to her wet softness. Her need meeting his.
He frowned as desire built within him and guilt warred with need. He knew he shouldn’t be eroticizing Maddy this way, that it would only make things more difficult, not less. But he was so close. Just this once, he promised himself. Just this once he’d indulge himself where Maddy was concerned.
His hand a blur, Max pushed himself toward the edge.
MADDY GRABBED HER PURSE and slung the strap over her shoulder. The bakery was just a few steps away on the corner, but she pulled on Max’s coat for the short walk. When she’d arrived last night, she’d had a taste of how bitterly cold a Parisian winter could be, and she didn’t need to learn the same lesson twice. She needed to shop for a coat of her own and a bunch of other stuff now that she’d decided to stay. The few tops and changes of underwear she’d thrown into her dance bag were barely good for a couple of days.
She was on her way out the door when the phone rang. She turned, eyeing it uncertainly for a beat, waiting for an unseen answering machine to pick it up. But the phone rang and rang. Finally she returned to the living space and picked up the receiver. If Max objected to her answering his phone, she’d find out soon enough.
“Max’s apartment,” she said.
There was a short, surprised silence before a woman spoke in accented English. “Is Max there? I need to speak to him.”
“Um, he’s in the shower. I can pass on a message,” Maddy suggested. She hoped like hell this wasn’t a girlfriend who would get the wrong idea about her and Max from the fact that she was in his apartment answering his phone.
“No. I need to speak to him now. Tell him it’s his sister. Tell him it’s about Eloise.”
There was an urgency in Charlotte’s voice that was undeniable.
“Give me a second, I’ll get him for you.”
Phone in hand, Maddy crossed to the bathroom door and tapped lightly.
“Max. It’s your sister. It sounds urgent,” she said through the door.
Nothing. She tapped on the door again.
“Max, I think your sister really needs you,” she said more loudly this time.
Still nothing. She could hear the splash of water on the other side of the door. She knew from experience how noisy Max’s stall could be with water pounding on the tiles and the plastic shower curtain.
She eased the door open, very aware of Charlotte waiting. Maddy hoped she wasn’t about to embarrass herself and Max by barging in on him. There was a shower curtain, after all. And since the shower was still going, there was no chance she’d catch Max drying off. So this wasn’t a total invasion of privacy.
She felt faintly stupid even worrying about catching him naked, given she’d just spent the past three hours posing in the buff for him. There was nothing he had that she hadn’t seen before, after all.
“Max,” she said as the door swung open.
The rest of what she’d been going to say got stuck somewhere between her lungs and her mouth as she saw that the shower curtain wasn’t fully pulled across and that she had a perfect view of Max standing under the water, erection in hand, a look of pleasurable pain on his face as he stroked himself toward fulfillment.
He was totally oblivious to everything except the matter in hand and she literally didn’t know what to do. Breathe. Retreat. Say something. Die on the spot.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Golden skin, covered in fine dark hair. A muscular body, bunched and flexed slightly forward as he neared his climax. Strong thighs. And a powerfullooking erection that jutted arrogantly from his body.
He groaned, a low sound that snapped her into focus. Heat rushed up her body, sending prickling tendrils beneath her armpits and the back of her neck before filling her face with warmth. Eyes glued to Max, she took a step backward, her shaking hand reaching for the door handle as she pulled it shut behind her.
Oh, boy.
Her knees were weak. She felt hot, as though she’d been rehearsing for hours. She fanned herself, then suddenly remembered the phone call.
The receiver was still in her left hand. She lifted it to her face.
“He won’t be a minute.” Her voice came out as a croak. “He’s just getting out of the shower.”
Then she counted to ten before knocking very, very loudly on the bathroom door. Opening it a crack, she hollered through the gap.
“Max, your sister is on the phone. It sounds important,” she said.
She left the phone on the kitchen table where he would be sure to find it and hightailed it toward the door.
Once she was outside she walked up the street and around the corner before she felt safe enough to stop.
She was shell-shocked. There was no other word for it. She’d caught Max touching himself, on the brink of having an orgasm, and she was blown away.
She leaned against the wall of a building and closed her eyes. Instantly she was in the bathroom again with Max naked and aroused, his hand sweeping up and down his shaft, his head thrown back, his whole body tense with anticipation.
God, he’d looked amazing. So…masculine. She huffed out a small, humorless laugh at how woefully inadequate her vocabulary was. Masculine didn’t even come close to describing how vital and overwhelmingly male he’d looked with his legs braced apart, his back against the wall, all that hardness in his hand.
No wonder they called him Rex.
The thought popped into her mind before she could censor it.
“Oh, God,” she said, pressing her hands against her burning face.
She should not be thinking about his generous schlong. Definitely she shouldn’t. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. He was her friend, her lovely, platonic friend who had danced with her, lived with her, laughed with her, cried with her.
And now she knew with absolute clarity how he looked naked. And not just undressed naked, either. She knew how he looked fully aroused, ready-to-go, big-and-proud naked. And she didn’t know what to do with her new knowledge.
“Max is my friend,” she said out loud.
An old man braving the cold to walk his dog gave her a curious glance as he passed by.
Great. She was a voyeur and a crazy, talking-to-herself-in-the-street person.
She pushed her frozen hands into her coat pockets and turned toward the boulangerie. Her French was rusty, but she managed to greet the woman behind the counter and buy half a dozen croissants and a baguette. The baguette was fresh from the oven and the paper bag it was wrapped in grew warm in her hand as she walked the short distance to Max’s front door.
She had no idea what to say to him. Or how she would look at him without breaking into a sweat.
She should have knocked
