Tempestuous/Restless Heart

by Tami Hoag

  “Sorry, you don’t meet the age requirement.”

  He made a face as he released her and sat back. “You’re like a terrier with a rat on that age thing, aren’t you? Must be a birthday loomin’ on the horizon.”

  “The big four-oh, if you must know,” she said, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin. “There, I’ve said it. Now you can slink off and feel properly foolish for coming on to a woman old enough to be your—”

  “Lover.” The word was a caress coming from his mouth. He said it with all the heated passion the term implied. He said it with the kind of excitement that brought to mind images of rumpled sheets and sweat-slicked skin. Danielle’s breath whistled out of her lungs. “So you got a coupla years on me, chère. What difference does it make? What’s between us has got nothin’ to do with age.”

  “You can say that now, but what will you say when you see my steel-belted foundation garments?” she quipped, swallowing hard as her head swam.

  “Kinky.” He grinned when she rolled her eyes at him. “You’re really that bent outa shape about turnin’ forty? What’s the big deal? It’s only a number. You’re a long way from joinin’ the prune juice set.”

  He was right about that. Any other year she would have said the same thing. Age had never mattered to her. It was just that forty was a more significant peak. She was going to be forty and what did she have to show for it? She had a successful career, but she hadn’t pursued her career in search of success; she was an artist for the sake of art, not fame. She was wealthy, but she had been born that way; it was no achievement.

  Maybe what was bothering her was the fact that in a matter of days she was technically going to be over the hill and she had nothing of significance to show for the climb. As she looked at Eudora she wondered if maybe she had begun to think that children were a way of gauging a life and she had none; she would never have any. She had her art, but her art would not lament her when she was gone.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Danielle,” Remy whispered.

  “And you’re the nanny,” she countered, using a tone designed to put servants in their place. The trouble was, this Cajun rogue didn’t know his place. His dark eyes flashed with a rebellious light as he continued to stare her down.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Why aren’t there a passel of little Doucets dogging your heels?”

  Remy’s expression grew thoughtful. He didn’t have a very good answer for her question. The fact of the matter was he had always wanted a family, and he still planned on having one. Even though he enjoyed playing the carefree bachelor, he liked the idea of married life—the constancy, the stability, the comfort of a mate. And the truth was he could have had his pick from a number of lovely ladies. One in particular had made it more than clear that she would marry him in a minute if he would but ask the question. But he hadn’t asked her and he wasn’t sure why. Marie Broussard was exactly what he wanted in a wife—a pretty Cajun girl who shared his values. Problem was he had never quite been able to fall in love with Marie. He liked her fine, but he didn’t love her, and he was too much the romantic to settle for less.

  He sighed in reflection then raised his eyebrows and turned up the corners of his lips. “You wanna do somethin’ to help that situation, ma chère?”

  Instead of the witty rejoinder he expected, Danielle’s eyes went bleak. She turned away from him. “I’m the last person you should ask.”

  This wasn’t about the curse, he thought as he studied her. This wasn’t about her upcoming birthday. They were back to the little matter of why she was sitting there in the dark tearing herself up when she should have been asleep.

  “You’ve seen a small sample of my expertise with children,” she said sardonically, the thickening in her voice ruining the effect of the sarcasm. “No one’s ever going to nominate me for mother of the year.”

  She had to know herself better than he did, Remy thought; he’d only met her. But he found himself wanting to refute her statement. Maybe that was for his own benefit. Maybe he wanted Danielle to be more adept at motherhood than she really was. Or maybe he was simply responding to the sadness in her voice. Whatever the reason, he acted on his instincts and pulled her back on the window seat, paying no attention to her struggle to resist. He pulled her back into the vee of his legs and hugged her to his chest.

  “Mr. Doucet!” she hissed, fighting in vain to pull away as his arms banded like steel around her midsection, beneath the fullest swell of her breasts. He held her as easily as he would have held little Ambrose.

  “Hush,” he commanded, giving her a squeeze to still her squirming. “You’ll wake the baby.”

  “That should be the least of your worries.”

  “That threat’s losin’ its starch, sugar. You aren’t gonna fire me; you need me too much. Now lean back here against ol’ Remy and stop thinkin’ those dark thoghts that haunt your pretty silver eyes.”

  His insight effectively took the wind from the sails of her indignation. She’d always believed she was a good enough actress to hide the pain, the self-doubt. He had seen through her shield with ease. And he was going to offer her comfort whether she liked it or not.

  Slowly the stiffness melted out of her body and she sank back against him. He was as solid as a rock, as warm as a security blanket. It felt much too good to be in his arms. Nothing about this situation was proper, but nothing had ever felt so achingly right. She was too tired to fight it now. She let her head fall back against his chest, her face turning so that her cheek brushed against the soft mat of hair. She breathed deep of the warm, masculine scent of him, and sighed out the last of her resistance.

  Remy pressed a kiss into the tangles of her hair and softly sang a few bars of what sounded to her like a Cajun lullaby. He had a wonderful voice. It was as smooth as good whiskey, as seductive as a kiss. Without even realizing it, she snuggled closer into his warmth and her eyelids slid to half-mast. Her gaze was still on the baby, but all the tension associated with that task had left her. She listened to Remy’s voice, her brain idly attempting to sort through the words, but the Cajun dialect was as different from the French she had learned as Elizabethan was from modern English.

  “What does that mean?” she asked softly, half waiting to hear words of love. Half hoping as her mind drifted into the shadows of sleep.

  He smiled against her hair and whispered. “‘Workin’s too hard and stealin’s not right.’”

  A soft laugh left her on a puff of air as her eyes shut. “How unromantic.”

  “Demander comme moi je t’aimais, ma jolie filie,” he sang softly, changing tunes to suit her. Ask me how much I love you, my pretty girl.

  His heart skipped curiously and he held his breath a minute, wondering if Danielle had noticed. But she had fallen sound asleep in his arms. She lay against him, as trusting as a child, as beautiful as an angel. She was all wrong for him—an américaine lady who roamed the world with a restless heart and a hunger for things he couldn’t understand. She was the client his sister had warned him away from.

  He tightened his arms around her and sighed into her soft wild hair. She may have been all wrong for him, but she felt so right. According to the rules, he wasn’t supposed to want her. But then, said the little devil on his shoulder, you ain’t never been much for rules.

  “Mais non, I haven’t,” he murmured, his grin lighting his face like a crescent moon.

  seven

  DANIELLE AWOKE SLOWLY. DURING THE COURSE of her career she had gotten up at whatever hour was necessary for her to get the shot she wanted, but she was by nature a night person. When she had her choice the most strenuous morning activity she tackled was peeling her eyelids up far enough to focus on the alarm clock by noon. She hadn’t voluntarily seen a sunrise since 1981.

  An enormous weight fell across the bed, pinning her legs to the mattress. The antique mahogany four-poster rocked beneath her. Obviously, this was an earthquake and the ceiling had fallen on her, she thought, not moving an inch.
She decided she could just as well sleep until a rescue team arrived to dig her out of the rubble.

  The bed shook again. The weight on her legs crawled its way up toward her head. A long wet tongue slurped over her cheek.

  “Wake up, Auntie Dan-L.”

  Danielle managed to raise one eyelid just enough to make out Ambrose standing beside the bed wearing Smurf pajamas and a pair of black glasses with a big fake nose, bushy eyebrows and mustache attached. His ragged stuffed dog was tucked under his arm.

  “Do you want Puppy Chow to kiss you again?”

  She turned her head, coming face to face with the Old English sheepdog that had settled on the other pillow. He was as big as a pony and so shaggy the only feature of his head that stood out was the tip of his wet black nose. He slurped her again, point-blank.

  “Ugh!” Pulling her pillow over her face as a shield, she spoke to her nephew through it. “Ambrose, this is not your dog.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, it isn’t.” She forced her legs to drop over the side of the bed and struggled to sit up. “I distinctly remember your dog being brown.”

  The boy giggled as if she’d just said the silliest thing. He grabbed her limp hand and tugged. With wobbling legs and a fuzzy head, Danielle stood up and wandered around the elegant room like a zombie. She ran a hand over her tangled hair and tried to recall her return to bed the night before. The last thing she remembered was the sound of Remy’s voice as he sang to her. Glancing back at the rumpled bed, she wondered if he had carried her to it from the nursery. Had he slipped her beneath the sheets, tucked her in, brushed a kiss to her lips?

  Heat suffused her at the thought and she shuddered. She was too attracted to him. He was too tempting. He was too young.

  She scowled at the reminder.

  While she stood lost in thought, Ambrose went about in a businesslike manner, selecting clothes for her to wear, pulling garments out of the closet his mother used for storage. He trailed the clothes across the wild-plum carpet and handed them to Danielle. Automatically she put the articles on over her nightgown without paying any attention to what they were. Her brain had fallen back into the blissful blankness that hovered just above sleep. When she finished dressing, her nephew took her by the hand again and led her away from the bed where the sheepdog had begun chewing on her pillow. He piloted her through the door and down the hall, jabbering all the while about his plans for the day.

  “Coffee,” she mumbled like one transfixed. “Coffee.”

  Remy stood in the kitchen with Eudora tucked under one arm and a spatula in his other hand, tending a pan of scrambled eggs on the stove. He glanced up as the door swung open and Ambrose led Danielle in. The air turned hot in his lungs. He uttered a prayer for mercy as his every male molecule snapped to attention.

  She looked like an expensive date from a house of ill repute. She wore the same short lavender nightgown she’d had on when he’d last seen her, but over it was a sheer black pegnoir trimmed in lace and belted at the waist with a wide leather strap. A flowered silk scarf was draped jauntily over one shoulder. Her shapely legs were bare to a breathtaking few inches above mid-thigh. One good deep breath and he’d know whether or not she slept in panties.

  He could have peeked the night before when he’d carried her back to her room, but that wouldn’t have been fair. He wasn’t into ogling unconscious women.

  Barely conscious now, she shuffled across the floor, her eyes mere slits in her face, chanting, “Coffee… coffee …”

  Remy dropped his spatula and handed her the cup he’d poured for himself. She wrapped both hands around the ceramic mug and brought it to her lips as if it contained the elixir of life. The strong hot liquid seared a bitter path down her throat, leaving behind an aftertaste of chicory. It hit her stomach sizzling and boiling like a witch’s brew. The caffeine went directly to her brain, jolting all the little gray cells to life. Her eyes snapped open looking twice their normal size. She stared down into the cup at coffee that was blacker than a bayou at midnight.

  Her words came out on a thin breath. “It’s a little s-s-strong.”

  “Good, yes?” Remy said. He leaned close, bracing a hand on the counter on either side of her. He had put Eudora down on the freshly scrubbed floor. The baby crawled off happily in search of toys. “Like coffee oughta be. You like it?”

  Danielle managed a wan smile. “Let’s say you’re not exactly Mrs. Olson.”

  “Yeah,” he drawled, as he shifted his hips and shuffled a little nearer. “Ain’t you glad?”

  A giddy twitter was her only answer.

  “That’s a helluva an outfit you got on, chère,” he said in his dark velvet voice. His black eyes glittered as his smile cut across his face. “You tryin’ to tell me somethin’?”

  Danielle glanced down at herself. Her jaw dropped so hard it nearly bruised her chest. She looked like she was ready to interview for a job on Bourbon Street. “Holy smoke!”

  “My sentiments exactly,” he agreed in a lazy drawl. His mustache tugged upward on the right as he let his gaze slide down over her again.

  “Doesn’t Auntie Dan-L look pretty?” Ambrose asked proudly. “I picked her clothes out myself.”

  Remy grinned. “You’re a man after my own heart, Ambrose. That’s a fabulous outfit.”

  Ambrose beamed behind his goofy glasses. “You really think so?”

  “Oh, yeah…” His voice dropped another heart-stopping step. “Absolutely.”

  Danielle turned burgundy in spite of the fact that she thought she was too old to blush. She carefully removed Remy’s arm from her path, her stomach flipping over at the feel of muscle and crisp dark hair under her fingertips. She kept an eye on him as she moved prudently away.

  He was dressed again in jeans that accented every masculine inch of his lower body, displaying to blatant perfection the impressive part of his anatomy that made him male. Spanning his mile-wide shoulders was a khaki T-shirt emblazoned with a smirking alligator hawking beer. No one had a right to look so sexy so early in the day, Danielle thought crossly as she headed for the door.

  “Oh, Danielle,” he called. “Would you please pick up that toy car there on the floor before someone trips on it?”

  She started to bend over automatically, but caught herself at the feel of her nightgown climbing up the backs of her thighs. She straightened and leveled a narrow-eyed look over her shoulder. “Not a chance, Doucet.”

  He shrugged and grinned an irrepressibly boyish grin. “Can’t blame a guy for tryin’.”

  No, she couldn’t blame him for trying. She blamed herself for wanting him to try. How was she going to get through the next two and a half weeks, she wondered as she showered.

  She needed a distraction even more powerful than Remy’s male allure. She pondered over that seemingly impossible quest as she dressed in knee-length navy-blue shorts and a prim white sleeveless cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She picked up the scarf Ambrose had chosen for her and fingered the whisper-soft silk. It wasn’t that she was falling for the kid, she told herself as she used the scarf to secure her hair at the nape of her neck. Sure, she wasn’t falling for Ambrose any more than she was falling for Remy Doucet.

  Brother, was Suzannah ever going to pay for this! But revenge would come later. Now she needed a distraction. She needed… work. Work! That was it. Few things had ever been able to cut through the concentration she poured into her work. All she had to do was hang a camera around her neck and it would act as a talisman to ward off virile younger men who had no business coming on to her. Virile younger men who sang to her and held her and kissed like bandits, stealing every scrap of common sense she possessed. Virile younger men with dark Cajun voices and pirates’ smiles.

  Her knees wobbled and her resolve swayed ominously as she rushed to the darkroom where Courtland Beauvais developed his own black and white prints as a hobby. She unlocked the door with the small key that was always left on top of the door frame and fell to her knees on the
cool linoleum floor beside her own battered camera bags.

  Work. Blessed, glorious work. She would do a perspective of New Orleans. The architecture of New Orleans. No, she needed something more focused than that. The doorways of New Orleans. Yes, that was it. Doorways. She’d do them by sections—the French Quarter, the Garden District, Bourbon Street and Magazine Street. She sighed with relief as a flood of images washed through her brain. This was the perfect diversion. Work was her life, after all.

  Ignoring the pang of emptiness that thought brought on, she slipped the camera bag over her shoulder and headed for the stairs.

  Remy sat at the kitchen table lingering over another cup of killer coffee and the business section of the Times-Picayune. There wasn’t a Beauvais in sight. The only sound was the bouncy zydeco music coming from the radio on the counter. Danielle thought the raucous accordion music very nearly drowned out the pounding of her pulse when Remy glanced up and assessed her new outfit with a slight frown.

  “Where are the kids?”

  “Gone swimmin’. All except the baby. She’s down for a nap.”

  Great. Danielle groaned inwardly. The children were gone, out of the house, out of the picture. She was essentially all alone with Remy Doucet, Cajun hunk of the year. Terrific, she thought with a sinking feeling as she lowered her camera bag to the floor. Where were those rotten kids when she needed them? Her gaze ran around the room in the attempt to find something to look at besides Remy.

  “How did you get this room so clean so fast?” She hadn’t noticed on her initial trip into the kitchen, but there wasn’t a trace of last night’s disaster. She couldn’t spot a single worm of macaroni anywhere. No one coming into the room now would have guessed her dinner had been so inedible the children had felt compelled to blow it up.

  “I told the kids they had to help me or they couldn’t go swimmin’ with their friends.”

  “Extortion.” Danielle nodded her approval. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  She poured herself half a cup of coffee and filled the mug the rest of the way with tap water. One sip of Cajun coffee had been enough. With a belated look of disbelief she slid down onto a chair kitty-corner from Remy at the table. “The Beauvais kids have friends?”