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

table, I’d ended up on his lap, our arms wrapped around each other, talking for ages and making out like teenagers. We’d stopped short of getting to any indecent behavior out of respect for Cristo and his establishment, but before long it was clear that not even our surroundings might stop us if we didn’t get out of there. We stumbled giddily down the stairs, saying swift and jovial goodbyes. In the cobbled streets, Xavier held me close, tucked under his arm, pausing occasionally in darkened doorways to kiss my neck and whisper French things in my ear. My skin was a conduit for his desire, every cell lit up with electrical fire.

I was giddy, breathless, and utterly seduced.

I guided Xavier down to my cabin where we barely made it through the door before our clothing was discarded. Only the mooring lights from the boat and dock filtered through my tiny window as I cradled his body between my open thighs and he slid into me, filling the seemingly endless ache I had for him. His face and eyes were barely visible in the shadows.

Our lovemaking started off slow and deliberate.

He lifted my leg, finding his way deeper, and I cried out at the new angle. “There’s no one to hear you,” he whispered, moving in and out of me languidly, making me feel every slow inch as he dragged out and pushed back in. “Tell me what you want. Let me hear you.”

“This,” I’d gasped. “You. You feel so good inside me.”

He grunted and mumbled something back to me in French. Then switched to English. “Faster?” he asked as he thrust in hard and fast.

I cried out again.

“Oui, like this,” he answered for me. “You make me crazy. Hungry. I will finish and need more. How is it possible?”

Then his whispers quieted and it was just the sound of our labored breaths and my cries as he brought me closer and closer to the edge. The sudden silence from him was disconcerting, but, oh God, he was just in the right spot.

“Xavier. Yes.” I wrapped my other leg around his firm butt, urging him faster, deeper. Lightning shot up and down my skin.

His body grew tense and strained and we both struggled against and toward the rush to the edge. I got there first, my eyes squeezing closed and my head going back as I gave myself up to the fall.

Then I held his head in my hands, watching his shadowed features as he came apart, wishing I could see what was going on behind his tightly closed eyelids.

He collapsed on me, his heart pounding against mine, and then slid off to the side. Cool air whispered over my sweat-slicked skin as I caught my breath.

I disentangled myself without resistance and crept out of bed to clean up. When I re-emerged, I found Xavier already sleeping, hand thrown up over his head, the other on 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.