his belly. The light from the bathroom showed his features were smooth and relaxed at rest, his thick eyelashes resting on his cheeks. I made myself stop staring and clicked the bathroom light off, crawling in to join him.
I lay in the dark next to his warm body, feeling strange and discomfited. There was a struggle going on within Xavier. He was open and teasing one moment and quiet and broody the next. Despite our romantic evening and the foreplay, verbal and otherwise, that had preceded our lovemaking, he’d seemed distant at the end, as though he suddenly found himself being vulnerable and had scrambled to close himself back up.
I awoke with a start, gasping a deep breath. It was dark and hot, and I was suffocating. The memory of the evening we’d spent together slid through me. The heaviness of Xavier’s arm draped across my middle and the heat of him curled around my back brought me back to my surroundings.
His breathing changed, then his arm moved, squeezing gently before lifting so his palm ran down my torso. His hand flattened on my belly and ignited the banked heat that hadn’t waned since the night in the club.
“Ça va?” he whispered.
I dragged in a breath, filling my lungs with much needed oxygen.
He shifted away, rolling me onto my back. “This is why you visit the deck at night? You wake up like this?”
I nodded, then realized he probably couldn’t see me. “Yes. It’s okay. I’m fine. I just need a second to breathe.”
“Do you have a bad experience where this comes from?”
I chuckled. “No. Not that I remember. Not everything has to be rooted in past trauma.” I rolled to face him and slipped my hand into the hair at his nape, scraping my nails along his scalp.
He groaned.
Our lips met. Soft, seductive, demanding.
“You just have to distract me,” I whispered as his lips slid down my neck and I arched my body.
Suddenly his hands slipped under me. “Come.” He made to lift me.
“Whoa. Where?”
“My bed. It’s bigger. More windows. More space. More air.”
I stayed him with a hand on his shoulder, thinking of all of Dauphine’s mother’s things in there.
“What?” he asked.
“What about the top deck?”
“Outside?”
“Under the stars,” I said, wondering if he’d remember what he’d said at dinner. Not that I needed that. I mean, I wouldn’t complain.
“Mmm.” He hummed, his fingers pushing the sheet off me and trailing down my belly.
I grabbed his fingers and kissed them. “Insatiable.”
“Addicted. Come. The stars it is.”
He pulled on his shorts and handed me his shirt lying on the floor. Then he gathered up two pillows and my duvet and we trotted up the levels of the ship until we broke through into the muggy, starlit night. The lights from the port twinkled, and pale yellow light washed up the walls of the citadel high on the cliffs. Out to sea, all was inky black.
Xavier pulled two chaises together and pulled the cushions out of a storage box. We tied the cushions to each other rather than the chair to stop them slipping apart. He lay down the pillows and duvet and then climbed on, holding out an arm for me to slip under and rest my head on his shoulder.
The railing height hid our bodies, but above us the stars blazed. Our only witness.
“Is this better?” he asked.
I smiled, snuggling in next to him. “Yes.” The mooring lights cast a faint glow around us, and as my eyes adjusted I could see as well as if there was a small lamp on.
“We will wake up wet and covered in … what’s the word when everything is wet from the air in the morning? I forget it in English. In French it’s la rosée.”
“Dew?” I suggested.
“Yes, dew.”
“God, that sounds better in French. Everything does.” Especially whatever the hell it was that poured out of his mouth while he was making love to me.
He kissed the top of my head.
“Now, tell me why you are so famous to Cristo. And why does he call you Pasqualey?”
Xavier chuckled. It was a dark rumble under my cheek. “One line of my mother’s family is originally from Corsica. There was a famous hero named Pasquale Paoli who at various times tried to help keep Corsica independent, working with the Corsican resistance against the French in the 1700s. Cristo is convinced I’m descended from him somehow.”
“Are you?”
“I have no idea. But likely not. Pascale is my father’s name, and as far as I know he