Conversely, now what could she say? A guy broke into my kitchen in the middle of the night. I bought his story, took him off on a motorcycle with me, and…and…then he turned out to be a lying bastard and…
Wait. Stop that negative thinking right there. There was no reason for her to find out that he was a lying bastard. Also, covert operations and being a lying bastard were not the same thing. They’d even had a class on trying to tell the difference.
Just because a man was covert didn’t mean he couldn’t meet a hot girl. Other men met women in the line of their work. It wasn’t like he would be able to tell any other hot French woman what he really did for a living either, and he was deployed here for the next six months.
He, Jake, Ian, and Mark hadn’t been able to believe their luck when they’d gotten their assignment. Holy crap, Europe? Where there were women and, and…Eiffel Towers, and…women.
The weather in July had been a bit of a shock, but the woman part was working out just fine.
Oh, yeah, he was hooked on covert ops. He was so hooked he was freaking effervescent. In fact, his dick was starting to feel like a corked champagne bottle, getting too shaken up.
This whole operation restored his faith in God and Hollywood, that was what it did. It was too bad he wasn’t Catholic, or he’d go light a candle in one of these cathedrals that dominated the city. “Are you going to insist the babies be baptized?” he asked at a light.
She gunned the motor and accelerated so fast from the light he had to grab her tight. He grinned and valiantly managed not to kiss the nape of her neck or squeeze any inappropriate parts of her and mess up her driving.
“It would be okay,” he said soothingly at the next light. “Grandma would be really happy, actually. She’s from one of the old Spanish families there. Tried like anything to get my mom to baptize us.”
“Do you actually know how to be quiet and focus, ever?” she said.
Well. If she put it like a challenge. He’d gotten her out of the kitchens, without having to drug her or kidnap her or do anything else to the restaurant’s top chef that might tip Al-Mofti off to how close they were on his trail. So maybe now he could quit trying to keep her distracted and just shut up and enjoy the view.
And the feel.
Her between his thighs, her in control while he just wallowed in pleasure. That sleek leather-clad body. Her grace and strength, the way his weight on the bike challenged her at first, and how quickly she adjusted to it, back in perfect, sexy control of her machine within a couple of blocks. He was so freaking aroused he was embarrassed at himself, pressed up tight behind her on the bike like that. Hell, he hoped he didn’t really embarrass himself. That might be possible, with the vibration of this bike, the erotic over-stimulus of having her right there in control of him and yet at his mercy, and the fact that she was so freaking hot.
He tried to focus on the city, all the lights shining off its wet pavement and buildings. Aww, she was—that was kind of sweet, actually. She was taking him on the Seine. Cutting left toward all these gloriously glowing buildings, a fountain leaping in front of a magnificent old palace—“L’H?tel de Ville,” she said, and it looked and felt so different when she was saying it than when he was studying the layout of the city as part of a mission briefing.
He started to…not relax into it, exactly. When pretty much every atom in his body was focused on crawling into her pants, relaxed wasn’t quite the right word. But to enjoy this part, too—the view. The ride.
Maybe he’d been a little harsh on this city. In certain lights, in certain conditions, it was a hell of a view.
Bridges arching over dark water, building after majestic old building glowing magically against the dark. She crossed one of the bridges and slowed for a light, Notre-Dame in their sights, the ancient view oddly…moving. Hell, Grandma, you should get on a plane just to see this, you’d love it.
Vi pulled her form-fitting leather sleeve back to check her watch. “Oh, only fifteen minutes before it goes out,” she said, and shot them left across a bridge and left again and then just bent into the handlebars and gunned it.
In the scarce traffic of the after-midnight weekday streets, she raced so fast he ducked into her and held on, all the already overstimulated cells in his body revved even higher and hotter by the speed. God, she had control of that Ducati. Cutting slick and sleek through what traffic there was, blazing past the long, stately Louvre, the streets sparkling up at her headlight as they sped toward the Eiffel Tower.
They reached the esplanade across the river from the Tower just as it went out. But—“Made it!” Vi exclaimed, jumping off the bike and heading toward the parapet, taking her helmet off as she strode.
Boots on stone. Long, ground-eating stride. Leather. The Eiffel Tower snubbing him by going out just before he got to it, in forty-degree weather in July.
Life was good.