The International Kissing Club (33 page)

He pulled her back down, rolled over on top of her so that she couldn’t hide. Couldn’t protect herself from the tenderness in his eyes. “I do want to.” He laughed. “Of course I do. But that doesn’t mean I want to push you into it.”

“You’re not!”

“Okay, then, that doesn’t mean I want to see
you
push
yourself
into it.” He kissed her again. “Let’s just relax, see what happens, okay?”

She nodded as relief and love and happiness exploded inside her. The tension and worry she’d barely let herself acknowledge drained out of her, and she wrapped her arms around Sebastian, hugging him as tightly as she could. Back in Texas, the boys she knew would never have thought twice if they’d believed they could go all the way with a girl. That Sebastian cared enough about her, about what she wanted, not to pressure her, was awesome. Amazing. Wonderful. Was there any doubt why she was so crazy in love with him?

He kissed her again, then rolled back onto his side. “So, tell me about this art project. What’s your teacher’s problem?”

“It’s not her problem. It’s mine,” she said. “I can’t seem to get anything right.”

“Can I see what you’re doing? Maybe I can help.”

“What, now?” she asked.

“Not right now,” he answered with a smile. “I don’t want to let you go yet.”

She didn’t want to let him go, either. Not now. Maybe not ever. How could she, when he knew her so well? When he’d known—even before she had—that she wasn’t ready to make love with him yet, no matter how crazy she was about him.

Instead, she wanted to study him, to learn everything about him. They talked and touched, kissed and cuddled. She told him about the pig incident and Germaine, and even about her mother. Things she’d never thought she could share with another person, at least not without feeling burning humiliation. But with Sebastian it was easy; he just accepted. And when it was his turn, he told her about why he loved to sculpt, about how he was afraid all his knowledge about art was just a substitute for real talent, that he was no more than a hack who’d never live up to the artists who came before him. After a while they got hungry. They went to the kitchen and ate crusty bread with cheese and some round, fat grapes that Sebastian insisted on feeding to her, one by one. Then they went back to his bedroom and cuddled some more, talked some more.

It was the best day of her life, one she knew she was going to hold on to forever. She wanted to sketch what she was feeling, to create a memento of this day that couldn’t fade. When she was back in Texas she wanted to be able to pull out the memory and examine it over and over again, to wrap herself up in it so that when the stupid football players started in on her she wouldn’t care. Because she would know what it was like to have had this one, perfect moment. But to do that, she would have to move and she wasn’t yet ready to give up the warmth of Sebastian’s arms.

Eventually Sebastian fell asleep—between school, his sculpting, and spending time with her, he hadn’t been getting more than four or five hours of sleep a night. For a while, she just watched him. Brushed
his hair back from his forehead. Traced the strong lines of his face with soft fingertips. Trailed gentle kisses over his jaw.

But eventually the need to sketch him grew overwhelming. She slid out from under his arm, grabbed a stray piece of paper and a pencil, and began to draw …

The strong curve of his shoulder …

The well-muscled line of his back …

The heavy roundness of his bicep.

He was so beautiful, so unbelievably beautiful, that she wanted to capture every nuance of him.

As she sketched, she marveled at the strange familiarity of the moment. She’d sketched tons of people in her life, some aware of what she was doing, some unaware, but never before had it felt like this. So personal, so emotional, so intimate. More intimate, she imagined, than even having sex with him would have been. This watching him while he slept, trying to use her talent to record on paper not just what he looked like but how she felt about him as well.

At first, she hadn’t been sure she was good enough to express all that. But as Piper worked, she realized that whatever funk had been bugging her in art class didn’t extend to her time with Sebastian. Drawing him was easy.

Smiling, she shaded the angle of his jaw before moving on to the curve of his ear and the pronounced sharpness of his cheekbone. He stirred but didn’t wake up, so she kept sketching.

She worked for a long time, until her hand ached and her fingers cramped. She knew it was time to stop—past time—but she couldn’t make herself put the pencil down. Her time in France—her time with Sebastian—was finite. Limited. With each moment that passed, it was slowly leaking away.

Sebastian stirred eventually, ran his hand over the spot next to him on the bed. When he didn’t find Piper, his eyes popped open and he
searched the room for her. Their eyes met and he smiled, a sweet, sleepy curve of his lips that arrowed right through her. He held out a hand and Piper took it, climbing onto the bed beside him and running her fingers lightly down his back.

As she settled next to him, Piper felt her eyes start to close. She fought sleep as long as she could, made herself a promise as she lay there listening to Sebastian breathe. She had four weeks left in Paris—to explore her art, the city, her feelings for Sebastian, and this place that had taught her so much about herself. She wasn’t going to waste a second of it.

The Official Fan Page for the International Kissing Club

11,776

people like this

IKC Page

Messages

Between
Piper
and
Cassidy
:

Piper

OMG!!! Who knew sculptors were so good with their hands!

Cassidy

I don’t even want to know what that means.

Piper

All I’m saying is OMG!!!

Chapter 18
Cassidy

The boat moored at the end of the marina’s wooden dock was huge and sleek. Its hull gleamed fire-engine red in the sun, the mahogany stained wood on its deck polished to brilliance.

“You said your parents owned a sailboat, Lucas.” Cassidy came to a full stop on the dock. She reached up and ripped off the motion sickness patch behind her ear. She wasn’t going to need it—this thing was the size of a freaking yacht.

“What? It’s a sailboat. There’s the sail and everything.” He pointed to the gleaming white sail that towered into the wide blue sky above them.

“I thought your dad was a banker and your mom stays at home.”

“My mom does stay at home, when she’s not hosting charity events.”

“And your dad?” Lucas looked everywhere but her eyes while Cass waited for him to answer.

He sighed before finally speaking. “Technically, he is a banker—he just also owns the bank.”

“Owns the bank? Which bank? Because the family who owns the local bank in Paris doesn’t have a hundred-foot sailboat.”

“It’s more like twenty-three meters, which is about—”

“Stop avoiding the question, Lucas.”

“NSW Bank.”

“You mean
that
bank?” she asked, pointing to the skyscraper on the other side of the harbor with the letters
NSW
emblazoned across the top. “So when you were telling me that your dad wants you to work with him, it never occurred to you once in the past six weeks to mention that it would be as chairman of the board.”

“Why are you upset, Cass?”

“Because you’re rich. Very rich.”

“No, my parents are rich,” Lucas stated matter-of-factly. She shot him a you-know-what-I-mean look.

Cassidy’s already frayed nerves unraveled as the wide chasm between their backgrounds expanded to Grand Canyon widths underneath her Payless sandals. All those golden-god quips didn’t seem so funny now that she knew he really was made of gold.

“Cass, it doesn’t matter.”

“That’s because you’re the one with the money. It matters a whole lot to me.”

He frowned. “It’s not that I was hiding it from you.” He faced her and put his hands on her hips to pull her to him. “It’s that”—he bent and kissed her earlobe—“I had other things”—then he traced the curve of her jaw—“on my mind.”