“I want you to tell me again,” he explained, pouting adorably.
Part of me was floating near the ceiling, buoyed by his good humor and obvious affection, while the
other part, smaller than a sandbag, kept me tethered to the earth. I cupped his achingly handsome face in my hands because it made me feel better about what I had to say.
“Daniel.” He flinched slightly but I tightened my hands on his cheeks. “I haven’t asked you to leave Elena, and I’m not going to. I have no right to ask you and I can promise you right now, I will never ask you that. But in return, I need you to promise me that you will never ask me if I love you, again. I can deal with this.” I rolled my head around to indicate our fucked up situation in the most eloquent way I knew how. “With Elena keeping you, but only if you let me keep a part of myself to myself.”
I sighed heavily, took a moment to collect my thoughts and project them clearly through my gaze when I met his eye again.
“You could take it.” I thumped my chest. “You could take everything I am and, you know what? A part of me wants that like crazy.”
His hands found my hips and rested there, just gently on the curve. I was grateful for it because he was letting me know that he understood what I was trying to say.
“But I have to be realistic even if I don’t want to be. You aren’t going to leave Elena and I refuse to put my heart in a cage I don’t have the key to open.”
His lips were screwed tight like a lid over the emotions bubbling up at his center. I could see some of it rise to the surface of his gaze but he was looking over my shoulder, shielding most of it from me.
I swallowed hard and decided to throw in the last of my grenades. “Also, I have a lunch date today.”
His eyes snapped to me, flashing like neon lights. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
His hands flexed painfully on my waist but the silence was worse than the physical discomfort. It stretched long and torturous before us like a road littered with mines.
“You’re going to sit across from another man when your ass is still sore from my hand?”
I raised my eyebrows. “You’re going to go home to my sister when your hand is still sore from my ass?”
Fury emanated from him like dry ice and I instantly regretted my barb.
I sighed. “Sin, it’s just a lunch date. Elena basically insisted on setting us up and I wanted to seem like a normal girl, one who was interested in other men.” I laughed a little. “We both know who I would rather be with.”
“Do we?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
But he wasn’t. He sat utterly rigid on the stool and his eyes had been reduced to icy shields.
“I want to be with you,” I said slowly and maybe a little condescendingly, because I thought it was blindingly obvious.
His jaw clenched and he stared me hard for a long moment before standing up and stalking away to the balcony doors.
“Sin?” I stayed where I was because I wasn’t sure how to deal with an angry Frenchmen even after all my time in Paris.
He continued to stare broodingly out the window. In only his low-slung jeans with the sunlight kissing his skin, he looked like stolen art, something far too glorious to ever belong to me.
“You cut a dashing figure standing there but maybe you could talk to me?” I asked as I scooted onto a stool to make myself comfortable while I waited.
He looked over his shoulder at me but his face was cast in shadow. “Come here.”
I slid off the stool before I could even process his request and I hesitated when I realized how easily my body revealed his dominion over me. He was in front of me before I could make a decision one way or another, his fingers sinking into the hair over my ears while his thumbs tilted my chin up.
“I have done nothing in my life to deserve you, Elle. Absolutely nothing. I’ve fought to be a good person when it is not in my nature to be kind or good, not like you.” He shook his head and his thumb brushed against my lower lip. “I do not deserve to hold something so precious in my hands.”
I turned my head, dislodging one of his hands so I could kiss his palm, leaving the imprint of my love for him like a lucky coin. I closed his fist over it and held it with both my hands. There was no way to articulate the toxic cocktail of emotions rolling churlishly through my veins and if I couldn’t, my enigmatic Frenchman probably couldn’t either.
Besides, we hadn’t really spoken about where we would go from here but as it stood, this was my last morning as Daniel Sinclair’s lover and I wanted to make the most of it.