Jonquils for Jax (Blueberry Lane 3 - The Rousseaus #1) - Katy Regnery Page 0,7

wonder she didn’t faint. God, he was beautiful. When he smiled, he was utterly and completely beautiful.

“Bonne nuit, Jacqueline,” he said in a low rumble. It made goose bumps rise on her skin, and she gasped softly.

“Au revoir. Merci.”

He nodded once, lifting his hand in farewell as she slipped out the door and ran barefoot around the cottage to meet her brother.

***

Gardener stared at the door for what felt like an hour before finally crossing the room and lowering himself to the sofa, where she’d been lying a few minutes ago. The spot was still warm, which made him flinch, made his nostrils flare in acknowledgment. La duchesse was gone, but something of her remained, and it was unsettling to him.

The initial adrenaline rush from hearing her scream and finding her injured had subsided now, but he still felt wired. He needed to do something.

He grabbed his gloves from the coffee table and pulled them on as he headed back outside into the darkness. Kneeling down in the grass by the border, he dug three new holes for the last three lavender seedlings, but his mind wandered endlessly as he worked. The peace he’d found working in the moonlight garden an hour ago, before meeting Jacqueline Rousseau, was elusive now.

A decent cover of Fly Me to the Moon by the wedding band floated over from Le Chateau on the breeze, accompanied by the clink of champagne glasses and the low hum of conversation, occasionally punctuated by a shot of high laughter.

He wondered if she was back at the party already. She didn’t seem like the cautious type, running around in the dark after midnight while strange men chased after her. Probably popped a few Advil and headed back to the dance floor, he thought, scowling as he picked up the trowel and circled the bench where she’d been sitting. He imagined her swaying to the music, some new asshole with his hands on her waist, pressing her too damned close to his body.

A girl like that is trouble, he thought, because every man who sees her wants her.

Except me, he quickly amended. I don’t want you, Duchess. All I want is peace. And quiet.

“In other words, hold my hand.” The words of the song popped into his head as he organized the empty plastic flats into a pile. “In other words, baby, kiss me.”

Kiss me.

He paused for a moment, one hand hovering distractedly over the tower of empty seedling flats, while he thought about Jacqueline Rousseau’s offer of a kiss and how her cheeks had colored as he’d refused. Her meaning had been unmistakable, the luminous green orbs of her eyes nailing him from a few feet away, waiting for him, or daring him, to take her up on it.

His body had recognized the offer for exactly what it was, his blood sluicing with precision from his head to his dick, making it twitch and swell…which is exactly what had also forced him to drop her eyes. Make out with a girl who had a possible concussion? No. Absolutely not. No way.

It had taken a lot of willpower to turn her down, because God only knew where a kiss could have led, and his mind had been full of dirty fantasies since she’d shown up unannounced in the garden like a golden wood nymph, like a displaced duchess. But Gardener Thibodeaux wasn’t in the habit of taking advantage of incapacitated women. Of any women, for that matter.

After a four-year career as a patrol officer and two years as a detective in the Special Victims’ Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, he’d seen enough women taken advantage of—battered and bruised, and some left for dead—to last him a lifetime. If he lived to be a hundred and ten, he’d never consider making a move on a woman if there was even the slightest chance her wits were compromised, and the duchess, with that nasty gash on her head, might have regretted that kiss in the morning.

A quick vision of her luscious red lips flitted through his head, which annoyed him. Stop thinking about her.

He picked up the pile of flats and walked them to the area behind the gardener’s cottage where Felix had instructed him to leave the empties until morning, when they could be taken to the dump. He opened the door of the nearby shed and put the trowel back on the magnetic strip over a wooden table that served as a workbench for plantings. He closed the door