He looked up, his brows knitted, as if he hadn’t even thought about what he’d said. With a slight tilt of his head, he said, “I guess.”
Cara Lynn laughed. “I really like that. Not that I need taking care of.”
He smiled. “I know. You’re perfectly capable of handling yourself.”
“Please, tell my brothers that.”
“Why? What’s the problem with being doted on by your brothers?”
“Nothing, if all you get are the perks. But with four older brothers, I have to put up with the downside, too.”
“Right. Please, tell me the downside to being the favorite in a huge family of wealthy Louisianans.”
“Just like tonight. Nobody thinks I can take care of myself. They don’t even think I can think for myself. It’s like I’ve had five dads threatening boyfriends and checking what time I got home from dates my whole life. And if that’s not enough, two of my brothers and three of my cousins are cops. I can’t count how many times they’ve stopped my car on the road with blue lights blazing, just to be sure I’m all right and on my way home.”
Jack laughed. “Nobody’s threatened or stopped me.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re hardly a boyfriend. But I can tell you this. If we hadn’t eloped, we’d only be about a fourth of the way to the wedding by now.”
Jack’s grin faded and he looked at her closely. “Did you want a big wedding?” he asked.
“No,” she said immediately. “I mean, sure I did, when I was a little girl, I dreamed about the huge wedding with the most beautiful white dress in the world and my knight in shining armor waiting at the end of the aisle. But what I found out as I got older is that the press and everybody who either loved or hated my grandfather, consider the Delanceys as Louisiana royalty.” She pantomimed air quotes around the two words.
“So, your wedding would have been the event of the season?” He spoke lightly, but his jaw ticced, as it did occasionally when he couldn’t relax the tension in it.
“Not that our family hasn’t had quite a few weddings in the past few years, but yes. Especially since I was the last holdout and the only girl.”
“What about your cousin Rosemary?”
“Rosemary and Dixon had the tiniest, least announced ceremony in the history of the state. And Hannah, Claire’s granddaughter, and her fiancé, Mack, aren’t planning on getting married until after her mom’s liver transplant. So that left me as the only girl with even a chance at a big wedding.” She gave a little sigh. “My mother has expressed her extreme disappointment that I denied her all the pomp and circumstance.”
“We could still—” Jack started to say as he took off his pants and boxers.
Cara Lynn broke in. “Don’t even go there,” she commanded, unable to take her eyes off him. “Although, it would shut my family up. I can’t tell you how much ribbing I’ve taken about being the last one to marry.” She shook her head. “My brothers and cousins have been falling like dominoes over the past few years.”
“So, when your cousin Paul said I was a criminal that needed punishment—?”
“He said that?”
“Yep. That’s fine though,” he said, hanging up his dress pants and pulling on pajama bottoms. He looked at her and smiled.
She hated that false smile that said, I’m smiling and agreeable, because that’s what you want. It had only appeared after they’d gotten married. In fact, she was pretty sure she could trace it back to the day—or at least within a few days—of their elopement.
“I’m glad they’re worried about you,” he finished.
Was he? He’d been so sweet and sexy and fascinating before they’d eloped. Now he was still sexy and fascinating, but he’d become more reserved and often seemed distant. The change in him made her nervous. It seemed as if sometimes, when he wasn’t aware she was watching him, he appeared to be sad or even angry about something. Could it be he regretted marrying her?
She smiled back, feeling as if her smile was as vacant and false as his, and a shudder slid through her, as if a goose had walked over her grave.
Ignoring the sinking feeling in her chest each time she saw that artificial smile, she took a deep breath and walked out of the bathroom toward him. Jack, his pajama bottoms hanging loose and low on his hips, met her halfway.
“You are beautiful tonight,” he said, running his palms down her bare arms and bending to kiss her shoulder. “Your skin glows like rose petals in moonlight.”
“Wow,” she said nervously, as his hands and lips began to stir her. “That’s quite poetic.”
“I have my moments,” he murmured, tracing his fingertips along her shoulder where he had kissed, then up the side of her neck to her jaw, and farther, until he reached her eyebrow. He kissed her there. “Did you get a chance to look inside the book?” he asked softly.
“What?” The question surprised her. Usually, when he made love to her he was single-minded, focused, as if he were a surgeon performing a very delicate procedure that could be disastrous if he made one tiny mistake.
“Your inheritance from your grandmother. It was one of her journals, like the ones in your office, right?”
“Oh. The journal. It looked exactly like the others. They must be hugely expensive, with all that leather and engraving and lace and the metal page corners. But no. I started to open the cover to look at the first page, but the lights went out before I saw anything.”
He pushed her hair away from her ear and nibbled on the earlobe. As she gasped with surprise and pleasure, he said, “What did the cover say?”
The front cover of each journal was engraved. She had traced the first line with her finger. “They all have her name at the top. When she was a little girl it just said Lilibelle Guillame. The later ones say Lilibelle Guillame Delancey. Beneath her name is the year. And the one that was snatched tonight had 1986 on it, I’m pretty sure.”
“1986? Isn’t that when Con Delancey died? I heard someone ask if it was her last journal. Was it?” he murmured.
Cara Lynn pushed away. “Why are you so interested in—”
He nipped at her earlobe, then lowered his head and kissed her collarbone as his hand slid down, down, to catch the hem of her nightgown and push it up.
He ran his hand along her hip, then gasped. “I’d forgotten you took off your panties,” he whispered as he caressed the delicate, sensitive skin on the inside of her thighs, then touched her intimately. He pressed his lips to the soft skin below her jaw and moaned as he increased the rhythm of his caresses.
At that instant, all rational thought left her head. Instead of trying to recapture even one of those thoughts, she slid her fingers into his hair, bending forward to reach for his mouth with hers.
He turned his head so that her kiss landed on his cheek, because he was bending
