But anyone who found their hotel so easily, could climb stairs unassisted and without tripping, and chatter on as she was without so much as a slur was not dead drunk.
He considered that thought.
She argued coherently, even if her logic seemed twisted by a dark emotion flickering behind her eyes. Her trains of thought started with that napkin she kept referring to, but they reeled out logically after that.
She wasn’t dead drunk.
Had she been faking it?
And why?
Wariness crept into his mind.
He wasn’t afraid of the tiny blonde. He was pretty sure he could snap her slender neck or wasp-waist if she attacked him, but she might be leading him into a set-up.
Lots of desperate people trolled the Parisian bars, looking for an easy mark to isolate and rob. Some of them were organized enough to lure a man to a second location with a honeypot trap.
The neighborhood was the red flag.
Blue-painted door, yellow stain on the white paint down the hall, charcoal gray industrial carpeting under his black formal shoes, a man shouting behind one of the doors, the rustle of the blonde’s clothes as she walked beside him, the sour smell of humid mold in the walls.
The blue paint on her door was peeling. She plucked her keys out of his hand and unlocked the door. One of the three locks spun when she twisted the key, broken.
She hadn’t had any trouble sticking the key in those locks and twisting them, unlike the building’s front door.
Maxence warily pushed the door and let it swing open.
Inside the room, the darkness was silent and still. Pale light from a window touched square objects with gray lines.
If conspirators were hiding in there, they were doing an excellent job of not moving, speaking, or breathing.
Maxence flipped on the light switch by the door without walking inside.
Just a bedroom, done in blue, white, and yellow. The air smelled fresh enough, a mild hint of lemon and lavender.
A small kitchen area had been built into one corner with a coffeemaker, countertops, and a refrigerator underneath. A high, white-painted iron bed with a slightly sagging mattress and blue coverlet stood in the center of one wall. It had long legs for storing luggage underneath.
White lace curtains surrounded one window, and an air conditioning unit jutted from the other. The walls were painted the same sunny yellow as the faded rugs on the blue cement floor.
Okay, no thugs.
It wasn’t a trap.
A memory of a small place and the scent of saltwater assailed Maxence, and he shut it out, hard.
Nothing about the room seemed personal. Indeed, it looked exactly like a substandard efficiency apartment purchased by an investor and rented out over the internet to tourists who didn’t know the shadier parts of Paris or were too cheap to care.
A nylon duffel bag lay on the bed next to a small pile of clothes and a toiletry bag.
Small hands grabbed his hips and tugged. He allowed himself to be turned around to face the woman, who shut the steel door and twisted the locks. She leaned against the door and stared up at him with huge blue eyes. “Are you still up for this?”
Max was so up for this that his cock ached. “Yes.”
The blonde balanced on one leg as she pried her delicate little shoe off her foot, then did the other.
If she’d touched her nose, she would have passed the drunk-driver test.
Why had she feigned being so inebriated when she clearly wasn’t?
She said, “And promise me you’ll leave in the morning. Don’t wake me up. Don’t say good-bye. Just go.”
She was just an odd little duck. “All right. Are you sure—”
Maxence was going to demand they discuss why she’d acted more intoxicated than she was and suggest perhaps they could do this tomorrow when she was in more of a mental state to make such a decision, but the little blonde said, “Good,” then reached up and grabbed fistfuls of his tee shirt right over his collarbones and jerked, trying to pull him down to kiss her.
Max considered letting her yank on him while he stood immovable until they had a cogent conversation, but that time had passed. At this point, his choice was to either have sex with her or defend himself.
Also, he didn’t want her to rip the shirt right off his shoulders. He didn’t need to try to hail a cab to drive him the miles back to his hotel, the Four Seasons Hotel George V, Paris, while naked to the waist. This tee shirt wasn’t even his.
Not that he planned to give the shirt back to Arthur. If Max wanted to mess with him, he’d have a case of tee shirts delivered just to piss Arthur off.
So Maxence allowed her to pull him down, then grabbed her around the waist, picked her up, and slammed her back against the door with her legs cinched around his waist. He tangled his fingers in her spider-silk hair and took her lips with his, sucking and jutting his tongue into her mouth.
She groaned against his lips and held onto his shoulders, and then she broke off the kiss, twisted her neck, and sucked and bit a path from his ear down his throat. Her teeth raked his skin.
Maxence’s mind flashed white.
The woman in his arms consumed his thoughts. Fire flashed over his skin, and he tightened his arms around her until she squeaked while he carried her toward the bed.
Testosterone roared in his veins and thundering heartbeat.
They crashed onto the bed. The clothes and duffel bag ended up on the floor, whether from the bounce of their weight on the mattress or if she had swept them aside, he didn’t care. He was a mindless beast enraged by lust and the desire to thrust inside her.
She stretched the neck of his tee shirt, pulling at it, and he stripped off his shirt and threw it aside. He heard her murmur, “Oh, jeez, will you
