She looked toward the funicular car slowly gliding up alongside the terraces. A set of stairs let people make the steep climb by foot, just past it. She would, by pure nature, never once have thought of taking the
funiculaire
, always just taken the stairs.
“You know what, let’s do something the easy way, for once,” Patrick said, and led her to the station. In the car, he pulled her against his warm body as they tucked into a corner of the glass windows.
It’s so, so easy, Sarah
, that warm, sandy voice had said.
Close your eyes.
While a sparse, late-night group of passengers took up another spot in the car, the women in heels and sleek pants, the men in jeans, Patrick bent his head to murmur to her: “Sarah. I can like you, and I can respect you, and I can still have a thousand fantasies worse than you in my lap in a garter belt and feathers. Maybe I’m a terrible person – I wouldn’t be surprised. Or maybe they’re not such incompatible things.”
Her nipples tightened, and the lips of her sex curled as hard as her toes, as arousal just seemed to sink, sink into her body, like an anchor into the ocean, holding her down, holding her still for him.
Yes, play with me. Play with me again. Take me over, don’t let me say no. I – what are those fantasies, exactly?
His hand had worked its way under her coat, meaning he must have unbuttoned it to press them warm chest to warm chest, but she didn’t even know when. From her nape, his fingers drew a long, slow, sure line down her spine. Her cheek pressed against his chest, and Paris fell away before her eyes as his fingers descended and their car rose, the city stretching farther and farther, gleaming, turned to everything beautiful by the dark. He kept his voice a breath only her ears could catch, just enough sound in it for the texture to brush all over her skin. “I like the way you yield to me. I like the way you look so serious when you do. But when you shut me out – the amount of times I have wanted to bend you over one of those counters, and hold you down by your nape, and run my hand down your spine just like this, and make you come fifteen times and beg for more…”
Heat flushed her entire body. Paris blurred. She tucked into him so tightly because she was melted to him, and if she tried to pull away, she was a little afraid of what parts of her might stick. Of what inside parts of her she, or he, or everybody else, might see. His fingers drew a circle against the base of her spine that made her hips want to writhe against him.
His head bent lower. “Or take you fifteen times myself while you begged for more, but I have to admit” – his mouth curved against her ear – “that one sounds considerably less likely. Great fantasy, though.”
She drew the number four against his chest, then tapped her fingers firmly into him, one-two-three-four. Because expecting to need four condoms seemed nearly as cocky to her as fifteen, or maybe even worse. At least you
knew
fifteen was a fantasy.
He drew the number three on the base of her spine, and it took her a minute to figure out…oh, that was the amount of times
she
had come, that night. Oh. Her flush of arousal met a blush of embarrassment and turned her crimson. A teasing hint of laughter against her ear, that rough, sleepy, sandy sound that tickled its way all through her. “At the time, four did feel entirely within my reach. Besides, I told you one was extra. But, you know, no matter how sure you feel beforehand that you’ll never get enough, after a couple of times – you’re ready for something else.”
It shafted through her like a knife. The funicular cable might as well have broken and sent them plunging down into a hell below.
Something else. Someone else.
Already, already, already.
“A cuddle.” He tucked her hair behind her other ear. “Sleep. Something gentle.”
She held very still against his chest as that pain faded away in surprise and Paris came back into focus, all sparkling in the darkness, and the car settled to a stop and she looked up at him. He was gazing down at her, his hand shifting to cup her face, his expression for a second very tender. As soon as their eyes met, the tenderness hid, and he winked at her: “Which doesn’t mean I can’t make
you
come fifteen times, though.” The playful leer was just slightly unsettling, because with Patrick – well, she could never quite be sure if that playful look might be just to trick her into not realizing he was capable of trying.
They left the car and strolled through the cobblestoned streets behind Sacré-Coeur to the Place du Tertre, so packed with artists most daylight hours that at night it seemed to take one great, big gasp of relief:
Ahh…air.
From this level, the white domes of the Sacré-Coeur, half hidden by buildings, grew more approachable, more alluring, genuinely beautiful. Restaurants released gentle waves of people into the square, their laughter and their footsteps a lullaby fading toward midnight. Medieval churches competed for attention with old restaurants that had hosted Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani. Amid the shadows and light and the gentle, rocking sound of the laughing people heading off to sleep or heading out to dance the night away, Sarah felt as if she was at the center from which everything most beautiful in the world had come.
Picasso and Matisse were real people who had walked these streets. Which meant that she, too, could be an artist, be amazing, change the way people tasted the world. In her little shop. In her small way.
Maybe her mother and stepfather were right, that engineering would be a better way, a bigger way. A way that made her solid and real, that her mother could hang her hat on and say, “See? See? I got her right. She makes up for
everything.
” But this way, this beautiful, luxurious food that would fulfill the hungriest person’s dream, was the way that compelled her. And if impractical art was all right for Picasso and Matisse, and if they were real people who lived and breathed and hung out in bars getting drunk with their friends, then maybe it could be all right for her.
They sat on the top stair of a great, long staircase street that led down into the rest of Paris, bordered by cobblestones and a wall on which graffiti fought the dominance of old, dead artists, young hands insisting on their right to make their mark. Streetlamps marched simple and golden down into the dark to the humble, welcoming glow of a restaurant at the bottom of the stairs far below. Paris sparkled out before them, but they were sheltered from it, too, by trees and the walls of the stair and the buildings tucking them into a gentle midnight world.
Patrick shifted off the top stair to kneel in front of her on a lower step, using his hips to nudge her legs apart around him. Her legs, covered in thin sparkles and net, flinched toward his coat when it brushed against them, instinctively seeking more warmth. “You’re cold.” He rubbed his hands strong and warm up her legs. “I don’t think this dress was meant to be out after midnight. Not in January. We should go back soon.”
“I know.” Leave the magic before she slipped into believing in it, as if it was true.
It felt true. But it felt true like a fairytale, reaching at some profound verity but impossible to believe it was real. Pumpkins did not turn into coaches, nor rags to a ball gown, and a woman needed to keep that straight in her head.
It was almost midnight, and she was perched on a flight of stairs, she thought wryly. Maybe she should run away before the clock struck.
But Patrick’s hands ran firmly down to the top of her carefully polished boots – not likely to fall off on a stair behind her as she ran – and then up again to the edge of her skirt. Up and down, a steady, warming rhythm. He opened his coat and pulled the panels of it around her legs.
His knees had to be killing him on that stone, she realized suddenly. But he didn’t show it.
“Happy?” he asked, his voice deep and quiet.
Too happy.
“I’m a little afraid,” she whispered, and then wished she hadn’t admitted that. Not to Patrick, who must ride waves of happiness in easy acceptance of their passing, because wasn’t that what surfers did?
Patrick didn’t ask her why she was afraid. Like maybe he already knew?
Midnight’s really close, and the slipper doesn’t fit, and this could all just really change my life. Brutally.
He ran his thumbs over her delicate earrings, toying with the tiny dangles. “I have a present for you, but now I think you might not like it.”
Uh-oh. She fixed her eyes on him and waited. You just never knew with Patrick. Sometimes watching him and waiting were the only way to deal with him.
His mouth curved in a soft way, as if his facial muscles couldn’t keep working enough to keep it straight. “I love the way you look at me sometimes. It makes everything about me feel…safe.”
Patrick’s in a fairytale, too
. He never spoke that seriously; he never revealed himself that way. This whole night was getting to him, too.
“Feel right,” he corrected himself, with a quick, wry grin to undo what he had just said. “Of course I feel safe with you. You’re half my size.”
There were all kinds of safe, though. Not all of them had anything to do with physical size.
He thrust a hand into the pocket of his coat and hesitated. “Don’t…worry about this,” he said, as he pulled out a velvet box.
It was too broad for a ring, and she realized that right away, really, she did, but for just a split second the thought of a ring shocked through her, and she almost did take off running down those stairs.
I can’t believe in
that
much. This is straining my credulity already.
“It’s just something I wanted to do.” He pushed the box into her fingers.
She sat with it a long moment before she opened it. The warm light from the streetlamp caught and winked off the contents, like midnight Paris caught in a box. Earrings. Little diamonds that dangled delicate sapphires on a fine platinum chain, so that they glittered like stars.
They had probably cost at least three months of her tiny intern’s stipend.
She stared at them, and the cold of her legs came inside and clutched at her middle, and she wished he hadn’t made that joke about her cuddling up in his lap at the Moulin Rouge, like some Gilded Age rich man’s mistress.
He wasn’t
rich,
not like that, although given how essential he was to Luc and to the running of the kitchen, he was probably doing quite well for himself. And she didn’t have to be poor.
But her toes clenched until the muscles of her legs hurt, and she gripped the box too tightly, wishing she was an engineer again. She never would have met him as an engineer. But if she
had
met him, he wouldn’t have seen himself as her sugar daddy, either.
I respect you. I like you.
“Can I put them on?” Patrick asked, petting her earlobes.
Her eyes flicked from the starry sapphires to his eyes. Patrick
pretended
to be eager, all the time, mostly to drive Luc nuts. But just this moment, he seemed actually eager.
“Patrick, I’m not – this isn’t–”
“Let’s just see what they look like,” he overrode her, in the calm, firm voice he used to guide her through a bad moment in the kitchens, after something she thought she had finally gotten perfect was sent back as not good enough. That voice that always relaxed her.
His fingers were little shocks of chill against her ears, still deft despite their cold as he slipped her original earrings free – that prize she had bought herself, when she accepted her first job after college – and traded them for the new ones.
And she let him. She let him shut her own accomplishments up in a box, she let him replace them with something only he could give her. That she could no longer afford for herself.
His thumbs rubbed gently over the new earrings in her ears, the heels of his palms against her jaw, his long fingers cradling the base of her skull. She looked up from the box to him, and his eyes were
brilliant.
Even in the dark.
“Yes,” he muttered, almost strangled, his fingertips flexing a little too hard against her skull. He pulled her torso forward into him, and suddenly there was warmth on her cold earlobe, the heat of his breath. His lips moved over the earring, the lobe of her ear, the slope of her neck, melting them, possessing them, until her head bowed heavily into his hand and shivers ran all up and down her body.
“You’re so cold.” He pulled her hard into the warmth of his body, nearly off the step, so that not only was he kneeling on stone but he was supporting most of her weight, too. His mouth ran down her neck to the edge of her coat, hot and hungry. “We should go back to your apartment.”
“No,” she murmured. “Yes.”
I don’t want the fairytale to end.
And:
Hadn’t he said his apartment was somewhere past hers in the Ninth? It wasn’t, therefore, closer to here?
Her inextinguishable brain twisted the little thought through her. She wasn’t welcome there?
“Yes,” he repeated. “Yes, to both. You are, too, cold, Sarah.
Allez.
”
He drew her up off the stairs. Maybe that was a tiny wince on his face as his knees straightened from the stone, but maybe it wasn’t.
He really didn’t like to show when things got to him, did he?
Often in the kitchens, she had just assumed that things
didn’t
get to him. He was just that much better at handling all of this than she was. But
everyone
’s knees ached after being pressed into stone.
“
Allez
, Sarah.” He closed his hand firmly around hers and led her down the long, beautiful stairs, the lamps glinting off the stars on her legs with every step, and neither of her boots even tried to fall off. Which kind of surprised her.
Chapter 17
The warmth of her apartment enveloped them as soon as they stepped inside, making Sarah shiver even before Patrick turned her until she faced the closed door and cupped the back of her head, pressing gently but entirely in control, until her forehead rested against the panel.
Her shivering grew deeper, goose bumps all over her body. She braced her forearms against the door, and Patrick ran his hands over her arms – thickly protected by the coat – and pulled them back down by her sides, so that her forehead was her only support, her body heavy and floating in that space between the door and him. “Yield to me,” he murmured to her, that low, assured command. Like when he was trying to get her hands to learn the proper shape of a new gesture.
Yield to me
.
Sarah. Relax.
An order, not a request.