J.C. and the Bijoux Jolis: The Rousseaus #3 (The Blueberry Lane Series Book 14) (8 page)

“Of what?”

“That nothing’s changed since the wedding. You and I are not a good idea.”

J.C. scowled as he reached for his glass, raised it to his lips, and took a long sip. “Not that it matters. You’re with Neil. Neil the baker with a long baguette.”

“He’s nice,” she said, hating how weak the words sounded in her ears but unable to think of anything more compelling to say about Neil.

“
Nice
.” He looked up at her, nailing her with his dark-green eyes. “Does Nice Neil make you feel the way I make you feel?”

Her cheeks flared with heat and she dropped her eyes, suddenly fascinated with Kate’s kitchen table. “I don’t know what you—”

“I know I affect you, Lib. The same way you affect me. There’s no use in denying it.”

“Actually, there’s a lot of use in denying it,” she said softly, tracing her finger over the wood grain of the table. “Denying it is for the best.”

“You really believe that?” he asked, his voice low and careful.

She looked up at him and nodded. “I do.”

“Why? We’re obviously attracted to each other. Why not…?”

“Because Kate’s right. We’re family.” She sighed. “Or we may as well be. We’re going to be Noelle’s godparents, J.C.—”

“Jean-Christian.”

“What?”

He leaned forward. “Call me Jean-Christian, not J.C.”

“Fine. We’re going to be Noelle’s godparents,
Jean-Christian
. That needs to be our priority, not some fling with zero chance of lasting and a great chance of making things really awkward between us.”

He flinched as she spoke, leaning back in his chair as he stared at her like she’d just hurt him. “Okay, Elsa. Have it your way.”

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, and she reached for it, grateful for the distraction.

“Nice Neil the baker?” asked J.C., reaching for the bottle of wine and adding the remainder to his glass.

“No,” she said, reading the text. “A client…looking for a Kandinsky.”

Libitz hit “Reply,” hating that she had to say no, because Mrs. Carnegie was a client Libitz had been trying to land for three full years. To have Mrs. Carnegie at her gallery showings, for other dealers to know that she was a client, would be a huge boost for the L. Feingold Gallery. But the sad reality was that Libitz didn’t have a Kandinsky to sell—he wasn’t an artist whom she collected. She could direct Mrs. Carnegie to a different gallery in New York that might have one, or she could offer to try to obtain one, but that would take time, and surely Mrs. Carnegie wasn’t accustomed to waiting for—

“You have one?” asked J.C.,
er,
Jean-Christian
.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “but my friend Camilla might.”

“What if you did?” he asked.

She looked up at him. “If I had a Kandinsky? I’d sell it to her, of course.”

“Would you make a good commission?”

“Of course. Money’s no object for Georgiana Newland Carnegie.”

“But I think there’s more to it,” he said intuitively.

“She’d be an amazing client. Just having her as a patron would vault my gallery to the next level.” She sighed. “That said, I can’t procure an available Kandinsky out of thin air. When I get back to New York, I’ll have to look around and see what I can find. Maybe she’ll be willing to wait.”

He searched her eyes gently, as though trying to make a decision about something, and her heart throbbed with longing as she stared back at him, the moment strangely intimate and yet without a hint of innuendo—just two passionate art lovers discussing their trade.

“I have one,” he finally said.

“A Kandinsky?” She leaned forward. “For sale?”

“It wasn’t.” He shrugged. “Now it is.”

“Are you serious?”

He nodded. “It’s yours if you want it.”

“Not
mine
. But I’ll broker it.”

“And I’ll pay you well for that service.”

“You weren’t even going to sell it, J.—
Jean-Christian
. I can’t take—”

“Either you make something on this deal or you forget it, Lib.”

She wet her lips, catching the bottom one between her teeth for a moment. “Which Kandinsky is it?”

“
Composition Seven
,” he answered.

Her breath caught. She knew the exact piece—its bright colors and bold brushstrokes were exactly what Mrs. Carnegie was looking for. “God, that’s perfect.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Do you really mean it?”

“Yes.”

“But…why would you do that?”

He took a deep breath and another sip of wine, staring at her in a way that made her feel hot from the lobes of her ears to the tips of her toes and everywhere in between.

“Because I want to.” He shrugged. “Because I can.”

He placed his glass back on the table, staring at it intently, running his index finger around the rim until it hummed. “Come and see it tomorrow. At my gallery.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“I’ll come and get you at nine.”

She nodded. “Sounds good.”

He looked up at her. “What’ll we tell Kate?”

“The truth,” she said simply.

“And that’ll be okay?”

“It’ll have to be,” said Libitz, folding her hands on the table. “It’s just business.”

He nodded at her slowly, staring at her with an inscrutable expression. “Just business.”

“No one is upset with you,
chaton
,” said Étienne’s voice from the dining room. “I promise. Come back and sit with us.”

“Jean-Christian?” Libitz whispered, her hand darting out to clasp his, her heart swelling with emotion as he looked up from his humming glass in surprise. “Thank you.”

His eyes widened as his fingers squeezed around hers for only a moment. “It’s my pleasure.”

The door opened, and they looked up to see a chagrined Kate standing beside Étienne. “I’m the worst,” she said, sniffling pitifully. “I’m just so hormonal! I had no right to accuse you two of anything. I’m so sorry, Lib.”

“KK,” said Libitz, standing up from the table and crossing the kitchen to gather her best friend into her arms, “stop! We all love you. We understand.”

“Forgive me, J.C.,” Kate said over Lib’s shoulder.

“Kate,” said Jean-Christian from behind Libitz, his voice warm and kind, “there is nothing to forgive. Everything,
chérie
, is perfect now.”

As J.C. pulled into the driveway of Toujours the next morning, he considered what an unexpectedly excellent time he’d had last night at dinner. Kate and Étienne had flanked the table, leaving Jax and Gard on one side and J.C. and Libitz on the other, and J.C. was struck by how naturally Libitz blended in with the Rousseau siblings and their partners, the six of them making a merry party as Kate told the story of “Étienne and the Rogue Sprinkler.” Thankfully, this prompted Gard to insist on coming over today to help set it up perfectly with the addition of something called a “Slip and Slide” that Gard insisted Caroline English would love.

He’d watched Libitz—subtly, of course—as she grinned at Kate’s anecdote or answered Jax’s questions about her gallery in New York. Occasionally, her elbow would brush against his as she lifted her wineglass, and he felt those touches soul deep, enduring an under-the-table boner for most of the evening, which made him yearn for more from the enigmatic Lib.

Back at Princeton, he’d dated a visual arts major who had a freakish obsession with time travel books and movies. She’d talked nonstop about a Scottish romance novel that she insisted should be made into a movie and made him sit through a dreadful film with the dead guy from
Superman
and the chick from
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
The best thing about the movie was the music: notably
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
by Rachmaninoff, which was seductive enough that they’d ended up fucking hard on her dorm bed halfway through the movie.

Suddenly the plot of that movie came back to him as he parked his car in his brother’s driveway. The dead guy from
Superman
had become obsessed with a seventy-year-old portrait of Dr. Quinn, even though she was long dead by the time he’d actually seen the painting at a historic hotel. Because of his fixation on the woman in the portrait, he worked tirelessly to travel back through time to find her. For no good reason that could be explained, he felt a connection to the model he could neither forget nor deny.

Yesterday Libitz had said that there was “a lot of use in denying” their attraction to each other, but J.C.’s feelings for her weren’t just about attraction anymore: they were all twisted and tangled with their mutual love of art, their delectable verbal sparring, and an ongoing sexy battle of the wills. Lately those feelings had been anchored by the fact that they’d be sharing the godparenting of Noelle and imbued with the magic of the Montferrat painting and Lib’s uncanny likeness to its model.

Before the Kandinsky opportunity had presented itself yesterday, he didn’t know how he was going to introduce Libitz to
Les Bijoux Jolis
, yet he was desperate that she see it. He needed to know if he was alone in the mysterious spell it had woven over him, because he suspected that he wasn’t…or
wouldn’t be
once she saw it. With no true and solid basis for his hunch, he felt certain that she would be as affected by the painting as he.

And with all these thoughts swirling like soup in his head, he hopped up the steps of his brother’s house and raised his finger to ring the doorbell. But before he could actually make finger-to-bell contact, the door opened an inch, and Libitz slipped out.

“C’mon! Hurry!” she whispered, grabbing his jacket sleeve and speed-walking down the steps to his car. “She thinks you’re a taxi!”

Deprived of the chance to open her door for her, he rounded the car and jumped into his seat, starting the engine quickly. “What happened to honesty?”

“It’s overrated,” muttered Lib, pulling down the sunglasses that had been perched on top of her head.

J.C. flicked a glance to the house as he put the car in drive, relieved that neither Kate nor his brother was darting from the house in a flurry to stop their now-illicit getaway.

Once they were down the driveway and through the gates of Toujours, he turned to Libitz. “What changed?”

“When I woke up this morning, she was sitting on my bed, all weepy, sorry for what she’d said last night, but not for the intentions behind it. She’s really scared that we’re going to hook up, break up, and hate each other for life.”

“Huh.”

“She kept saying it would be high stakes for a meaningless fuck.”

Just as it had bothered him last night when she’d referred to today as “just business,” it rankled him again now when she used the word “meaningless.” Whatever Lib was to him, “meaningless” wasn’t part of the equation.

He hazarded a glance at her, noting for the first time that she was wearing emerald earrings that sparkled and shined like the necklace in the painting. For a moment, he stared at her ear, almost hypnotized while they waited to merge onto a main road. A sharp pang of longing twisted his guts even though he reminded himself that it was a coincidence and nothing more.

“So, um…what did you say? To Kate?”

“I told her not to worry. We’re
not
happening.”

He flinched. “You’re so sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“No hint of doubt.”

“None.”

They were both quiet for a few minutes of stormy silence before Libitz’s spoke up again. “One, I’m sure you have a piece of ass stashed away somewhere.”

A mental picture of Felicity flashed through his head, and he scowled.

“Two, I’m with Neil.”

His lips curled at the idea of Nice Neil’s floury hands anywhere near Libitz.

“And three, somewhere along the way…” Her voice, which had been firm and decisive with her first two reasons, had changed now. It was softer and more tender, almost wistful. “…I decided that I don’t want meaningless anymore…and you’re, well…you’re
you
.”

“And all I do is meaningless?” he asked dryly.

She shrugged. “If the shoe fits…”

She was right, of course, but the word felt hollow and bitter in a way it had never felt before. “Meaningless” had always felt right. Safe. Comforting, even. But here and now? Sitting next to Libitz, speeding toward his gallery to show her something so beautiful, it had attached itself unerringly to his heart? They didn’t feel right, safe, or comfortable. For the very first time in his life, they felt…wrong. All wrong.

He stopped at a red light, turning to her. She lowered her glasses to the bridge of her nose and nailed him with a look. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

He couldn’t.

“Meaningless” was the right word. For all his life, he’d been meticulous in keeping every potentially romantic relationship purposely shallow, ditching his partner at the merest hint of her wanting more.

And yet he couldn’t stop thinking about Libitz—hadn’t been able to shake her from his mind since the night he’d kissed her in the moonlight—and his feelings for her didn’t show any signs of slowing down or retreating. If anything, they were growing, they were strengthening—he had the strangest premonition that they might even be here to stay.
There’s an exception to every rule
, he thought, staring at her profile: at the severity of her bobbed black hair and the gleaming emerald stud that glistened in the lobe of her ear like some sort of cosmic sign.

He huffed out a breath of annoyance and looked away from her. He could say nothing that would prove to her that he was changing, wildly, every day. There was no evidence, no obvious change of behavior, no solid example to prove that a brain he’d wired one way at age eleven was suddenly rewiring itself more than two decades later. If he wanted her to see that he was becoming a different person, he’d have to show her.

Challenge accepted
, he thought as the red light changed to green. He pressed down on the gas and zoomed toward the city.

***

Half an hour later, Libitz found herself standing in the middle of a small but very posh gallery in downtown Philadelphia. The walls had been painted dark gray and the floors were made of black marble with tiny bits of embedded crystal that twinkled in the dim light. Over her head was an original Anthony Primo blown glass chandelier, suspended like an aquamarine medusa, and the eclectic art on the walls ranged in movement from impressionism to neo-minimalism.

Jean-Christian disappeared down a back hallway for a second, telling her to look around, and Libitz closed her eyes, breathing in the scent of his gallery. There was a hint of fresh paint, the slight, pleasing odor of old canvas, the heat of the lights, glass cleaner, and shipping boxes or crates. As she breathed deeply, she heard music playing—low, sexy jazz—from hidden speakers, and she opened her eyes to find Jean-Christian standing no more than a foot away, staring at her.

Her lips parted, and she released the breath she’d been holding.

“Your eyes were closed,” he murmured, the way one would whisper in a sacred place, like a chapel or shrine.

“I was breathing it in.”

“Do you always do that?”

Her bottom lip slipped between her teeth. She was so
aware
of him, standing so close to her. She imagined she could feel the heat of his body, smell the leftover scent of the leather jacket he’d been wearing in the car and a faint hint of mint, maybe from brushing his teeth. He didn’t smell like vanilla, she realized as a weight lifted temporarily from her chest.

“Yes,” she said, still looking up at him.

His eyes traced her face, and she wondered if he was keeping himself from dropping them to the green silk blouse she was wearing with dark-blue jeans and nude patent-leather slingback pumps. Her nipples tightened, the memory of his hand cupping her bare breast making her cheeks flush with heat.

“Why?”

She gulped, feeling her flesh bead against her bra, no doubt pushing against the flimsy fabric of her top. “It gives me a sense of place.”

“And…?”

Standing in his gallery, surrounded by pieces he’d carefully curated, was turning out to be more erotic than Libitz would have ever guessed. She cleared her throat, damning her fierce attraction to him and wishing it away. “You have excellent taste, but I suspected that before walking in. I think you—I think you
love
this gallery.”

“That surprises you?”

“Very much.”

“You didn’t think I was capable of love?”

Tough question.

She knew that he was capable of loving his siblings—she’d seen it in his eyes at Étienne and Kate’s wedding and last night at dinner with his brother and sister. But familial love was the easiest kind, wasn’t it? Loving other people and things that didn’t organically belong to you was much harder.

“I don’t know you well enough to answer you,” she hedged. “But from what I
do
know,
romantic
love has certainly never been a priority.”

She didn’t mean it as a dig, so she didn’t like it that he looked wounded, that she’d inadvertently hurt him. She slid her eyes away from his face and looked at the careful lighting over a Jackson Pollock, the near-perfect matte and frame, the artful way he displayed a modern sculpture on a pedestal beside a famous Van Gogh.

“You love art, Jean-Christian. I can see that.”

His face had cooled, however, and this assessment didn’t warm it.

“Come on, Elsa,” he said, giving her his back as he stepped away. “You’re here to see a Kandinsky.”

She followed him, stopping before
Composition Seven
, which hung without noise or competition on its own wall a few yards away.

“Mrs. Carnegie will be thrilled,” she said, stepping closer to the painting. There was no doubt about its authenticity, and her lips tilted up in an easy smile of wonder as she admired it. “It’s stunning.”

“I can arrange to have it packaged and sent on Tuesday. Right after the holiday weekend. I assume you prefer private courier?”

“Yes, thanks,” she said. “I’ll have my assistant—”

“No need. I’ve already called the company I work with here in Philly and had it reinsured for eleven million. I have the address of your gallery, or I’m happy to send it directly to Mrs. Carnegie. Your call.”

“I’d like to be there for the installation,” said Libitz, breathless from his efficiency and trying not to find it a tremendous turn-on.

“Of course. I’ll arrange for it to arrive at your gallery by Tuesday evening and leave any remaining details to you.”

“I’ll wire the—”

“We can worry about that later.”

“
Jean-Christian
.”

“Fine,” he said with a sigh. He caught her eyes and held them intensely, clenching his jaw as he searched them for the answer to a question that he hadn’t asked.

“What?”

“Why don’t you—come into my office. I can type up an invoice.”

She nodded. “Thank you. This is a big transaction, and I know we’re…” She was about to say “family,” but that didn’t sound right at all. Nor did “friends.” Nor did “enemies,” much to her surprise. “Business associates” sounded way too impersonal for people about to pledge their love and guidance to the same baby, and “acquaintances” would be ridiculous, seeing as how she could still feel the imprint of his hand on her breast almost two months later.