Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2) (28 page)

Allegra came back and planted herself in front of him, fists on her hips. “Way to charm the girls, Matt,” she said very dryly.

“F—” He caught himself, horrified. He could not possibly tell a woman to fuck off, no matter how bad his hangover and the shock of the moment. Plus, the last thing his skull needed right now was a jolt from Raoul’s fist. So he just made a low, growling sound.

“She thinks you’re hot, you know,” Allegra said, in that friendly conversational tone torturers used in movies as they did something horrible to the hero.

“I…she…what?” The valley packed inside him fled in confusion before the
man
who wanted to take its place, surging up. Matt flushed dark again, even as his entire will scrambled after that flush, trying to get the color to die down.

“She said so.” Allegra’s sweet torturer’s tone. “One of the first things she asked me after she got up this morning: ‘Who’s the hot one?’”

Damn blood cells, stay away from my cheeks.
The boss did not flush. Pépé never flushed. You held your own in this crowd by being the roughest and the toughest. A man who blushed might as well paint a target on his chest and hand his cousins bows and arrows to practice their aim. “No, she did not.”

“Probably talking about me.” Amusement curled under Tristan’s voice as he made himself the conversation’s red herring. Was his youngest cousin taking pity on him? How had Tristan turned out so nice like that? After they made him use the purple paint when they used to pretend to be aliens, too.

“
And
she said you had a great body.” Allegra drove another needle in, watching Matt squirm. He couldn’t even stand himself now. His body felt too big for him. As if all his muscles were trying to get his attention, figure out if they were actually
great
.

“And she was definitely talking about Matt, Tristan,” Allegra added. “You guys are impossible.”

“I’m sorry, but I can hardly assume the phrase ‘the hot one’ means Matt,” Tristan said cheerfully. “Be my last choice, really. I mean, there’s me. Then there’s—well, me, again, I really don’t see how she would look at any of the other choices.” He widened his teasing to Damien and Raoul, spreading the joking and provocation around to dissipate the focus on Matt.

“I was there, Tristan. She was talking about Matt,” said Allegra, who either didn’t get it, about letting the focus shift off Matt, or wasn’t nearly as sweet as Raoul thought she was. “She thinks you’re hot,” she repeated to Matt, while his flush climbed back up into his cheeks and
beat
there.

Not in front of my cousins, Allegra! Oh, wow, really? Does she really?

Because his valley invader had hair like a wild bramble brush, and an absurdly princess-like face, all piquant chin and rosebud mouth and wary green eyes, and it made him want to surge through all those brambles and wake up the princess. And he so could not admit that he had thoughts like those in front of his cousins and his grandfather.

He was thirty years old, for God’s sake. He worked in dirt and rose petals, in burlap and machinery and rough men he had to control. He wasn’t supposed to fantasize about being a prince, as if he were still twelve.

Hadn’t he made the determination, when he came back from Paris, to stay
grounded
from now on, real? Not to get lost in some ridiculous fantasy about a woman, a fantasy that had no relationship to reality?

“Or she
did
,” Allegra said, ripping the last fingernail off. “Before you yelled at her because of something that is hardly her fault.”

See, that was why a man needed to keep his feet on the ground. You’d think, as close a relationship as he had with the earth, he would know by now how much it hurt when he crashed into it. Yeah, did. Past tense.

But she’d stolen his land from him. How was he supposed to have taken that calmly? He stared up at the house, at the small figure in the distance climbing out of her car.

Pépé came to stand beside him, eyeing the little house up on the terraces as if it was a German supply depot he was about to take out. “I want that land back in the family,” he said, in that crisp, firm way that meant,
explosives it is and tough luck for anyone who might be caught in them.
“This land is yours to defend for this family, Matthieu. What are you going to do about this threat?”

***

Available now!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I want to offer a huge thank you to Mercy and Dale Anderson, a wonderful editing team whose support and encouragement and insight into story has meant so much to me. And many, many thanks also to readers Lisa Chinn and Lynn Latimer for all their early feedback. And of course my thanks would not be complete without heaping praises on authors Virginia Kantra and Stephanie Burgis for their feedback.

And a huge thank you, of course, to all my readers, as always, for all your support which has kept me motivated to write more books! Thank you all so much.

ABOUT LAURA FLORAND

Laura Florand burst on the contemporary romance scene in 2012 with her award-winning Amour et Chocolat series. Since then, her international bestselling books have appeared in ten languages, been named among the Best Books of the Year by
Library Journal,
Romantic Times,
and Barnes & Noble; received the RT Seal of Excellence and numerous starred reviews from
Publishers Weekly
,
Library Journal,
and
Booklist;
and been recommended by NPR,
USA Today
, and
The Wall Street Journal
, among others.

After a Fulbright year in Tahiti and backpacking everywhere from New Zealand to Greece, and several years living in Madrid and Paris, Laura now teaches Romance Studies at Duke University. Contrary to what the “Romance Studies” may imply, this means she primarily teaches French language and culture and does a great deal of research on French gastronomy, particularly chocolate.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2016, Laura Florand

Cover by Sébastien Florand

ISBN-13: 978-1-943168-04-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at
[email protected]
.

The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
www.lauraflorand.com