“I loved it. I love the U.S.”
“Yeah? What do you love about it?”
“The countryside. The big cities. The work ethic, which is more important than your birth status. The American Dream. Anything is possible here.” He paused. “And Target.”
“Target?”
“Yes. You have so many choices here. I’ll never forget the first time I went for some toiletries, and I couldn’t decide what to get. I didn’t know how deprived I’d been when it came to choosing deodorants.”
She laughed. “And have you supersized your royales with cheese when you’re here?”
“We call them royals, actually, but yes. I always supersize them. And I drink as much Sprite as I want here. From the machines. Because you get free refills with ice. At home, they give it to you in tiny bottles, and the ice is doled out like a precious commodity.”
“I don’t think I would like France,” she said, shuddering dramatically. “What kind of culture doesn’t believe in free refills on your Diet Cokes?”
“We are very backward in Europe, clearly. You’ve never been?”
“Not yet, sadly. I’ve always been more of a beach girl. We vacationed in Hilton Head, South Carolina, a couple times growing up. The farthest I’ve ever been is Toronto to visit a college friend. That’s the only reason I even have a passport. But I’m dying to go to Europe. I have a lot of art museums to see before I die.”
He blinked, his poor brain spinning off in several directions at once.
First came the image of her in a string bikini (white, to complement her beautiful dark skin) on some pristine beach with crystal blue waters and no one around to notice if they decided to, say, sunbathe nude or skinny dip. He would bring his camera, and she would pose for him with the straps dangling while she held the cups to her bosom, revealing more than she hid.
And where would they go?
Fiji, probably. Perhaps Tahiti. She would also love Cannes.
Yes, perhaps he should take her to Cannes first. Not so far to travel.
He wrenched his mind’s eye away from splashing with her on the beach only to be confronted with several images of her happy face if he took her to some of his most beloved art museums.
He would drown in her smile then, wouldn’t he?
They could start with the Louvre, where he would show her one of his favorite pieces, The Winged Victory of Samothrace. A stop in Florence to see Michelangelo’s David, of course, and she might also enjoy shopping for leather (did she like fine leather?) or jewelry on the Ponte Vecchio. Florence also had a lovely Cartier shop, where he could buy her a watch as a souvenir of their day together. Oh, but perhaps she’d prefer Rolex? No, she’d admired his Cartier. She seemed like a Cartier girl.
Then, with her new watch (and he would engrave it, of course—Pour Ma Reine seemed appropriate) firmly on her wrist, she would want to see the Nefertiti bust in Berlin. He would have to take her to Madrid to see the Picassos—especially Guernica, which took up an entire wall. In Spain, they’d take a siesta to make love every afternoon, then rise for dinner by nine or ten, when they would eat and drink all the local specialties.
They could have endless adventures together.
His heart thumped with excitement. Anticipation. Yearning.
He wanted to take her everywhere. Show her everything. See her reaction when she saw it.
The words danced on the tip of his tongue:
Come with me. Let me take you.
Somehow he wrestled them into something more appropriate:
“You must make it a priority to go. You’ll love everything in Europe.”
“If I can get over the lack of refills, you mean.”
“Refills are crucial—one moment, please.” He frowned up at the server, who’d chosen the exact wrong moment to reappear—just as he and Samira had started to really talk. Now the spell was broken. “I don’t think Samira has had the chance to look at the menu.”
“I’ll come back,” the server said, heading off again, but the damage had been done.
“Actually, I’m not going to stay,” Samira said firmly, reaching for her bag.
He nodded, trying to manage his disappointment as he gestured to his carryout containers.
“Why? Not enough food?”
Another of her semi-smiles whet his appetite to see the real thing.
“We already talked about this, Baptiste.”
“Perfectly true, but we talked about me taking you to dinner. This situation? It’s me running into you and you sparing me from having a lonely dinner in my hotel room. So it’s clearly not a date. If I put it into my calendar, it would not say date.”
Amusement lit her eyes. “What would it say?”
He thought it over. Shrugged. “For a meal this unimportant? Why bother to put it in the calendar at all?”
That got her. Her laughter was throaty and unabashed, exactly as sexy as he’d remembered. Every time he heard it was like a transfusion of fun and joy to his veins.
“You’re very hard on my ego,” she said. “You compared me to a muddy cat earlier.”
He stared at her, doing his best not to hang the balance of his life on her smile or the absence thereof.
“Since you are also very hard on my ego, I’d say we are even. And two even people can eat an unimportant meal together.”
She hesitated, her unfocused gaze drifting to the tabletop.
He held his breath. Sagged with relief when she put her bag down again and resettled in her seat.
He’d become pathetic overnight. Truly. Judging by the way his heart soared, one would think his business manager had called to tell him that his portfolio’s value had quadrupled.
The thing was, it didn’t matter to him in the slightest, and that seemed like an important detail.
Which was worse? Being pathetic, or not caring that you were pathetic?
He couldn’t care less in that heady moment.
He quickly signaled to the server before Samira could change her mind. “We’re ready to order.”
The server came back from the shadows where she’d been lingering, her mood distinctly cooler. “What can I get you?”
“I’ll have the grilled salmon with roast potatoes,” Samira told her. “Thanks.”
“Nothing else for me,” he said, passing back the menus. “I have plenty already.”
The server marched off, her back ramrod straight.
“Not sure I should eat anything she serves me,” Samira said, raising her brows. “She’s got her eye on you, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Her eye on me?” As if he cared with Samira there. “Perhaps I should give her my number, since I don’t know any special women.”
“Be my guest,” Samira said without missing a beat, her gaze direct and unwavering.
She wouldn’t be so quick to taunt him if she knew how these subtle challenges made him want her all the more and amplified his determination to win her again.
If it was the last thing he ever did, he swore he’d quench his thirst for her.
“In a bit,” he said easily. “First, tell me about your life.”
“My life? That’s a big topic. Would you like the thrilling diaper-wearing years? The awkward and chubby preteen years? The partying college years?”
“Yes.” He rested his elbows on the table and leaned as close as he could to her. “You’d better get started so you can finish in a timely manner.”
“O-kay.” She laughed. “Well…I was born in Journey's End. Adopted when I was a day old.”
“Many people these days meet their birth parents.”
“I know.” Her face brightened with excitement. “My adoption records aren’t sealed, so I reached out to my birth mother a few weeks ago. I want to know where I come from and why she gave me up. And I was getting married, so I figured that was a good time to contact her.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“No.” Her smile wobbled, but she recovered it quickly. “Not yet. But
I’m really hopeful. I have so many questions about her and my birth father, but I wanted to reach out to her first. Where did they come from? Why couldn’t they keep me? I’ve always wanted to have some sort of a relationship with her. Maybe I have siblings. Maybe we can be friends now. Anyway, that’s my wish.”
Something powerful, protective and unexpected rose up in him as he watched her. Baptiste didn’t know anything about Samira’s birth mother or her circumstances, but he knew he’d be the woman’s enemy for life if she did anything to hurt Samira.
“I hope you do hear from her,” he said fervently. “I hope she’s everything you want her to be.”
“Thank you.” She beamed at him. “I appreciate that.”
“And your adoptive family? They were good to you?”
“Absolutely. I couldn’t have built a better family from the ground up. I have a younger sister in Phoenix. She’s their, ah, biological child.” Once again, Samira’s smile showed signs of strain. “The late in life baby they’d been praying for.”
“Oh.”
“So, anyway…my parents just sold their house. They’re moving out there to be closer to the grandkids,” she added with determined enthusiasm. “And they’ve always wanted to retire out west.”
“What were their careers?”
“My father was a plumber and my mother was a dental hygienist.”
“They’re good people? What did they teach you?”
“They’re the best people. They taught us to study hard and work hard. To be kind and have fun. To tell the truth. They scrimped and saved and put us through college. Then they paid off their house. Lately they’ve been traveling with their RV—”
“RV?”
“Recreational vehicle. They’re huge. You can sleep in them and everything. Anyway, they’re planning on hitting all the national parks and Alaska.”
Baptiste thought of his late and unlamented father, whose honesty had extended only to immediately confessing to every attractive woman he met how much he wanted to fuck her, and his mother, whose hard work had consisted only of a willingness to shop until her high-heeled feet bled.
Their philosophy? Why work hard when you’d had the great good fortune to be born to wealth? Why not spend your life watching other people do all the work or, better yet, pretending that such nasty details about life did not exist?
In short, his parents had not been the best people. They had not even been nice. He thought hard, craning his mind’s eye, and tried to produce a single legitimate compliment for them. The only things that came to mind were that they were charming and stylish, neither of which made them candidates for parent of the year.
“And your parents are still married?” he asked, fighting the unwilling fascination he invariably felt when confronted with normal people and families.
“Yes. It’s been almost forty years.”
How was that possible? If his father had lived, Baptiste was quite certain that he would have eventually killed Baptiste’s mother in a domestic battlefield scenario straight out of that old movie, The War of the Roses.
“And they still like each other?” he persisted. “And they both like you and your sister?”
“Yes,” Samira said with a bemused grin. “They just invited me to go with them to the Halloween bonfire Saturday night.”
“A bonfire?”
“Yep. Big Journey’s End tradition. My father’s responsible for the ribs this year.”
Sounded wonderful.
Baptiste thought of the small town in Bordeaux where he’d grown up, a place utterly devoid of either children his age to play with or adults who cared that children needed friends. Then he thought of his childhood meals, which had consisted of chef-prepared extravaganzas far too sophisticated for young palates.
“Will there be soul food? With the macaroni and cheese? And potato salad?”
“Soul food?” She glowered. “What kind of question is that? You think that just because I’m black, my family eats soul food?”
“I didn’t mean to offend you in any way” he began quickly. “I was only thinking of—”
“Just kidding.” Samira laughed. “Of course we eat soul food. We’re black.”
Christ. And he’d been about to break out into a cold sweat.
He laughed, relieved. “You think you’re funny, do you?”
“The French are so gullible.”
More laughter on both sides of the table. At least until some of his yearning for her burned its way to the surface, probably brightening his face like one of the neon lights at the Moulin Rouge back in Paris.
She returned his stare, her smile fading into something as hot as what he felt for her.
Reining himself in with great difficulty, he pulled his hands off the table so they wouldn’t be tempted to reach for her and rubbed his thighs instead. All of his sexual energy seemed to have collected in one leg, which jiggled. He stopped it, but the effort took three years off his life.
Shit. At this rate, he was likely to break into a cold sweat.
Afraid to look at Samira again—God only knew what she’d see in his expression at this moment, and he would not blow this chance with her, especially not so early in the evening—he signaled for the server.
His frayed nerves needed something stronger than champagne if he hoped to keep his sanity tonight.
“Scotch,” he told the woman. “Neat. Anything else for you, Samira?”
He risked a glance at her, only to discover her lowered gaze and two bright patches of color over her cheeks as she shook her head.
“Just more champagne. Thanks.”
He refilled her glass.
She drank deeply.
The server brought his Scotch.
He drank deeply.
He and Samira didn’t look at each other.
He cleared his throat.
“So where did you go to college?” he asked. “Tell me about that.”
She took a deep breath and looked at him again, all sexual heat shuttered now.
“Syracuse.”
“Ah. You’re a big lover of winter, are you?”
She dimpled.
“I’m a big believer in scholarships. And that’s enough about me—”
“But I haven’t heard about the toddler years yet,” he protested.
“I have to maintain my air of mystery. Tell me about you.”
“Me?” He drained the last of his Scotch, not wanting to get into his sketchy past. What would she and her normal family say or think when they learned about his situation? “There’s nothing worth mentioning.”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
He hesitated.
She waited patiently.
He opened his mouth, wondering whether he should reveal the number of his mother’s ex-husbands (four), the times she’d been hospitalized for “exhaustion” before her cardiac arrest death last year (eleven that he knew about) or the times he’d had a positive interaction with his biological father before his death in that boating accident when Baptiste was ten (three point five).
“Start with where you grew up,” she said softly. “That’s easy, isn’t it?”
“Not really.”
Shifting uncomfortably, he tried to decide where he should begin. He always hated these nasty reminders, which tended to crop up during what should be idle chitchat, that he was not normal.
His family had never been normal.
Wealthy? Yes. Normal? Absolutely not.
And he’d trade the one for the other in a heartbeat if he could.
He’d never gotten over the shock he’d felt when he’d been six or eight and had spent the winter watching episodes of Roseanne with his favorite nanny, Mrs. Smith, before bedtime. The idea that there were families out there where the house was small and unfashionable, but the parents liked their children. That there were mothers and fathers out there in the world who interacted in a meaningful way with their kids.
“Baptiste?”
“The family home
is in Bordeaux,” he said dully. “There’s an apartment in Paris. A chalet in Gstaad for skiing. A home in St. Tropez for getting the sun.”
“Oh, my God,” she said.
Ah. There it was. That look of amazed disbelief he’d been dreading and hoping never to see on Samira’s face.
His heart sank.
“Which one was home?” she asked.
He wanted there to be a simple answer. He really did. Where had he spent the most time? Bordeaux? Voilà. Bordeaux was home. All he had to do was say that.
But when he opened his mouth, all he had to offer was a smile that felt lopsided.
“Define home.”
Her expression turned pitying around the edges as she watched him.
“The place where you’re happiest and most relaxed,” she said gently. “Where you feel the most like yourself.”
Ah. Easy.
“None of them.”
“None?”
He shrugged.
“Where do you spend the most time?”
“Paris these days.”
She shook her head.
“Baptiste. You have to have a home. You have to make it. Find it. Do something. That’s more important than business. How can you ever be happy if you don’t have a place to call home?”
He stared down at the table, the renewed pain of emptiness (it couldn’t be loss when you’d never had it) slicing closer to his bones than she probably realized.
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “Didn’t mean to lecture you.”
“It’s okay.” It was an effort to meet her gaze again. Double that effort to manufacture an airy smile. “Really.”
“Sooo…I’ve been wondering how you learned English.”
Gratitude and memories made him grin. At last a topic he could entertain without embarrassment.
“My favorite nanny was an American. Mrs. Smith. She taught me a lot, mostly by reading to me. We read all the classics together in English. One of my earliest memories is of her reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream to me while I sat in her lap in the rocking chair. I didn’t understand it, but I loved the sound of the words. And then, of course, when you go to school, you learn English.”
“One of your nannies? And how many Mercier children were there?”
He hesitated and tried not to think of the echoing hallways or the aching loneliness that followed him wherever he went and always had. Tried not to remember the little boy he’d been. The one whose only friend was often a book because he didn’t make friends easily. The one whose crooked teeth, pre-braces, had made him the object of ridicule for years.
No Ordinary Love_A Journey’s End Billionaire Romance Page 12
