Alas, she suspected it didn’t have quite Scarlett’s effect with her wildly curly hair—more like putting a hat on an electrocuted porcupine—but she didn’t have to see herself.
“You…just…” His fingers stretched out, got restrained back into a fist, flexed out again. “Right there, it…” His hand worked in frustration, just shy of her face.
She rubbed ineptly. “Better?” she asked cheerily.
He looked down at her a moment. Brown eyes narrowed a fraction. A little shot of adrenaline charged through her, like maybe she was about to pay the consequences of her teasing. Ooh, yeah.
“Hold still,” he said finally, and big palms framed her face. Two callused thumbs rubbed gently but firmly over the bridge of her nose, then down across her cheekbones, smearing in cream. The scent of rose oils on his hands dominated even the sunscreen smell. It was all she could do not to turn her head enough to bury her face in that big tough palm and see what it was like to smell only him, no sunscreen as distraction.
Her lips parted, and all that merry, teasing happiness in her went very, very still. Her face framed in his palms, he let his gaze drift down to her mouth and linger there a moment. Long black lashes, curled at the tips, didn’t quite veil those rich brown eyes. That stern pressure of his upper lip slowly relaxed, releasing the sensual, full lower one as his lips softened apart.
She touched her tongue to her own lips in reaction, involuntarily, and his gaze swept back up suddenly to her eyes.
“You’re…gentle,” she said wonderingly.
He frowned a little, even as a touch of color snuck across his cheeks. “What did you think I would be?”
A little smile ran through her. “Bossier. I thought you’d take that sunscreen and make it do what you wanted.”
His own smile snuck out, that sensual lower lip escaping further from the bossy control of the upper one. His thumb snuck another caress of her cheek that made her feel so happy. Alive. Touchable. As if she was a rose petal. “It’s only sunscreen,” he said. “Pretty pliant.”
She laughed. His gaze caught on that laugh.
“And it’s just a little face,” he said softly, still framing her cheeks with both hands. The calluses rubbed carefully against her skin, his hands covering pretty much the whole of each side of her head. “I wouldn’t want to be too rough with it.” His fingertips caressed very gently into the edge of her hair.
A woman could nestle her head into that caress, kiss the base of his wrist, forget anything and everything.
His family. He didn’t want you to make him look vulnerable in front of his family.
And maybe she didn’t want to be that exposed, that fragile, either. She’d only been fooling around, right? Gentleness, and her reaction to it, put them in completely new territory.
You know, just because a guy is hot, surrounded by roses, and speaks French is no reason to believe you’re immersed in a fairy tale. This is real life to him.
And it’s not real life to me. No matter how real and magical it feels.
Maybe if they could stop speaking French. It had always been her heart language, her secret language, the one she spoke with her mother and grandparents there in that emotional safe space of her home growing up and rarely out with the rest of the world. It was probably leading her astray to use it so much with him. Misleading her heart into thinking he was her safe space, too.
She drew a breath. “Do you speak English?”
“A little bit,” he said carefully in that language, and every erogenous zone in her body just abandoned all resistance. Okay, then, switching to English was not going to help in this case. Apparently she was more vulnerable to accents than she had previously realized in all her travels around Europe.
She held up a hand, struggling for an even, sane breath. “Stop. Don’t do it anymore.”
“Why not?” he asked, still in careful English.
She lifted her fist to her mouth and bit into the side finger. Because I can’t handle that much hotness right now. It’s hotness overload. I think I need a break before I do something really crazy. “Umm...I need to practice my French.”
“Probably,” he agreed, back in that language. She gave a little gasp of relief. “Because I’m not sure you entirely realize the things you say to me sometimes. That is, I think you know what they mean, but I’m not sure you realize how hard they hit.”
“I should stop, shouldn’t I?” she asked wistfully.
He considered that a long moment, big and brawny, all strong cheekbones and stubborn jaw and half-curled hair and those brown eyes, when they focused on a woman like that, just utterly lovely. The whole of him was so big and testosterone-charged, and yet...there was something about those eyes. And that blush that sometimes betrayed his soft heart. “Why?” he asked finally.