The blond woman paused at the doorway and looked back at Max, the fluff of her blond curls blowing in the breeze.
In his hands, his jacket was still warm from her soft, curvy body.
It was that last look over her soft shoulder that got to him.
The taxi waiting for them on the street rolled down the passenger-side window to talk. Maxence said to the driver in French, “Wait one minute, if you please. My date forgot her coat.” The guy started arguing, but Maxence said, “Just one minute!” and ran after the woman.
She was still watching him as he hurried toward her.
“I say, you there!” Maxence called. He didn’t know her name. How could he not have gotten her name? “You, little girl, there! Wait up.”
“I am not a little girl!” she told him as he jogged up and held out his coat to her. “I am a grown-ass woman.”
She was exaggerating her words drunkenly, slurring, and it was funny as hell. “Of course, you are a grown woman.” But a drunk one.
She gesticulated wildly, her arms flying through the air. “And I’m going to fuck every man in that bar!”
“Oh, we’re not on that again, are we?”
“Yeah, we are! I am going to have a gang bang, or a foursome with three guys, or a threesome, or at least a one-night stand with a beautiful man whom I’ll never see again because the napkin says so!” She shook her purse at him.
“You will? You will do all these things because a napkin demands it of you?” he asked, hammering his point home. That wasn’t the only thing he wanted to hammer home, and he forced himself to drop that line of thought.
“Yes!” she said. “Have you ever done any of those things?”
All of them and more, though mostly with women instead of men, but that was none of her business. The gang bang had been Maxence and twelve women. “That’s immaterial. Why would you blindly follow everything written on a napkin?”
“Because I have to change my life! I’m stupid and gullible and pathetic, and I have to stop. I have to be something else. I have nothing left, nothing, so I cut my hair and got on the plane to Paris because I’d never been to Paris or London or anywhere, ever in my whole life. At least I’m going to have this night, this one night, this one night in Paris, to remember for the rest of my life!”
“It occurs to me you may not remember much of it,” Max mused. He was still watching the group over by the streetlamp, and they were still watching him. The lamplight shone like a yellow crust on the big guy’s white skin.
The little blonde said, “And if I have to fuck every guy in this place to change my life, I will!”
She was drunk-adamant and sounded desperate, so he needed to drunk-argue with her until she came around. “You want to get laid at any cost, and yet you’re walking away from a man who wants to take you home tonight.”
“Where?” she demanded, throwing her arms to the sides and nearly stumbling again in her vehemence.
“Right here.” Max wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep this up. “Me, right here.”
“Nuh-uh,” she said, her head hanging and wagging. “You’re a ten, and I’m a six when I have on wedding make-up and it’s a good hair day. And I don’t have any of that. I used a Sharpie marker for mascara.”
He took a long look at her, allowing himself to savor the view of the roundness of her breasts and hips, her narrow wasp waist, and her full thighs stretching that bright scarlet dress that drew him like a waving red flag.
Max’s friends had warned him, many times, that he had a bad habit of getting involved with women who were ragged bundles of waving red flags.
He smiled as he allowed himself to thoroughly enjoy examining her lush body, the swells of her visible in the streetlamp’s glow. To be any more form-fitting, that dress would’ve had to have been painted on. “I don’t think you’re a six.”
She argued, “A guy like you wouldn’t want a woman like me. Only a pathetic loser would go home with me. I could never get a guy like you.”
Pure frustration with her illogic and the fact that she would not get in the damn car so he could take her someplace safe broke his willpower.
Max grabbed that blonde with the spectacular tits around her bendy waist, yanked her against himself, and kissed her until she melted in his arms.
Her mouth opened in surprise when his lips crashed down on hers, and he took the opportunity of her parted lips to stroke his tongue over hers. She was a limp drunk in his arms for a second or two, and then she came alive and wrapped both her arms around his neck, kissing him back and sucking at his lips. She twined one of her curvy legs around his thigh.
Desire raced through him. Maxence was all too easily tempted, and this amorous, soft, yielding woman was his favorite kind of temptation. Her mouth tasted of tequila and vanilla peaches. He wondered vaguely if she’d eaten dessert or whether that was just her, and he wanted to nip her skin to find out. He reached one hand lower, feeling the curve of her hip in his palm, and then pressing all of his fingers around one overflowing globe of her ass.
She gasped against his mouth.
Shit, grabbing her ass had been too much. He lifted his head.
Her eyes were misty, as drunk with desire as she was with tequila. “Seriously? A guy like you, and me?”
His whole body was responding to her, and the impulse to fight a man and then take her vibrated in him. His voice had dropped lower when he rumbled, “Let me take you home.”
“And you’re going to fuck me?” she demanded, her voice low like she was exacting a promise from him.
Odd, he’d always thought of Americans as rather Puritanical when talking about sex.
Your job, they’d natter on about for hours. They were obsessed with work, again, due to their Puritan founders.
But sex? He’d seen grown women sputter and refuse to discuss what they wanted.
Not that he was any better about his darkest desires that he never admitted.
Yet, the woman seemed to want an assurance, so he leaned over and whispered near her ear, his breath puffing her gossamer hair, “Yes, I’m going to fuck you until you scream and can’t move with exhaustion.”
She paused, but then turned away. “No, you won’t.”
He tugged her hand back and caught her in his arms. “I will fuck you in ways you haven’t dreamed of. I’ll be your sure thing for the night if you will just get in the damn car.”
She drew back and examined his face, seeming to look for signs that he was serious, and then took his hand and marched toward the cab.
Odd, she wasn’t weaving when she walked, like she would have if she were that drunk.
He dropped his jacket around her shoulders again and hustled her into the back seat of the cab, handing the driver the little paper on which she’d written her address.
The guy looked at the paper. “You’re sure this is right?”
“Yes, she’s rented an apartment there.”
“If you say so.”
The taxi drove through the Parisian night, speeding on expressways and making quick turns on city streets.
The woman snuggled against his side, and her alcoholic breath warmed his neck. He’d kept one arm around her in case she passed out and flopped over, but her fingers roamed over his tee shirt, tracing his hard-won musculature. None of that had been built in a gym. There had been no gyms for miles where he’d been living for the past several years.