Chapter 1
Jean-Baptiste Mercier worked hard to repress his smile—at least some of it, if not all—but his cheeks refused to cooperate. Spending time with the woman in the passenger seat of his rental car did that to him. Suddenly he was part golden retriever, happy with the world and excited to experience the evening’s adventures.
“Are you going to keep grinning like that?” Samira Palmer, the beautiful source of all his enthusiasm, raised a brow. She kept her answering smile severely repressed, but her laughing eyes gave her away. For this evening’s Halloween bonfire in her hometown, Journey’s End in the Hudson River Valley, she wore a black maxi sundress beneath her jean jacket. One that allowed a breathtaking view of her shapely mahogany legs down below and her cleavage up top. Controlling his hands proved as challenging as reining in his smile, so he gave in to the impulse to trail his fingers up her thigh. “Everyone in the park is going to know we’ve been—stop that!”
She smacked his hand away, squirming out of his reach as best she could.
“What? I’m not allowed to touch you now? I feel like we should consummate our new relationship. Strictly to make it legal.”
“First of all, consummation is for marriage,” she said, rearranging her dress so that her bare flesh was no longer visible to his avid gaze.
Without missing a beat, he leaned across the console to nuzzle the silky and fragrant side of her neck, capturing a whiff of sandalwood in the process. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her as close as he could.
“Marriage. Got it. My mistake.”
“Second,” she continued, a distinct and breathless coo in her voice now as she tipped her head to the side to give him better access, “we’re going to put sex on the shelf while we get to know each other.”
“Indeed,” he murmured against her neck, where he could feel her pulse thud its way to the thousand-beats-per-minute range. She melted into dark chocolate pudding when he scraped his teeth along the sensitive tendons, which gave him the idea to slide his hand up her side, beneath her jacket, and flick her nipples with his thumbs for the pure pleasure of feeling her gasp and arch against him. Ah. There it was. “Well, if you think celibacy is for the best, then who am I to argue with you?”
“And finally,” she said, her voice dissolving into little more than a whimper as he continued to stroke her breasts, “we’ve just agreed to see each other, right? No need for all this talk about legalities.”
He didn’t like the word just.
Raising his head, he pulled back enough to look into her brown eyes, glazed now with lust. But beneath that? Trepidation. Which was only fair, he supposed, when you were a small-town career woman who’d recently been engaged to another man and now found yourself unexpectedly embroiled in a passionate new affair with a French billionaire—Baptiste.
In fact, what had she called him yesterday?
Ah, yes. An international player.
More words he didn’t like.
“You’re mistaken, ma reine.” My queen. He took great care to maintain his hold on her breasts, which were deliciously soft and full, both to maintain the renewed connection between them and to remind her that he now had full access to her body with no intention of relinquishing it. “You have finally seen it my way, which is that a one-night stand could never be enough between us. We’ve agreed both that we’re forming a relationship and that it will be exclusive. Two things that I, for one, have never done before. So, you see, we’ve passed many relationship milestones already in our short time together, and there is a need for legalities.”
“I see,” she said. “And what do you suggest?”
What his seething hormones and rock-hard queue urged him to suggest was that they skip the bonfire, go back to his hotel suite and spend tonight as they’d spent their first night together—with him buried to the hilt inside her and their limbs twined together.
But…this was his opportunity to spend some time getting to know her and her delightful town better, and he wanted to meet her parents, who would also be at the bonfire.
That being the case, right now all they could do was the next best thing.
So he flashed her a dark look of intent and reached under the hem of her dress.
“Baptiste!” She shut her thighs to him, clamping down on his left wrist. “We are in a public—”
He put his lips to her ear. “Shhh. The windows are darkened. We’re parked far away, under a tree. No one can see us.”
She made a sound, half shaky laugh and half shuddering sigh. Cast a furtive look around with her too-bright eyes, and saw what he saw—namely that the car faced a park full of people, none of whom were within a hundred meters of them. Looked back at him, her face flushed and her lips dewy.
He stared at her through his heavy-lidded eyes, trying to smile despite the growing tightness in his chest and throat and the blue balls that would keep aching until he got inside her tight pussy again.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” she said helplessly.
There was only one response to that.
“Because you were waiting for me, chérie,” he said tenderly.
She hesitated.
“It’s okay,” he said softly. “Anything we do to give each other pleasure is okay.”
Shaky laugh from Samira, tinged with despair. “Why can’t I ever tell you no?”
That wasn’t the question at all.
“Why do you keep trying?” he asked, curling his fingers against her satiny thigh…
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