Fierce (25 page)

I did show Hope Notre Dame before we left Paris. But I showed it to her from a boat. 

From a table next to the glass-enclosed sides of an excursion boat, to be exact, on a four-hour dinner cruise that I’d never in my life have considered wasting time on in the past. And, of course, she loved it. 

We hadn’t made it out of the hotel that afternoon. It had been that bath.

Now, I watched her, the low light of candles illuminating her animated heart-shaped face as she smiled and talked, drank wine and ate more fish, as the light caught the sparkle from the silver beads on her blue dress, and I remembered.

Hope, lying over me in the bath and sighing as I ran slow, slippery hands over her, then turning the tables again once we’d pulled back the duvet on the big white bed. Hope exploring my body and my tattoo, giving everything she had to this new experience, just as I’d known she would.

“It really does go all the way,” she’d said, running languid hands over my chest, my shoulders, all the way down my arms, as if she were memorizing me. “I remember you saying that in the car.” She leaned down to kiss her way over the whorls decorating my chest, and I sighed and closed my eyes, and then opened them, because I wanted to look at her. 

She should have looked fragile, perched over my body like that, but she didn’t. Hope was lit from within, and today, that light burned so strongly. So fiercely. 

“It’s private,” she said, her fingers brushing lightly over my shoulder, tracing the intricate pattern that covered my skin from pectoral to forearm. “I remember that, too.”

“Mm.” She had me on such a buzz, I didn’t want to talk much. I just wanted to feel her. “Not a secret. It’s my whakapapa. My genealogy. My ancestors, my iwi, my whanau—my tribe and my family, the parts of it I want to think about—and my own journey. It’s a…” I smiled slowly, and she smiled back. Her light burned a little brighter, and something in my chest tightened, then released, the same way it had when she’d told me her swan story. “A Maori thing. A tribal thing.” 

“The parts you want to think about,” she said quietly. 

Not asking, and because she didn’t ask, I told her. “Not my small whanau. That isn’t so good. My big whanau. My grandparents. My cousins.”

“Ah.” It was a sigh, and her lips were over my heart now. “Yeah.” 

I couldn’t help tensing as I waited for the next question, but she didn’t ask it. Instead, her fingers went to my pendant, suspended from its braided black cord and resting between my collarbones. I hadn’t taken it off before our bath, and now, she stroked the greenstone that lay cool against my skin and asked, “And this?”

“Yeh,” I said. “A tribal thing as well. Personal.”

“Does it mean something?”

“Mm. A hei toki’s the adze. For strength. Determination. Courage as well. It’s a reminder.” 

She hummed at that, moved her mouth up to kiss my neck, her teeth teasing the sensitized nerve endings as her hand continued its leisurely journey down my arm. “I’d say you’ve got all of those,” she said, breathing the words into my ear, then sinking her teeth delicately into the lobe, making me jerk a little. “And that you don’t have to use any of them right now.” 

I didn’t enjoy letting a woman take the reins, didn’t like having my body at the mercy of another person. But this was better for today, I thought hazily as she continued to kiss me, to stroke me. I lifted my hands to her small breasts, felt her instant response, her indrawn breath. I pulled her higher so I could taste her there, and she didn’t have all the control after all, not then. So we kept on that way, because the position allowed her to control the angle and depth of my penetration, and let me relax, too, knowing I wouldn’t be too much for her tender insides. I could touch her so easily as well, could take her along with me, could watch her head going back, her soft lower lip being caught between her teeth, and that was even better.

And the sight of Hope’s slim torso bent like a bow, one of my hands covering her breast, the other pleasuring her as she rocked her way to sweet, slow fulfillment in the golden light of an autumn afternoon…surely Paris didn’t offer anything more beautiful than that. 

“What are you thinking about?” she asked now, turning from the view of Notre Dame standing in Gothic splendor in the midst of the Ile de la Cité. 

“Thinking that you’re beautiful,” I said before I could stop myself. 

I saw the softening in her eyes and thought,
Shit.
This was why I didn’t do relationships. Now I’d given her the wrong impression, had aroused expectations in her that I couldn’t fulfill. 

All she said, though, was, “Hmm. You’re not so bad yourself, you know?” before turning back to the window. Letting me off the hook, and I couldn’t have said whether that was what I’d wanted or not. 

The moment passed, the soft chamber music provided by the onboard orchestra continued to provide its discreet accompaniment, and the wine in the bottle dipped a little lower. I could see Hope starting to droop, so I scooted my chair over so I could put an arm around her and watched the floodlit monuments of Paris drift slowly by. And the next time I looked down at her, her head was on my shoulder, her lips had parted, and she was asleep.

“That’s so sweet.” 

I turned my head to see the fiftyish American woman from the next table watching us. That was the downside of this kind of journey, I guessed. Fellow passengers.

“Are you two on your honeymoon?” she asked.

“Pardon?” I asked, startled. “No. No. On holiday, that’s all.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said, sounding flustered. “You just looked so much in love, I thought…”

I wouldn’t tell her about the nondisclosure agreement I’d pulled out the night before at a restaurant a few kilometers from here. Let her preserve her illusions.

“She’s a beautiful girl,” the woman said. Clearly the last of the true romantics. Well, she was in Paris.

“Yeh.” That one, I could agree with. “She is.” I looked down at Hope again, at the vulnerable line of her part showing white in the midst of her tumbled hair, and somehow, I’d kissed the top of her head. I couldn’t help it, not really. She was just too sweet there.

“Would you like…” My newfound friend hesitated. 

“Yes?” I asked, doing my best to be polite. It was lucky that the boat was almost back to the dock. 

“I thought you might like a picture,” she said. “To remember your night by. I could take it, if you like.”

I hesitated for a few seconds, then was reaching into the pocket of my trousers, pulling out my phone, and handing it to her. “Please.” 

A minute later, she was handing it back, smiling at me again, and turning to her husband, beginning to gather her belongings. I shoved the phone back into my pocket without looking at it as the boat slowed and maneuvered toward the dock and Hope stirred in my arms and blinked her way back into consciousness. 

It had been a weak moment, true. But at least it had only been a moment.

My softened mood lasted less than twelve hours. Just as long as it took Hope to challenge me again.

“What?” I stopped typing on my phone and stared at her. I’d already gone back to my room and packed up, and had come back down to wait for her to finish. Somehow, I’d spent the night with her again, even though all we’d done was sleep. “Why the hell not?”

She wasn’t a bit intimidated, it was clear, just kept folding the blue dress with more care than it required. “Remember that thing I said? That what’s between us is separate from the job? This would be it. If everybody knows, it’s not separate at all, is it?”

“I’m not talking about sending out a bloody bulletin,” I said. “There’ll be
three
other people on the jet. I don’t even have Josh with me. Sent him back on Friday, didn’t I.”

“Not exactly a big concession.” She’d stopped folding. Clothes, that is, because her arms were folded across her chest now, sure sign of temper. “Since I’m sure Josh has a pretty good idea of what you’re doing.”

“Not as much as he normally does,” I muttered. “Have you heard from him once?”

“Have I…what?” Her eyes got wider. “Oh. He normally handles your…arrangements. Wow.
That’s
romantic.” 

“I told you. I don’t do romantic. Except that I’ve done it with you, haven’t I. And now I’m asking you to fly back with me on a corporate jet, where you could eat real food and drink real wine and sit in a real chair and even lie down if you wanted to, and you won’t go because a few other people will be on board? We have a meeting scheduled. They’re not going to be interested in you.”

Which was a lie, because everybody was always interested. Which was why Josh handled my arrangements. Normally. 

“No,” she said, “I won’t go because your
marketing people
will be on board. And I have the feeling that they might have the occasional conversation with your publicity director. Who is my
boss.”

I didn’t tell her that Martine probably had a pretty good notion of my interest. That wasn’t going to help me. “I’m not going to cancel my meeting,” I told her. “That’s rubbish.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Her tone was level again, and she was back to packing, taking the black skirt off its hanger. “I have a perfectly good plane ticket home, and I’m happy to use it.”

“Flying coach,” I said. “All the way back by the lavatories, eh. Probably in the middle seat.”

“You forget,” she said sweetly. “My second flight, and I’m excited. And no. I’m by the window. I want to watch.”

“Right, then.” I got myself back under my normal self-control, or something close to it. “I’ll take you to dinner, uh…” I consulted my phone. “Tuesday.”

“Sorry, I can’t,” she said, and I looked sharply at her. Was she playing games? “I’ll have a lot of work this week,” she went on. “I’m positive of that. Who knows when I’ll be done? I’ve left Karen for more than a week, too, and I don’t like to be gone all evening on a school night anyway. Could we do something on the weekend instead? Saturday, maybe?”

I was the one who set the limits. Always. And those limits were once a week, twice if I needed to work off some…stress. On
my
schedule. I was a busy man, and a disciplined one. But while I was still thinking out how to make that clear to her, she added, “Unless…”

Ah. She was reconsidering. 

“There’s this one thing,” she said. “Wednesday nights. You could come for that if you wanted.” She was getting busy with her folding again, looking self-conscious. 

Hard line,
I reminded myself.
The winner is the one who needs it less.
Not answering had been right, had forced her into concession. The rules were always the same. Business or personal, it didn’t matter. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Women’s Wednesday,” she said. “Karen’s and my thing. It’s nothing much, it’s just at home, popcorn and a movie, but we always do it, so…just if you wanted to come,” she repeated. “If you wanted to…see me.”

“Lunch,” I suggested. A movie on the couch, not a bit of privacy, and then I’d go home? Not good enough.

She shook her head. “I only have a half hour, and I can’t plan ahead. It depends when I can get away. And the roof is too public. I shouldn’t have done it before, but I didn’t know.” She stopped folding, turned, and looked at me for a minute, and her expression changed. The next thing I knew, she was shifting the ground out from under me again. Stepping around the bed, putting her hands on my forearms, and looking up into my face.

“Hemi,” she said. “I want to see you. Very much. But this is what my life is. If you don’t want to come over on Wednesday, then…Saturday? Sunday? We could have dinner, or go for a walk, or to a museum. Anything, really. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I just want to be with you.”

She clearly hadn’t read the memo about the winner being the one who wanted it less, because once again, she’d put her heart right out there for me to see. 

“Saturday,” I said, doing my best to maintain. “Seven. Dinner. And this time, I’m sending Charles for you.” 

She wrapped one soft hand around the back of my head and pulled it down for a kiss. “And this time,” she said, smiling into my eyes, “I’m saying yes.”