What a weird little girl. Maxence pulled back and kicked his pants off his ankles while he got rid of the condom. He yanked his shirt off her wrists, untying her. His mind was still a blurred mass of smudges.
Dree, for that was the blonde’s name, was wiggling, trying to free herself from the tight, red dress like she was fighting her way out of a cocoon. She’d gotten her elbows inside the red roll of elastic around her waist.
He helped her, pulling at the straps and finally locating a zipper.
She popped out of it like a sausage splitting its casing, sucked in a few panicked breaths, and tossed the red fabric over the footboard and onto the floor.
The bed was a four-poster. Damn. He really should have made use of those.
Four posts.
Three.
The Trinity.
“Augustine,” Maxence said, almost chuckling with the rightness of it. “My name is Augustine.”
“Like, St. Augustine?” Dree asked, rolling and wriggling to get under the covers. “Like, The City of God, that St. Augustine?”
The City of God was St. Augustine’s most famous book, yes.
Maxence rolled naked onto the bed and pulled the duvet over himself. The room had turned chilly in the December night. “More like when Augustine was younger. Like his prayer, ‘God, grant me chastity and sobriety, but not yet.’”
Her chuckle was slow at first but sped up to a laugh. “‘But not yet.’”
The double bed had two pillows, so Max commandeered one and grasped the voluptuous Dree, pulling her against himself and spooning her. “‘Not yet.’ Maybe someday, God will grant me chastity and sobriety, but He has not done it yet.”
“Well, I’m glad God hasn’t answered your prayer for chastity yet, Augustine, because that was spectacular.”
Damn, that was gratifying.
As he was drifting off, she asked, “What’s that tattoo on your back? Or your arm?”
But Maxence was already descending into sleep, and he couldn’t make his mouth move.
Rescuing two women in two days and then satisfying each of them didn’t leave much time for sleep, and he was damn tired.
Chapter Three
Plan
Dree
Sunlight bouncing off the sunny yellow walls glared on Dree’s face and stabbed her eyes, so she squeezed them more tightly shut.
The DJ from the night before at the Buddha Bar had crammed the nightclub’s enormous speakers inside Dree’s skull and turned up the pulsing bass to full volume.
Her shoulders were sore.
So were her boobs.
Not to mention between her legs.
She might have a hangover, too, but that guy, “Augustine,” had been amazing in bed. She had been well and truly fucked. Last night was exactly the sort of thing that she’d needed to draw a bright line in the sand between her old life and her new one. She’d needed a fantastic night with a gorgeous, gorgeous man whom she’d never see again.
She was never going to see him again, right?
He had left during the night, right?
Dree held her breath, and despite her hangover, she squinted and rolled over, hoping like hell that he had done as she’d asked and taken off during the night.
The other side of the bed was empty. The sheets were rumpled, and the pillow lay askew.
Oh, thank goodness. Dree did not need to explain herself to anyone in the light of day just then. Her life was a godawful mess. Putting it back together was going to take a hell of a lot of work, and she didn’t need some hanger-on bugging her for ass while she was trying to deal with it.
Besides, she had a “Bucket List” to attend to. She had a hundred more things she wanted to experience in Paris before she caught that plane in four more days.
She swung her legs around and hopped down to the floor, smiling a little at the edge of the bed.
Her legs wobbled as she tried to walk. Man, Augustine had gone at her so hard last night that she might have sprained something. She should have stretched before a marathon like that. Her muscles had locked up so tightly when she’d come that second time that tears had leaked out of her eyes and she’d thought she might get a migraine.
It had been spectacular.
Augustine had been spectacular, and as a part of a last, hedonistic few days before she changed her life, he had been perfect.
She could limp around Paris and do the next couple of things on her napkin-based bucket list with a grin on her face.
The plan had been one night, and then he would leave.
She was not going to feel bad about it.
Even if she kind of wanted to see him again, hear him talk again, and lick his hard, hot skin again.
But no. That was not the plan.
She would stick to the plan.
She stumbled to the kitchen area and chugged a glass of water straight out of the tap, then another. Dehydration was the enemy. Getting over a hangover migraine required water.
Back in nursing school, she and her friends had given each other the ultimate cure for a hangover: eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, a liter of lactated Ringer’s saline solution delivered intravenously, and ten minutes of breathing pure oxygen. In half an hour, that would entirely cure even the worst hangover.
Damn, she really needed an IV and some O2 just then.
A can of coffee grounds stood beside the coffee maker, and she thanked St. Augustine and all the other saints that the B and B had supplied her with coffee. Last night, after she’d gotten off the plane, ridden the subway, and found her room, she’d just kind of dumped everything and thrown on her one good dress to go to the Buddha Bar in a fit of blind rage and despair.
Packets of sugar lay on the counter beside the coffee pot, so she dumped three of them into a cup and added coffee to it. No milk, but she wasn’t picky.
Maybe that’s what Dree’s problem was.
Maybe she should be pickier.
Or at least a whole lot less gullible.
At the thought of just how damn gullible she was, another horrible possibility occurred to Dree.
Shock slammed her, and her heartbeat battered her temples.
She grabbed her purse, frantically praying that even though she’d been hopelessly stupid and naïve, maybe she’d escaped the consequences this time.
Probably not. Probably not.
She opened her purse and shook it hard.
Her wallet fell out with a heavy plop on the kitchen counter. She scrambled while opening it anyway, and a wad of pastel-colored euros scattered on the white Formica. She spread the bills out, frantically counting them, but it looked like all her one hundred fifty-two euros were still there.
Her heart was still slamming in her chest, and she braced her arms on the counter and gulped air with relief.
How stupid was she for picking up some guy, bringing him back to her hotel room, and then passing out drunk while he was there? He could have stolen all her money—which was everything she had left in the world—and walked out while she’d slept it off.
With her luck, she was surprised he hadn’t stolen all her money and her clothes and left her literally naked without a shirt on her back.
But she was okay.
She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
No more trusting people with her money or her heart.
And today, her goal was to figure out how to put her life back together and go on. She was going to live a whole new kind of life, one where she was smart and had adventures and didn’t get taken advantage of.