by JoAnn Ross
He gave her another of those long unfathomable, brooding looks. Then shrugged again. “I don’ know about you, but I skipped lunch today to meet with a pirate who calls himself a septic tank engineer and I’m starvin’.
“I’ve got some chicken in the smoker and after we take care of that scrape on your face, you can peel the shrimp while I make the roux. Then we can pass ourselves a good time over some gumbo and jambalaya and see if we can come up with a way for both of us to get what we want.”
Determined to settle her business, Dani forced down her concern about getting back to town. Marie Callahan had once told her that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. At the time, since she’d been sleeping with Marie’s son, Dani had known—and kept to herself—the fact that Jack’s other hungers had held first priority.
Still, perhaps he might be more amenable to negotiation after a good meal. Even one he’d cooked himself.
“That sounds like a reasonable enough solution.”
A white sickle slice of moon was rising in the sky as they walked in silence toward the house, the bayou water lapping against the raised narrow pathway. Dani had just about decided that the rumors of Jack as a dark and crazy swamp devil, living out here like the fabled Loup Garou—a legendary evil shape-shifter that was the bayou’s answer to the Abominable Snowman—were merely gossip, when he suddenly crouched down and plunged his hand into the inky water. The violent splash sent a flock of ducks who’d been sleeping in the nearby reeds exploding into the sky, firing the night with a dazzling shower of falling stars.
“Bon Dieu,” he murmured. “I’ve never seen the ghost fire so bright.” He brought up a broad, long fingered hand that glowed with phosphorescence in the purple velvet dark surrounding them. Sparks seemed to fall back into the water as he stood up again. “You still set this bayou on fire, mon ange.”
His feral gold eyes drifted down to her lips and lingered wickedly for what seemed like an eternity, as if he were remembering the taste and feel of them.
He moved closer. Too close. But if she tried to back away, she’d risk falling into the water.
“I’m not your angel,” she insisted, even as erotic pictures of them rolling around on a moss-stuffed mattress flashed through her mind, making her breasts feel heavy beneath the white T-shirt that had been pristine when she’d begun her long, frustrating day but was now clinging damply to her body. Although it had to be at least ninety degrees, with a humidity equally high, her nipples pebbled as if she’d dived naked into the Arctic Ocean. She dearly hoped it was dark enough for him not to notice.
It wasn’t. “You can lie to me, sugar. You can try to lie to yourself. But your pretty angel’s body is saying something else. It remembers, she. The same way mine does.”
Dani managed, with herculean effort, to drag her gaze from his, but couldn’t resist skimming a look over his broad chest and still flat stomach, down to where his erection was swelling against the faded placket of his jeans.
“See something you like, chère?”
Heat flooded into her face. “You know how it is,” she said breezily. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. It is comforting to discover that not everything around Blue Bayou has changed. You still have sex on the mind.”
“Mais yeah,” he countered without an iota of apology. His wicked eyes glittered with predatory intent as they took a blatantly male appraisal from the top of her dark head down to her sneaker-clad feet. Then just as leisurely roamed back up to her face. “The day I stop reacting to a desirable woman is the day I tie some weights around my neck and throw myself in the bayou as gator bait.”
Dani was no longer a virginal Catholic girl experiencing sexual desire for the first time. She was a grown woman who, in the years since she’d left home, had married, given birth to two children she adored, and was the first divorcée in Dupree family history. This bayou bad boy leering at her should not make her stomach flutter and her pulse skip. It shouldn’t. But, heaven help her, it did.
As they resumed walking toward Beau Soleil, she vowed not to let Jack’s still powerful sexual magnetism turn her into some fluttery, vapid Southern belle who’d swoon at his feet. Or any other part of his anatomy.
But when he put a casual, damp hand on her hip to steady her as she climbed up the braced stairway to the gallery, Dani feared that if she wasn’t very, very careful, she could discover exactly how dangerous supping with Blue Bayou’s very own homegrown devil could be.
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Blue Bayou
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JOANN ROSS
Fair Heaven
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JOANN ROSS knows the way into the hearts of readers around the globe—true romance. She has garnered several writing awards, including being named Storyteller of the Year by Romantic Times. Her work has been excerpted in Cosmopolitan and featured by the Doubleday and Literary Guild book clubs.
She lives with her husband and dog in eastern Tennessee, where she is inspired daily by the majesty of the Great Smoky Mountains. She is currently working on her next novel for Pocket Books, Blue Bayou.
