“Beautiful, don’t you think?”
I smile as Aaron’s arms circle my waist, my eyes fixed on the Tower standing before me. “It is.”
“Oh, you’re talking about the Tower.” He curves his lips against my cheek. “I’m talking about you.”
I shake my head and turn my face toward his. “You’ve been waiting to do that, haven’t you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
My fingers link through his, and I turn my attention back to the Eiffel Tower. There are no words to describe the feelings running rampant through my body in this moment. Being back at the place it all started, with him, is surreal. It’s been so long, but it really does feel like yesterday he was pulling me to the coffee shop around the corner to replace the one he made me spill.
“At least I’m not covered in coffee this time.”
Aaron laughs and steps to my side, keeping one arm firmly around my waist. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“Sure you didn’t. I believe you.”
“Whether I did or not, it remains the greatest success in pick-up fuck-ups.”
“Pick-up fuck-ups?”
“Where it all goes wrong but still works. At least, that’s what Joey, my nineteen-year-old cousin, tells me.”
I roll my eyes, but I’m laughing. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“What did you think when you saw me for the first time?”
I stop and look at him after a long moment of silence. His eyes are set on me, clouded with that memory and full of tenderness, and his lips are curved on each side.
Slowly, he reaches out to push my hair from my face. “I remember sitting on the grass, working on something for my father, when you walked past. You were humming to yourself. You couldn’t have been more in your own little world if you’d tried to be. You walked past and I watched you, and I remember the exact moment you truly looked at the Tower.
“You just…stopped. Your eyes flicked over it until you’d seen every last inch and your lips parted like you’d never seen anything that incredible before. And it was as if the whole world stopped, just for that moment.” He trails his fingers down my cheek and cups my jaw. “I couldn’t let you leave without speaking to you. If we’d only ever exchanged a few words, that would have been good enough. But I had to talk to you.”
“Why? I was just a crazy American girl amazed by the Tower, just like thousands of others that pass through here every year.”
“I was as amazed by you as you were by the Tower. Just like you had to see it, I had to speak to you.”
I touch my lips to his gently. “I’m glad you did. Most of the time, anyway.”
“Most of the time?” He smirks when I shrug in response then sighs. “Come on. I made reservations for dinner.”
“I’m not exactly dressed for dinner.” I look at my light blue dress.
“You look perfect. No arguments.” He pulls me down a long, winding street, and I flash back to our first date.
The one after he replaced my coffee. The proper one.
“Aaron?” My smile creeps into my voice. “Are you taking me to that little sandwich shop we found?”
“It’s not really dinner, I know. But it was the first thing we ate together in Paris and it doesn’t seem right we go elsewhere tonight.”
Holy shit. “Are you trying to make me swoon with your incredible ability to recall all the firsts in our relationship after all these years?”
He turns to me outside the quaint sandwich bar and smirks, his eyes flashing lustfully. “You remember the hotel.”
Of course I remember the hotel. I lost my damn virginity in it. In our suite, for fuck’s sake.
“Oh, I remember. Nice move there.”
“It wasn’t that bad.” He pulls me into the building before I can respond and rolls off our orders. My club sandwich, on multigrain bread, with extra cheese and lettuce. His BLT, holding the lettuce and doubling the bacon and tomato. Some things don’t change at all.
We step outside, our sandwiches in his hand, and I pick the conversation back up.
“You have to be kidding, right? It was hardly earth-shattering,” I remind him, thinking of the first time we had sex. You know all those romance novels where the first time doesn’t hurt and it ends with a mind-blowing orgasm? Yeah, they’re called fiction for a reason. They’re bullshit.
“Day…” He can’t help the laugh that escapes him, and I fight my own.
“Fucking hell, Aaron. It hurt so badly I cried for like half an hour. I spent the next two days walking around like I’d shit myself. I couldn’t close my legs!”
When we get in the car he’s hired for us, he’s still chuckling to himself. “If you must know, it wasn’t exactly great for me. Making a woman cry during sex is a definite hit to the ego.”
“It wasn’t bad sex. It was just painful sex. Very painful sex,” I add at his pointed look.
So painful it makes me want to cross my legs at the memory.
“It wasn’t my fault, Dayton.”
“Hey, did I say it was?” I prod him in the arm. I know it wasn’t his fault. He did everything he could to make it perfect for me. “I just didn’t realize you were so big. If I’d have known, I’d have run a fucking mile to find something closer to the size of a tampon to break me in.”
He raises his eyebrows. “I’m offended by that. Especially since it was actually your fault.”
“Excuse me?”
Aaron leans across the car, his eyes darkening as his face nears mine. “If you weren’t so tight, it would have been a lot less painful.”
“And that right there is the only time in my life a man has ever complained about my vagina.” I tap his nose.
“Oh, you’ll find no complaints here. That was merely an observation.” He leans in farther and captures my bottom lip between his teeth. I shiver. “I happen to like your tight pussy very, very much.”
Said tight pussy clenches.
“Mhmm,” I mutter as he tugs on my lips and sends an ache to my clit. “Aaron?”
“What?”
“You’re squashing my sandwich.”
He pauses then pulls back. I grin at him and shrug a shoulder as the car stops. Just in time.
“This isn’t going the way I imagined,” he mutters in the elevator.
“Join the club. I imagined you’d be as charming as our first date, but clearly your cock has overtaken that part of your brain.”
“Charming… Sexual… Is there a difference?”
“Yes, unless you’re being sexually charming, in which the two merge together. And you definitely are not,” I clarify, opening the door to the penthouse suite of the Paris Stone.
“It doesn’t matter what I’m being. I’m still going to be fucking you by the end of the night.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about fucking you in a hotel your uncle now owns.”
“There are no cameras in the penthouse.” He steps up behind me and breathes on the back of my neck. “So we have free rein, and since this week is all about us, I plan on taking you on every. Single. Surface.”
My breathing stops and my brain is flicking between the ‘all about us’ and ‘every single surface’ while it decides which it wants to address first.
“All about us?” I spin. “Explain.”
He strokes his thumb down my jaw and hands me my ‘dinner.’ “What explanation do you need? This week belongs to us, Bambi. No work. Just me and you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“We fly to London in a week. Then after seven days there, we fly back here for a further week in which I will be working.”
Six weeks.
Five cities.
“You mean…every day…you’re going to be here?”
“Every day. From the moment you open those gorgeous brown eyes until the minute you shut them again.”
It makes so much sense.
I step away from him and toward the balcony doors, dropping my sandwich on the table as I go. I push the doors open and step outside. “Why?” I ask, knowing he’s right behind me. “Why aren’t you working this week?”
He steps behind me and pushes his chest into my back. His hands rest on either side of mine on the railing. “How can I? How can I be in this city and not see you everywhere I turn? I’ve been here so, so many times in the last seven years, and every time I was haunted by my memories of you. You were—you are—everywhere.
“This city… Dayton, it belongs to us. Regardless of the time that passes, Paris will always be ours. That’s why this week is for us. For you. Shit, for me. I need to be in the city and be reliving memories instead of being haunted by them.”
I swallow. “You planned this, didn’t you? That’s why…” You bought me. I pause, unable to say the words. “Six weeks, not five. You knew all along this would happen.”
“No, Day. I didn’t know. I hoped, but I never assumed. Not a single day has passed that I haven’t hoped to look in your eyes and see what I feel reflected back again.”
I turn and wrap my arms around his waist. He embraces me swiftly, his face in my hair, breathing me in, his arms tight around my body. I sniff.
“You’re a real pain in my ass, Stone, ya know that?”
“You’ve been a pain in my ass since you ruined my sweater by wiping coffee off your shirt.” He kisses my head and releases me.
“Oh, don’t even go there!”
I stretch out my muscles, aching from a night of being pinned to the bed by a certain strong-willed, demanding businessman, and sit up in bed. The silence of the suite is broken only by my breathing, and I look around for any signs that Aaron is still here.
His watch is still on the nightstand, his turned-off cell still lying next to it and yesterday’s clothes still resting on the chair in the corner. The only indication of his being anywhere but here is the absence of a robe on the back of the door.
I climb out of bed and slip my own robe on. I’m ready to leave the room when I notice a bright pink Post-it note stuck to the door.
You have no idea how beautiful you look when you’re sleeping.
My lips twitch, and I pull it down, holding it to my chest as I leave the room. A soft breeze floats in from the open balcony doors. I spin on the balls of my feet and stop at the view before me.
Aaron’s sitting at an cast-iron table, sipping a tall glass of orange juice, a spread of French breakfast foods before him. My lips part slightly, and he turns to look at me.
His eyes flick from mine down to the slip of paper in my hand. “It took you long enough to find one.”
“What?”
He stands and pulls a second chair out from the table, gesturing for me to sit. I oblige, and when he reseats himself, he places a pain au chocolat onto the plate in front of us. He’s ignoring my questioning stare. I can tell by the smirk playing on his lips and the amusement dancing in the depths of his gorgeous blue eyes.
“Well?” I push.
“Eat your breakfast.”
“No. Not until you explain yourself.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Dayton, eat your breakfast. I’m not explaining anything until you do so.”
I mirror his facial expression. “Fine.” And I walk back into the bedroom.
“What are you doing?” He follows me.
I grab my lipstick from my bag and stroll casually into the kitchen. I open the trash can and hold it over it.
“What are you doing?”
“See this?” I pull off the cap and twist it up, showing him the red he loves so much. “Speak or it goes.”
“You’re threatening me with your lipstick?”
“Promising you, buddy. Promising you.”
“I’m not your fucking buddy, Dayton. I’m your man.”
“You’re whatever the hell I want you to be if you want me to suck you off while wearing this ever again.”
He pauses and runs his tongue over his bottom lip. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re threatening me with lipstick and blow jobs?”
“Quickest way to break a man is to take away his favorite thing.”
“You’re my favorite thing.”
“Did I miss that? No red-lipped blow jobs and no me.” I point the lipstick in his direction. “Now talk.”
Our eyes meet and he stares me down for a long time. I purse my lips. I’m not fucking budging. I want to know what he means about these Post-it notes. I ‘finally’ found one?
He crosses the kitchen and takes the bright square from my fingers. “This is one of many notes I’ve left you.”
I say nothing.
“I’ve left one for you every day since we arrived in Vegas.”
“Why didn’t I find them?”
“You never wanted to find them.”
“This one was obvious. It was behind my damn robe!” I put the lipstick on the counter, and he runs his eyes over his own words. “What happened to the others?”
“I kept them.”
This surprises me. “Why?”
“Because I hoped that one day you’d be ready to read them.” He takes my hand and places the note back in my hand. “But you are now.”
He disappears. I watch him go and watch the empty space that joins the main room to the bedroom until he reappears, a stack of small, brightly colored squares in his hand. “Forse il tuo forse non è sufficiente quando i tuoi occhi mi lasciano senza fiato e il tuo tocco mi fa sentire vivo. Non quando l’amore che abbiamo avuto è bollente sotto la superficie. Non quando sono così pronta a permettere al mio amore per te di consumare me ancora una volta. And in French. Peut-être que ce n’est pas assez quand tes yeux me laissent à bout de souffle et votre contact me fait me sentir vivant. Pas quand l’amour que nous avions est en ébullition sous la surface. Quand je suis prêt à laisser mon amour pour vous de me consumer à nouveau.”
“What does it mean? Tell me. Please.”
He hands me the notes. “Read them first.”
I take them and flick through. My heart pounds a little harder and my breathing hitches a little more and tears fill my eyes a little quicker at each one.
True love is never letting go, despite all the odds being against you. I never let go.
Two thousand, seven hundred and seventy four days. That’s how long I waited and wished for you.
I look into your eyes and see everything I’ve always wanted. Everything I’ve wanted since I realized the coffee you spilled on your shirt matched the shade of your eyes perfectly.
I love it when you smile at me—really smile at me. I can almost pretend you remember as much as I do.
They go on and on, telling me everything he’s never said aloud and some things he has, like the repetition is necessary for me to believe it. Either way, these notes are everything I never wanted to hear. Everything that would make me fall again.
“You said maybe you believed in romance. And I said maybe isn’t enough when your eyes leave me breathless and your touch makes me feel alive. Not when the love we had is boiling beneath the surface. When I’m so ready to let my love for you to consume me again.”
Air fills my lungs with one short, sharp inhale, and I fall into him. The Post-its scatter on the floor around us, but I don’t care. All I care about is burying my face into the chest of this man I’ve loved since I knew what love was and wondering what the fucking hell I’m going to do.
I cling to the back of his robe. “Why didn’t I find them? Why?”
“I wanted you to look,” he whispers into my neck. “I wanted you to look for something that was so glaringly obvious to me. Something you were oblivious to.”
“How was I supposed to find them if I never knew?”
“I don’t know. Jesus.” He cups the back of my head. “I’ve done a whole lot of fucking hoping since you walked into that goddamn booth, Dayton. I hoped every morning you’d find them, and when each night you hadn’t, a little bit of that hope died.”
“That’s why you wanted to drop the call girl stuff.”
“No.” He pulls back and looks me dead in the eye. I’ve never seen his gaze so hard and determined. “No. I wanted you drop that bullshit because that’s not who you are to me. You will never be that person to me. I accept it, but I know you better.”
“You know me from years ago.”
“No. I know the woman who lies about loving Bambi and being amazed by the Eiffel Tower. I know the woman who hides her emotions behind a barbed-wire fence because it’s what society expects of her. And I know the beautiful, passionate, playful woman hiding behind that fence.” His words wrap around me in a blanket of comfort and security. “And that’s the woman I’ll take.”
I know those words. I know what they mean. Him or my job. A choice. An ultimatum.
And not an unfair one.
Also not one I’m going to respond to right now.