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Authors: Nancy Warren

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Seventeen
“Why did you leave?” she asked, over a supper of shrimp etouffee. Not only had Gabe given her more orgasms than she could count, he'd also fed her the best meals of her life.
“I figured it was the right thing to do.” When the crocodile kitchen timer dinged, he crossed the room and took a pan of bread pudding from the oven. Emma couldn't decide which made her drool more—the scent of that sweet baked pudding or the sight of Gabe's firm hard butt in those jeans he'd put back on. “I didn't have any prospects. You were going off to college in the fall. No way was I going to ask you to give up your dreams to chase mine.”
“You were my dream.” She was no longer embarrassed to admit it.
“Could've been a dead-end one,” he said. “By the time it looked like I was goin' to be working pretty regular, you'd gotten married.”
Gabe remembered Nate's phone call as if it had been yesterday. He was admittedly foggy about the next few days, having spent them in a drunken pity party of self-recrimination.
“You could have written.”
“Last time I checked, the mail goes both ways,” he said mildly, as he poured the hot whiskey sauce over the pudding.
“You didn't exactly leave a forwarding address.”
“Nate always knew where I was.”
During the past few days Gabe had come to the conclusion that Nate knew a lot of things. He also suspected that if he'd checked, that so-called construction emergency that had Emma meeting him at the airport would turn out to be as bogus as Richard the dickhead's tax return.
Not that he minded. In fact, Gabe decided, as he carried the two bowls of pudding back to the bed they'd hardly left this weekend, maybe he'd buy his best friend a case of Scotch as a thank-you gift.
“Let's not rehash the past, Emma,” he said, handing her one of the heavy earthenware bowls. “We'll leave yesterday behind, worry about tomorrow when it comes.” He stuck a finger into his bowl, scooped out some of the brown sugar whiskey sauce and drew a ring around Emma's plump pink nipple. “Right now, I'm suddenly feelin' hungry again, me.”
Eighteen
Emma was in the bathroom, getting dressed for the presentation ceremony when the phone rang.
“I think the jig's up,” Nate said without preamble. “A couple reporters from the
Enquirer
just dropped by the mayor's office, asking questions about you.”
“I'm surprised it took them this long,” Gabe said. He'd been half expecting the hungry hoards to descend on him since he'd first arrived. He'd also decided that if any reporter tried to intrude on his and Emma's weekend, he would've dug out Nate's old twelve-gauge shotgun. “Do me a favor.” He told Nate what he had in mind.
“No problem. Just make sure you send Regan and me an invite to the wedding.”
“The lady hasn't said yes, yet.”
“Women can be funny that way,” Nate allowed. “Lord knows, my bride, she tested my resolve when it came to settling down. But I convinced her to see the light.”
That was an understatement. When they and their adopted teenage son had visited him in L.A. last fall, Gabe had never seen two people more enthralled with each other's company.
It was then that he'd first started thinkin' that maybe that's what he wanted for himself. And, as always, whenever his mind went wandering down that path, it led straight to Emma Quinlan.
 
The entire town showed up for the ceremony. Even Emma's mother and father were there, looking tanned and fit after two weeks spent on a ship cruising the Greek Islands.
Neither looked all that pleased to see their daughter enter the high school auditorium with Blue Bayou's former bad boy.
“Broussard,” her father said.
“Sir,” Gabe responded. As far as he was concerned, the guy was nearly as much of a dickhead as Emma's ex, but since she'd been unfortunate enough to have him for a father, Gabe was going to pay him respect if it killed him. Only for her. There was nothing he wouldn't do for his lush, lusty wench.
“Gabriel.” Angela Quinlan somehow managed to hold her surgically perfected nose in the air while looking down at him. Which should have been even more difficult since she was a good foot shorter than his six feet two. She was also so bony a stiff wind would blow her away. Which had him suddenly wishing for a hurricane. Or maybe a tornado.
“Miz Quinlan,” he said politely, smiling as he imagined a house dropping out of a stormy sky onto Emma's mother.
“I was surprised you'd come back to Blue Bayou,” she said. If her tone had been any icier, there'd be frost all over the green, purple, and gold crepe paper strung across the ceiling. “Now that you're so famous, or should I say infamous”—her teeth flashed like a barracuda's as she layered the acid scorn onto the word—“there's nothing here for you anymore.”
“
Mais, oui
, there sure enough is,” he drawled, rocking back on his heels as he gave Emma a look hot enough to melt the metal rafters. He put an openly possessive arm around a shoulder he knew was sporting a little love bite from this morning when they'd gotten a little frisky in bed with the beignets.
“Emma?” From her tone, Gabe figured that if it weren't for the Botox keeping her forehead an expressionless slate, Angela Quinlan's brow would've climbed into her perfectly coiffed blond hair. “What is this”—she paused, as if seeking some word allowable in public—“actor talking about?”
Before Emma could respond, Nate was calling her name over the microphone, asking her to come present the elderly teacher with her award.
Obviously torn, Emma's concerned gaze moved from the stage to Gabe to her parents to Gabe again, then back toward the stage. Her green eyes reminded Gabe of the time a bird had gotten caught in the cabin, and had been frantically trying to find a way to escape.
“You'd better go do your deputy mayor thing,” he said. “I'll just stay here and chat with your
maman
and dad.”
“I don't know—”
He pulled her up against him for a quick, hard kiss and was pleased when, even while her mother was emanating enough frost and ice to cover Jupiter, he could still make her blood heat.
“It'll be okay,” he said. He ran a hand down her hair, which she'd smoothed out before leaving for town, but was already breaking into those bright curls he loved. “I promise.”
“Okay.” She breathed out a sigh.
He caught her arm as she began making her way through the crowd, which had begun talking about that hot public kiss they'd just witnessed between Emma Quinlan and bad boy Gabriel Broussard. “When you get done with your speechifying, why don't you call me up to give Mrs. Herlihy that plaque.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Her smile lit up her face. That lovely, generous face Gabe knew would still be able to make his heart turn over when he was an old man, retired from the movie business, sitting out on the
gallerie
at the camp, making love to his Emma in that wooden swing.
“There's somethin' you both should know,” he said to her parents, who were still looking properly scandalized by that kiss as Emma walked to the stage.
Mon Dieu,
Gabe was enjoying pissing off these two! “I'm gonna marry Emma, me. Now, you can make things difficult, or you can go along with the program. Which I suggest you do, 'cause, if Emma agrees we'll be making ourselves a lot of babies. Now, personally, I don't give a rat's ass if you ever visit your grandchildren or not, but I've got the feeling Emma will care. So, we may as well all just pretend to get along. For her sake.”
“You haven't changed, Broussard,” her father said. “You're still a bastard coonass.”
“Well, that may be. But at least I'm not doin' time in prison like the dickhead.”
Suddenly he heard Emma calling his name. Gabe had never heard it sound sweeter than when it came from her sweet lips.
The elderly mentor blushed to the roots of her lavender hair as Gabe told the gathered crowd how every success he had in the movie business, he owed to his former teacher. Then he kissed her, a smack right on her scarlet tinted lips. The crowd cheered. Gabe didn't care. All that mattered to him was the pride in those faded blue eyes and the love in Emma's gaze as both women looked up at him.
“I've got one more announcement to make,” he said. “And, lucky for us, we've got some esteemed members of the press, from the
Enquirer,
in the back of the room.”
Heads spun around. The two reporters, thought Gabe, though those words were stretching what they did for a living, looked uncomfortable. And more than a little nervous. Which vastly added to his enjoyment of the situation.
“There's been talk about my getting engaged recently, and I'd like to go on record saying that some of that story's true.”
There was an audible gasp.
“I'm lookin' to get myself married.” He reached out and took Emma's hand, knowing that she'd truly trusted him when it didn't turn cold at the unexpected remark. “If the lady will accept me.”
Her eyes filled with moisture as she flung her arms around his neck. “It's about time you asked that question, Gabriel Broussard.”
There was more cheering. As he carried his Emma past Nate, his friend looked nearly as pleased with himself as Gabe was feeling.
“What about Every Body's Beautiful?” Emma asked.
“Roxi says she'll be happy to run it while you open up a western branch. What do you say, Emma? There are a helluva lot of ladies out there who could use a place where they can feel pretty and pampered. Even if they haven't dieted themselves down to skin and bones. And believe me, their menfolk will be real happy with the idea, too.”
“I love it.” She snuggled into his arms as he marched past the reporters. Wanting to make sure the entire world knew that this story was true, Gabe made a point of pausing to kiss her again. Their cameras snapped. Busy kissing him back, Emma didn't seem to notice.
“There's just one thing,” she said as he buckled her into the seat of the truck.
“What's that,
chère
?”
“Are you sure you can keep a woman of my vastly voluptuous hungers satisfied?”
He laughed, feeling, for the first time in his life, as if he'd come home.
“I gau-ran-tee it,
mon coeur
.”
Y
OU
G
IVE
M
E
F
EVER
Nancy Warren
One
“What we need is a decent skeleton in our family closet,” Lucy Charles said to her mother. “It would make writing the family newsletter a lot more interesting.”
“Don't go looking for trouble, sweetie. I'm sure the family likes recipes more than gossip,” Patrice Charles said absently, flicking over the pages of a loose-leaf binder that was her personal cookbook.
They were in the big old kitchen of the family home in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lucy lived in Toronto now, but home would always be here, where she could watch the sea from her bedroom window and fresh lobster was what you ate when hot dogs were too expensive.
“Okay, what have you got?”
“What about the
tortiere?
Your aunt Florence sent it from Quebec.”
“I used that recipe year before last.” She stretched her neck, which was sore from too many hours spent working on her laptop. “Maybe I'll pick up a good recipe for jambalaya when I'm in Louisiana.”
Lucy was a history lecturer at the University of Toronto. Currently, she was researching her own family's background, which included the splitting up of her ancestors when the French Acadians had been expelled from Canada in the mid 1700s. She'd recently discovered, through damn fine research, if she did say so herself, living relatives in Louisiana.
“I'm not sure you should go down there all alone, Lucy,” her mom said for the hundredth time. “You don't even know these people. They could be a bunch of crazies living in the swamps.”
Her mother didn't quite approve of Cajuns. According to Patrice, the way they dropped vowels and slurred a perfectly nice word like Acadian into Cajun—well, she suspected there'd been drinking involved. “And you, a professor.”
“I'm not a prof, Mom. I'm a lecturer. Big difference.” The biggest being a permanent job and tenure. “That's why I'm spending my summer break writing this book. Publish or perish. Besides, Beatrice LeBlanc, one of your long-lost cousins, sounds great on e-mail.”
“Hmm. Internet friends. We all know where that can lead,” her mother said darkly.
Lucy went back to the notes she was making on her laptop. “But first I need to fit in family recipes and the fascinating exploits of Roland Charles, Jr. on the high school baseball team,” Lucy sighed. “Oh, well. I can write a nice article on the Louisiana branch of the family for the next issue.”
“You be careful, honey. And for goodness' sake, book yourself a decent hotel. Don't be putting up with strangers in some swamp shack.”
“They're family, Mom, and the address is in New Orleans. I can't turn down their hospitality, it would feel rude. Don't worry. If I don't like staying with Beatrice, I'll move to a hotel.”
“A mother always worries.” Patrice flipped to desserts. “My daughter in a shack.”
 
Her mother could not have been more mistaken, Lucy thought a week later as the cab pulled up in front of a gracious old mansion in New Orleans' Garden District.
“Are you sure?” she asked the cab driver.
“This the address you gave me.”
She felt disoriented, and from more than a few hours on a plane and a change from breezy Atlantic Canada to this hot, humid paradise.
“Thank you,” she said at last and got out of the cab, still staring at the home of her newfound relatives.
Wrought iron, that wonderful curlicued twirling iron lace, fronted the mansion. Inside the gates was a walkway that ought to have been artistically crumbling but looked brand-new, winding through lush gardens. The house itself was the perfect combination of grand and charming, with balconies, rich cream stucco walls and the kind of verandah where you simply had to sit and sip a mint julep.
She hadn't been bothered by the thought that her hosts might live modestly, but she'd never thought for a second that she'd be vacationing at Tara. Wow.
She swung her overnighter over her shoulder and dragged her wheeled suitcase behind her so it bumped noisily over the sidewalk. The gate was open, so she walked through and bumped her way up the path.
When she was halfway to that inviting verandah, she had to stop and unbutton. The jacket she'd needed in Halifax was suffocating her suddenly. Her oatmeal linen trousers might as well have been made of asbestos and her
trés
fashionable beaded cotton top felt like a ski parka.
Once she'd stopped to slip off her jacket and lay it over her arm, she took another second to drink in the beauty around her. There was so much of it. An embarrassment of garden riches. From gardenia in full, perfumed splendor to massive magnolia trees sporting white blossoms the size of dinner plates. Walls spilling over with purple bougainvillea, green slinky vines, and palm trees. Peeking from among the greenery were tiny garden gnomes. Somewhere water played, which only made her feel hotter.
A prickle ran over her skin and she realized in that sudden jolt that she wasn't alone in the garden.
A quick, searching glance and she discovered a sweaty guy with black, shaggy hair leaning silently on a shovel, watching her. The sweaty guy was shirtless.
He stood to the side of the house, and he'd obviously stopped in the middle of digging to watch her. There was a patch of fresh black dirt around his feet but he wasn't digging now. He was staring. Hadn't offered her a hand with her luggage, either.
He continued to stare at her and the heat of the afternoon intensified. He was exactly the kind of man who appealed to the part of her she didn't want to encourage. His eyes appeared heavy-lidded and predatory, his hair so long past the cut-by date that it curled over where his collar would be—if he'd been wearing a shirt.
What he was wearing was a tan. The kind of tan a man gets by working outside a lot without his shirt on. Even as she willed her feet to move up the path and toward the house, that part of her that was yelling,
Yes, Yes, YESSS!
held her rooted to the spot.
She'd never entirely believed Lady Chatterley would go quite so goopy over a gardener until now. This gardener had the slightly scruffy look of a man who hasn't shaved in a day or two, blue-gray eyes staring at her as though it were perfectly all right to stare unabashedly at a stranger.
Naturally, he had broad shoulders and a muscular torso, with a nice amount of chest hair, now damp from exertion. As she stood there entranced, a drop of sweat rolled, as slow as syrup, over his collarbone, tracking a wet streak over his upper chest and finally disappearing into the damp hair. Her gaze continued to follow its path as though that drop of sweat had rolled unimpeded over the nicely defined pecs, dipping to the rib cage and finally hitting the smooth plane of tawny belly. His jeans were low enough that she saw the jut of his hipbones. The jeans were grubby and shapeless, but she saw that his thighs were powerfully muscled and his feet, in disreputable old sneakers, were long.
While her eyes had been drinking him in more thirstily than anything long and cool she'd ever consume on that porch, the gardener had been doing the same to her. She felt scratchy and overdressed, and was aware of a wild longing to stand before him as he was, in a pair of low-riding jeans and bare torso—she even wanted her feet bare so she could curl her toes into the rich black earth he'd churned up.
Her common sense finally asserted itself. “Will I find Ms. LeBlanc in the house?” she asked in the tone she used at school when she felt she needed to exert her authority over students who were no more than five years younger than she.
Those blue-gray eyes considered her for another interminable moment and then he showed surprisingly white teeth in a quick grin. “I believe she is.” Very attractive voice. Slow talking and deep with a slight hint of a French accent.
“Thank you.” If her tone was cool, it was the only part of her that was.
She turned and made her way to the verandah. Based on the fact that she heard no sounds of digging behind her and that her spine prickled, she'd be willing to bet a month's salary that the gardener was checking out her back view.
Suitcases and all.
When she got to the verandah and started up the wide steps she heard a wolf whistle, so soft she could pretend she hadn't heard it if she chose.
She did not choose.
She turned to glare at the culprit only to find his head bent, watching the progress as his shovel plunged deep into the fertile ground. There was something aggressively sexual about the gesture, which she told herself was her own fault for studying too much literary symbolism. Suddenly the gardener lifted his head and she caught the carnal gleam in those eyes. Very deliberately, while holding her gaze with his, he raised the shovel and plunged it back into the yielding earth.
Her breath caught and a quiver of arousal struck, so strong it shocked her. Resolutely, she turned away from the sexiest man who'd ever planted a tulip bulb.
After taking a moment to compose herself, she knocked on the wide oak door. She wouldn't have been surprised to be met by liveried servants when the door opened, but in fact the older woman in a stylish blouse and peasant skirt took one look at Lucy standing there with her cases and beamed. “Why, you must be our cousin Lucy. Welcome, honey. I'm your cousin Beatrice.”
Lucy held out her hand politely but the older woman laughed and pulled her into a huge hug, lightly scented with a perfume she couldn't identify but smelled like lily of the valley. “You're in the south now, honey. Everybody kisses everybody.” For a split second she thought about that man in the garden and then forced him from her mind.
“Come in. It's wonderful to have family in the house. I swear this old place gets lonely when there aren't enough people to fill it.”
Lucy smiled and pulled her cases into the wide foyer. “I really don't want to put you to any trouble. I'd be happy to stay at a hotel.”
“We already had this argument on e-mail,” Cousin Beatrice reminded her. “You're family. You stay with family.”
“This is such a wonderful house,” Lucy said, following her newfound cousin inside. “Has it been in the family long?”
“Not by New Orleans standards. It was built by a Yankee trader back in the late eighteen hundreds. We bought it in the sixties. Claude can tell you more. He's the one who knows about history.”
“Your son, Claude?”
“Your Cousin Claude. Didn't you see him? He's out in the garden.”
The half-dressed hottie was her cousin? “Yes. I did see him, but he didn't introduce himself.”
“Probably didn't even notice you. He's very focused when he's busy with something.”
He'd certainly been focused when he'd undressed her with his eyes, but she didn't feel like sharing that fact with the man's mother.
“You two will have a lot in common. You teach history and my son owns a couple of antique shops.”
“Really?” It wasn't what she would have expected of the man outside. “I thought he was the gardener.”
Beatrice chuckled. “He's that as well. He helps me keep up this place. I couldn't stay here if he didn't.”
As Lucy was led through into the main living areas of the house, her surprise grew. “What beautiful things.” She was no expert on furniture, but she could see the rich patina of age on some of the pieces. The Aubusson rug in the living room was almost too gorgeous to walk on. The whole house reeked of old money. Claude traced his distant relationship to her through his father, so the money must be on his mother's side.
“Are you hungry?”
“No, thank you. I had lunch on the plane.”
“Some iced tea, then. I've got a fresh pitcher all ready in the refrigerator.”
“That would be wonderful,” Lucy said.
“Go on out to the porch and sit. Tell Claude to wash up and join us.”
“All right. I'm going to change into something cooler first.”
“You go right ahead.”
Lucy slipped up to the room she'd been given. As pretty as anything in New Orleans, she figured. The wrought iron bed frame and the antique furniture were feminine and dainty. A dormer window with a padded window seat looked out over the back garden, which was as pretty as the front.
She washed up and brushed her teeth in the adjoining bathroom, which contained one of her favorite things in the world, a claw foot bathtub.
Just knowing that Claude was out there in the garden somewhere had her bringing a pale yellow cotton sundress into the bathroom to change. She freshened her lip gloss, ran a brush through her hair, and pushed her feet into sandals. She ran down the stairs, stopped and huffed a quick breath in and out before officially meeting Claude LeBlanc.
All right then. She'd made a small miscalculation about the identity of Sweaty but Gorgeous out front. He wasn't a totally hot gardener, but her distant cousin. Well, if she'd mistaken her man, Cousin Claude was about to find out that he had also mistaken his woman.

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