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

***

Libitz felt his eyes on her again, but she refused to look at him.

Between Kate and her cousin Stratton, whom Lib had known for most of her life, she knew all she needed to know about Jean-Christian Rousseau, and very little of it was favorable. She knew from Kate that her cousin Barrett was sometimes referred to as “the Shark” in business circles, but as far as Libitz was concerned, the only shark at the English-Rousseau wedding today was the one staring at her.

Wait. Staring at her?

No.

Eyefucking
her, same as he’d been doing since last night when he sidled up to her at the rehearsal dinner and tried introducing himself with so much innuendo, she almost couldn’t hear his words through the cloud of smarm.

Jean-Christian was a predator, plain and simple, and every lazy eye blink, every sexy smirk, every deep breath he took was premeditated to make a woman rip her panties down the middle and mount up with abandon.

And the thing is? Libitz had no problem with that.

Though she wanted, one day, what KK had found in Étienne, she had no illusions that it was going to happen any time soon. She’d dated boys from prep school, from summer camp, and from college. She’d met them through well-intentioned mothers at her parent’s temple; through sorority sisters whose boyfriends had brothers; through J-Date, an online dating service for young Jewish singles; and occasionally at posh hotel bars, where she wasn’t above a quick fuck in a coatroom if she felt like it.

Libitz was no prude, and despite her longing, she had no fanciful ideas about a happily-ever-after around the next bend. Whatever romantic bones she had in her body were protected so far beneath the surface, she wasn’t even positive they still existed. If she hadn’t hidden them away, after all, her veritable parade of Mr. Wrongs would have surely crushed them all to dust.

No, Lib didn’t mind that Jean-Christian Rousseau was on a mission to screw every human being with a vagina in a ten-mile radius, but she refused to be added to his list.

Why?

Mostly because of Kate. Kate English. KK. Libitz’s best friend since kindergarten, where their desks and coat hooks had been side by side because of their last names, English and Feingold. Neither girl had been blessed with siblings, but they’d quickly chosen each other as their adopted sister for life. Through six years of elementary school and seven years of middle and high school, where Libitz was one of four Jewish kids at Trinity Prep in Manhattan, KK and Lib had remained inseparable. There was nothing that Lib wouldn’t do for Kate. Nothing.

And she certainly wouldn’t dream of jeopardizing her long-term relationship with Kate’s new family by fucking her best friend’s brand-new brother-in-law. He wasn’t some random guy she met in a bar who could give her a nice anonymous fuck. She was going to know him for the rest of her life, which made him complicated.

Not just complicated.

Forbidden.

But that didn’t mean it was going to be easy to refuse him.

Jean-Christian Rousseau was the epitome of a beautiful bastard—a gorgeous specimen of a male, a man so eminently fuckable in every way, it physically pained her that she couldn’t let it happen when she’d lowered the bar for far-less-deserving men.

Letting her eyes flick to his for just a moment, she scowled at him and watched as his dark-green eyes lit with amusement. Deep inside, under the bridesmaid dress and the silk lingerie she’d bought for Kate’s wedding, she felt a heat, a blissful pressure in her core, her muscles clenching and relaxing as she turned away from her nemesis, feigning disgust.

Well, partially, anyway.

He was brutally hot. It would be impossible to be disgusted with his tall, muscular body, Henry Cavill good looks, sexy smile, slight French accent, and easy, charming manners.

But when Libitz looked just beneath the surface of the stunning packaging, disgust wasn’t far behind or difficult for her to find and grasp. He was also an opportunist, a sexist, and a possible misogynist. From all accounts, he ploughed (literally) through women like a wrecking ball taking out fifty-seven floors with a single swing. It happened fast, and he was long gone after the destruction.

How did she know this?

Well, she knew what she’d been told by Kate and Stratton—that his list of conquests was substantial, leaving more than one disappointed woman behind—but more importantly, she knew his type: beautiful, charming, self-centered, self-serving men who thought with their dicks.

How many hearts had he broken?

A million, she’d bet. Or more.

And the funny thing was? If you asked him, he’d probably say, “None.” He probably assumed that because he wasn’t interested and made it clear, it staunched any interest or expectations on the side of his partners. Stupid, selfish man. Women didn’t work like that.

At any rate, it wasn’t her business how many hearts he’d broken, only that hers would
not
be among them.

Unfortunately, however, with a man like J.C. Rousseau, the stronger she was in her refusal, the more ruthless he would likely be in his pursuit. At this point, after two solid days of rolling her eyes and ignoring his come-ons, she was a juicy bone and he was a dirty dog with one thought in his very teeny, tiny mind: to eat her whole.

Libitz just hoped the weekend ran out of time before it all came to a head, because she had experience with men like J.C. Rousseau, and when they didn’t get what they wanted, it rarely ended well. For whatever reason, he’d chosen her as his target for the weekend, and she sensed that he wasn’t going to back off…which meant that eventually he’d run out of patience, call her a “bitch” or worse, and either cause a scene or create a rift between himself and his new sister-in-law, who wouldn’t stand for Lib’s abuse.

And that was the antithesis of everything Libitz wanted both for Kate and for herself. She wanted KK to have a happy life with her new family, smooth and full of love at this tender beginning. And Lib, who also wanted a permanent place in Kate’s new life, didn’t especially want to piss off her brother-in-law out of the gate.

She glared at him as Kate and Étienne kissed and the crowd cheered with applause, because she resented him for putting her in this position.

Why couldn’t he find someone else to bother?

Sighing with annoyance, she collected herself just in time to watch Kate and Étienne turn around as the priest announced that they were husband and wife. She beamed at her friend with a lifetime’s worth of affection and offered the bride her bouquet.

I love you
, mouthed KK to her best friend before turning to her new husband with a look of such utter and complete happiness, Libitz’s heart clutched with longing.

She stood, nearly limp with yearning, watching as Kate and Étienne laced their hands together and walked up the aisle to Mendelssohn. Her eyes burned. Her lips quivered.

Luckily, J.C. was there to shatter the magical spell woven by Kate’s happiness.

“Hey, Elsa,” he said, nudging her bony hip with his elbow, “ready to go?”

“My name isn’t Elsa,” she said, fixing a smile on her face as she reluctantly took his elbow and started down the altar steps to the middle aisle of the church.

“Really? Because I could have sworn you were an ice princess.”

“Ah! You’re referencing a character from a Disney cartoon movie. Meant for children. Right about at your level, huh?”

He waved with his free hand at someone he knew before tipping his head closer to hers. “Actually, I just thought I’d bring things down to your level, Princess. Basic and cold.”

She chuckled acidly, winking at a friend from Trinity. “Any woman who doesn’t do a split on your dick is an ice princess, huh?”

“
Quoi!
Did you just say ‘dick’?”

“You heard me,” she said through clenched teeth, waving at her mother.

“You’re going to make me hard,” he murmured.

“No great feat there,” she answered back, relieved to be nearing the rear vestibule of the church.

“You know we’re sitting together at the reception, right?”

When they’d cleared the sanctuary, she whipped her arm away and faced him. “Must be my lucky day.”

“It could be. If you’d just let it happen,” he said, leaning so close to her, she could feel his warm breath on her cheek and the throb of her pulse in her throat.

Why did you have to be so fucking hot?

“Not cold enough,” she whispered near his ear, forcing herself to take a step away from him even though his soft, seductive words came perilously close to making her rethink her resolve not to fuck him.

A door opened to their left, and they turned in unison to see Kate emerging from a small bride’s room at the back of the church, where she’d fixed her lipstick and veil.

“Lib!” she cried, “I did it! I’m married!”

Libitz held out her arms and gathered Kate in her embrace as she narrowed her eyes at J.C., who stood behind Kate, beaming at Libitz with a wolfish glint in his eyes. “You did it, KK. You’re a Rousseau now.”

J.C. inadvertently avoided Libitz for most of the reception, trapped with family visiting from France who wanted to catch up with him while his parents greeted the hundreds of guests in the receiving line. He kept an eye on her, however, watching her face relax from uptight to merry around a handful of Trinity friends by the bar. She laughed a lot, keeping a knuckle on her hip while her other hand held a glass of Cabernet at an exquisite right angle. At first glance, she appeared
all
angles, this petite, prickly woman—sharp and obtuse, acute and right.

The softness in her, he learned through observation, was concentrated in her face—in her almost-too-big brown eyes and pillowed lips, in the rounded peaches of her cheeks when she smiled, and the warmth in her expression when she chuckled with a friend.

She was angular, yes, but not wholly without curves, he realized, even if they weren’t the obvious ones that he was used to. Something about that realization made him feel…fortunate. It was a little bit like how he’d felt the first time he’d seen a Picasso up close—like he was seeing something very precious that not everyone got to see, something special that could be easily missed if one didn’t take an extra moment to look closely.

One of her prep-school chums put his arm around her slight shoulders, pulling her close for a photo, and J.C. flinched, a sudden burst of acid souring his stomach as he instinctively flexed the knuckles of his left hand.

“Looks like someone stole the march on you, Jean-Christian,” said his second cousin Luc, a Montferrat relation on his mother’s side.

J.C. shifted his gaze away from Libitz and her handsy fucking admirer. He wasn’t familiar with the expression his much older cousin had just used. “Sir?”

“You look ready to fight off Satan.”

He scowled. “What do you mean?”

“Narrowed eyes.” He flicked a glance at J.C.’s hand. “Clenched fist. Scowl.
Cherchez la femme
.”

Cherchez la femme
?
It translated directly to “Look for the woman,” but J.C. sensed it was a French idiom—one with which he was unfamiliar. He searched his cousin’s amused eyes, trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Look for the woman?
What
woman? Libitz? Ha!

Luc chuckled knowingly and J.C.’s scowl deepened—not because of a woman, but because Luc was using archaic expressions that didn’t mean jack shit, and it was annoying. But as bad luck would have it, Luc was not only his elder but a guest.

J.C. relaxed his fist and shrugged. “Not sure what you mean.”

Luc’s eyes trailed deliberately to Libitz and then back to J.C. “Ah, but I think you do.”

He followed his cousin’s glance and found Libitz standing about a foot away from the guy who’d been mauling her a moment before for the camera. Releasing a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, he gestured to the bar with his chin. “I need a refill. You?”

“No, thanks.” Luc cocked his head to the side. “But good luck.”

“With what?” asked J.C., feeling beyond irritated as Luc winked at him before wandering away to chat with more Montferrat and Roche cousins across the room.

“
Casse-toi
,” J.C. growled in Luc’s direction before heading toward the bar.

Swirling the ice in the bottom of his glass, he shook off the awkward exchange with his cousin, waving to a friend with whom he’d been at Princeton but not bothering to stop and chat. He ordered a scotch on the rocks, then pivoted slightly to find the frosty maid-of-honor standing to his right with her back to him.

Turning back to the bartender with a grin, he ordered a lowball glass full of ice.

“With…?”

“Nothing,” said J.C. “Just the ice.”

The bartender gave him a look but filled a lowball glass with ice cubes, placing it on the bar beside the scotch. J.C. nodded his thanks and picked up both. As he passed by Libitz, he “accidentally” spilled several of the cubes into the concave of her back.

“Ah!” She gasped in shock, whipping around to face him. “Did
you
do that?!”

“What?”

Her eyes shot to the glass of ice in his hand, wiggling to release the cold cubes from where they must have lodged between her lower back and the dress.

“Did you just put ice cubes down my back?!” she asked, her voice just shy of a shriek, intense in expression but low in actual decibel.

Damn, but she’s fiery.

He shrugged, taking a sip of scotch. “One might have slipped from the glass as I turned around, but I certainly didn’t—”

“Save it,” she hissed as two cubes plunked on the ground by her satin shoes. “Follow me.”

Without excusing herself from her friends, who had watched the exchange with interest, she hustled away, her heels clacking furiously along the edge of Le Chateau’s ballroom. Without thinking, J.C. followed her, barely able to conceal his grin as she made her way through a set of open doors at the end of the room that led outside. She didn’t stop until she reached the ornate cement balustrade of the West Terrace. When she turned to face him, her arms were crossed, her face fierce.

He placed the glasses on a table just outside the door, then straightened, staring back at her in the moonlight.

“What do you want from me?” she demanded.

“What do I…
want
?”

“You’ve been staring at me and coming on to me for two days. And despite the fact that I’m
clearly
not interested, you show no signs of stopping. So what’ll it take? What do I have to do to get you to cut it out and leave me the fuck alone?”

It was a good question.

Such
a good question.

But unfortunately, he was too distracted to give her a quick answer. Her huge spirit was in such contrast to her tiny body, for a moment he wondered how she contained it. This close and this alone, the physical differences between them were startling: she wasn’t more than five feet tall and couldn’t weigh much more than one hundred pounds, while J.C. cleared six feet and weighed in at almost two hundred pounds.

Reminded of a line from William Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, he whispered distractedly,
“Though she be but little, she is fierce!”

She dragged a sharp breath through her lips, and her eyes flashed and narrowed, but she didn’t respond, holding her pose, staring up at him, waiting for him to answer her question. He chuckled softly at her bravura. If he wanted to, he could break her in half like a twig, and yet there she stood—eyes furious, arms crossed, so fucking pissed, so fucking indomitable and strong, she was…magnificent.

And again he wondered, as he had last night,
What would it take to make an impression on you?

Without consciously coaxing the image to mind, he had a sudden mental fantasy of tongue fucking her—of her laid out, spread eagle–style on his bed, her tawny skin bare, her smart mouth open in a perfect
O
as he razed her tender clit with his teeth then shoved his tongue between her legs to lave the inside of her sex until she screamed.

That would make a fucking impression, ice princess, wouldn’t it?

Two fingers appeared an inch shy of his nose and snapped twice. “Earth to Jean-Christian.”

Merde.
He flinched in shock, stepping back from her. “Don’t fucking snap at me.”

Her hands landed on the nonexistent flare of her hips as she fearlessly stared up at him. “Then answer the fucking question!”

His cock jumped at her bossy fucking tone, blood sluicing from all over his body to unexpectedly stiffen it. Letting his eyes drop to her breasts, which looked slightly bigger because her arms were crossed under them, he deliberately gaped for several seconds before raising his glance slowly and smirking at her.

“Ask me again.”

“What. Will. It. Take. For. You. To. Leave. Me. Alone?”

This time his eyes fixed on her pink lips, which were glistening and glossy in the dim light.

“A kiss,” he murmured, the words coming from nowhere.

“What?”

“A kiss. Yeah,” he said, leaning into the idea quickly and stepping closer to her, so close she had to tilt her head back to look up at him. “Give me a kiss and I’ll leave you alone.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she answered, though her voice was slightly weaker than it had been a moment before. “I’m not going to kiss you. Choose something else.”

“No.”

She took a sharp breath, averting her eyes from his for a moment before looking up at him again.

“I won’t
give
you one. But if it’ll get you off my back, you can kiss me.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Giving versus taking.”

“But I don’t just want to take,” he said, his voice dropping to gravel. “I
want you to give too.”

“Why?” she asked, her forehead creasing with annoyance.

His heart thumped faster, and his cock, which was already pressing uncomfortably against the zipper of his tuxedo pants with intense arousal, throbbed. “Because I want you to participate.”

A small noise—so small, he would have missed it if they hadn’t been standing so close—issued from her throat, and when he flicked his glance downward for a moment, he realized that her chest, small though it was, heaved with every breath she took, her nipples straining against the thin, silky fabric of the bridesmaid dress.

He dragged his eyes back up her body, lingering on the pale skin of her delicate throat, stopping at her lips, which were softly parted, then finally slid his gaze to hers.

“So?” he prompted. “What’ll it be?”

“One kiss,” she confirmed.

To start.
He nodded.

“One kiss and you’ll leave me alone for the rest of the weekend,” she said, her eyes dropping to his lips as she wetted her own.

“Sure. But you won’t want me to…leave you alone,” he teased, unable to keep his lips from grinning as her arousal became more plain to him.

She jerked her eyes back to his, the fire in their depths telling him she’d let him rot in hell before ever asking for another.

“One kiss,” she said. Raising her angular little chin, she nodded once. “Fine.”

***

The closeness of him—the proximity of his body—was making her breathless.

Fuck him for oozing sexy from every pore, like if she licked his skin, he’d
taste
like it. This would be so much easier if she wasn’t attracted to him, because she could give him one kiss and walk away from him forever like it never happened. But she had a dreadful, aching feeling that if she kissed Jean-Christian Rousseau, it would be an experience she’d never be able to forget.

Unfortunately, it was too late for misgivings.

She’d already agreed.

And besides, she needed him to leave her alone. Her relationship with KK trumped all, and it certainly trumped a cheap fuck at a wedding with her brand-new brother-in-law. They weren’t going to “happen”—no how, no way—and the sooner he understood that, the better.

Taking a step forward, she raised her palms and slowly, slowly placed them on his chest, first the pads of her fingers, then the heels of her hands, until finally they rested, flush and full, against the crisp white linen of his shirt. Beneath her right palm, she could feel the thundering of his heart, and she furrowed her brows in confusion, wondering why it was beating so fast if this was just a game to him and she was just a plaything. Before she could muse on the topic any further, however, she felt the curve of his finger under her chin, lifting her head back so that she gazed up at him.

His eyes, so dark green as to appear black in the moonlight, stared down at her, searching her eyes for a long moment—much longer than needed for a kiss that meant nothing—as he repeated softly,
“Though she be but little…”

It was her favorite quote of all time, and one that she had had professionally painted in chic white script on her powder-pink bedroom wall years ago when she moved to New York City. Hearing it now, issuing from his lips a second time in a handful of seconds, made her heart clutch and stutter unexpectedly, and she gasped a breath of surprise, holding it as his lips descended, with unerring precision, to hers.

…she be fierce.

His mouth sealed over hers as he swallowed her exhalation of breath, his tongue exploring the seal between their lips with an unexpected gentleness that made her fingers curl lightly into his shirt, and she stepped tip-toe onto his shoes to even out their height difference and press her body closer to his.

She felt the hard ridge of his erection immediately, and his hands, which had been cupping her face, slid down her back to cup her ass, forcing her closer so that the soft inward curve of her sex cradled the bulging hardness of his.

Ring.

Their kiss became hotter and more desperate, Jean-Christian’s tongue sliding against the length of hers as his hands kneaded her backside, pushing her close as he thrust against her hard enough that she felt the pressure of his rigid cock, through layers of clothing, against her clit.