Viennalooked at him curiously. “Can’t imagine why she’d have to. The very mention of her paintings would bring people in.”
“Oh, this isn’t a showing of her paintings.”
Viennadidn’t understand. She looked at the small grouping of abstract paintings closest to her. “Then whose—” “Her…friend’s.” Stuck for the right term, he pulled the all-purpose label into service. “Kyle Winterset or Summerfield or some such name involving one of the seasons.”
“Autumn,” Alain said, coming up behind them. He clamped down one hand on his brother’s shoulder. The other held a glass of champagne. A half-empty glass of champagne. His eyes shifted to the woman beside his brother. The interest was impossible to miss. “His name is Kyle Autumn.”
Georges didn’t remember hearing that last name. Had to be a last-minute decision of his mother’s. “You’re kidding.” Wearing a tuxedo like his brother, Alain lifted his broad shoulders in a careless shrug. “That’s what Mother says.” He gestured toward a far wall with his glass. “Some of his efforts aren’t half-bad.” Taking a sip of champagne, he smiled into his glass. “Of course, his efforts with Mother are spectacular.” Lowering the glass again, he looked atVienna . “Hello. My uncouth brother seems to have completely forgotten his manners and lost the ability to speak, so while he’s just standing there, posing for the park’s next statue, let me do the honors and introduce myself. I’m AlainDulac , Georges’ younger brother.” Lifting her hand, he brought it to his lips in the courtly fashion of an era long gone. And then he raised his eyes to hers. “And you are…?”
“Not impressed,” Georges informed him beforeVienna could reply. Taking possession of his younger brother’s arm, he drew Alain away fromVienna . “Territorial,” Alain commented, nodding with approval as he looked from his brother to the woman in shimmering blue. “Sounds promising.” Moving closer to her, Alain said in a stage whisper, “He’s never brought any of his ladies to one of Mother’s shows.”
Georges took matters into his own hands. If he didn’t, he had a feeling that Alain would feel tempted to monopolizeVienna all night. Not that he could blame him. “Go fill up your glass, Alain,” Georges urged. Turning his brother away fromVienna , he placed both hands on Alain’s shoulders and propelled him toward a waiter. The latter was moving through the crowd, offering glasses of champagne to those without liquid libation. “Alone” again, he focused onVienna . “Don’t mind Alain,” he told her. “He likes to run off at the mouth. He’s a lawyer, so it’s pretty much an occupational hazard.”
She’d liked Alain, she thought. And the two got on like typical brothers. An only child, she envied Georges a little. “He seems nice.”
Georges made a sound that was swallowed up by the crowd’s noise. “Operative word here beingseems. ”
Well, one hurdle passed without incident. But Alain wasn’t the main attraction.Vienna drew in a breath. “When do I get to meet your mother?”
“Now.” He barely had time to utter the single word—or was it more of a warning?— before Lily swooped down on them. Viennaswung around in time to see a diminutive, shapely woman with raven-black hair and eyes the color of violets in the spring materialize behind her. Her nails and lips were scarlet. The rest of her was all in black.
On her, black seemed like a lively color. “Welcome, welcome,” Lily declared with the dramatic intonation she was famous for. Not standing on ceremony, she envelopedVienna in an embrace, pressing her against an ample chest that would have been more in keeping with a far larger woman. “I’m Lily and you must be…?” She looked fromVienna to her son, waiting for a name. Wanting to have been filled in yesterday.
“Vienna Hollenbeck,” Georges said, which was good because she seemed to have temporarily lost her voice. “Vienna,” Lily echoed. And then she nodded her approval. “What a charming name.” Releasing her, Lily took half a step back and extended her hand to her. “Well, I’m Lily Moreau,” she said needlessly, as if she could be anyone else. “Georges’ mother.”
Not foremost,Georges thought. Lily had never been just a mother to any of them. It had always seemed more like a footnote, an afterthought, even though she’d always been careful to see that they were well cared for. But he was beginning to think that maybe Philippe was right. Lily seemed to be trying to make up for a huge amount of lost time.
Well, if anyone could do it, Lily could.
Turning away from them for a moment, Lily extended her hand to someone just behind her, beckoning to him with her fingertips. Scarlet spiders moving through the air.
When he joined her, she slipped both her arms through his and smiled. Damn, but she seemed content, Georges thought. When had she last looked like that?
“And this is Kyle Autumn,” she was saying toVienna . “My protégé.” So that was what they were calling it these days, Georges thought. Kyle was tall and thin, with jet-black hair. He wore a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks, looking for all the world like a throw-back to the beat era of the fifties. But his mother had a penchant for black and he had a feeling that Kyle did everything in his power to please her and remain on Lily’s good side.
He refused to think about how far Kyle’s efforts extended. Kyle towered over the famed artist. “And she is my muse, my angel,” Kyle told them. The statement was punctuated by a light kiss pressed against the top of Lily’s head.
Georges experienced a sudden desire to punch that very good-looking jaw, but refrained. Oblivious to her son’s thoughts, Lily seemed appropriately pleased by Kyle’s words. “Kyle, you know my son, Georges. This—” scarlet fingertips gestured towardVienna “—is Vienna Hollenbeck, his…”
Lily let her voice trail off, waiting for one of them to fill in the glaring blank she’d left open. Instinctively, she knew that Georges would want to avoid any labels being thrown at whatever it was they had between them. SoVienna took the conversation in a different direction. “Dr. Armand is my grandfather’s doctor. He saved his life,” she told Lily, then added, “And mine.”
Very carefully sculpted eyebrows narrowed over dramatic eyes. Lily seemed to be looking right into her. “Is that figuratively, or literally?”
Both,Viennathought. But out loud, she replied, “Literally.”
The answer seemed to please the mother in Lily. “I need to hear all about it,” Lily declared, slipping her arm throughVienna ’s. Georges almost laughed. For a fleeting moment, the expression onVienna ’s face looked as if she were being kidnapped by a hoard of Vikings and whisked off to the deck of their ship as their booty.
“Shouldn’t you be mingling with your other guests?” Georges suggested tactfully. He glanced at the so-called guest of honor. “Introducing them to Kyle’s work?”
To his surprise, when his mother glanced at him, there was gratitude in her smile. She thinks I’ve accepted him,Georges realized. When had his opinion, or the opinion of his brothers, mattered to her? He loved his mother and he was certain, in her own fashion, she loved all of them, but he had never thought of her as the garden variety mother who wanted to matter to her children or who sought their approval, however covertly. This was something new.
Lily clapped her hands together, suddenly struck by a thought, her subtle interrogation ofVienna , for the moment, placed on hold. “I almost forgot, Georges. I have a gift for you.” He looked at her, a little stunned. “A gift? Why? What’s the occasion?” Gifts came on birthdays and Christmas. Tons of them. Sometimes even in the right size. Lily was generous and lavish, though thoughtful rarely ever entered into it.
“Your graduation from the residency program,” she declared, her expression asking how he could have possibly forgotten that.
“That’s not for another few months, Mother,” he tactfully reminded her. Undaunted, she waved her hand at the reminder. “So, I’m a little early. Why wait until the last minute?” She turned toward the tall, handsome man beside her. “Kyle, be a darling and bring me the box from the back room.”
Georges knew for a fact that the “back room�
�� was actually the office where the owner of the gallery conducted his day-to-day business. But, as they all knew, when his mother moved in, she commandeered everything in her path and it all became hers.
He watched as his mother looked after Kyle as he disappeared from view. Like a schoolgirl watching her first crush, he thought. He wondered how concerned he and his brothers should be.
Kyle returned quickly, carrying a large rectangular box before him. When he brought it to her, Lily shook her head. “Not to me, to him.” She pointed at her son. Shifting, Kyle presented the large box to Georges. “Open it,” Lily coaxed, sounding very much like an eager child on Christmas morning. “Open it.”
Curious now himself, Georges did as she requested. Silver wrapping rained down to his feet as he tore it away.Vienna held the bottom of the box for him as he lifted the lid and found himself looking down at—
“A defibrillator?” he asked, looking up at Lily quizzically. His mother nodded. “You want to be a heart surgeon, don’t you?” she asked, obviously proud that she remembered. And then uncertainty entered her eyes. “Or have you changed your mind?”
“No, I haven’t changed my mind,” he assured her, looking back down at the box and its contents again. Heart surgery was his eventual goal, but that was going to require two more years of residency, hopefully again at Blair.
“Then this is perfect for you,” she declared, then flashed a pleased smile.
They had the same smile,Vienna thought. “This way,” Lily was saying to him, “if my heart stops beating, you can zap me back to the land of the living without my having to go to that wretched hospital.” To Lily, all hospitals were wretched and meant to be avoided at all costs. She beamed at him. It was the most expensive one she could find. “Do you like it?” she wanted to know. “Tell me you like it. If you don’t, I can always exchange it for—”
He didn’t even want to imagine what was running through her head. “I like it, Mother, I like it,” he told her with the feeling he knew she required. Holding on to his gift, he stooped to kiss her cheek. “You’re one of a kind.”
“Yes, I know,” she replied, looking pleased with herself. Forgetting about the inquest she’d wanted to conduct, Lily turned to Kyle. “Now we can go and mingle, my love.”
Still holding the box with the defibrillator in it, Georges eyedVienna to see how she’d weathered her first encounter with his mother.
“She’s a little like a hurricane,” he repeated his earlier description. “If you’re left standing in her wake, you’re doing well.”
That,Vienna thought, was a gross understatement.
Chapter Thirteen
Onceshe realized that there was nothing to be nervous about,Vienna had a wonderful time at the gallery.
She had an even better time afterward. Given Georges’ careless-charmer reputation and the intimate level of their present relationship, it surprisedVienna that he took nothing for granted when it came to her feelings. After spending a good twenty minutes saying goodbye to his mother and her protégé, his brother Alain and the man’s date, and his brother Philippe, who was there with his fiancée, Janice, as well as Janice’s sparkling jewel of a daughter,Kelli , Georges escorted her out of the gallery. Taking her arm, he hustled her across the parking lot and to his sports car.
Just as he unlocked and opened the passenger-side door for her, he surprised her by whispering against her hair, “I know you want to get back to your grandfather, but why don’t you make a call to Silvia and see how he’s doing?”
“Why?” She searched his face, wondering if he knew something she didn’t. Had Georges gotten a call from the nurse while she was talking to Janice or one of the other patrons at the gallery? Had he kept it to himself, not wanting to spoil her time? The nerves she’d successfully eradicated earlier came rushing back.
But Georges seemed untroubled. “Because I thought if he was doing well, maybe we wouldn’t have to call an end to the evening so soon.”
Relieved, she glanced at her watch. “It’s not evening anymore. It’s very early morning.” “Semantics,” he responded, amused. Once inside the vehicle, he looked at her to gauge her feelings. “Does that mean you don’t want to stop at my place for a nightcap?”
She wasn’t interested in a nightcap, but she was interested in his place. She’d never seen where he lived before. The fact that he wanted to bring her there was a large step forward.
“Maybe just for a few minutes,”Vienna allowed, doing her best not to sound as excited as she felt. As she took out her cell phone, she saw that he was grinning. “What?”
“What I have in mind might take a little longer than just a few minutes.” His eyes were teasing her as he buckled up. “Unless wereally hurry.”
She couldn’t have restrained the smile that rose to her lips even if she’d been sucking on a lemon. “Maybe for more than a few minutes,” she amended.
He put the car in gear. “Sounds good to me.”
And it was good. Oh, so good. For both of them. So good, she thought later, that the very word needed a new meaning, one that took in the presence of flashing lights, electrical currents flowing through limbs and a complete spectrum of adjectives that bowed before the altar of ecstasy.
They’d made love now more than a few times, and each time was better than the last. Almost different from the last. It still surprised her that she could experience this heightened state of pleasure. Lovemaking with Edward had been nice. Satisfying most of the time, but after the first time, it had become almost routine to the point that she worried about her own response. She knew what to expect. Edward made love by the numbers.
If Edward played the kazoo, Georges was the whole damn orchestra, she thought. She’d quickly discovered that she never knewwhat to expect. There was always the promise of something new, something wondrous each and every time they made love together.
He taught her that she could climax in a myriad of ways, enjoy a myriad of sensations, all slightly different from one another. And she never,ever knew which she would experience.
Or for how long. Some climaxes tiptoed in before pouncing, others exploded with a teeth-jarring crescendo and then softly slipped away. Still others seemed to go on and on for so long, she thought she was going to expire from sheer sweet agony.
But covertly woven through the pleasure was the dreaded realization that a man like this was not going to stay. A man like this would, sooner or later, find himself straying to new ground, in search of new conquests.
Viennawas on borrowed time, and she knew it. The knowledge made her try to savor everything as much as she could, to make love with him in the fullest sense of the word. It helped her not to think about the future.
She couldn’t help but think of the future.
Turning toward her on his bed as the euphoria of their last joining began to fade away, Georges saw the sadness in her eyes before she had a chance to bank it down. “What’s the matter?”
Viennaforced a smile to her lips, but it was just that. Forced. “Nothing.”
He traced the outline of her lips with his fingertip. “Nothing was making you frown, hence it has to be something.” When she said nothing in response, Georges pressed his lips to her bare shoulder. She had to struggle not to shiver, not to turn into him and just cling. The last thing a man such as Georges wanted was someone clinging to him like some hapless damsel in distress. Besides, that wasn’t her, she silently insisted. What was going on? She was more independent than that.
Wasn’t she? Because he was still waiting for an answer, she gave him a half truth. “You know when you’re very, very happy and you feel it just can’t last? That something is going to happen to take that happiness away from you?”
She was thinking of her grandfather, Georges thought. Afraid that the yin and yang of life would take the man from her because she was enjoying herself too much. It wasn’t a philosophy he ascribed to.
“It doesn’t always have to be that way,” he told her, slipping his arms around
her waist and pulling her body into his. He did his best to look serious. “There are documented cases of some people experiencing happiness for decades.”
“You’re making that up.” And she loved him for it, she thought. Loved him for trying to joke her out of it, for trying to make her feel better instead of annoyed that she was marring his own enjoyment.
“You’ll have to torture me to get me to admit that,” he told her.
“All right,” she agreed. “How shall I start?”
Viennagot no further in her teasing. He’d framed her face with his hands and brought her mouth down to his, stealing her breath—and her heart—away again. Maybe he was right,Vienna thought two weeks later as she glanced over her shoulder toward the dining room. Maybe Georges had actually been right, even though he’d been teasing, and there were cases of happiness that had lasted for decades. Because God knew, she was close to deliriously happy and fervently praying that she would remain that way.
Moving about the kitchen quickly,Vienna deposited the empty beer bottles into the recycling bag and gathered together another eight bottles from the refrigerator. She placed them on the tray.
Voices crisscrossed over one another from the other room, warming her. Holding her breath, she picked up the tray and walked slowly into the dining room, which had been commandeered tonight by Philippe, Georges, Alain, Gordon and three of their cousins whom she’d met at the gallery show last week:Vinnie , Remy and Beau. Seemingly out of the blue, Georges had suggested to her that he and the others bring their weekly poker game over here. Specifically to her grandfather. He’d broached the idea within Amos’s hearing range. The old man had perked up considerably and was overjoyed at the prospect of having so much testosterone gathered together under his roof.
She, on the other hand, although thrilled by the thought of her grandfather having company, hadn’t exactly been keen on the idea of having him gamble. He wasn’t really all that good. But then Georges had explained that they bet with toothpicks, not money, and that the big winner collected a prize, a chore of his choosing performed by the big loser of the evening.
[The Sons of Lily Moreau 02] - Taming the Playboy Page 13
