The Frenchman (Crime Royalty Romance Book 1) (30 page)

“Cock,” I demanded.

He smiled vicious.

“Is that what you—”

I flipped over on my hands and knees, beating him at his taunting game, arching my back, sticking my ass in the air, legs spread. He hissed again, and his hand grasped my butt cheek, gently caress it, and—
mmm
—his face was deep, lapping—I gasped as sharp pain quickly diffused. Twisting around, he winked at me and bit down again on my ass cheek.

“Cock,” I said, getting down on my elbows, raising my butt even higher in the air.

Finally, the cot squeaked under his weight as he positioned himself. His tip massaged my wet core, hitting my clit, rubbing it, tapping it. Louis made a low noise like an animal, and I moaned with rabid pleasure.

His hand reached down and squeezed my breast hard.

“Yes,” I gushed, needing like never before.

I wiggled my ass.

I was throbbing.

Give it to me
.

He was going to make me beg.

I wanted to beg. I wanted him to know how much I needed him, how much I would always need him. “Please, Louis.”

I gasped as a large hand dug into my hair, twisted it, pulled me up and around roughly. My pussy clenched with desire at the hunger in his eyes. “I want to see your face when I give you what you want.”

I let out a blissful mewl as his length entered me.

Finally.

I needed to collapse at the invasive pleasure-connection, but he held up my waist with one arm, keeping my head twisted up with the other. His face was wrenched in a frenzied trance. I cried for more. I’m not sure he was listening—he seemed lost in another carnal dimension. He just kept pulling out, and ramming into me, stoking the tremulous sweet throbbing that was traveling from my pussy to my mind. Watching me, always watching me. Again, again, harder and harder, with each pounding thrust he brought me, us, closer in the chase.

He leaned over my back, holding me close to him, my muscles wanting to give out even as they clenched tighter. Our mouths completed the tangled siege, a tremor wracked through me, and he murmured
oui
, fucked me, and my mouth, harder, biting my lip, exerting his control over me, reveling in his mastery of my total surrender.

I climaxed, quivering on a slippery floor of euphoria as he groaned wildly, pumping erratically, surrendering to his own pleasure, losing control. He let my hair and mouth go, hands slipping down to milk my boobs while he shuddered twice more inside me. We stayed like that, intertwined, connected, for a moment or two.

The second he let go of my body I melted onto the cot. Having gone hungry for so long, my body was unable to absorb it all. And it felt hollow. He stood up for a moment, and I watched his magnificent silhouette return with another blanket.

When he saw me staring at him, he smiled, as though our lives were about to start over—it stole my breath. He crouched near the pillow, brushing the hair out of my face, kissing my lips the way I like. “You are my heart, Fleur,” he repeated, hushed.

He climbed back into the cot, and I rolled over onto his chest as he covered us with a blanket.

In my mind, over and over, rubber squealed on pavement. Metal crumpled with two-ton head-on force. Glass shattered. Sirens screamed. A mother cried plaintively.

I didn’t care. I wanted to lie in this wreckage. Blind. Immobilized. Listening for a distant echo of heartbeats.

• • •

“This place is tragic,” I whispered. I knew he had come up behind me. I could
feel
him.

I sat on a rock far too large and lonely to have ended up at this cliff’s edge by environmental forces. My arms were wrapped around my bent legs, chin on my knees, staring out at the setting golden orb in the unearthly pink sky. Below, a miniature village was nested on the tip of a cliff. And far, far away, lay the sea.

“I wanted you to see my island.”

He settled beside me on the rock, dressed, bringing with him the blanket we had just fucked on. I thanked him and wrapped it around my shoulders.

“Surely this is not your family’s summer home.”

“No.” He smiled, mysterious. His eyes roamed approvingly over the church, which was indeed in a state of restoration. “But my grandfather, how do you say, removed three times?” I nodded. His great-great grandfather. “He was from here. My family bought this town, which was not easy. Laws here dispense ownership to every single generation past. We tracked down hundreds of people.”

“I bet they didn’t sell cheap, either,” I said, turning to stare at him, temple resting on my knee. He shrugged indifferent. “It is the Messettes’ now. Forever.” The way he said forever, staring at me pointedly, made me shiver.

He thought I was his—forever.

Leaning back on his elbows, he stretched out his long thick legs and took in the wonder before him. He
was
a king, just then, I marveled. A majesty, surveying his splendor, bought and owned with the ashes of unwritten stories. And isn’t all royalty resting on a precarious mountain of souls, inheritances reaped from the deeds—good, bad, no matter—of generations past? I could easily imagine, though never properly understand, the obligations of such a legacy. The way it would shape and mold a young boy into a prideful man whose sense of honor was bound by winning rather than by earning; who had been taught and shown how the world was his for the claiming. I could also understand—perfectly—how so many could love such a man with all their hearts, even as the guillotine dropped down.

I sighed deeply.

Time passed in silence. Just as the sun slipped under the edge of the world, he said, staring after it, “I don’t like you this way.”

“How’s that?”

“Triste
.” (Sad.)

• • •

In the church, after we ate meat and cheese sandwiches that had miraculously arrived while we’d sat on that stone, posing for an imaginary painter, he asked me to let him make me “happy.”

And I said yes, because I was selfish. He was soft and tender and soulful. But it didn’t work.

He took me to the car, parked on a frighteningly narrow road with no safety barrier, with plenty of time to make the seventy-two-hour promise to Marie. An unmarked boat would return me to Toulon overnight. I was leaving solo; he could not risk being connected with my disappearance, in case Marie changed her mind. I spotted another car farther up the road, near the row of dilapidated, conjoined stone houses I hadn’t seen until then.

I had waited, biding my time, letting him believe he had me until the end. It was time to show my hand.

My heart beat a dire drum. Could I quantify what I loved about him? Did things like passion, sensuality, determination, even matter? For it’s not the man we love, but his very soul.

His hand reached up to caress my face.

I pulled away.

Yes, the end is near
. I stared into his chest.

Never one to miss an emotion, he grabbed my face, suddenly, and made me look into my future.

Caustic, demanding eyes.

“Do we have a deal?” I whispered. His eyelids opened wide as he realized, yes, I still wanted him to let me go. His mouth stiffened and twisted.

I flinched as he tossed his head back suddenly, and growled his displeasure at the hint of moon in the midnight-blue sky. I steeled myself as he spread his legs out, crossed his arms over his chest, and stared at me, disbelieving. Angry. Leaning forward, his face was inches from mine. I tried to stay strong. He wanted to intimidate me, since seducing me had failed.

“Deal?” I asked again.

“
Non
!”

“Louis. Your brother could go to prison for life if you do not agree. That’s why you brought me here.” The Messettes were desperate. If Marie had built a case against Georges, and that was a big
if
, you bet your ass she’d built an iron-clad one.

Well, I was desperate to have my way, too. And LaSalles could be equally determined.

“
Mon Dieu
!” He grabbed his head in frustration. “Why, why do you insist on such foolishness? Why do you not believe me? None of this is necessary! Are you trying to punish me? Is that it? You are angry at yourself. Fleur.” He stepped into my space. “You will stop this nonsense. You will see, you will believe me, and help your mother, not Georges, your mother. And, in time, this will not matter. You will see. Please trust me.”

He pulled me to him and kissed my head.

I remained stiff in his embrace, searching for some way to get through to him.

“Do you remember the night when—” my voice hitched “—you asked me to trust you to hurt me?” He let me lean back, and I watched his face still. Yes, he remembered how he’d claimed my virginity.

I stared up at him. “Now it is your turn.”

His brow leveled down on his fierce eyes. There. He was starting to understand, or so I imagined. Could he see he had lost the game? Or, God willing, that it was only
he
who had been playing one all along? I had given him my heart. That’s why he called me “his heart.” Well, where was his heart? I wanted it.

“But . . .” he said, and I watched him rush, frantic, to paste on his charming smile. No. He didn’t see. Was he unwilling, or unable? “. . . we love each other.”

A terrible sound came out of my mouth. His face pulled back.

No. He would never have heard me laugh so. I had never heard me laugh so.

I stared at him with genuine contempt, the kind that steals angels’ souls. And I slayed him even as his eyes bled with child-like confusion at the sudden reckoning.

“You have to give love to get love, Louis.”

He flinched, and red infused his cheeks as my words sank in. There. Did he understand? All he had to do was let me into his heart, the precious palace he kept under lock and key.

I clutched my hands together, bloodied from wounding him, and shivered with cold. God help me, I had to fight the urge to hug him to me and tell him, “Just breathe. It will be okay. You’ll live.” Instead, I kept on slaying him with my cold stare.

Somehow, inside of me, I’d found the courage to take a stand. Why? Because while I may like life to be easy, I wasn’t willing to live a lie. I deserved more from him. And no, love isn’t something you can simply ask for from someone. That’s called self-delusion. Letting him take freely—and for free—from me as he did would have drained me dry. He was so fucking greedy.

I
wanted more. Badly. And the only way he would ever know what was at stake was if I took it away from him.

He searched, of course, one last time, guns ablaze, for a new way to have me, to insist on having me, yet. I watched his eyes dart back and forth.

He would have to do better than forcing his way in. And after he recovered from this wound I had just delivered, I swallowed but my throat had a big fat lump in it, he would have to want to find another way.

The price of love was only love.

Surely he would pay it?

His mouth drew into a firm line.

I watched the lights turn out in his face, and with it the feeling in my limbs.

“Deal,” he said, coldly, and walked away.

A shadow of my former self sailed back to Toulon. I floated into a waiting car and then back into the lobby of my apartment building. I was too weightless to fear—as strange men peered at their pale-faced, silent passenger—and imagined stray bullets passing right through me.

Marie was on the sofa, waiting, a bundle of anxiety. Upon disbelieving first glance, she gasped and launched herself at me, hugging me briefly, then searching me with her eyes, frantic, for what? A missing ear?

I wanted the first question out of her mouth to be, “Are you okay?”

“What does he want?” she heaved. My stomach dropped. There it was: she trusted no one. Not even her own daughter. She was terrified I would expose her to them.

Of course, I already had my story ready. Louis had only wanted a chance to convince me of his love, I said, shrugging.

Did she buy it? Well, she definitely wanted to make sure I didn’t believe him. So yes, she did, maybe because it was true—that had been one of his goals.

When I think back to that tipping point in Corsica, Louis had said he needed two things from me. He had stated the first: getting his brother freed. The second had never been said because I let him believe, through our sensual language, that he’d got it, that he would always have it—my love.

And in the end, I’d refused him his demand in the only way I knew he would accept, by wounding him. It helped that he could justify letting me go for his brother’s freedom.

The regret ate at me. Had I done the right thing telling him his love lacked? Had I sabotaged any hope for us? Was there another way . . . and I just didn’t see it? No. No, I couldn’t turn into that kind of person. I had to protect myself by fighting for more, not begging for it or accepting less.

So if I’d done the right thing, for myself, why did I feel so helpless, sleepless, still marooned on his island, hoping for rescue?

I tried to focus on what mattered the most: Marie’s salvation.

• • •

Three weeks had passed since Louis let me go; it was just two days before Georges Messette’s arraignment. I had every reason to believe Louis made up the stuff about Marie planting evidence. But here’s the thing: Louis hadn’t asked me to get her to drop the charges for his benefit, or even for his brother’s, not really. Sitting at that table, staring at me with sympathy in his eyes, he had asked for me.

Had
Marie, grown tired of fighting a losing battle, stepped up the ante? Had she crossed a line because her own daughter, the one she’d given up to protect from a criminal, had gone and fallen in love with one? And if so, if she had dipped her toes into the inferno to support her cause, was it too late to save her?

The minute I got back from Corsica, I stuck close to Marie. I told Sylvie I was taking time off to free up my days. (She didn’t ask questions, perhaps grateful for me having kept the assault secret.) Marie was pleased as punch I was her new sidekick, because we loved each other, and it also meant I was at the station with her, safe. She gave me small jobs around her office, namely the ongoing organizing, and I worked on my French and my food blog the rest of the time.