Tempestuous/Restless Heart (23 page)

“Here,” he said, positioning the baby to slide her into Danielle’s arms. “All you gotta do is relax, darlin’.”

With his dark eyes locked on hers, Danielle completely lost track of the conversation. The moment was suddenly charged with all kinds of possibilities—possibilities that involved a lot less clothing than she was wearing now. As her breath grew painfully short, her nipples hardened beneath the suddenly abrasive fabric of her tank top. Memories of the kiss she’d shared with Remy flooded her foggy head—the brush and tickle of his mustache against her skin, the sensuous fullness of his firm lower lip, the clean earthy scent of him. She was on the verge of begging him to kiss her again when Eudora’s weight settled into her arms.

She looked down at the sleeping child and automatically tightened her hold. Eudora squirmed and made a face in her sleep.

“Relax,” Remy coaxed gently. “Don’t squeeze her; she’s not an accordion. That’s right. Just relax,
chère
, she won’t break.”

He slid his arm directly around Danielle’s shoulders this time, not bothering with subterfuge. She needed his support now. The sight of her holding the baby, her gray eyes full of uncertainty, stirred feelings deep within him—protective feelings, primitive feelings. There was a tenderness, a sweet, aching kind of tenderness that shamed the mere lust he’d felt for her earlier.

“Bien,”
he murmured, leaning down to brush his lips against her temple. “That’s fine. You’re doing just fine.”

Danielle soaked up his words like a dry sponge absorbing rain. In that instant she didn’t feel forty, she felt afraid. And Remy wasn’t too young, he was too good, too sweet. She lifted her gaze, intending to dispel the magic with a wry remark, but her heart caught in her throat as she met his earnest, caring look.

Remy stroked his fingertips down her cheek, his thumb brushing the corner of her mouth. Then before the spell could be broken, he leaned down and caught her parted lips with his. It was a sweet kiss, a soft kiss, not threatening or demanding. It was all too brief, and yet it was long enough to send all of Danielle’s senses into a frenzy.

She could have put it down to the fact that she hadn’t been near a man in a long time. Or she could have put it down to the stress she’d been under recently. But under all the excuses lay the basic truth—she was attracted to this man in a way she couldn’t remember ever having been attracted before. It was frightening, particularly now when she had decided she wasn’t going to find fireworks or bliss, now when she had finally resigned herself to the fact that some dreams weren’t meant to come true.

Looking down at Eudora, she tried to clear some of the huskiness from her voice, but managed only a hoarse whisper when she said, “Maybe you should take her up to bed now.”

Remy sat back thinking it was Danielle he wanted to take to bed. He wanted to hold her and love away all the shadows in her pretty gray eyes. He wanted to kiss her and bury himself inside her and tell her how pretty she was and how hot she made him.
Bon Dieu
, he thought, it was a wonder the swing didn’t burn away beneath him.

A brief flash of movement at the front door caught his attention and he glanced over expecting to see one of the children, but the figure that quickly ducked back was much too tall to be a Beauvais. He rubbed the back of his neck and narrowed his eyes in thought as he pulled his cigarette out from behind his ear and planted it in the corner of his mouth. There was something very strange going on around here.

“That Butler,” he began. “What sort of fella is he?”

“Butler?” Danielle repeated dumbly, her brain still shorting out.

“Yeah. He wouldn’t—”

His question was cut short by the resounding
Ka-boom!
of an explosion taking place somewhere inside the house.

Remy bolted to his feet and dashed for the door. Danielle stood and stumbled as the swing hit her in the back of the knees. She snatched Eudora tightly up against her shoulder, waking the baby and scaring her so that she immediately set up an ear-piercing wail.

It wasn’t difficult to tell where the blast had taken place. Smoke rolled out of the kitchen under the door. A cloud of it billowed out as the door swung open, and from the cloud emerged little Ambrose, his hair sticking up and a big grin on his face beneath his Lone Ranger mask.

“Ambrose! What happened?” Danielle asked frantically as she rushed down the hall with Eudora bouncing in her arms, the baby’s cry taking on a kind of yodeling quality as she ran.

“Tinks blowed up the macaroni surprise with a firecracker,” he said with a giggle. “It was fun.”

Bracing herself for the worst, Danielle pushed the kitchen door open and stepped in. Remy was standing near the table with a fire extinguisher in his hands. The table was lost somewhere under a sea of white foam. There was macaroni everywhere. It was stuck on the walls, on the white cupboards. Wiggling worms of macaroni dangled from the ceiling and the light fixture.

It was clear, though, that Tinks had got the worst of it. She stood at the head of the table looking like something from a cheap horror movie. Her face was covered with a slimy layer of cream of mushroom soup, dotted with bits of mushroom and crescents of overcooked pasta. Luckily, it appeared that the only thing seriously wounded was her pride. Her lower lip stuck out through the goo in a threatening pout.

Eudora, on the other hand, had stopped crying. She stared around the room, her blue eyes round with wonder as she took in the sight, as awestruck as if it were Christmas morning.

“Ah, me.” Remy groaned, setting down the fire extinguisher. He speared both hands back through his dark hair as he picked his way across the macaroni-strewn floor toward the perpetrator of the crime. “What a mess!”

“Radical!” Jeremy exclaimed, bursting in through the door and bounding past Danielle. “Tinks slimed the kitchen!” He skidded across the slippery linoleum, pretending it was a skating rink.

Dahlia opened the door just enough to stick her head into the kitchen. Taking in the scene, she made a horrified face and squealed, “Gross! I’m gonna gag!”

With Eudora perched on her hip, Danielle tiptoed into the room, carefully tracing Remy’s path to where he stood scraping Tinks off with a spatula.

“It would seem the caution inspired by the tales of your incarceration has worn off.”

Remy said nothing, but scowled down at Tinks, his temper simmering.

From the hall on the other side of the kitchen Butler emerged panting, his hair disheveled, cheeks flushed. He looked to Remy as if he might have just run up the front stairs and down the back, but Remy made no comment other than a raised eyebrow at the Scot’s shoes—a pair of black wingtips that looked very out of place beneath the legs of his pajamas.

“What the devil is going on here?” Butler demanded breathlessly. He tightened the belt of his robe and started forward into the room, remembering belatedly to stoop and press a hand to his back. “A man canna get a moment’s peace in this house!”

“It was nothing, Butler,” Danielle said reassuringly. “Just a minor explosion. You can go back to bed.” She stopped herself and shook her head, a horrified look coming over her face. “What am I saying
? Just
an explosion? This isn’t a household, it’s a training facility for midget terrorists!”

Remy turned his attention back to Tinks, his big hands planted at the waist of his jeans, his shoulders looking impossibly huge as he leaned over her. “You’re in a whole lotta trouble,
’tite rouge.
I want you upstairs an hour ago. Got it?”

Tinks gave him a mutinous glare. “You can’t make me. I don’t have to do what you say.”

A muscle tightened and kicked in Remy’s jaw. “You wanna take bets on that?”

She hauled back and kicked him in the shin a split second before he could grab her. Remy winced, biting his tongue on the string of expletives that threatened. Tinks turned to make a break for it, but Remy caught her around the waist and swung her up, spinning her around and plunking her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Her breath left her on a surprised “Oof!” She tried to kick him once. He stilled her squirming with one hand shackling her ankles and one smacking her smartly on the fanny.

“We’ll be upstairs discussing the new house rules regarding explosives,” Remy said tightly to Danielle as he passed her, his face dark with fury, black eyes flashing.

Danielle, Eudora, and Jeremy watched them go. Jeremy looked stunned and pale, his freckles stood out in sharp relief against his skin. His eyes bugged out like Bart Simpson’s. Butler looked thoughtful. Eudora gave a startled little gasp and pressed a chubby hand to her mouth as the kitchen door swung shut.

“Uh-oh is right, sweetheart,” Danielle said, with a smile of smug admiration. “I think Tinks has met her match.”

“Do you think he’ll kill her?” Jeremy asked in a hushed tone. “Do you think he’ll dunk her in chicken broth and feed her to the alligators?”

Danielle gave him a look. “Of course not. Mr. Doucet is a trained professional nanny.”

Butler gave a snort at that, but declined to elaborate when Danielle turned toward him. She looked from his face to Jeremy’s to Eudora’s, her initial pleasure at Remy’s actions fading. She might have wanted Tinks to have an attitude adjustment, but she certainly didn’t want the little girl hurt, despite the many dire empty threats Danielle herself had made. She turned and stared at the kitchen door as if it were the portal to hell, her ears trained to catch the faintest sound of suffering. The house was ominously silent.

What did she really know about Remy Doucet? As paranoia tried to get a foothold in her mind, she walked calmly across the carpet of macaroni, not wanting everyone to panic.

“I think I’ll take Eudora up to bed,” she said, putting so much false serenity into her voice she sounded like she’d had a lobot-omy. “Why don’t you all go back to whatever you were doing?”

After depositing the baby in her crib. Danielle crept down the hall toward the sliver of light that escaped Tinks’s room to fall across the darkened hall. The rumble of Remy’s husky voice gradually came into focus as she sidled up against the wall beside the partially opened door and peeked in through the crack.

“You coulda been hurt. You coulda hurt one of your brothers or sisters. How would you have felt if Ambrose had got his head blown off?”

“I dunno,” Tinks mumbled meekly. She sat perched on the edge of her bed, her head down, her hands folded in the lap of her yellow nightie. She had been efficiently washed down and her red hair combed back behind her ears. Remy stood before her with one leg cocked, his hands on his hips, a solemn, expectant look on his face. Tinks peeked up at him and dropped her head again. “Bad, I guess.”

“You guess.” Remy gave a snort. He raised neither his hand nor his voice, but he brought Tinks to the brink of tears with his next words, just the same. “He’s your little brother and he loves you. You remember that the next time you go to do somethin’ stupid.”

“Yes, sir.”

Danielle’s eyes widened at her niece’s respectful tone.

“And how do you think your
Tante
Danielle feels, you blowin’ up the dinner she made for you?”

“But it was gross!”

Remy’s expression quelled her protest. “I don’t care if it tasted like dog food right outta the can. You hurt her feelings and you oughta be ashamed.”

Danielle bit her lip, her own eyes filling with tears of sympathy for Tinks, pity for herself, and tenderness for Remy for him thinking about her feelings. He really was a sweet man. A sweet
young
man, but that didn’t matter so much at the moment.

Tinks hung her head even farther and tried unsuccessfully to sniffle back her tears. Remy relented then and sat down beside her on the bed, gathering the little tomboy to him for a bear hug. Tinks wrapped her arms around his brawny neck and cried on his broad shoulder for a couple of minutes. Remy rocked her and murmured to her, his lips brushing her temple every so often. Finally he whispered something in her ear that made her giggle. She sat back on his lap and rubbed her eyes with her fists.

Remy tweaked her nose and winked at her. “Bedtime for you,
pichoutte
.”

“What’s that mean?” Tinks asked as she scrambled under the covers and Remy tucked her in.

“Little girl.”

“Yuk!”

He chuckled and turned toward the door. Too late, Danielle jumped back from the opening. He had seen her clearly. Their eyes had met unerringly in that split second. She cursed her slowing reflexes. They were the first to go. Next she’d be asking people to talk into her good ear.

She turned to make a token attempt at escape, but Remy caught her from behind when she was no more than three steps from Tinks’s door.

“Spyin’ on me, boss?” he asked softly, his dark eyes twinkling as he neatly trapped her with her back to the wall. He planted a big hand on either side of her shoulders and leaned toward her, giving her a teasing, questioning look. “You checkin’ up on me? Hmm?”

Danielle swallowed hard. The inside of her mouth seemed to have turned to cheesecloth the instant Remy had gotten too close. “I—um—well… you looked so angry…”

“I
was
angry,” he admitted. “I’ve got a helluva temper,
chère.
But it’s like that firecracker—one blast and it’s all over.”

“It’s all over all right,” Danielle said, seizing the opportunity to steer the conversation away from dangerous territory. “It’s all over the kitchen. We’ll be cleaning up macaroni until the Second Coming.”

“I take it there’s no housekeeper?”

“She ran off the day Suzannah and Courtland left. Said something about preferring to take a job as a tour guide in Beirut.”

“Yeah, well, some people got no guts atall,” he said dryly. “I’ll take care of the kitchen tomorrow.”

“Thanks.” Danielle gave him a wry little smile of appreciation and apology. “Kids, cooking, cleaning. I guess you got more than you bargained for taking this job.”

His expression softened as he gazed at her, his eyes looking like black velvet in the dim light of the hall. “I sure did, sugar,” he whispered, stepping closer, gently pinning her to the wall with the weight of his solid, muscular body. “I sure did.”