Cordelia had left a note. Gone to final appointment. No Love, Cordelia. No signs of affection. Just a no-nonsense series of words, and the subtext that required no further interpretation. Gone to final appointment, alone.
Charles balled the note in his fist and threw it across the room. He couldn’t keep up with the bitch’s moods at all. For months, she’d allowed him to play a role in his son’s development, and now, she’d taken this away, as quickly as she’d given it. She didn’t have the imagination for playing games, so the only conclusion he could draw was cruelty.
She claimed not to care about his roving eye, and this was probably true for the most part, but that was before Lisette. Before his desires lived under the same roof as their façade of a family. Cordelia had no mind for jealousy, but there was an especial brand of effrontery involved in waving your mistress under your wife’s nose.
Charles had every intention of making the young, supple Lisette Duchene his mistress.
Because she wasn’t Cordelia.
More to the point, she wasn’t Cat.
As he turned away, he caught someone pick the wad of paper off the floor. Lisette looked at it with a strange, almost guilty expression, then held it out.
“Just toss it,” Charles said, but he had the sudden, powerful urge to take the paper between his teeth, and pass it to her, mouth to mouth, as he ravaged her on the secretary the note had been scribbled on.
Now who’s the vengeful bitch?
“You dropped it?”
“I threw it.”
“You mean to throw?”
“I meant it and then some.”
Lisette seemed reluctant. She held it out like a bloody carcass and made her way to the kitchen.
“Do you have everything you need?”
Lisette turned. “Monsieur?”
“Here, I mean, Lis. Do you have what you need?”
“This house is so beautiful. How could I not have what I need?”
“Yes, but are you… uh, happy?”
Lisette smiled. “You ask me that every day.”
“I promised I’d look after you here.”
“I don’t need you to protect me, Monsieur.”
Yes. You do. “You didn’t answer.”
“No one asks if someone is happy. What use is happy?”
“Did your mother teach you that?” Charles felt, for a moment, as if he was sparring with his own mother, who had always given happiness a backseat to anything practical. You didn’t need to like what you ate, it only needed to sustain you. Who cared if you were too cold, or too hot, at least you had a roof over your head. Lisette’s mother and Irish Colleen were cut from the same cloth.
“My mother teach me to first take care of me and my own. Knowing my family is fed and safe is happiness.”
“That’s surviving, Lis. Not happiness.”
“Does not each person get to define their own happiness?”
Charles frowned. The question was fair, but it confounded him. If happiness was a moving target on a sliding scale, how could anyone know if they’d hit it? I was happy once. I know that was happiness. And if not, then it was good enough for me.
“I can’t argue that,” Charles said. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Am I happy?”
“Yes.”
Lisette licked her luscious cherry lips and then ran her teeth over the bottom one. “I have you, Monsieur. You see to my needs, even ones I do not know I have.”
Oh, yes. You have me all right.
Colleen thrust her hips upward and used the momentum of Noah’s delighted surprise to roll them in one deft move, positioning herself on top of him, where she was in control.
Oh, how Colleen had always craved control in all things. All things except sex, which she’d never understood beyond the physiological response—Philip—or the societal expectation—Rory. She’d allowed both men to lead her in the direction they felt best, assuming the defect was hers. What else could explain it, when she’d loved Rory and desired Philip? Two sides of the sexual coin, and she’d experienced both, but neither left her fulfilled.
With Noah, that last missing piece of herself snapped into place and locked there, refusing to budge. She didn’t only love him. She needed him. She craved him. She needed to crave him, and for him to crave her, and, at last, her control of this synched with every other part of her and she was whole.
Noah’s head rolled back against the pillow as she commanded her body, moving over him in slow, deliberate strides. He was ready to come. Had been ready, but her own climb to climax heightened at the sight of her undoing his resolve… at drawing every last tendril of orgasm from him and demanding it sit, waiting, patiently, until she decided it was time.
Colleen spread his sweaty hair off his brow and kissed the spot where it had clung. I love you so much it terrifies me. “Come for me,” she purred, and he did.
Charles found Lisette later that afternoon, making her bed. Cordelia hadn’t come home yet from her appointment and hadn’t called to say she’d be delayed. He had no idea where she was and ordinarily wouldn’t especially care, except she was giving birth to his son any day.
He’d decided to call one of his contacts to have her tracked, when Lisette appeared in his peripheral. For such a large house, she had a way of being where he was, just when he began to miss her.
“Hey, you don’t have to do that.”
She looked up, surprised. “Do what?”
“You know, clean. We have a staff for that.”
Lisette chuckled to herself and continued spreading the comforter across the top of the sheets. “I didn’t come here to be spoiled, Monsieur.”
None of the girls, and later women, he’d been raised around acted this way. None of them could have pulled off that wide-eyed innocence; that naivete about the way the world was supposed to work. She was one step away from a maid’s uniform, asking to be spanked with a feather duster.
But she really was from another world. One where the thought of anyone doing for you was so foreign it was offensive. What did she think of him, then? Of a man who was king and center of that world?
Maybe all the coquetry was part of the job for her.
“I’m curious, Lisette,” he said. “What did you come here to do? Now, I don’t mean the money. Everyone who works, works because they need money for something. What is that something, for you?”
Lisette paused for the most fleeting moment before smoothing the comforter. She kept herself focused on the task at hand, never looking up. “A girl like me does not have many choices. My mother marry poor man and lived poor life.” She tilted her head to the side. Some of her blond hair spilled out of the tie at her neck. “I don’t need much. Only that my children, when I have them, don’t know how it feels to go to bed hungry.” She waved her hand around the room with a hard smile. “What’s all this, to someone like me? A dream? It’s no dream of mine. People, they think dreams are dangerous. My people think that. I say it is only dangerous to dream so big you forget why you had dreams to begin with.”
Charles had no acceptable answer for her, and he was too busy falling in love to think of how to respond. It was no wonder he’d never met a woman he wanted to be with more than once or twice, because the women in his circle never dreamed of anything. What was there to dream of, when you had everything? Catherine was a dreamer, because she knew hardship and knew the value of wishing for better. But Catherine dreamed too big. She always had, and she dreamed so big she forgot why she had dreams to begin with.
“I can’t imagine what you must think of me, Lis,” he said. “Living like this.”
She shrugged. “You have all this, but it doesn’t mean you have everything.”
“What am I missing?” Would she travel down the path he was heading?
But she only smiled. Her blue eyes twinkled as she watched him, patient but distant. “It is not for me to say, Monsieur.”
Colleen danced around the sides of Noah as she dropped herbs and spices into the dish he was cooking, fancying herself a bona fide sous chef. Or even better, playing wife to a husband. She imagined them five years from now, children running around the hearth as they sipped their favorite wine together. She saw them twenty years in the future, drinking that same wine as they both celebrated, and lamented, their empty nest.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he cried and tore the cayenne from her hands. “Are you trying to turn us into an incendiary device?”
Colleen gasped at the sea of orangish red floating atop the roux. “Oh no.”
“Well, we are from New Orleans,” he said and grabbed one more pinch from the open can in her hand. “Unless our time in the Highlands has turned us into wimps.”
“You, maybe.”
“I’m the goalpost for masculinity.”
“Too bad the real tough ones are the women.”
“True,” he said as he stirred. “I think I’d rather have sons than daughters, though. They’re less complicated.”
Colleen laughed. “But your daughters will run the world someday.”
“Also true.”
Children. They’d joked about this from time to time, in lighthearted ways ascribing their best and worst characteristics to their future nonexistent offspring. But Noah had been making these jokes more frequently now, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he was hedging closer to a serious conversation on the topic.
“You’ve thought about this a lot,” she ventured. “Having children?”
Noah shrugged and did a spin move around her as he reached for the burner. “I could take or leave having children, to be perfectly honest. My childhood wasn’t exactly normal. I’m not sure what normal is supposed to look like.”
“I can relate to that.”
Noah laughed. “The Goddess of the Garden District, ladies and gentleman.”
“Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Assume being wealthy means my life was good?”
Noah set the spoon on the rest. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Because, growing up without money I suppose I had an unhealthy view of how well it would have solved our problems.”
“It solved some,” she agreed. “But it created others. And the worst of our problems had nothing to do with money. Some of us, like Augustus, like me, have tried to rise above it and be our own people. I came here because I didn’t want doors to open because of who I was. I wanted to earn my way. And I’m not naïve enough to believe having money hasn’t helped me, or won’t help me, but growing up a Deschanel was its own special brand of dysfunctional. Trust me.”
Noah kissed her cheek. “Then tell me.”
I wish I could tell you everything. I don’t know how. “Maybe after you meet my family, so you don’t change your mind about marrying me.”
“Never.”
“Never say never.”
“Are you excited to go home? Sometimes you seem like you’re dreading it.”
Colleen laughed. “I am dreading it! But I want them to know you, Noah.” She turned toward him and took both his hands in hers. “I’m afraid of what they’ll think. Not of you, but me. I know they’ll love you. My mother will fall all over herself to charm you, because you’ll remind her of her own world.”
“Then what? Is it the difference in… who we are?”
Colleen shook her head before he could let that fear sink in too deep and take hold. “Augustus married a woman who had nothing but the clothes on her back. They won’t care about that. It’s more that I worry they’ll question my judgment in falling for someone and agreeing to marry them after a long weekend. I know, I know, what I am feeling is real, no question. But I’ve created this image of myself as being reasonable and thoughtful in everything I do, and how I feel about you is a new side of me. One they won’t recognize.”
Noah finished stirring and tossed the spoon aside. He pulled her in. His warmth sent chills all through her. “I love this side of you. I love every side of you.”
“You haven’t seen all sides of me.”
“I already know I’ll love them.” He kissed her. “I’m not worried about it, Colleen. When you love someone this much, it’s not about fearing the dark sides. It’s about being safe to show them. Whatever I don’t know about you, I’m not scared now, and I won’t be when you sprout three heads and come into your final form, either.”
Colleen smiled into his kiss. “Four heads.”
“Well, four might be one too many.”
She saw them forty years from now, as their grandkids played in the yard of the house they’d built from their memories of Scotland. Their final place to enjoy retirement.
Marriage only seemed impractical until you met the man you saw yourself growing old with.