Page 4 of Iridescent
An indecipherable emotion flickers through Xavier’s expression, gone too quickly to name. His attention narrows to my lips. “That merciless mouth of yours,” he breathes. “You have no idea what it does to my restraint, amor.”
“Shameless,” I chide.
He answers by taking my mouth. His hand slides to the back of my neck, angling me exactly how he wants me, and the first sweep of his tongue turns the rest of my sentence into a gasp. My fingers spear into his damp hair, holding on as the kiss changes shape between us—heat and relief and all the fear neither of us knows how to say out loud.
Desire narrows everything to the island beneath me and Xavier standing between my legs. The taste of him floods my senses. The heat of him anchors me. His body is solid against mine, and I kiss him like the world has goneunder and his mouth is the last habitable place left.
Hungry. Messy. Consuming.
Still not close enough.
When he finally releases my mouth, my breath is uneven and his is no better. For a second, we stay like that, foreheads almost touching, his fingers flexing at my waist like he is trying to remember where we are and resenting the effort.
Then his hand drops to the hem of my shorts.
I lift my hips to help him, my pulse tripping because Colette, our housekeeper, is away on her annual holiday in Marseille, and there is no one here to walk in on us this time.
The memory almost makes me laugh.
Last year, she found us half-dressed against this same island, screamed as if she had discovered a crime scene, and Xavier carried me upstairs with my shorts still caught around one ankle.
Four years in this house, and the woman still hasn’t learned that my husband and I are a public decency risk wherever marble, walls, or locked doors are involved.
God, I hope she never does.
My teeth catch my lower lip as he eases the fabric down my legs. The question on the tip of my tongue escapes before my courage can desert me. “Are you hopeful?”
His hand stills, a minute tension gathering in his forearm.
“About the IUI,” I clarify, softer now. “Are you?”
His throat moves with a swallow. “Terrified,” he admits, and the answer steals whatever breath his mouth left me with. “Hopeful too.”
A knot beneath my ribs loosens by a painful degree.
That’s all I need.
He tosses my shorts somewhere behind me and parts my thighs wider. I roll my hips into his hand and meet his gaze with a smirk, anticipation blooming into defiance.
“But right now,” he murmurs, “I keep thinking about Maison Verre.”
“Maison Verre?” I ask, though my body already knows exactly where he istaking this.
His thumb strokes the inside of my thigh. “You sitting across from me pretending those dates were platonic. Looking at my mouth like you weren’t imagining it between your legs.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You’re a shit liar, amor.”
A laugh slips out of me, breathless and shaky, but it dies the second his fingers hook into my panties and pull them aside, his knuckles brushing my clit with a pressure that makes my thighs tense around him.
Fuck.
My head falls back, breath coming apart in my throat.
“I remember the bathroom stall,” he continues, his voice dropping. “Your hand over your mouth. Your thighs shaking around me. My name trapped in your throat while you tried so hard to stay quiet.”
“Xavier.”
