“Why? I was just a crazy American girl amazed by the Tower, just like thousands of others that pass through here every year.”
“I was as amazed by you as you were by the Tower. Just like you had to see it, I had to speak to you.”
I touch my lips to his gently. “I’m glad you did. Most of the time, anyway.”
“Most of the time?” He smirks when I shrug in response then sighs. “Come on. I made reservations for dinner.”
“I’m not exactly dressed for dinner.” I look at my light blue dress.
“You look perfect. No arguments.” He pulls me down a long, winding street, and I flash back to our first date.
The one after he replaced my coffee. The proper one.
“Aaron?” My smile creeps into my voice. “Are you taking me to that little sandwich shop we found?”
“It’s not really dinner, I know. But it was the first thing we ate together in Paris and it doesn’t seem right we go elsewhere tonight.”
Holy shit. “Are you trying to make me swoon with your incredible ability to recall all the firsts in our relationship after all these years?”
He turns to me outside the quaint sandwich bar and smirks, his eyes flashing lustfully. “You remember the hotel.”
Of course I remember the hotel. I lost my damn virginity in it. In our suite, for f**k’s sake.
“Oh, I remember. Nice move there.”
“It wasn’t that bad.” He pulls me into the building before I can respond and rolls off our orders. My club sandwich, on multigrain bread, with extra cheese and lettuce. His BLT, holding the lettuce and doubling the bacon and tomato. Some things don’t change at all.
We step outside, our sandwiches in his hand, and I pick the conversation back up.
“You have to be kidding, right? It was hardly earth-shattering,” I remind him, thinking of the first time we had sex. You know all those romance novels where the first time doesn’t hurt and it ends with a mind-blowing orgasm? Yeah, they’re called fiction for a reason. They’re bullshit.
“Day…” He can’t help the laugh that escapes him, and I fight my own.
“Fucking hell, Aaron. It hurt so badly I cried for like half an hour. I spent the next two days walking around like I’d shit myself. I couldn’t close my legs!”
When we get in the car he’s hired for us, he’s still chuckling to himself. “If you must know, it wasn’t exactly great for me. Making a woman cry during sex is a definite hit to the ego.”
“It wasn’t bad sex. It was just painful sex. Very painful sex,” I add at his pointed look.
So painful it makes me want to cross my legs at the memory.
“It wasn’t my fault, Dayton.”
“Hey, did I say it was?” I prod him in the arm. I know it wasn’t his fault. He did everything he could to make it perfect for me. “I just didn’t realize you were so big. If I’d have known, I’d have run a f**king mile to find something closer to the size of a tampon to break me in.”
He raises his eyebrows. “I’m offended by that. Especially since it was actually your fault.”
“Excuse me?”
Aaron leans across the car, his eyes darkening as his face nears mine. “If you weren’t so tight, it would have been a lot less painful.”
“And that right there is the only time in my life a man has ever complained about my vagina.” I tap his nose.
“Oh, you’ll find no complaints here. That was merely an observation.” He leans in farther and captures my bottom lip between his teeth. I shiver. “I happen to like your tight pu**y very, very much.”
Said tight pu**y clenches.
“Mhmm,” I mutter as he tugs on my lips and sends an ache to my clit. “Aaron?”
“What?”
“You’re squashing my sandwich.”
He pauses then pulls back. I grin at him and shrug a shoulder as the car stops. Just in time.
“This isn’t going the way I imagined,” he mutters in the elevator.
“Join the club. I imagined you’d be as charming as our first date, but clearly your c**k has overtaken that part of your brain.”
“Charming… Sexual… Is there a difference?”
“Yes, unless you’re being sexually charming, in which the two merge together. And you definitely are not,” I clarify, opening the door to the penthouse suite of the Paris Stone.
“It doesn’t matter what I’m being. I’m still going to be f**king you by the end of the night.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about f**king you in a hotel your uncle now owns.”
“There are no cameras in the penthouse.” He steps up behind me and breathes on the back of my neck. “So we have free rein, and since this week is all about us, I plan on taking you on every. Single. Surface.”
My breathing stops and my brain is flicking between the ‘all about us’ and ‘every single surface’ while it decides which it wants to address first.
“All about us?” I spin. “Explain.”
He strokes his thumb down my jaw and hands me my ‘dinner.’ “What explanation do you need? This week belongs to us, Bambi. No work. Just me and you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“We fly to London in a week. Then after seven days there, we fly back here for a further week in which I will be working.”
Six weeks.
Five cities.
“You mean…every day…you’re going to be here?”
“Every day. From the moment you open those gorgeous brown eyes until the minute you shut them again.”
It makes so much sense.
I step away from him and toward the balcony doors, dropping my sandwich on the table as I go. I push the doors open and step outside. “Why?” I ask, knowing he’s right behind me. “Why aren’t you working this week?”
He steps behind me and pushes his chest into my back. His hands rest on either side of mine on the railing. “How can I? How can I be in this city and not see you everywhere I turn? I’ve been here so, so many times in the last seven years, and every time I was haunted by my memories of you. You were—you are—everywhere.
“This city… Dayton, it belongs to us. Regardless of the time that passes, Paris will always be ours. That’s why this week is for us. For you. Shit, for me. I need to be in the city and be reliving memories instead of being haunted by them.”