“Oh,” I say, laughing. “Maybe my costume choice was a little weird for you.”

He groans, tickling my side. “I assure you, you did not make me think of my mother tonight at all.” After I’ve stilled at his side, he says, “Her first job was working in the very regal house of a businessman named Charles Guillaume.”

“Your father,” I guess.

He nods. “My mother is a wonderful woman. Caring, fastidious. I imagine she was a perfect housekeeper. I suppose I get those tendencies from her, but also my father. He required the house to be spotless. He was obsessive about it. He required that I never leave a mark, anywhere. Not on mirrors, or windows. Not a crumb in the kitchen. Children were neither to be seen nor heard.” He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is lighter. “Perhaps our fathers are not very nice, but would get along well?”

I hold my breath, not wanting to move or blink or do anything to break this moment. Each word feels like a gift and I’m so hungry for every little piece of his history. “Tell me more about them?”

He shifts me closer, sliding his hands into the hair at the back of my head. “They began to have an affair when my mother was only twenty, and my father was forty-four. From what my mother has told me, it was very passionate. It consumed her. She never planned to stay in France for so long, but she fell in love with Charles and I don’t think she has ever recovered.”

“‘Recovered’?”

“My father is an ass**le,” he says, laughing a little dryly. “Controlling. Obsessive about the house, as I mentioned. As he’s aged, he’s only gotten worse. But I think he must have a charisma, a charm that drew her in.” I smile into the dark when he says this, knowing he may be a better man, but he certainly got charm from his father. “During this time that he and my mother were together, he was married to another woman. She lived in England, but my father refused to leave his home to live with her, and my mother didn’t know this wife existed. When maman became pregnant with me, my father wanted her to remain in the servants’ quarters, and didn’t let her tell anyone it was his child.” He laughs a little. “Everyone knew anyway, and of course I turned three or four, and I looked exactly like him. Eventually, the wife found out. She divorced my father, but he did not choose to marry my mother.”

I feel my chest tighten. “Oh.”

“He loved her,” he says quietly, and I’m obsessed with the way he speaks. His English is perfect, but his accent lifts the words, tilts them so his h’s comes out nearly inaudible, his r’s always slightly guttural. He manages to sound both polished and crude. “He loved her in his strange way, and made sure to always provide for us, even insisting on paying when my mother wanted to attend culinary school. But he’s not a man who loves very generously; he’s selfish and didn’t want my mother to leave him, even though he had many other women in those years. They were at the house, or at his work. He was very unfaithful, even while he was possessive and crazy for my mother. He said he loved her like no other. He expected her to understand that his appetites for other women were not personal against her. But of course she was never to sleep with another man.”

“Wow,” I say quietly. In truth, I can’t imagine knowing so much about my parents’ marriage. Theirs feels like a bleached, sterile landscape compared to this.

“Exactly. So, when my grandmother became sick, my mother took the chance to leave France, to go home to Connecticut and tend to her until she died.”

“How old were you when she left?”

He swallows, saying, “Sixteen. I lived with my father until I began university.”

“Did your mother come back?”

I can feel him shake his head beside me. “No. I think leaving was very hard for her, but once she was gone she knew it was the right thing. She opened a bakery, bought a home. She wanted me to finish school here, with my friends, but I know being so far away ate at her. It’s why I came to the States for law school. Maybe she would have come back here if I asked her to, but I couldn’t, no?”

When I nod, he continues, “I went to Vanderbilt, which is not so very close to her, but much closer than France.” He turns his head, pulling back so he can look at me. “I do intend someday to live there. In the States. She doesn’t have anyone else.”

I nod, tucking my face into the crook of his neck and overcome with a relief so enormous I feel light-headed.

“Will you stay with me?” he asks quietly. “Until you need to be in Boston?”

“Yes. If it’s what you want, too.”

He answers with a kiss that deepens, and the sensation of his hands in my hair and his groan on my tongue fills my head with an emotion that feels a little like desperation. In a flash, I’m terrified of having true, intense feelings for him, of having to end this marriage game at some point, let real life back in and try to get over him. But I push it aside, because it feels too good to let the moment turn down at any corner. His kisses slow and tame until he’s just pressing his smile to mine.

“Good,” he says.

It’s enough for now. I can feel the heavy weight of sleep behind my eyes, in my thoughts. My body is sore and feels perfectly used. Within only seconds, I hear the slow, steady rhythm of his sleeping breath.

Chapter TWELVE

I’M DIMLY AWARE of a fist pounding heavily on the door and I sit up, disoriented. Beside me, Ansel bolts upright, looking at me with wide eyes before tossing back the covers, pulling on boxers, and sprinting out of the room. I hear his voice speaking to whoever is there, thick with sleep and so deep. I’ve never heard him sound stern before. He must have stepped out into the hallway and close the door behind him because his voice disappears after a heavy click. I try to stay awake. I try to wait for him and make sure everything’s okay and tell him how much I enjoy his voice. But I must be more exhausted than I thought and it’s the last groggy thought I have before my eyes fall closed again.

I FEEL THE air slide under the sheets and sweep over my skin as Ansel climbs back into bed. He smells like him, like grass, like salt and spice. I roll to his side, my mind still foggy and full of heated dream images . . . and as soon as his cool skin touches mine, longing flares low in my stomach. I want him with a kind of instinctive, barely awake yearning. The clock beside the bed tells me it’s nearly four in the morning.

His heart is pounding under my palm, chest smooth, hard, and bare, but he traps my wandering hand with his, stilling it so that I can’t slide it down his stomach and lower.

“Mia,” he says quietly.

I gradually recollect that he had to go to the door. “Is everything okay?”

He exhales slowly, clearly trying to calm down, and I sense more than see his nod in the darkness. The skylight over his bed lets in a bright slice of moonlight, but it cuts across our feet, illuminating only the very edge of the bed.

I press my body along his side, sliding my leg up over his. The muscles of his quads are defined and firm beneath smooth, warm skin, and I stop when I’ve reached his hip, gasping slightly when he arches up into me and groans. He’s still wearing only boxers, but beneath my thigh he’s semi-hard. Beneath my palm, his heart is slowly returning to normal.

I can’t be this close to him—even half asleep—and not want to feel more. I want the blankets tossed away and his boxers shoved down. I want the heat of his h*ps pressing to mine. As I hum quietly against his skin and rock against him—half conscious, half instinct—it’s several long beats before I feel his body fully stir.

But it does, and with another quiet groan he rolls to face me, shoving his boxers down his h*ps just far enough for him to pull his erection free.

“J’ai envie de toi,” he says into my hair and rubs the head of his c**k over me, testing, before pushing inside with a tight sound of hunger. “I always want you.”

It’s sex without words or pretense, just both of us working to get to the same place. My movements are slow, full of lazy sleepiness and that middle-of-the-night bravery that makes me roll on top of him, rest my head on his shoulder as I slide along his length. His movements are also slow, but because he’s being intentionally gentle, careful with me.

He’s usually so much more talkative. Maybe it’s that it’s so late, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s working to pull himself out of the hallway and back into the bedroom.

But then Ansel’s hands drift down my sides, clutching my hips, and any uneasiness dissolves, replaced with a mounting, crawling pleasure.

“You f**k so good,” he growls, rocking up into me, meeting my movements halfway. It’s no longer sleepy and relaxed. I’m close, he’s close, and I’m chasing the sound of his orgasm as much as I am the pleasure I can feel sliding up my legs and down my spine. I’m so full of him, so full of sensation, it’s all I am anymore: crystalline and hot, hungry and wild.

He pushes me so I’m sitting upright, his hands jerking my h*ps back and forth over him, urging me to ride him roughly as he shoves himself deeper and harder into me.

“Fuck me,” he growls, reaching up with one hand to grip my breast roughly. “Fuck me harder.”

And I do. I find anchor with my hands on his chest and let go, slipping down onto him over and over again. I’ve never been so wild on top, never moved so fast. The friction between us is amazing, slick and rough, and with a sharp gasp I start to come, my fingernails digging sharply into his skin and tight, desperate sounds falling from my lips.

I want

So

Coming so

Hard oh

Oh my God

My incoherence tears a savage growl from his throat and he sits up, fingers clamped to my h*ps and his teeth pressed to my collarbone as he pushes roughly up into me, coming with a hoarse shout after a final, brutal thrust.

His arms form a tight band around my waist as he presses his face to my neck, catching his breath. I feel dizzy; my legs are sore already. He doesn’t seem to want to let me go but I need to shift my position, and I gingerly lift myself off and slide down next to him on the bed. Without speaking, he rolls to face me, pulling my leg over his hip and slowly rocking his still-hard c**k along my cl*t as he kisses my chin, my cheeks, my lips.

“I want more,” he admits into the dark room. “I don’t feel done.”

I reach down, slide him carefully back inside me. It won’t last long, but there’s something about feeling him like this—just barely rocking, no space between us, the black of night spread across the bed like a velvet blanket—that makes my bones ache with how intense it is between us.

“I just want to make love to you all day,” he says against my mouth and rolls on top of me. “I don’t want to think about work or friends or even eating. I want to exist on you alone.”

With this, I remember wanting to ask him what happened at the door. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. I just want to fall asleep inside you. Maybe our bodies will make love again while our brains sleep.”

“No, I mean,” I start carefully, “who was at the door?”

He stills. “Perry.”

Perry. The friend who wasn’t in Vegas with the rest of them. “What did he want?”

He hesitates, kissing my neck. Finally, he says, “I don’t know. In the middle of the night? I don’t know.”

Chapter THIRTEEN

I DON’T HAVE TO open my eyes to know it’s still dark out. The bed is a nest of warm blankets; the sheets are smooth and smell like Ansel and laundry detergent. I’m so tired, floating in that place between awake and dreams, and so the words being whispered into my ear sound like bubbles rising up from underwater.

“Are you frowning in your sleep?” Warm lips press to my forehead, a fingertip smoothing the skin there. He kisses one cheek and then the other, brushing his nose along my jaw on his way back to my ear.

“I saw your shoes by the door,” he whispers. “Have you walked all of Paris by now? They look nearly worn through on the bottom.”

In truth he’s not that far off. Paris is an unending map that seems to unfurl right in front of me. Around each corner is another street, another statue, another building older and more beautiful than anything I’ve seen before. I get to one place and that only makes me want to see what’s beyond it, and beyond that. I’ve never been so eager to become lost in a place before.

“I love that you’re trying to learn my city. And God help the poor boys who see you walk by in that little sundress I saw hanging in the bathroom. You’ll have admirers following you home and I’ll be forced to chase them off.”

I feel him smile against the side of my face. The bed shifts and his breath ruffles my hair. I keep my features relaxed, my exhales even, because I never want to wake up. Never want him to stop talking to me like this.

“It’s Saturday again . . . I’m going to try and be home early tonight,” he sighs, and I hear the exhaustion in his words. I’m not sure I’ve fully appreciated how difficult this must be for him, to balance what he sees as his responsibility to me, and to his job. I imagine it must feel like being pulled in every direction.