The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 29



Magalie was just starting to dream of taking control of the situation, her mouth closed around the lusciously suggestive pastry, when Philippe pulled it out of her hands, leaving the cream clinging to her lips and driving her to instant temper. What was wrong with him with his tormenting, broken promises, the touch pulled away, the taste pulled away? And hadn’t he gotten her message with the éclair? Why couldn’t he just be her victim? He had seemed to like it the night before.

He wrapped her hair around his hand and held her head back, studying that cream on her lips. She knew what he was waiting for her to do, and she tried to refuse him the gesture, but she couldn’t, couldn’t just leave that cream clinging to her lips forever. Involuntarily, eventually, her tongue slipped out and licked it off.

His teeth showed in fierce triumph. Eyes dilated blue-black. “Good girl,” he said approvingly, and she gasped. She hadn’t done it at his command.

But it nevertheless felt annoyingly and erotically like a reward for good behavior when he pulled her up off the floor and kissed her, lavishly, thoroughly, with no hurry to end. Pushing her back against the cold glass of her window, so that it seeped into her back and her butt while his heat consumed her breasts and belly and the thighs she lifted to wrap around him.

He kissed her . . . forever. Time seemed to blur, until there was nothing but their bodies and their mouths. Until she had always been locked away in this tower, not alone but with a man and his hardness and lips and teeth and tongue. Until she always would be there, the new Lady of Shalott, weaving bodies instead of threads, and a curse be on her if she stay. She wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could.

He rode her pelvis over his arousal, adjusting her hips to his liking with every change in angle of his kiss. How could he be so deeply aroused and in so little hurry? He just kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, until all the rest of her life drifted away. And there was only his mouth. Only his body.

He tumbled them into her bed and made a rich, hissing sound as he hit it, one hand flexing into her pale covers, a great cat taking possession.

Rolling over her, he pushed his sweater off her, and then her own, and then her top underneath, laughing a little in triumph with each layer, like a person who just loved the box-within-a-box gift trick.

She was used to the first shiver of cold when she hit this bed in the winter, but he chased it all away, his body rubbing heat everywhere.

She protested when he moved to take off her boots. She had put on those boots on purpose. They were her mastery. They were what she would wear to take him over, to take charge, to make him helpless in her hands.

He cupped his hand over her sex, through the knit leggings. “Do you want me to rip these in two?” he asked conversationally.

The matter-of-fact menace made her sex bloom hot through the knit against his hand. Could he? The leggings were stretchy and strong and . . . He looked as if he could.

She gave him her leg, which felt like open submission and therefore made her unbearably hot and wet, and he worked the long leather boot down off her thigh over her toes to the ground. Then the next. Then her leggings. Her panties. When he had her completely naked, he smiled suddenly, a smile that made her whole body prickle with delicious vulnerability, and drew the boots back on, over her bare feet and bare legs, the leather gliding against her naked skin.

So, she thought, with a rush of victorious relief. He did like to leave the power in her hands. But when she tried to rise off the bed, to come astride him in her boots, he flipped her over as easily as if she was his teddybear and tucked her back against his chest.

His penis pressed hard against her bottom. His arm wrapped around her, holding her against his chest. One of her arms was pressed against his arm and the bed, captive. He curled his hand around her other bicep, a gentle, close hold.

His fingers slipped up and down her cleft, and it unfolded instantly for him. She couldn’t have stopped her response. She had no control over it. He did.

And he was in no hurry. He explored her. Not as if he had any immediate goal to let her come. But with intimate curiosity, his fingers pressing apart her folds and tracing over them and inside them as if he could memorize their shape. Pinching them gently as if to learn their consistency, what she was made of.

As she tried to writhe, his easy hold tightened, pulling her back against his chest until his mucles imprinted themselves against her back and her breasts rubbed against the hair and muscles of his forearm. He contained her writhing. Effortlessly. She could barely move.

All her writhing had to transfer downward, to her hips, and even then he mastered it. He let her twist her buttocks against his sex with a laughing growl of approval, and when he decided he wanted to control that, too, he speared two fingers deep inside her. She whimpered and tried to curl over his arm, but he held her tightly back against him. All her inner muscles squeezed onto him, as if she could force him somehow to her nub, the lips of her sex clinging, as if maybe they could somehow writhe her *oris to him.

But that was not physically possible. She could feel his hardness against her, how much he liked it. But he just kept exploring her at his own pace. No hurry. That man never rushed anything.

“I’m not one of your damn patisseries,” she told him.

He laughed.

That laugh drove her wild. She wanted to hate it. She wanted her body to shut down in revolt. And yet it just seemed to blossom further, the muscles of her sex trembling around his fingers, her hips writhing in a vain effort to get his hand where she wanted it.

His fingers, still in her, rotated a little, pressing outward against the walls of her sex, as if still testing what she was made of. She whimpered.

His thumb drifted toward the rear of her cleft.

Her body tried again to curl over his arm, and again he held it still without effort.

The heat washing through her was unbearable. “Philippe.”

His thumb rewarded her with a fleeting hard press against her *oris, there and gone so fast, her sex could only cling desperately to his fingers still inside her, her thighs trying to wrap around his arm. “Do you know that’s the first time you’ve said my name? I like it.”

“Please,” she whispered. She could feel his hardness against her, his arousal. How could he do this to her? Did he not want her as much? She could make him. She could make him. But she couldn’t take control while he held her like this.

His fingers spread a little inside her sex. The purr or growl inside his body reverberated through hers. “Yes, beg me,” he whispered into her nape. “I like that. Say it again. Say it with my name.”

“You bastard.”

He pulled his fingers out. “No, that one I’ve heard before.”

Her sex clung bereft to emptiness, and she tried to buck up to press herself against his palm. He pulled it away.

“I love you, Magalie. Have I mentioned that lately? And I want you to beg me.”

The words Je t’aime washed over her, seeming to loosen something in her while making some other part more afraid. Combined with the open declaration that she should beg, it forced the most uncontrollable heat everywhere through her. “Why?” she protested furiously.

“I just do, Magalie,” he said, so it wasn’t clear if he was saying why he loved her or why he wanted her to beg. “I have for a long time. Since I met you, really.”

“I knew you wanted me to beg you in that meeting.”

“That, too,” he agreed, and her body sparkled all over at the double admission. “You’re begging me with your body already, Magalie.” His palm rubbed lazily, heavily over her, deliberately just short of her *oris. “You’re so hot and so wet and so . . . open.” His fingers flicked elusively over the innermost folds that were all exposed.

Her body jolted helplessly against his imprisoning arm.

“Can’t you open yourself to me in other ways, too?”

She did. He was in her room right now with her.

“If you invite me in nicely,” he breathed against her nape, “I promise you’ll enjoy it.”

“Philippe.” She tried to arch and couldn’t and made a little moaning curse under her breath.

“That’s a start.” His fingers glided in reward more deeply up and down the length of her sex. But he didn’t touch that nub. He drew one little circle just around it but never touched it before his hand continued exploring.

Why was she so stubborn and closed and proud? She pressed her head back against his shoulder. “There might be some rewards in it for you, if you stop trying to play power games.”

“You mean, if I give up and let you have all the power.”

Given how powerless she felt, that was the height of irony.

“Besides, you’re always complaining that I barge in where I’m not wanted,” he murmured provocatively, the tips of his two fingers playing just inside her but not going deeper. “I’m trying to respect your territory.”

“Philippe . . .” She put all the menace a naked, involuntarily clutching and writhing woman could into the word.

“Allez, Magalie.” His chin was rough against her neck. “Say it,” he breathed. “I’m begging you to say it. It excites the hell out of me when you say it.”

He was begging her to beg him. That was—like the words Je t’aime, it freed something in her. She felt almost protected, held against him so tightly and so helpless. As if the strength of his arm was his promise: Let go. I’ve got you.

I’m as vulnerable as you. Which he couldn’t possibly be, but—

“S’il te plaît.” She had never asked anyone for anything she desperately needed in French before. She felt, oddly, a spark of hope. It was like a new beginning. “Philippe.”

He bit into the nape of her neck like a cat and pressed his palm down hard, rotating her sex against her pubic bone. She jumped into him, convulsing against his hold, her body giving itself up so uncontrollably, everything in her dissolving and shattering while he held her together so tightly, that when she finally begin to sink limply against him again, tears were leaking out of her eyes.

His hand rode her down gently, caressing her through the aftershocks, keeping them going, and letting her subside slowly, slowly, until so much had drained from her that she was almost asleep.

Then he turned her over onto her back and licked the tears from her temples like an animal craving salt. He combed her hair back from her damp face and pressed it to the bed, holding her head still as he kissed her everywhere, all over her face, coming back to take her mouth again and again.

He wrapped both his arms under her and squeezed her up against his chest hard as he slid into her, as if he couldn’t hold her tightly enough. Her body started to tremor again around him, tightening reflexively in what she thought at first were more aftershocks, and he made a low, hungry sound.

She ran her hands down his back, feeling the hardness of the muscles all in play, the arch of his spine. Finding tight buttocks and digging in, holding on for the ride as it got harder. She was close to coming again from the pleasure of that hard, steady ride, the use of her, the way he so clearly loved it, but she didn’t think he realized it, his focus seeming to have drawn down, down, into his own body. She clenched again on him, and his body thrust deep, deep into hers, and he came, holding her tightly against him.

Afterward, when he eased off her and rolled them both to their sides, her body curled back against his in the position that had started this, she found his hand and slid it between her legs again. His muscles were all heavy against her, and she thought he was almost asleep, her second peaking like a secret. But his thumb curled up and cooperated, and he pressed a kiss against her shoulder when she finished.

He pulled the comforter over both of them, no cold left in her bed, nor in all the room. “It’s not so bad being invaded, is it?” he murmured provocatively.

She smacked his forearm, but without force, and he nestled his head a little in the bed of her hair and laughed, drifting to sleep.