Page 12 of My One Week Husband
That gasp. That hitch of her breath.
She does. It’s sensual and erotic, and it goes straight to my cock.
I do the thing I’ve thought about doing for the last few years. The thing I’ve prided myself on resisting. I move closer, lean in, and press a kiss to her cheek.
It’s the same type of kiss I’ve given her every time we greet each other. But this time, I linger. I don’t back away. I simply brush my lips across her cheek and whisper, “All better now?”
She nods against me, grabbing my shirt, gripping the fabric. “All better.”
She steps away, runs her hand down her sleeve, glances at the clock, and says, “Now we really need to catch the train back to Paris.”
As we leave, I catch one last glimpse of us in the mirror as we walk past it. We look like we always do—confident, assured, on top of the world.
But also . . . frazzled.
Both of us. She seems thrown for a loop.
As for me, a small sliver of regret twinges in my chest. Was that my chance? To haul her into my arms, cover her lips with mine, and kiss her until she melted beneath me, until she begged and moaned?
Was that my chance to kiss her until she can hardly take all the pleasure I could give her?
That’s what I would do if I touched her—focus my ample sexual energy on her. Make sure she’s drowning in orgasms. Touch her in ways that make her writhe, moan, call out my name.
In ways that give me the control I long for.
Perhaps I do regret stopping.
But regret is a familiar emotion.
I’ve battled it many times and lost on nearly every occasion.
But I shouldn’t regret resisting a bad idea. And it is a very bad idea—a far more regrettable idea, and maybe a disastrous one—to introduce my business partner to how I like it in the bedroom.
We leave the hotel, returning to Paris to meet Cole, our other business partner.
Pretending we didn’t nearly kiss in the South of France.
But then, pretending is what I do best.
5
Scarlett
That evening, freshly showered and dressed after the train ride, hand and arm thankfully unbruised after the faucet incident, I crank open the tall windows of my seventh-floor flat overlooking Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower.
The evening light filters in, and I inhale Paris.
It smells like home.
It smells like memories—the good ones, that is.
Maybe even memories that extend so far back they come from other lifetimes.
If that’s even possible.
I turn around, stride through my kitchen, and tap the cover of a paperback I recently finished—the story of a man who meets a woman he loved forty years ago, a woman who died in a boating accident one summer. It’s a heartrending tale of the possibility of living again and again, meeting the same lover over and over, but at the wrong times for both of you.
In this story, it takes the man and woman eighteen generations till they reconnect. My heart squeezes, like it did while I was devouring this tale of out-of-sync love.
I don’t believe in reincarnation.
Not of people, and not of souls.
Yet I do believe we can have connections to people, and especially to places that almost feel as if we could have lived there in another lifetime.
Paris is that for me.
Paris is my soul mate. It speaks to some deeper, ancient part of myself, of my soul.
It’s the lover I’m destined to meet again and again.
This city centers me, as if I have lived here before, as if I was destined to return to it.
I can still recall with crystal clarity the first time I set foot here.
When I was eight, my scientist parents brought me here for a research conference, and after they presented on gene mapping, we wandered.
I skipped down the Rue de Rivoli, traipsed through the Jardin des Tuileries, and climbed up onto a mint-green stool at Ladurée to order a chocolat chaud. I ordered it in French.
The server was most impressed. “C’est bien,” she told me.
My father snapped a photo of me, gap-toothed and grinning at the server. He captured another shot minutes later of me wearing a chocolate mustache and licking my lips. My parents still have those pictures framed in their Manhattan home.
That trip, more than twenty-five years ago, turned the key in the door of my heart, opening a latent part of me.
A part that had perhaps always been present inside of me.
Present as a hum, as a wish, as a hazy dream. To be here. Because I felt like I knew this place, and had for all time.
That day at Ladurée, I was certain that this city would be my home one day.
The sights, the sounds, the smells—they belonged to a part of me that perhaps already knew the city. The museums, the shops, the language . . . The way beauty exists on corners in the lines of streetlamps, in the glass of boutique window displays, and on sidewalks in the shape of cobblestones, especially as they glisten after a rainstorm, like they’re made of diamonds.
