Trust Me (Rough Love #3) by Annabel Joseph Page B

the center of the living room where my parents had held court with their rich friends and their rich endeavors, and tugged her down with me to the floor.
    “What are you doing?” she asked as I slid a hand beneath her waistband.
    “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m going to defile you on my parents’ living room floor.”
    I popped her button and slid down her zipper. She stared up at me and lifted her hips so I could yank down her jeans. I held her gaze for a moment as I shoved fingers into her pussy and found her wet and ready.
    “This floor is really…” She bit her lip. “It’s really hard.”
    “I’m really hard, too.”
    I tried to cradle her as I shoved down my pants and positioned myself between her thighs. I could tell she wasn’t comfortable, but when was she ever comfortable when we had sex? I groaned as I shoved inside her. Her warmth enveloped me and we were connected again. I was inside her and she was around me and Jesus Christ, I was so in love with her. This room was full of bad memories, but this would be a good one. I grasped her closer and wrapped my arms around her so I wouldn’t bruise her as I fucked her across the floor.
    “You’re mine,” I whispered. “I want you. I always want you.”
    “I want you too.”
    Her hips bucked up to meet my thrusts, and pretty soon the hard floor didn’t matter, or the slipcovered furniture, or the fact that this was the room where my parents had always come to get away from me.
    “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, yes, yes.”
    “More?” I asked.
    “ Yes. ”
    I arched over her, driving in her hard, squeezing and pinching her, caressing her wherever I could reach. When she was close to orgasm, I grabbed her arms and yanked them over her head, and buried my face against her neck. I urged her on with dirty, filthy words until she came with a series of urgent gasps.
    I held off a little longer, because it was so delicious to hold her writhing body here on the floor of this awful place. It was weirdly necessary to take her here in this room, in this house with so much sadness. Maybe that was why I’d brought her here. I didn’t know, and by the time I started climbing toward orgasm, I didn’t care. I gazed down at her and thought about the poem I’d mentally composed earlier. I’d have to write it down for her. You trembled under me as I fucked you in that bleak, black house…
    When we finished, I helped her up and into the bathroom to put herself back to rights. It wasn’t even dinner time yet. “There’s more I want to show you,” I said. “Let’s get out of this tomb.”
    *
    I took her from the stark stillness of my parents’ pied-a-terre to the touristy squalor of the 18th Arrondissement. We skirted around the Moulin Rouge even though I thought Chere might enjoy it. Too many people, too campy, and honestly, Chere was a hundred times sexier than the topless burlesque dancers inside.
    Instead we walked the gritty streets and browsed the North African marketplace. I was blond and white enough to raise some eyebrows, but Chere fit in with her bronze skin and old New Orleans features. When I was a teenager, I came here to get away from my parents’ glittering world. I learned to scowl and be tough, and posture, and throw attitude. I wanted so badly to belong here, where life seemed real, where money changed hands in small, sweaty, wrinkled bills, where my parents would never dare go. Stay out of the Goutte d’Or , my mother would scold, but I knew Goutte d’Or meant Drop of Gold , and even before I used the name for my first bridge, I thought that was the most beautiful name for anything ever. I felt like a man in the Goutte d’Or, even if the ageless women behind the stalls would smile at me like I was a boy.
    They smiled at me now just as they had then, with curiosity and a quiet patience. We walked from the Maghreb areas into the Chinese district and then to a row of Indian shops with windows full of gold and silk.
    “There’s so