Page 16 of We Are the Match

Helen

Paris is sharp teeth and lean muscle. She is wind and rain. She is a lethal blade of a woman, and then she is kissing me as I have never been kissed in my life. She is kissing me as if she cannot get enough of me, as if she will never have me again, as if she wants to hurt me, and I want it all.

Does it matter if she is dangerous, if she feels like this? And she may have been the one who leaned in and kissed me, but I am the one who scrambles across the space between us, nearly knocking the trays of breakfast over as I do.

She pulls me to the sofa, nips at my lip, and then I am straddling firm, muscular thighs, her tongue in my mouth.

She is taller than me by at least a few inches, but I am curvier than her. Still, she is strong enough to flip me over a second later, and she straddles me, pinning me to the cushions beneath us. She draws back, her mouth hovering a breath away from mine, her hands pinning my wrists.

“Helen,” she says, my name a growl in her throat.

I lean toward her, but she pushes me back down.

“No,” she says. “No, Helen.”

No one ever, ever tells me no.

Everyone wants more of me, always.

But this damn woman has said it to me so many times in the last twenty-four hours, and now she is staring down at me with her wild storm eyes and she is holding me here, unmovable.

“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.

“Get off ,” 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, this woman with 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 say I 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.

I wish it was just me and Paris, and no one else on the whole godforsaken island.

I wish she belonged to me.

“Is it not enough?” I ask her. “That I have hired you? That I will give you whatever you want in exchange for helping me escape?”

Paris stares at me. “It will never be enough,” she says, so softly I almost miss it.

“Paris,” I whisper.

“Helen,” she repeats. “What do you want ?”

But how can I answer her, when I don’t quite know myself?

When I am not sure, at the end of this, what will be left of me?

And how can I do this—kiss her and know she will be expendable, if she steps too far into my father’s sights?

That no matter what happens to her, I will put my own freedom first?

Paris stands, drawing back. “When you finally have the stones to say it,” she tells me. “You tell me, Princess.”

And then she leaves me there, windswept and breathless, and descends to face god.