pleasure surged through Gabriel on his walk home at midnight, when that walk was in the same direction as Jolie’s apartment. Even knowing that if he tried to redirect his path enough to show up at her door instead of his own, she would probably hit him over the head.

  She hadn’t come to the restaurant that night. It pissed him off. Come on, you love this, and you’re only here three and a half days each week. Don’t waste it.

  He had almost called her to beg her to come by, but that had pissed him off, too. He had kept hoping she would forgive him for being a connard earlier in the day and show up on her own accord; and in the end, instead of calling her, he had just had a crappy, high-strung night, always checking the back door in the hopes to spot her coming down the alley. Always turning away in crushing, growling disappointment.

  He lived so much too much on all his emotions. He wished sometimes that he could flatten himself out, be all even and self-possessed—like Daniel, merde—but then he gave up on it, because it felt horrible and two-dimensional when he actually tried. Who wanted to live life like a sheet of metal?

  But, merde. He stood for a moment under their balconies, looking up at Jolie’s. Strongly tempted to throw a stone. To sing a teasing little serenade. To whistle for her to come. His grin flashed.

  It left him wide open at her mercy, those emotions. Sent to heaven or hell by a touch of her finger or its removal, and she held cautiously back.

  Well, not so cautiously sometimes, but she wanted to hold cautiously back. No one else moves as fast as you. You need to remember that other people go slower than you do.

  Oh, and if you do get what you want—me—then it’s at the price of your own heart, because I like to dump people. Sucker.

  He fisted big fists and pushed himself up his own stairway. There was always that leap from the balcony if he cracked later, he promised himself, with a delighted kick of testosterone.

  He took a shower and went into his kitchen to find some food. The potato chips were sitting in the middle of the kitchen table, which threw him. In his kitchens, he always put things back in their exact place. They were always where he wanted them.

  Still, she had him pretty rattled. Maybe he had actually forgotten to clean up.

  He reached for the bag and realized there was a big white note taping the bag closed. Mange quelque chose de plus équilibré, it said. Eat something better for you. With an arrow toward the refrigerator.

  His chest tightened, so that he almost couldn’t breathe. He approached the refrigerator as if it might contain one of those exploding practical jokes, snakes springing out at him or something. No. Two simple glass containers of rice and—his heart beat so hard as he peeled back the lid—something with red lentils. He dipped his head and breathed in the fresh clear scent of cilantro and then the richer, earthy aromas it brightened. Dal.

  Something good and filling and healthy that he would never in a million years eat at his own restaurant, where they didn’t serve Indian food.

  Oh, God. He actually thought he might cry. Had she done this after he stalked away from her like a bastard?

  The soft knock on Jo’s door came a little after midnight. She could feel him through the door, a dangerous monster in the dark, wanting in. She had stayed up late, then lambasted herself for doing so and gone to bed around eleven-thirty, only to twist and turn under the thin shelter of the sheet, watching the open balcony windows.

  She pulled jeans and a shirt on over her pajamas this time. She just couldn’t be that brazen, to answer the door nearly naked twice in a row, especially knowing what was waiting out there. A great shadow, leaning into the door. “What do you want?”

  His eyes flickered over her rumpled hair. She had forgotten to turn on the light. He was a darker figure than anything else there, indistinct and very large, shadows condensed in him. Danger brought to life.

  “Were you asleep?” He was breathing deeply, and it couldn’t possibly be from the stairs. Not with the physical intensity of his life.

  “A little bit.”

  “Sorry,” he said. And he did sound a little sorry. But he didn’t go away. Forearms braced on the doorjamb, he leaned his weight into them, gazing down at her, swamping her. She had a feeling he was trying very hard not to push his way in. “How did you get into my place?” he murmured.

  Oh, so he had found her present. Her heart squeezed with pleasure and trepidation. It felt so good to take care of him. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Raphaël’s key.”

  “Ah, so that’s why he looked so pleased with himself.” Gabriel leaned more weight onto his forearms. “Why didn’t you come by?”

  Her face flickered with a smile, hard to keep lit under the thick pressure building in the room. “You’ll spoil me, letting me come by every mealtime like some stray alley cat.”

  “You’re not my stray,” he said. “And I want to spoil you.”

  She slipped in closer to him, unable to help it. His forearms, braced high against the doorjamb, his body on offer for her. She wanted more of its heat and strength. She wanted more of that danger and that utter, blissful sense of safety of their kisses in that alley.

  “If I kiss you, will you not throw me down on that bed because you’re sure I want it?”

  Eyebrows plummetted, and just for a second that aggressive, take-what-I-want face was wide-open with shock and hurt. “I wouldn’t do that. Putain, you really do think I’m a beast.” He pulled his weight back off his arms, straightening away from her.

  “I didn’t mean—” She shook her head and put a hand on one bunched shoulder. He stilled. Then slowly let his weight settle back against his forearms. “I didn’t mean that. I wouldn’t open the door to you, if I thought you would hurt me. But I don’t know what I’m doing here. You’re bigger than anyone I’ve ever met in my whole entire life. You fill every inch of space. Just because you’re right, that I want you, doesn’t mean I’m going to take you.”

  He shook his shaggy head. “It’s like a diet, isn’t it? I hate diets.”

  Her fingers spread unconsciously on his shoulder, seeking to feel more of him. That shoulder tightened under her hand, more pressure going against those forearms holding him off her. Her fingers shifted, tracing the effect of that effort farther, seeing what other muscles came into play. His back, his abs . . . his biceps, his forearms themselves. . . .

  “They’re evil,” he breathed. “Diets. Sado-masochistic.”

  “But sometimes you do need to pay attention to what you put in your mouth,” she said, as she curled her hand behind his neck, lifted herself up, and kissed him.

  All his muscles strained against the doorjamb as he took her mouth in return, long and hungrily. He didn’t lower his arms. He didn’t try to touch her. Just his mouth, his neck straining to bend low enough for her, while her hands slid from his nape to frame his jaw as she kissed him longer and longer. He was so intensely—everything. She couldn’t get enough of him.

  He made a little groaning sound when she finally fell back onto her feet. And then a low, dangerous growl that licked heat all through her.

  She forced herself to take a step back and drop her hands away from him, trying to get her bearings.

  The muscles on his arms corded, fists clenching above the doorjamb. But he kept them there. “It’s biology, isn’t it. Women are programmed to select, to make sure the man would be a good—partner.” His mouth twisted. “And you don’t think I would be one. That’s why the invisible fence. Right?”

  “I just don’t know what I’m doing,” she repeated softly. “You’re so big.”

  He shivered, locked against the doorframe. “You’re killing me.”

  “Will you keep your arms on the door?” she whispered.

  “Oh, putain, you’re so mean,” he breathed. And lowered his head to her so she could take his mouth.

  She dragged her hands through his hair and over his shoul
ders, pulling herself into him as she kissed him and kissed him, struggling to get closer all by herself, struggling to press her body as tightly to him as she wanted without his help.

  She couldn’t do it. She went wild at the frustration, kissing him harder and harder, wide open, dragging her hands over all the bow-taut muscles of his back, his sides, sliding them back up over his chest to dig into his shoulders again and try—try and fail, try and fail—to get enough of his heat.

  He didn’t touch her. He locked his arms against the doorjamb until she thought he might break through the frame, and he gave his all to the kisses, a desperate claiming.

  He had promised, and he let her. Do everything she could to him, without taking over. The self-restraint undid her in a different and even more profound way than the feel of his body.

  The years of yoga hadn’t left her weak, not by any means. She could pull herself up into him. She could wrap her thighs around him and hold herself there in a long, strong grip, taking her time, in for the long haul. She could tighten herself to him until the clothes between them seemed as if they should burn away in their heat, no space left for them.

  But she still couldn’t get close enough.

  She twisted against him, thighs locked around his hips, still kissing, kissing, kissing, while he hung there. Wild. Crazy wild.

  “Jolie. Jolie.” He was begging, her name a plea. His body was so taut, it felt as if his muscles might just snap, fling him apart. He fought her for her mouth, fought to make her lose her mind.

  No, he had already won that battle. Why wouldn’t she let him take his hands off the door?

  She wanted them around her back. She wanted his hands digging into her butt. She wanted the two of them wild and tangling in her bed. She wanted him to take her like that, driven crazy.

  If she wanted to establish a long, happy, fruitful working relationship with someone, this was sure as hell not the way to go about it.

  That he was aroused, that he was starving aroused now, was unmistakable. But beyond her name, he didn’t ask. He bunched and clenched under her frantic clutching, he arched his pelvis into hers, he kissed her mindless. But he didn’t take his hands off the door.

  She slid down at last from his body, like some mud slide caving helplessly off a mountain, that was how destroyed she felt. She was shaking all over.

  She literally fell against his chest, swaying forward, unable to hold herself up for the shivering, hot hunger.

  “Jolie.” His voice was so hoarse she could barely hear it. She petted his chest in frantic, trembling touches. “Please say I can take my arms off this putain de porte.”

  She slid her head up and down in agreement against his chest, shaking all through her, unable to look at him, so desperate for him to crack.

  He picked her up by the hips, just lifted her straight off the floor, and kicked the door closed behind him as he strode straight down the hall to her bed. He stilled with her held vertical just above it. “And throw you down on it? Because I’m pretty sure you really, really want it.”

  “Yes.” She groaned it like a curse, twisting in his hands. “Yes, please.”

  He did throw her. Tossed her onto the mattress and came down on top of her like an avalanche, ripping her shirt over her head.

  He laughed, rough and despairing, when he discovered her little white cami under that shirt and nothing else. He wrenched her jeans open instantly to check for the lace-edged boy short. “Bébé, when I told you I would treat you right and not like a beast, I didn’t expect this much provocation. You want me wild.”

  “I do.” She flexed into him, pressing her hips up hard. “I do.”

  “Bordel.” He yanked her jeans off and threw them somewhere. “Well, you’ve got me that way.”

  Her hands slid over his forearms and stopped to run over the deep red indentations left from the door frame. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  He dragged his hands over her body roughly to grab and pin her shoulders to the mattress. “If you tell me you didn’t mean to go this far, I will lose my freaking mind.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” she whispered, running her hands down his torso, finding the clasp of his own jeans. “But don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”

  He shivered, digging in the pocket of those jeans. She could be pissed off at him later for showing up at her apartment at midnight with a condom in his pocket. Now, she just tried to help him put it on.

  He knocked her hand away as if she had tried to hurt him. “This is going to be bad enough as it is.”

  “Bad?” Offense prickled, even as he pushed the little boy shorts and the panties under them to the side.

  “Wild.” He positioned himself against her, fingers forcing the panties and shorts out of the way until their elastic dug into the skin of her hip. “Rough.” She arched her hips up involuntarily at the promise, wrapping her thighs around him. He drove into her in one savage thrust, and she moaned with the pure pleasure of that first hard taking. “Short.” For a second, he managed to hold still, staring down at her, maybe to let her body adjust to him. What her body did instead was writhe helplessly for movement. “Putain. And I’m pretty sure you’ll find my manners atrocious.”

  “No ladies’ first?” She bucked her hips against him, managed to make it teasing.

  “Oh, minette, I wish. You have no idea what you just did to me.” He drove into her hard again, making her gasp, her body all his, controlled by pleasure.

  “I thought you believed in doing impossible things.” She dragged one of his hands off her thigh and to her sex.

  A savage grin glinted, even in the dark. “All right, chaton. Why don’t we try how many impossible things we can do before breakfast?”

  She had never in her life had her body worked over the way he worked it. He made her come with him, with a kind of ruthless determination, as he reduced her to a begging mass of desire with his thumb while his thrusts grew harder and harder.

  She bit her own thumb to keep from screaming out just before the waves broke, and then she was wrenched apart by them, lost in them even as he grabbed her bottom with both hard hands and drove one last time into her.

  He hung over her for a long time, after that. When she opened her eyes, he was just watching her, his expression impossible to fathom in the dark. He stroked her hair off her face and then slipped away into the bathroom. She heard the shower run briefly.

  He came back naked, towel-dried, the light from the shower falling across his body.

  Her mouth went dry, despite her satiation. It was like seeing a god walk out of heaven into the mortal shadows.

  A wild god. An old god. From deep, dark, primitive times.

  He really did have a beautiful body. The lean, delineated muscle of a man so physically active that his greatest challenge was to manage to eat enough to keep on weight. The heavy shoulders of his gym workouts. The tight butt. His sex jutting from dark curls.

  Jutting again? Already?

  He slipped into bed behind her and pulled her back in tight against his body. Before she could relax into the post-sex cuddle, one arm tightened around her upper torso like a vise. The other slipped between her thighs. She made a little sound, her last orgasm still recent enough that it would take very little to send her into another one. His hand pulled back a little, just enough to frustrate. His low growl seemed to nip warning teeth all up and down her skin. “Pace yourself, minette. This is punitive. I want you to know exactly what you did to me, there in the doorway.”

  Chapter 18

  Gabriel slept until the sun was high on the horizon, nine o’clock, which must be very late for him. His big body sprawled across her double bed, leaving her almost no room. If she didn’t want a man to take up her space, had she ever picked the wrong man to let in.

  All her centered, happy existence tilting toward him like he tilted the cheap mattress. It made her feel as if she was scrambling to stay up as a cliff crumbled out from under her.

  She tried to wiggle out from
under his arm, and he groaned at her efforts, his eyes opening reluctantly. From close to her face, she could see all the striations in the blue.

  She blushed fiercely and twisted away. Just as her body was escaping, his fingertips made a grab, too late, and she stood.

  “Merde,” he said from behind her. “Please tell me those finger-shaped bruises on your butt are not from me. No. No. Don’t tell me that. I don’t like the other possibility, either.”

  “They’re not from anybody else,” she said dryly, hunting for something to cover herself. Only lace-edged boy shorts immediately presented themselves to her eye, and she just couldn’t go there, not with the bright sunlight beating through on what they had done during the night. She made a beeline for the bathroom.

  When she came back out, a long, hot shower later, in a towel because she still had to dig through her carry-on for clothes, he had a pillow over his head, locked firmly there by powerful forearms.

  She snuck closer. He had bruise marks, too. In lines, diagonal across his arms, the shape of a door frame.

  He pulled the pillow off his head and looked at her. Deep in his eyes, there was something wary, careful. “I’m sorry I was rough. I know I told you I would treat you right. I meant to.”

  She smiled a little. She couldn’t help it. Embarrassed though she was, there was something about how wild she had driven him that made her feel like a cat with cream.

  Some of his wariness faded. But he still watched. Stuffing the pillow under his head, he stretched an arm to her. “How about a little early-morning cuddle?”

  She hesitated, not sure if she could bare herself any more to him, after that night. Her sense of intimacy needed time to adjust. “I think you’re late to work.”

  His arm drooped back to the bed. She realized only as it faded that there had been a profound sense of contentment in him, and she had just stomped on it. The wariness came back, lurking deep in the blue, like a little sea monster no one would ever believe existed.