To Tame Her Tycoon Lover Page 3

  “I’m not the same foolish girl I was nine years ago. You can’t stomp in here and intimidate me.”

  “I will reimburse you every penny you’ve paid my grandfather and then some.”

  “Money. You think you can buy your way out of any problem.”

  “That’s unfair, and you know it.”

  “Who just said, ‘This is Louisiana. I own the law?’”

  His dark face turned a mottled shade of purple that wasn’t nearly so lovely on him as it was on the purple water hyacinths that choked the bayou at the edge of the lush grass behind Belle Rose.

  “I’ll wait for you on the gallery of Belle Rose,” he managed, his posture stiff, his deep tone icy.

  “I won’t be allowed inside the house then?”

  “You’re the one putting yourself down,” he said. “Not me.”

  “I own the law,” she mocked.

  When he stalked out without bothering to reply, she resisted the very strong impulse to slam the door. After letting it shut softly, she leaned against it for a long moment and tried to catch her breath.

  She couldn’t believe she’d been so rude. Even to him.

  Did he ask for it, or what? Why did women with a drop of Southern blood always think they were supposed to be nice? Even to total jerks, which he was, even if he was rich and handsome and had a home like Belle Rose that was architectural poetry?

  She moved away from the door toward her desk. Slowly she lifted the photograph of him where he looked so lost and sad. She’d taken so many pictures of people in pain, she recognized real suffering when she saw it.

  Not wanting to think about that or to feel sorry for him, she slipped his picture inside a drawer.

  Suddenly it dawned on her that she hadn’t heard him stomp down the stairs. Was he standing on the other side of the door?

  Or was he as upset and confused as she was after seeing her again?

  Was he human after all?

  When she considered the possibility that she might have hurt him, even just a little, she felt a strange catch in her heart just like she had when she’d first seen that picture of him after Noelle’s death.

  Closing her eyes, she saw his dark, pain-ravaged face after he’d told her making love to her had meant nothing…that he’d never loved her, that he’d only done it to save his twin. She’d never known which to believe: his brutal words or his heartbroken eyes.

  She took a breath and told herself his jilting her was all that mattered. Like photographs, actions told the deepest truths.

  When she removed her towel to dress, she caught sight of her reflection in the tall mirror on the wall.

  Turning on the light, she studied the crescent-shaped scar on her stomach for a long moment. And as always, whenever she let herself remember that terrible night when she’d had an emergency C-section, the night she’d lost their baby son, fathered by a man who’d refused to even listen to her when she’d tried to tell him she was pregnant, she froze.

  Under no circumstances could she allow herself to soften toward Logan Claiborne.

  Grabbing a blouse, she turned away from the mirror. The last thing she needed was any reminder of how deeply involved she’d once been with the angry man who’d just left.

  She was through with him forever.

  Three

  L ogan was furious at himself for storming into the garçonnière after becoming impatient when Cici hadn’t opened the door the minute he’d knocked.

  Furious at her, too. How could she have just stood in her bathroom naked like that, smelling so sweetly of jasmine, her fine-boned face looking so startled and golden and glorious; her glistening, wet lips and body tempting him as she’d towel-dried her glossy ringlets.

  She’d had every right to be there as she’d aptly pointed out.

  At the sight of those sparkling droplets of water clinging to the grapelike tips of her dusky nipples, his groin had hardened. His blood had coursed like lava. He’d felt like a beast. Even now he wanted to rush her, to jam her against the wall and take her then and there. He wanted to taste those lips again, to lick those nipples, to lick other secret places until she moaned in ecstasy, to run his hands through her thick, springy curls. Yes, he’d wanted to drown himself in Cici Bellefleur.

  How could he still want her with every cell in his being, despite their past? Why did he keep remembering how her golden curls had spread across his pillow like a Southern belle’s fan every night after they’d made love? Or how he’d liked to trace her soft, swollen lips with his fingertip, regretting more with every night that passed that his obsession for her had grown with every kiss, with every touch until he’d wanted her for himself far more than Jake had ever wanted her. Then he’d begun to agonize about how painful it would be to give up something so beautiful and infinitely precious to him.

  But Grandpère’s view had been that Cici was just like his mother—a poor girl out to better herself at their expense—that she would lead him around by the nose as his mother had led his father, that she would spend every last cent of their money until they were completely ruined.

  Grandpère kept repeating that he’d had to be tough on him because he’d been too soft on his father and Jake. And as a result of his earlier failure to be firm, the family business was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Jake was wild and out of control. Everything, his grandfather warned, depended upon Logan making a prudent marriage and then settling down to save Claiborne Energy.

  Grandpère’s opinion about Logan’s parents’ marriage and the decline in the family fortune had been too true. Their once-proud family and company were on the brink of ruin. Sacrifices had to be made, his grandfather had said, and there was no one else to make them except Logan.

  “Don’t disappoint me, too, the way your father and brother have always disappointed me,” his grandfather said when Logan had been reluctant to come between Jake and Cici. The next night Logan had seduced her to save his brother, and Jake had caught them in bed together. Jake had quit the family in disgust without ever knowing why Logan had acted as he had or that Logan had been cruelly caught in his own trap.

  Maybe initially Logan had obeyed his grandfather and slept with Cici to save his brother and his family from ruin, but no sooner had he started making love to her than other forces had him taken over and he’d realized he’d always wanted her for himself.

  Still, he soon knew he had to break up with Cici, too, that she was no better as a mate for him than she’d been for Jake. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her by caring for her and making her care. He’d hoped that in time he’d forget her and that she’d forget him, too.

  When he’d married Noelle, he’d told himself the man who’d loved Cici was dead. But today all the longings of that younger self had clamored inside the man he was now. She was more appealing to him than ever.

  Why had Cici saved the picture of him that had been taken at one of the lowest moments in his life, the day of Noelle’s funeral, when he’d come to terms with what a bastard he’d been, and not just to Cici?

  He’d been devastated at Noelle’s death, but for all the wrong reasons. He’d known then he’d never loved her. That he’d only ever wanted her half as much as he’d always wanted Cici, and he hated himself for that.

  Nine years ago he’d believed he’d done the right thing in jilting Cici and marrying Noelle. But his marriage to Noelle was what hadn’t worked. Nothing in his personal life had succeeded since Cici.

  Deliberately Logan forced his big hand to loosen its crushing grip on his second tall glass of iced tea with a sprig of mint and a slice of lemon. If only the heat in his blood for Cici would lessen.

  Alicia would be waiting for him tonight in New Orleans. A sane, mature man would stop lusting after Cici’s lush, naked body. But he wasn’t sane. And the memory of how she’d looked wetly aglow and achingly vulnerable in the rosy sunlight wouldn’t quit.

  Maybe Cici’s grammar was better—she was a damned good writer, if an annoying one—but was she any more suited t
o him now than she had been then? She’d always been antiestablishment; a rebel, and an adventuress, while he was conservative to the core. Hell, her uncle was very little short of being an outlaw.

  Did those differences really matter in the twenty-first century? Or did the raw, true, primal desire he felt for Cici matter more?

  No. He’d been carefully taught that money and breeding and power and the willingness to accept responsibilities that came with position separated people like him from her. He made rules and followed them; she and her uncle stomped over every rule in the book. Nothing was sacred to her. Not even death. Her books and photos proved that.

  For money she’d taken a picture of a child being stalked by vultures to horrify her audience of human vultures avid for such shots of lurid misery. At odd moments the picture still haunted him. How could he feel any sympathy for a woman who had lived off the suffering of others?

  His feelings for her were driven solely by lust. He’d been obsessed by her in the past. He wasn’t about to let his animal urges take over and ruin his life or hers again.

  But, oh, God, why did she have to be as lovely as ever—hell, maybe even lovelier? Why did one glimpse of her make his heart open wide and throb with regret? Make him feel as if crucial years of their lives had been cruelly stolen from them?

  He was wondering what the cure for such a severe case of lust was—a speedy marriage to the refined Alicia or taking Cici one more time to get her out of his system?—when the front door opened and his grandfather came out holding onto Noonoon’s arm.

  At the sight of his much stronger and more vigorous grandfather, he did a double take. Gone was the frail, ghostly shadow who had lain in his bed in Baton Rouge less than a month ago and had weepily confided in Logan that he wished he was dead. That’s when Logan had left no stone unturned to find the perfect situation in New Orleans for his ailing grandfather.

  Logan slugged his iced tea and set his glass down and shot to his feet eagerly. “Grandpère! Where’s your walker?”

  “Kept tripping over the damn nuisance,” Pierre said, sounding gruff, almost angry, almost his old authoritative self. “Cici got me this quad cane.” He let go of Noonoon and shook it.

  Cici. Glad as Logan was that his grandfather was so much better, he resented that her name alone was enough to make him flush with heat. Would Noonoon and Grandpère see and understand?

  The old man lifted his cane in a commanding fashion. “Cici suggested I use a wheelchair when we give our afternoon tour, though. Don’t like to, ’cause it makes me look old.”

  Our tour.

  “You’re nearly eighty.”

  “Cici says age is just an attitude.”

  “She should have seen you in the hospital.”

  “I’m glad she didn’t!”

  “Okay. Look, I don’t want to quarrel or remind you of unhappier times.” Logan went to him, and they embraced fondly. “I’m glad you’re better,” he said. “You feel solid…so much stronger…heavier.”

  “He’s had the appetite of a horse ever since Cici started cooking him gumbo and making his favorite spicy boudin with red beans for him. Cici does love to cook. She always did!”

  The old man’s blue eyes flashed at her name, and a tinge of brilliant color dotted his plumper cheeks. “Cici’s been great. She’s given me a whole new lease on life. I’m almost glad I had the damn stroke. Don’t think she’d be fussin’ over me if I hadn’t.”

  The sparkle in his eyes and the intensity of his smile made him look ten years younger. “By the way, did you get our invitation?”

  “Our invitation?”

  “For my eightieth birthday party next Saturday. You didn’t R.S.V.P. Cici thought you’d probably be too busy to come. Well, are you?” His grandfather’s eyes reproached him.

  “I didn’t receive any invitation, so I didn’t know anything about it. And I don’t have my calendar,” Logan replied, his voice even.

  “Your invitation must have gotten lost in the mail,” Cici said with false gaiety behind him.

  Lost, my ass. The sexy witch had no doubt cleverly excluded him.

  Logan whirled and felt another rush of unwelcome heat as they locked eyes for the length of several, thudding heartbeats. Unable to resist dragging his gaze lower, he noted a pink T-shirt stretching across her ample breasts that read T-Bos’s Bar under a stenciled biker’s face. Her skintight jeans had holes in the knees.

  T-Bos’s was a successful biker bar of unsavory reputation that her uncle Bos defied the Claibornes by running on his property next door to Belle Rose.

  There should be a law against shirts like that, at least on bodies like hers. The jersey knit hugged her breasts and waist even more snugly than her jeans cupped her ass. Not that he was surprised at her getup. It was sexy as hell, just like the woman who wore it. Conservative, she wasn’t.

  “Jake is coming,” she taunted softly. Or did he only imagine the challenge in her husky voice?

  “You invited Jake? And not me?”

  “Still competitive?”

  “Damn it, no!” His feelings for his alienated twin were more complicated than that single word could possibly describe. “How could I be? Because of you, I haven’t talked to him in nine years.”

  “Only…because of me? How easily we forget.”

  “I’ve called him, but he refuses my calls,” Logan said.

  “Do you really blame him?”

  Her question reminded him of all he’d done to come between Jake and her once again.

  “I’m sorry.” She paused. “I don’t want to quarrel. I hadn’t talked to him either until a few weeks ago. He’s been living in Orlando, although I expect you know that…just like I expect you know that he set up a branch of his business in New Orleans after Katrina.”

  He knew. Jake, a successful architect and builder in Florida, had pledged his support to help rebuild New Orleans after two major hurricanes had nearly destroyed it. Not that Jake ever bothered to look him up when he’d breezed into the city to check his operations. And he didn’t blame him.

  “I thought it was a shame we’d never talked since that last summer,” she said, “so one day I just picked up the phone and called him.”

  “And he answered?”

  She nodded. “Why wouldn’t he? I guess my name showed up on his Caller ID. He had no reason to be mad at me. We must have talked for at least half an hour.”

  “About what?”

  “If you come to the party, you can ask him yourself.”

  “Again, I’ll have to check my calendar.”

  “You will come, won’t you?” Grandpère said, his voice weaker, maybe because he’d been up too long.

  At his grandfather’s question, Logan felt trapped.

  Damn.

  “He had so much fun planning his party, and Cici’s worked so hard on it,” Noonoon pleaded softly. “I’ll go inside and get you an invitation.”

  “A hundred people have already accepted,” Cici added. “Lots of them are your friends. I let them think the party was your idea.”

  “Me? Why how generous of you.”

  The three of them were all staring at him, waiting, their eyes begging him to say he’d attend. Funny how he could go for the jugular in business, and in a family situation that involved upsetting Grandpère, he was ready to cave in an instant.

  “All right. All right. I know when I’m beaten. I’ll give the party top priority.” After a pause, he continued. “Cici, I need to get back to New Orleans. Tonight. I have a date.”

  “With Alicia Butler?” Cici’s eyebrows arched. “Of Butler Shipyards?”

  “And just how in the hell do you know that?” He stopped himself, when he saw her smile.

  “I’m a journalist. I read the gossip columns.”

  He ignored her answer. “You and I need to discuss your lease. Did you bring it with you?”

  “Sorry.” Cici, who cupped her hands over her mouth, didn’t look the least bit sorry. “Forgot.”

  Like
hell.

  A woman sharp enough to know what was going on in his personal life better than he did had deliberately refused to bring it just to provoke him.

  “Well, go get it!” he thundered.

  “All right,” Cici purred, smiling at an alarmed Noonoon and Pierre. But just as she turned to go, her gaze darted toward the back of the house and then to her watch. “Oh, dear…. Bad timing. Looks like our tour has assembled. “Noonoon,” she said. “I know this is a lot to ask, with all you have to do, but if you wouldn’t mind wheeling Pierre around back—you and he could start our last tour of the day. You won’t have to say anything…if you’d just be kind enough to push him. I’d do it, but Mr. Claiborne insists he wants to discuss my lease. Maybe by the time the tour is over, he and I will be finished with each other, and he can be on his way.”

  Cici’s sweet smile made Logan wish he had a nail or two to chew. “After all he has a very important date with Alicia Butler. Butler Shipyards.”

  Feeling like he was about to explode again, Logan nodded curtly toward Noonoon. When Noonoon walked over to Pierre, Cici ran back to the garçonnière to fetch the document she should have brought with her in the first place. Fuming, he watched her retreating bottom in those skintight jeans with way too much interest.

  Not for the first time today, he told himself to calm down, reminding himself that he was firmly in control, that when she returned, he would be so utterly ruthless she would soon be packing her bags.

  “I said I’ll double the money you paid my naive grandfather, if you’ll be so kind as to rip up this worthless piece of garbage and leave tomorrow morning.”

  Logan relaxed a little when Cici, who was sitting on a wide wicker chair on the gallery, was quiet, her brow furrowed as if she were considering his most generous offer. Then she looked up from the document and smiled at him, blushing so prettily he itched to caress her.

  When her sparkling eyes teased, luring him, he should have been warned.