Page 39 of We Are the Match
“Tell me what you want,” Paris says softly.
It is both command and question.
I am at her mercy.
“I want—” I am staring at her lips now, so very, very close to mine. So very, very unreachable. “I want to ... stop a war. I want to leave the Family behind.”
I want you.
I want to be free.
I want so many, many things.
Paris’s fingers brush mine. “Will you do as I say?” she asks.
“Getoff,” I growl, and then I gasp.
I am smooth and soft-spoken. I am half goddess, half girl. I never get angry, and I certainly never growl.
But this woman, thiswomanwith her lean muscle and short-cropped hair and wild flashing eyes. This woman drew that growl from me like it belonged to her.
Paris releases my wrists. I ache with missing as soon as the touch ends.
I can feel.
I can feel everything.
Every beat of my heart, every place where her legs touch mine. In all the long years where I walked on the other side of a veil, never quite in my body, I never knew I could want this much, and now it intoxicates me:
I want to be tangled up in her forever. I want to feel her heartbeat and mine. I want the weight of her body, holding me down, tethering me to my body, tethering me to hers. I want her. I want this.
I want it all.
What do you want?she had asked me.
And I had not had the strength to sayI want you, this, more.
She swings a leg off me and stands with more grace than I can manage.
I just lie there on her couch, panting. “I—” I begin, and then I stop. There are no more words to say.
Mama would think it was disgraceful to throw myself at anyone this way, let alone a fixer whom no one on this island knew until yesterday.
“Paris,” I whisper.
When she takes her seat on the couch opposite me again, she has the audacity to lick her lips. They are swollen, puffy—like mine, which I touch gingerly.
“Paris. Paris, I have a fiancé, such as he is.” Though, in truth, it is not Milos’s feelings on the matter that concern me—I will be gone before we are ever married. It is his brother, watchful and protective, who may act if he comes to see me as a threat to his brother’s work.
“Do you, though?” she asks. “You have an upcoming alliance. Nothing more, and everyone knows it.”
“His brother Marcus cannot,” I say quickly. Shame follows a moment later. “He cannot know.”
Marcus and his broad, heaving chest, and his furious, snapping eyes. Marcus, who already mistrusts me.
Paris raises an eyebrow. “He doesn’t like you?” she asks, eyes growing darker, a storm there I had not anticipated. “I thought everyone was obsessed with you.” I sit up at last. I wish I could take my eyes off this woman. I wish I could take back the kiss.
I wish I had told her to bend me over the back of this chair and fuck me.
