It’s a poor approximation of his fingers, and an even worse approximation of his cock, but with his eyes on me and the brushing rhythm of his fist tugging at his length, I feel the rush of blood to my thighs and the heavy ache between my legs build, and build until I’m arching off the table and coming with a sharp cry. With a relieved moan, he lets go after me. I push up on an elbow, watching as he spills onto his hand and stomach.

In a blur, Ansel is on his feet and pulls me down onto the floor, falling on top of me and still hard enough that he can push inside with a steady, hard thrust. He looms above, blocking out even the tiny bit of light from the few candles still burning, and reaches up to pull the strap of my negligee off my shoulder, baring one of my br**sts.

“Did you come just now?” he whispers into my skin.

I nod. My pulse was barely slipping back to normal, but the feel of him stretching me even now brings all of my sensation back to the surface. I can feel his orgasm still wet on his stomach pressed to mine, on the hand he has curled around my hip. But feeling him begin to harden in me again so soon gives me a dizzying sense of power.

“If I had been Satan tonight . . .” he begins and then stops, his breath choppy so close to my ear.

The air between us seems to grow completely still.

“What, Ansel?”

His lips find my ear, my neck, and suck gently before he asks, “Have you ever been unfaithful?”

“No.” Sliding my hands up his back, I whisper, “But I did once shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

He laughs and I feel my body squeezing his as he lengthens slightly, getting even harder.

I pull back slightly to look up at him. “The idea of marrying a killer turns you on? Something is wrong with you.”

“I love that you make me laugh,” he corrects. “That turns me on. Also, your body, and what you did tonight.”

He cups my other breast through the negligee, thumb passing back and forth over the peak. He is strong enough to break me in half, but the way he caresses my skin, it’s as if I’m too valuable to risk hurting.

I thought I might be the only one who noticed the new, fascinating sway to my hips, the heaviness of my br**sts, but I’m not. Ansel lingers at my br**sts, playing and pushing at them. French cuisine has been good for my body . . . though maybe I’m indulging a little more than I should. It doesn’t matter; I love the feel of my curves. Now I just need to find the Frenchwoman’s secret for enjoying it and still looking like she could fit inside a straw.

“You’re taking care of your body.” He hums into my chest, tongue sliding over my collarbone. “You know your husband wants more flesh on you. I like your h*ps fuller. I like to be able to squeeze your ass in my hands, feel your br**sts move over my face when you’re f**king me.”

How does he do this? His hair falls over one eye and he looks almost boyish, but his words are coarse on my skin. His breath, his fingertips, they brush across my ribs, the bottom swell of my breast, my nipple.

He begins to rock inside me, slowly, lips moving across my neck and up to my ear. My body responds, tensing and thrilled, waiting for the pleasure I know will make me explode. Like I’m made of a thousand tiny beating wings.

“Tonight, Cerise . . . thank you for wanting to save me.” He puts a tiny inflection on the last word.

It takes a beat for my brain to process the inflection but then adrenaline courses through me so fast my fingertips flush, my pulse thunders.

Come to France for the summer.

He knew his life didn’t have space for this but it didn’t matter. He was trying to save me first.

Chapter SIXTEEN

SOMEWHERE IN MY subconscious I sense Ansel crawling on the bed and hovering over me beneath a sun-warmed blanket cave. He wakes me up with the pressure of his stare.

I stretch, frowning up at his neatly pressed dress shirt, white with small purple geometric shapes.

“You’re going in to work?” I ask, my voice still thick with sleep. “Wait,” I add, once consciousness forces its way to the surface. “It’s Tuesday. Of course you’re going in to work.”

He kisses my nose, running a warm palm from my shoulder, down over my breast, to my waist. “I only have a few weeks left of this craziness,” he says.

“Me, too,” I say, laughing. And then my smile drops like a hammer out of the sky and I pout. “Ugh. Why did I even say that? Now I want to eat my feelings in the form of an enormous chocolate croissant.”

“Croissant,” he repeats, kissing me before whispering, “Better this time, Cerise. But we call it pain au chocolat.”

He touches my lip with his index finger. I smile and bite his fingertip. I don’t want him to be frustrated with my impending departure, either. We’re both so much happier when we’re pretending it doesn’t exist.

He pulls his hand back and runs it over my breast again. “I’m pretty sure Capitaux will settle eventually.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go.”

“Me, too.” He kisses me, so softly, so earnestly that something swells painfully inside my chest. It can’t just be my heart because it sucks the air from my body, too. It can’t be only my lungs because it causes my pulse to race. It’s as if Ansel has taken up residence inside my rib cage, making

everything go haywire.

“Do you have very important plans for an adventure today?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Then today you practice speaking French,” he says, resolute.

“With who?”

“With Madame Allard downstairs. She loves you and thinks we’re going to have a baby soon.”

My eyes go wide and I press both hands to my stomach. “I have not gained that much weight.” I look down at my hands and ask, “Have I?”

He laughs, and bends to kiss me. “You don’t look very different from when you arrived. Tell me how you say ‘I’m not pregnant’ en français. You can go downstairs and tell her yourself.”

I close my eyes, thinking. “Je ne . . . suis pas . . . uh”—I look up at him—“pregnant.”

“Enceinte,” he says. His eyes move over my body, and I stretch under his gaze, wondering what the chances are that he will take off his clothes and make love to me before he goes to work.

He pushes away, but I can see the tight bunching of his dress pants where he’s hard beneath his zipper.

I palm him, arching my back. “Ten minutes.”

I mean it to sound playful, but his eyes grow a little pained. “I can’t.”

“I know.”

“I’m so sorry, Mia.” His eyes search mine. “I knew I would be busy, what was I thinking? But you’re here and I’m wild for you. How can I regret it?”

“Stop,” I tell him, curling my hand around the shape of him. “It’s the best decision I made in a long time.” His eyes flutter closed when I say this, and he pushes into my palm before lowering himself over my nak*d body.

“It is strange, isn’t it?” he asks quietly, pressing his face to my neck. “But it isn’t fake. It’s never really been pretend.”

In a wild burst of color, images from the past several weeks pop through my vision, each one bringing such a surge of nostalgia, so much emotion. The disorienting first two weeks with him gone nearly every waking minute. The awkwardness of the first time we made love after we arrived. The renewed heat between us the night I dressed up as his maid. I would no more be able to serve Ansel with an annulment than I would be able to swim all the way home in a few weeks.

“What are we going to do?” I ask, my voice disappearing on the last word.

My sunshine Ansel returns as he pulls back with a smile, as if he knows only one of us at a time is allowed to consider the darker side to our impulsive—and wonderful—adventure.

“We’re going to have a lot of sex when I get home from work.” This time, when he pushes away, I can tell he’s determined to get moving. “Let me see the naughty side again.”

The comforter flaps over me with a burst of air, and when it settles, he’s gone, and all I hear is the heavy click of the front door.

IT TAKES A while for Madame Allard to get around to asking me whether we’re having a baby—she’s determined to cycle through her thoughts on the new puppy in the building and the fresh grapes at the corner market—and then even longer for me to convince her that we are not. Her joy over my simple sentence, “Madame, je ne suis pas enceinte,” is enough to make me want to try to order lunch in French.

But the far less approachable grouchy waiter with the wild eyebrows at the corner brasserie makes me reconsider, and instead I order my favorite—soupe à l’oignon—in my standard apology-glazed English.

I wonder how many of the people in Ansel’s life assume that I came back here with him because I got pregnant. Even though he was gone for only three weeks, who knows what the people in his life assume? And then I wonder: Has he told his mother? His father?

Why does the idea of being pregnant right now make me laugh, and then make me feel a tiny bit tingly inside? Enceinte is such a gorgeous word. Even more gorgeous is the idea of being full—full of him, and the future, and this thing building between us. Even if a baby isn’t growing inside me, genuine emotion is.

So is a glowing hope. Immediately, my stomach drops.

Impulsively, I pull out my phone, texting him, Do your parents know you’re married?

How has it never occurred to me to ask him this yet?

He doesn’t answer while I eat, and it isn’t until nearly an hour has passed and I’m a mile away from the apartment, wandering aimlessly through curving alleys, when my phone buzzes in my bag.

My mother knows, not my father. And then: Does this bother you?

Knowing he’s at work and I may only have his attention for a second, I type quickly: No. My parents don’t know. I just realized how little we’ve really talked about it.

We’ll talk about it later, but not tonight.

I stare at my phone for a beat. That’s certainly cryptic. Why not tonight?

Because tonight you are naughty, not nice.

I’m typing my reply—basically hell yes and get home as soon as you can—when my phone buzzes with another incoming message . . . from Harlow.

I’m in Canada.

My eyes widen as I search for any other explanation than the one my brain immediately latches on to. Harlow has no family in Canada, no business in Canada. I type my question so fast I have to correct typos seven times in five words: Are you there banging Finn???

She doesn’t answer immediately, and without thinking, I text Ansel for confirmation.

Not Lola.

In fact, it feels natural to text Ansel first . . . holy crap we have mutual people, a shared community now. My fingers shake as I type: Did Harlow fly up to Canada to visit Finn this weekend?!

Ansel replies a few minutes later, They must have texted us at the same time. Apparently she arrived wearing nothing but her trench coat.

I nod as I type my reply: That sounds like Harlow. How did she get through security without having to take that off?

No idea, he says. But they’d better not be trying to steal our costume game.

My blood simmers deliciously in anticipation. What time will you be home?

I’m here with the dragon until around 21:00.

Nine o’clock? Immediately I deflate, typing OK before slipping my phone back into my bag. But then, a thought occurs to me: He wanted me to be naughty? I’ll give him naughty.

LATELY, ANSEL HAS been texting me around dinnertime—when he’s working and I’m home. The routine has only been going on maybe the past four days when our schedules land like this, but somehow I know to expect it around seven, when he takes his evening break.

I’m ready, in the bedroom, when my phone buzzes on the comforter beside me.

Don’t forget what I want tonight. Eat dinner. I will keep you up.

With shaking hands, I press his name to call him, and wait while it rings once . . . twice . . .

“llo?” he answers, and then corrects to English. “Mia? Is everything all right?”

“Professor Guillaume?” I ask in a high, hesitant voice. “Is it an okay time to call? I know it isn’t your office hour . . .”

Silence greets me across the line and after several long beats, he clears his throat, quietly. “Actually, Mia,” he says, voice different now—not him, but someone stern and irritated at the interruption, “I was in the middle of something. What is it?”

My hand slides down my torso, over my navel and lower, between my spread legs. “I had some questions about what you were teaching me, but I can call back if there is a better time.”

I need to hear his voice, to get lost in it to find the bravery to do this when he’s not expecting it. When he may be sitting across the table from someone.

I can almost imagine the way he leans in, pressing the phone flush to his ear and listening carefully for every sound on the other end of the line. “No, I’m here now. Out with it.”