Broken French: A widowed, billionaire, single dad romance by Natasha Boyd (books like beach read txt) 📕

myself slam forward. Knowing, trusting, that she could take it. Again. Again. Words fell from my lips, but I wasn’t cognizant of them. It took all my effort to try and stave off the explosion that was building. She’d started by meeting my thrusts, and now she braced herself, back arched, offering what I was taking. Sweat beaded and pooled, rolling down my temple and splashing on her skin. She still watched me. I could feel it. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to. I thrust harder, punishing myself for my weakness. Punishing her for it. Making myself wait. Finding the last of my control from the very depths of me. Admitting to myself I was taking advantage of her attraction to me. Of her love for my daughter. And hating myself for it. Because I knew if I opened my eyes, hers would be telling me it wasn’t just sex, and it wasn’t just two days, and there were rules. And we were going to smash everything down. Including ourselves.

My eyes snapped open. She was there to meet me with everything I already knew. In that moment, something inside me snapped free. I wished we were face to face, my body cradled in hers as she took me in. I sank down, my chest to her back, hands slipping down her arms and entwining with her fingers, the need for connection overriding every argument I had. I rocked my hips, rolling out and thrusting back in. The angle had changed and she cried out and pressed back, seeking more. I buried my face in her hair and let her surround me. I was giving in to it. Giving in to her. Letting go like she asked.

I couldn’t.

I shouldn’t.

This way lay utter destruction. I’d been down this road before, and I wouldn’t go again.

But my body wouldn’t listen.

Josie’s soft cries and needy whimpers held me captive. Her fingers gripped mine as if I could be her salvation. Or she could be mine.

I had to pull back. I had to. Too late, the sensations boiled over, catapulting through me, dragging destruction and absolution in their wake. “Joséphine.” Her name tore through my lips as I let go, pouring myself out and leaving myself like a broken dam and utterly exposed.

Chapter Thirty-Four

JOSIE

The weight of Xavier—hot, hard, and sweaty—pressed me into the bed, teasing out the last of my orgasm. It was soft and rolling on the heels of his. Not near the explosiveness of the first one he’d given me with his mouth and hands, but no less intense. Deeper even. The feel of his breath in my hair and on the back of my neck underscored the utter rawness of the moment.

I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling the moisture that had gathered and the rise of emotion that had just choked my throat closed. Shit. Crying after sex? This was new. I tried to even my breath before I sobbed and utterly embarrassed myself.

Something had just happened. I’d felt it, experienced it as it happened to him, and whatever it was had tried to grab at my heart, trying to take me with it. What I’d just experienced had felt a lot less like fucking and a lot more like making love. Maybe it was a French thing. Perhaps this was what lovers were like in France. Soul sex, with lots of emotion, but able to simply switch it off. If this was his idea of just sex, two days, no rules, I was in so much trouble.

His hand brushed my hair off my damp shoulder and his lips, soft and prickly with his stubble, pressed against my skin.

I cringed into the pillow, fighting off the way his tenderness was confusing me, the way it made my eyes leak. He’d been rough in the beginning. Rougher than I was used to. Rough in a way I didn’t know I liked, apparently. The memory of it prickled over my skin. The roughness kept things simple.

He needed to get up right now and clean up and leave me here. I was inside out.

He eased off me. Out of me. I was bereft. “Dis moi …” he whispered.

I wondered if he knew how often he’d slipped into French with me in the last little while. I wondered what it meant that he wasn’t mentally checking himself. Listening to him mumbling in French, saying God knew what, as he did those wicked things to my body, was just about the most erotic thing I’d experienced. I groaned and squeezed my thighs together. I wanted him again. This was bad.

His fingers caressed my hair again. I turned my face away so he was on my other side. I wasn’t ready to look at him yet.

“Josie,” he murmured. “Are you okay? Tell me … did I hurt you? I’m sorry.” His lips found my shoulder, my spine. Warmth moved through me.

I answered him in my head. Not yet. But you will. Of that I’m sure.

Counting silently to three, I turned my face to the side he was on, trusting that the pillow had wiped away all traces of my strange emotional reaction. He lay, temple propped up on one hand, looking down at me. His blue eyes were soft and dark. Intense.

The boat’s rocking had calmed, though the engine still chugged, propelling us on our journey. “That was an interesting way of taking my mind off feeling seasick,” I mumbled and watched as his mouth spread into an open smile.

I closed my eyes. “Don’t do that,” I grumbled.

“What? Smile at you?”

“Mmm.”

“Are you so grumpy?” He trailed fingers down my spine to the curve of my ass. He was obsessed. My flesh rose with sparks in his wake. “I would have thought you’d be relaxed now.”

“Like you are?” I mused. “You’re like a tamed panther.”

“But still hungry. Hungry animals are never tame.” His palm circled over one mound, then the other before his fingers trailed up the crease.

I was awash with aching heat again. I