A Wish Upon Jasmine (29 page)

“Do you want to try it?” He parted his collar, stroked the hollow of his own throat. “Here?” His fingertips were too damn callused from the rock climbing. His stroking didn’t have the texture he wanted at all. But a spritz of her scent would be almost close enough.

She hesitated and gave a funny little shrug. “I kind of do and yet…” Those dusk blue eyes met his, with all the promise of an early evening. “…I really like the way you smell without anything at all.” A faint hint of color on her cheeks, like the last light of sunset. “Just you.”

The power she had over him, that she could say something so simple and it could delight him so much. His hand curved over her butt, and he tried not to grip, tried not to pull her in close to him.
You do it. You reach for me.

How long did he have to restrain himself, to get her to make the first move?
Were
his lips soft and inviting? No, they’d tightened in hunger again, and he bit on the inside of the lower one, trying to get them to relax.

Her thumb came and stroked beside the corner of his lips. “You have a triple A personality, don’t you?”

No, he didn’t, damn it. That sounded like a risk for heart disease or…migraines. Definitely a weakness. But he shook his head only a tiny, tiny bit, because if he shook it too hard it might knock her fingers away.

What was that look in her eyes? So wonderful and yet so baffling. Like tenderness, or protectiveness, just this great
caress
of a look that could not possibly be meant for him.

She bent her head and replaced the tug of her thumb with her own lips. A kiss.

She’d
kissed
him
. All on her own, not him but
her.

He drank in that kiss like a bee might drink in nectar if the crazy flower just turned upside down and started raining sweetness down on him instead of making him work for it. This glorious sense of starvation and generous fulfillment.

The cloth fell off his forehead to the floor. Her weight came more onto him, one of her hands dropping to his shoulder, the other curving around his head, the scent strip rubbing against his ear as she deepened the kiss.
Yes.
He spread his legs, urging her deeper between them.
Get lost in me.

She rubbed her mouth away from his, nuzzling down toward the join of his shoulder, her fingers flexing into his hair as she took a deep breath, and then another. It drove him absolutely crazy when she did that, this woman who lived by her sense of smell luxuriating in his scent. His fingers flexed hard into her butt before he could stop them, and he pulled her in closer.

“I like trying to come up with fragrances for you,” she murmured into his ear. “I like the idea of you collecting samples of everything I try, as if they’re special to you. I like”—a little hesitation, and then, extra low, like a dirty secret—“I like
marking
you.”

His head flexed back, his body lifting toward the brush of that word
marking.
The chair creaked. He tightened his hold on her, so that if he went crashing down, at least he could bring her with him in a tangle of heat and thunder on the floor. Where had all her honesty and sincerity come from? This
openness
, as if she was deliberately lowering all weapons and shields, presenting herself without armor.

“If you ever wore someone else’s fragrance, I think it would drive me to a livid rage,” she said.

Would
it? If he got more aroused, he would combust. Just explode and burn this centuries-old stone building down. He could not possibly sit still for this much longer.

“But,” she whispered, taking another deep breath of him, “I love the way you smell as
just you.
”

Oh, hell. He pulled her down onto him, finding her mouth again, his hands rubbing over her, too hard and too eager. The chair creaked again, and he lunged them to their feet before it could give under them.

The counter invited. He set her on it so that he could have his hands free, to run over her as much as he liked. “I like this skirt.” Some handkerchief hem, flowing and flirty. A romantic’s idea of a dress for a summer evening. His hands sank into its softness and the muscle of her thigh underneath. A man could slide and rub and play with that skirt, against her legs. He didn’t have to push it up and invade.

She could wrap her legs around him and still have fabric spilling over her, not straightaway stripped bare.

She touched a finger to his third button, still buttoned, rubbing it as if she could wish it away.

“You can undo it,” he murmured, sneaking kisses over her ear, through her hair, down to her shoulder, back up to her forehead. Just anywhere a kiss could fall and not take over.
I’ve seduced. I’ve taken. You take now. You take me.

She smiled a little as she rubbed the button again. And then carefully undid it. And then the next. And then the next. There she paused, one finger sneaking in like a secret between the parted panels of his shirt, stroking his chest.

Warmth swelled in him. Not heat, not burning, but this great, massive, erotic warmth, overcoming him like sun on snow, melting everything. “You can undo all of them.” He bent his head into her soft curls. “All of them, Jasmin.”

She rested her forehead on his chest, between the parted panels, and took a deep breath. Savoring his scent still. Desire washed through him again, this mounting, insistent wave, like he was a sandcastle and it was going to tear him down. He stroked her back, running his fingers up and down, finding spots that made her shiver and sigh a little and take another deep breath of him.

“I’d like it,” he whispered into her curls, “if you’d do that. Very much.”
You have no idea how much.

She stroked her hands over his chest, through the shirt, fisting the fabric against his skin. The touch sank hot through his body. He braced his knee against the cabinet door under the counter, to keep from driving into her.

She found a button and undid it, her head still tucked into his chest. His hand stroked firm up her back, sinking into her hair at her nape.
Don’t stop.

She didn’t. Her fingertips brushed against his skin as she bared another button’s worth and then another. He breathed slow, concentrating on that breathing, hands dipping down her back to her butt for something he could hold on to.
Flick
, went those fingers. And flick, and flick. Little electric teases of sensation, again and again.

He grabbed her hand as soon as the panels fell apart and pressed it against his bared ribs. She got that hint. She ran her hands over his ribs and up his chest with so much care he could have been a jasmine blossom she was afraid of crushing.

Which was ridiculous, of course. He was the very opposite of fragile. He was the one who went into battle to protect all those fragile things behind him.

“You can touch me”—
harder
, he had been going to say.
A lot harder.
But the softness and the care were so fascinating that the words changed even as he tried to say them—“any way you want.”
I think you’ve made my body utterly yours.

Her hands slid up over his shoulders and pushed his shirt down, and his heart pounded so hard he had to let go of her butt and grip the counter.
Steady. Steady. Let her set the pace.

He was hungry like a child in front of a bakery window to know what she would do if she led the way.

His shirt got caught at his elbows. He pried his hand free to let her pull it off that arm, then the other. It brushed against his skin as it fell to the floor, and his breath filled his body with too much air. He felt too light and too heavy, as if he could sail across the sky and as if his gravity would suck everything about her in and crush it in his hunger.

Gripping the counter, he buried his face in the hair spilling over her shoulder, twisting through it until he could kiss the curve of her shoulder. Kiss up her throat to her ear. Slide his lips down to her shoulders, lost in the scent and fall of her hair. She drew her hands down his back, the whole length, from his shoulders to his waist, and he forgot himself and bit her.

She made a little sound.

“Sorry.” He kissed the spot.

She turned her head into the join of his neck and shoulder and bit
him.
Then kissed it.

It yanked one huge thread out of his already unraveling control. “Jasmin.”

She pressed her face against his shoulder, her arms tightening around his waist. “In New York, you only knew me as Jess,” she whispered. “Whenever you call me Jasmin, it’s like you know me whole.”

He slipped his hand from the counter to her thigh, one greedy grip of skirt and her. “I like both. The
Jess
you are to your friends, and the
Jasmin
you are to the people who—” He turned his head into her hair again, stifling what he’d almost said. He drew a long breath and let it slowly out.

“There aren’t any other people. You’re the only one who’s ever said my name quite that way.”

He didn’t know what to make of that. It left him feeling exposed again, as if the way he said her name stripped him naked.

She stripped him and stripped him and stripped him, didn’t she? Right down to bare skin, and then she just kept going. Worse, he wasn’t even sure she tried. It just happened to him, as if his clothes dissolved in her presence.

“Jasmin.” Oh, damn, he’d said it again. With this huskiness in it, all raw. He bunched her skirt up toward her hip. His hand curved over the uppermost point of her thigh, his thumb stretching down inside it.

Her body flexed, her arms tightening so that her breasts pressed against him as she opened her mouth against his throat.

“Jasmin.”
I love this room. But right now…I don’t want to do that tree trunk over again. I don’t want to push you back on this counter. Test scents on your skin.

Oh, yes, I do. I want to do everything.
But today…
“Ask me up?”

He’d wanted her to ask without prompting. But arousal had surged him right past that stupid barrier.

“Yes,” she whispered against his skin.

He almost hesitated. She’d skipped over asking him, just said yes to his own asking. But that would be a stupid thing to get hung up over, right now. He was Damien Rosier. He took what he wanted, he didn’t wait for invitations.

Anyway…
yes
was close enough.

He picked her up, wrapping her thighs around his hips, her skirt spilling over his legs and his hands as he gripped her butt. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, her eyes fascinated and wanting and a little shy, still, but…yes, they invited. She held on tight to him, as if she wanted to make sure he didn’t get away.

Well, good. That would be absolutely shitty, if he got away.

He focused on those inviting eyes as he carried her up the dim staircase, their pelvises rubbing maddeningly with each step.
Yes. Want me. Trust me. Ask me in.

It was a small room, with a bed in it that had been old even in the forties. Heavy furniture that had been put in here in the nineteenth century, and which, once its weight was up those stairs, no one had ever bothered to move again.

The embroidered sheets were white against that dark wood. The scents here were quieter, simpler. A rush of lavender as he laid her down on the bed. The twine of jasmine coming through the window. A base of old wood and musty time.

Her space. Hunger pounded thickly in him as he pressed his hands into the mattress on either side of her head. “You’re so pretty,” he said with this sense of helplessness before his own words. That was what she was,
jolie
, this lovely, rich, sweet, human pretty that made him want to kiss her forever, and yet the word seemed so inadequate to the power of the feeling.

All words were inadequate, though. Even kisses were, but he tried them anyway, kiss and kiss and kiss.
Slow down
, part of his mind tried to tell his mounting urgency.
How many times did you come yesterday? Surely only twenty-four hours later you can manage to take your time.

All the time that filled this room, held there, like something precious.

We can take forever.

He buried his head in her hair, breathing the lavender sheets through the soft sweet scent that lingered from her shampoo. She drew her hands down his back and up, gripping and caressing over his shoulders, his arms, all the way down to his wrists, in an exploration of his body that reminded him of that first time.
He’d found his way back.

But this time was stronger, and it was richer, and yes, it had more dirt on it, and that made it even better. Like it could survive.

“I like dirt,” he said, his hand tightening in her hair, and she blinked up at him, confused.

“You like it dirty?” she murmured finally, sensual teasing.

“I—” Well, yes, also. The idea of doing dirty, kinky things to her beat at him like a full sun, heating everything, and yet… “Not right now.” Dirty might have its place and time, but it wasn’t this one.

Precious and careful had their space and time, too.

She wrapped her hands behind his head and twisted her hips against his, her eyes so wicked and slumberous. “Maybe a little dirty?”

She was so damn perfect for him. He scooped his hand under her butt, pressing their hips together. “Maybe a little.” He rocked his hips against hers.

Her hands sank into his hair, stinging as she lifted herself until her mouth was close to his ear. “You make me feel dirty,” she whispered. “I think I’d do anything with you.”

Hell. It fused his brain. “Shh.” He covered her mouth with his hand.

She sucked on the skin of his palm.

Hell.
He shoved away from the bed and went to the window, taking a deep breath of the jasmine that grew there. He looked back.

Jess had sat up on the edge of the mattress, her hands clenching in the sheets on either side of her thighs. “You are gorgeous,” she said in English, stunned. “The way you look against that window—I could
eat
you. I don’t understand how you can be so gorgeous and here.”

He shook his head, not sure how to tell her how beautiful she was when that wasn’t even what
mattered.
He knew hundreds of beautiful women. Top model, world famous beautiful. She was different. She was her.