Summer Sins

She felt good to hold. Good to lie with.

Good to fall asleep beside.

He felt his focus dissolve, the drowsiness of post-coital satiation wash up over him. His eyes started to feel heavy and close, his breathing slowed. Instinctively for one second his arms tightened around her, checking she was still there. He let his body relax, his mind, too.

He slept in her embrace, embracing her.

It felt very good.

CHAPTER NINE

SUNLIGHT, AND THE smell of fresh, fragrant coffee stirred the senses of Lissa’s sleeping mind, luring her to wakefulness. As she surfaced from slumber she wondered why she felt so wonderful—and then she remembered. Her eyes flew open.

She was alone in the bed, but Xavier was sitting on the edge, clad only in a short white bathrobe that accentuated the fabulous golden tan of his skin and exposed—she gave a silent gulp—the smooth muscled surface of his chest and forearms. Her eyes flew to his and clung.

He leaned forward and kissed her softly on the mouth.

‘Bonjour, cherie.’ He smiled.

She felt her heart melt into a puddle inside her. Her eyes lit.

‘Xavier.’

A huge, joyous smile broke across her face.

It had been true, not a dream. A wonderful, blissful truth that made her breathless with delight. Xavier had swept down on her and scooped her up and borne her away to Paris, the most romantic of cities, to make her his. Her smile deepened and her eyes drank in the beautiful planed face of the man looking down at her, amusement and bemusement glittering in his eyes in equal measures.

Long, silky lashes swept down over his eyes.

‘Would you like coffee?’ he asked.

The aromatic, heady fragrance tickled at her nose again. ‘Oh— Please,’ she answered.

She started to sit up and then remembered, with a little thrill, that she wasn’t wearing a stitch. Sudden confusion and embarrassment swept over her, and she clutched the rumpled duvet to her breasts as she sat herself up. Xavier leaned around her and propped up the pillow. The silk of his hair brushed against her jaw as he did so, and her heart melted again. As he straightened and she leaned back against the head of the bed, she pushed back her own tumbled hair with fingers that trembled suddenly.

‘Black or white?’

His hand hovered over a jug of hot milk that stood on the coffee tray on the bedside table.

‘Oh— White, please—thank you.’

Her voice sounded breathless, even to her, and suddenly she was too shy to look him in the eye. She took the grande tasse and raised it to her lips for a tiny sip of hot, pale coffee, glad he had busied himself pouring his own cup and then settling back, one leg crooked under him on the wide bed, to drink it. As he did so she stole a look at him, feeling that thrill go through her again.

Her face opened into a huge, joyous smile of delight and wonder.

‘Did it really happen?’

The words came from her before she could stop them. Dark eyes lifted and looked into hers.

‘I thought it might all have been a dream,’ she said haltingly, her eyes meeting his, only to drown in their depths. ‘It was just so wonderful!’

A smile played at the corner of his sculpted mouth, and again there was that mixed look of amusement and bemusement in his dark eyes.

‘It was my pleasure,’ he murmured. his French accent making her insides quiver.

‘Mine, too,’ she blurted. ‘Heaps and heaps—’ She cut off dead, and, biting her lip, made a face. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being— What’s the French term? Jejeune? Is that it? Or—’ she made another face ‘—maybe just naïf. Anyway.’ She swallowed, ‘Um, er— Well.’ Hastily she drank some more coffee, dropping her head so that her tumbled hair covered her embarrassment at behaving like an idiot.

Fingers gently touched the side of her head.