Читать книгу Peachy's Proposal - Carole Buck - Страница 9

Lucien “Luc” Devereaux, scion of a tradition-rich but financially strapped Louisiana family and veteran of an elite U.S. Army special operations team turned bestselling novelist, had been propositioned by a lot of different women in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons since his sexual initiation at age sixteen. Nonetheless, the proposal he received from Pamela Gayle Keene five days after she and all the other people aboard her flight from Atlanta survived an emergency landing at New Orleans International Airport left him temporarily bereft of speech.

“You want me to what?” he finally managed to ask, staring at the improbably nicknamed redhead who’d been his tenant and downstairs neighbor in a mansion-cum-apartment building on Prytania Street for about two years.

“It’s no big deal,” Peachy responded, sustaining his gaze with remarkable steadiness even as she started to flush.

“My taking your virginity is no big deal?” he echoed tightly, wondering whether her dismissive comment had been inspired by her feelings about the sexual act itself, her expectations about his performance of it or a mixture of both. He also wondered why it should matter to him. Because there was no way—no way in hell—he was going to do what he’d just been requested to do.

Luc watched as Peachy veiled her green-gold eyes with her lush, mascara-darkened lashes. After a few moments, she lifted her left hand and began fiddling with a silver locket at the base of her throat. Her rhythmic fingering of the pendant had an odd effect on his already erratic pulse.

He’d never seen it coming, he thought, trying to rein in emotions that ran the gamut from strangely flattered to furiously stunned and then some. He, the man who’d been accused more than once of having distrust of the opposite sex imprinted on his DNA, had been blindsided by a blush-prone innocent, a decade his junior!

The weird thing was, Peachy had done it by behaving in the same straightforward way she’d behaved since the first day he’d met her. There’d been no deceit involved, no sneakily seductive tricks. Armored against guile, he’d been ambushed by honesty.

It was a perverse state of affairs, to say the least. And Luc Devereaux was a long way from understanding how it had come about.

He and Peachy had had a brief encounter in the foyer of their Garden District apartment building that morning. He’d been heading in after a five-mile run, mulling over the fate of a minor character in his latest book. She’d been heading out to her job as a junior designer with one of the city’s finest custom jewelers.

They’d chatted for a minute or two. Right before they’d gone their separate ways, she’d asked him to drop by her apartment after she got home from work.

“I need a favor,” she’d said simply, gazing up at him with clear, candid eyes.

“I’ll try to oblige, cher,” he’d answered, his grin as easy as his unthinking use of the colloquial endearment.

He’d knocked on her door about twelve hours later. She’d invited him in.

They’d talked a bit. She, perched on the edge of a lavishly fringed but slightly moth-eaten hassock. He, sprawled comfortably in a funkily shaped armchair he’d helped her lug home from a flea market the previous spring. Their conversation had been a genial one, spiced with good-natured laughter.

Eventually, he’d gotten around to asking what he could do for her.

She responded promptly and without mincing words.

It had taken him several minutes to accept that she’d actually said what he’d thought she’d said.

“I don’t think taking is the right word,” Peachy suddenly declared, lowering her hand from the locket. She shifted her position on the hassock, crossing her long, slender legs beneath the crinkled, paisley-patterned cotton of the calf-length skirt she was wearing. The toenails of her bare feet were painted a vibrant coral pink. “It’s not—I mean, it’s so—so—”

“Politically incorrect?” Luc offered sardonically.

She lifted her lashes and gave him a look he couldn’t interpret. Something—annoyance? impatience? embarrassment?—flashed in the depths of her eyes.

“It’s not as though I’m trying to keep it,” she retorted.

“True,” he acknowledged with a humorless laugh. “You’re offering to give it away.”

There was a pause. After a few moments Peachy smoothed her curly tumble of red-gold hair back from her face, squared her slim shoulders and calmly replied, “That’s right.”

“To me.”

There was another pause, a little longer than the preceding one. Then, again, a quiet affirmative.

“So that the next time you confront the possibility of dying you don’t have to worry about going to your grave wondering what all the fuss was about.”

Peachy’s eyes flashed a second time. Her delicately made features took on a decidedly determined cast. “More or less.”

“And this is a no-strings-attached, one-time-only deal.”

“Yes.”

Luc inhaled a short, sharp breath, struggling with a sudden surge of temper. He couldn’t define the source of his anger, nor determine whether it was directed more at himself or her.

When he thought he could trust his voice he said, “No.”

Peachy stiffened. Her chin went up a notch. “No?”

“No,” he repeated, underscoring the negative with a shake of his head.

“You mean—” she swallowed “—you don’t want to do it.”

Luc felt the muscles of his belly clench and fervently wished she’d phrased her statement in a different way. Preferably one that omitted the word want.

He wasn’t oblivious to Peachy’s appeal. Although she was a far cry from his usual type—he was inclined toward experienced blondes and exotic brunettes, not arty, ethereal redheads—he’d felt a powerful tug of attraction the day she’d shown up on his doorstep, seeking to rent the unit one floor down.

He’d refrained from acting on this attraction for a variety of reasons. Peachy’s comparative youth had been part of the equation. His firm conviction that getting entangled with any female tenant—much less one who’d become the darling of their mutual collection of rather eccentric neighbors within a week of moving in—would be asking for trouble had been a factor, as well.

But the key basis for his decision to clamp down and hold back had been his gut-level feeling that there was a lot more to Ms. Pamela Gayle Keene than immediately met the eye. For all her seemingly free-spirited manner, she’d exuded an aura of potential complications.

Luc grimaced, raking a hand through his hair. “Look, cher,” he began, letting his gaze slide away. “My saying no to you—it’s nothing personal.”

The ludicrousness of his words registered with him even as he was uttering them. Nothing personal? Peachy had asked him to be her first lover and he’d rejected her! What in heaven’s name could be more personal than that?

He glanced back at his would-be bed partner, expecting an angry reaction. He was startled to find Peachy was no longer looking at him. Instead, she was staring down at her well-pedicured toes. Her mouth was set in a stubborn line, her forehead was furrowed. He had the distinct and rather disturbing impression that she’d dismissed him from her mind and was now contemplating her next option for defloration.

Every instinct for self-preservation Luc Devereaux had—and he had developed a great many of them during his thirty-three years on earth—told him to get up and get out. But he couldn’t.

He just…couldn’t.

“Peachy?” he asked after a few seconds, acutely conscious of the thudding of his heart. Even the most automatic of natural functions, breathing, suddenly seemed to require a conscious effort.

She started slightly, then lifted her eyes to meet his.

“I understand, Luc,” she said quietly, without bothering to specify exactly what it was that she comprehended. “And…well, I appreciate your being honest with me.” She paused for a moment, her lips quirking into a crooked little smile. Then she rose from the hassock in a graceful movement and concluded with a shrug, “I’ll just have to find someone else.”

From another woman, Luc would have interpreted this last comment as a threat. As an attempt at emotional blackmail. But coming from Peachy…

He got to his feet slowly, keeping his gaze fixed on his tenant’s expressive face. She means it, he thought, a chill skittering down his spine and settling in the pit of his stomach. She really means it.

“You genuinely intend to go through with this, don’t you,” he said.

Peachy lifted her brows, plainly surprised. Perhaps even a little affronted. “I told you I did.”

Yes, she had. But until a couple of seconds ago, he’d been unwilling to believe that she’d been sincere.

“Why?” he asked bluntly.

“I told you that, too.”

“Tell me again.”

Peachy’s green-gold eyes flicked back and forth several times as though she was trying to figure out what sort of game he was playing at. Finally, she expelled a breath in a long sigh.

“You’ve been in life-or-death situations, haven’t you?” she questioned. “When you were in the military?”

“A few,” Luc acknowledged after a fractional hesitation, sensing where she was heading and not entirely comfortable with the direction. Although he was intensely proud of the services he’d performed for his country, not all his military memories were pleasant ones. The covert style of war he’d been trained to make had been a dirty, as well as dangerous, business.

“Didn’t you find yourself regretting things you hadn’t done?”

“While I was in the middle of an operation where I might be killed, you mean?”

Peachy nodded.

Luc felt his lips twist. “If I regretted anything, it was committed sins. Not ones I hadn’t had a chance to get around to.”

“Still—”

“Still,” he interrupted, “I take your meaning. Facing down death tends to reorder a person’s priorities.”

“Exactly.”

Luc considered for a moment or two, once again replaying the proposal Peachy had put to him. Did she truly understand the nature of the favor she was asking? he wondered. And more to the point: Did she truly understand the nature of the man of whom she was asking it?

No, he told himself. She couldn’t. She had no idea of who he was. Of what he was. Of how he’d lived.

“Am I the first man you’ve approached about this, Peachy?” he abruptly queried.

“You mean, are you the first one I’ve asked to—?” She then gestured.

“Yes.”

Her chin went up again. A blush blossomed on her cheeks. “I don’t think that’s any of your business at this point, Luc.”

“No?”

“You turned me down—remember?”

“I’m considering changing my mind.”

Peachy’s eyes widened to the point where there was white visible all the way around the irises. “I thought that was a female prerogative.”

Luc shrugged with a casualness he was far from feeling. “Consider it a matter of equal opportunity indecisiveness.” He waited a beat, then repeated his previous inquiry. “Am I the first man you’ve approached about this?”

Peachy glanced away from him, the color in her cheeks intensifying, the line of her elegantly sculpted jaw going taut. Her reluctance to respond was palpable.

“Yes,” she finally replied.

Luc released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, a primitive sense of triumph suffusing him. He closed his mind to thoughts of how he might have reacted had her answer been different. Then, goaded by an emotion he couldn’t—or wouldn’t-identify he said, “But you have other…candidates.”

Her gaze swung back to collide with his. The expression in her eyes said he was perilously close to getting his face slapped.

“That’s really none of your business,” Peachy declared through gritted teeth.

It wasn’t and he knew it, but he didn’t give a damn.

“What about that Tulane University M.B.A. the MayWinnies tried to fix you up with last month?” he pressed.

“The MayWinnies” was Prytania Street shorthand for Mayrielle and Winona-Jolene Barnes, a pair of sprightly seventy-year-old twins who rented the apartment next to Peachy’s. Although they cultivated an image of white-gloved propriety, Luc had heard from numerous sources that they’d once been quite free with their favors.

Well, no. Perhaps free wasn’t the appropriate adjective. Because gossip also maintained that in the course of bestowing themselves on a goodly number of Louisiana’s richest and most powerful men, the MayWinnies had amassed a six-figure nest egg, which they had subsequently multiplied many times over in the stock market.

Short of inquiring of the ladies themselves, there was no way for Luc to be certain how many of the stories about the May Winnies’ alleged exploits were true. He was inclined to dismiss a few of them—most notably the one involving a former U.S. senator and a Mardi Gras float—out of hand. He was also prepared to bet a substantial amount of cold, hard cash that many of the tales were dead-on accurate.

As for the rumors about his septuagenarian tenants transforming themselves from good-time girls into gilt-edged investors…

Again, there was no way for Luc to be absolutely sure. However, he and the MayWinnies did happen to bank at the same place. He’d long ago noticed that although he and his book royalties were accorded a significant degree of respect, the bank’s president practically genuflected at the mention of the Misses Barnes.

“Are you talking about Daniel?” Peachy asked, plainly startled by the specificity of his query.

Luc was a tad surprised by it himself. He hadn’t realized he’d registered the individual in question—Daniel, had she said his name was?—quite so strongly.

“Yes,” he affirmed after a moment.

Peachy began fingering her locket again. “I only went out with him once.”

Luc couldn’t tell whether she was being deliberately evasive. He fleetingly considered pointing out that “once” was one more time than she’d been out with him, but discarded the idea.

“So?” he challenged.

“So—he’s nice!”

Luc lifted a brow, contemplating the possibility that he’d just been insulted. Under normal circumstances there would have been little doubt in his mind that he had, at least by implication. But the inflection Peachy had given the adjective strongly suggested that it was Daniel, not he, whom she’d judged and found wanting.

Nice.

Hmm.

His ready-to-be-bedded tenant had a problem with nice?

She wouldn’t be unique among her sex if she did, Luc reflected with a touch of cynicism. And heaven knew, such a prejudice would go a long way toward explaining her decision to ask him to take—er, make that “accept”—her virginity. Yet he couldn’t quite reconcile that sort of character kink with the woman who’d lived beneath his roof for nearly twenty-four months.

“You’re saying that being nice disqualifies a man from inclusion on your list of potential, ah, deflowerers,” he clarified.

“I’m saying that Daniel wouldn’t understand my situation.”

“And you think I do?”

“Not anymore.” Peachy glared at him. “Look, Luc. This obviously was a mistake. I’m sorry I said anything to you. Just—just forget about it, all right?”

And with that, she started to pivot away. Reacting purely on instinct, Luc reached out and grabbed her by the arm, halting her in mid-turn.

It was the first time he’d touched Peachy with anything more intense than the most casual kind of affection. He felt her go rigid in response to the contact. Her gaze slewed back to slam into his, then dropped pointedly to his hand. After a taut moment, he opened his fingers and released her.

God, he thought, sucking in a shaky breath as he lowered a nonetoo-steady hand to his side. The potency of his emotions shocked him. My…God.

“Why me?” he demanded harshly. He couldn’t have stopped the words if he’d wanted to. He had to know.

Peachy blinked and edged back slightly. “Wh-what?”

“Why did you ask me to—?” he completed the question with an explicit variation of the gesture she’d made earlier.

There was a long pause. Peachy’s eyes moved back and forth, back and forth. Finally, she seemed to reach some kind of decision. After moistening her lower lip with a darting lick of her tongue she countered flatly, “Do you want the truth?”

He nodded.

“All right.” She swallowed, then cocked her chin with a hint of defiance. “I asked you because I thought you’d make it easy.”

“Easy?”

She nodded. “Do you remember me saying that I only wanted you to do it with me once?”

“Vividly.”

“Well, it seemed to me—I mean, you’ve never made any secret of the fact that you’re not inclined toward making emotional commitments. That you don’t want to be tied down. So I decided, uh, uh—”

“That a one-night stand would be right up my alley?”

“Not in a bad way,” Peachy quickly insisted.

“Oh, of course not.”

But even as he voiced the retort, Luc had to acknowledge the fundamental validity of his tenant’s assessment. He had no desire for a permanent relationship with a woman. He never had. He seriously doubted he ever would. In point of fact, he was supremely skeptical about his ability to sustain one. He’d never hidden that.

Yet for all its accuracy, Luc found Peachy’s reading of his character disturbing. The idea that she perceived him as some kind of…of…disposable stud unnerved him in a way he couldn’t fully explain.

“You’re not the only man I considered,” Peachy said earnestly. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. My first impulse was to go to the bar at a good hotel, maybe Le Meridien or the Windsor Court, and pick up a nice-looking stranger and let nature take its course.”

“What?”

“You don’t think I could have?”

“For God’s sake, Peachy.” He could barely speak. The scenario she’d sketched was appallingly plausible. “Do you have any concept how dangerous—”

“I’m inexperienced, Luc,” she interrupted, nailing him with a fulminating look. “I’m not an idiot. The hotel bar idea occurred to me while I was still pretty shaken up from the emergency landing. As soon as I got my brains unscrambled, I realized I could never go through with it. So I sat down and wrote out a list of all the eligible men I know. Then I started to eliminate. It was pretty much the same thing, over and over. ‘If I do it with him and it’s awful, he’ll probably be upset and that could get complicated.’ Or, ‘If I do it with him and it’s terrific, he’ll probably want to do it again and that could get complicated, too.’“ She paused, her cheeks flushing. “I ended up with you.”

Luc took a few moments to absorb this remarkable explanation then asked, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Wouldn’t you be upset if you ‘did it’ and it was awful?”

For the first time, a hint of shyness entered her expression. “Actually…that was the second reason I decided to ask you first.”

Luc frowned, genuinely flummoxed. “What was?”

“I’ve been hearing stories about your love life from the moment I moved into the building. Even the MayWinnies—oh, they tut-tut about your behavior, of course. Which is sort of funny, considering the outrageous things they supposedly did when they were younger. Still, as prim as they pretend to be now, I can tell they get a kick out of having a lady-killer for a landlord. In any case, when I was thinking about who I should ask, I realized that if even a quarter of what’s said about you and women is true, you’d know how to make my first time, uh, well, unawful.”

There was a pause.

“Supposing it isn’t?” Luc finally asked.

“Supposing what isn’t…what?”

“Supposing not even a quarter of what’s said about me and women is true? Supposing it’s all lies?”

Peachy regarded him with disconcerting directness. “If that were the case,” she said slowly, “I think you’d tell me.”

Luc stiffened. No, he thought. She can’t be that naive! She can’t believe—

But she did. He could see it in her lovely, wide-set eyes. For reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom, this woman trusted him to be truthful about a subject that was notorious for inspiring lies.

“Men don’t usually go around puncturing the myths about their sexual prowess, cher,” he said, conscious of an unfamiliar stirring of protectiveness.

“Not if they’re the ones who’ve been spreading them,” Peachy agreed. “But everything I’ve heard about your prowess comes from other people, Luc. Where they heard it, I don’t know. Except I’m certain it wasn’t from you. Because as far as I can tell, you don’t brag about what you do, how you do it, or whom you do it with. And I…well, I admire that.”

Luc glanced away, his throat tightening. Peachy’s summation of his behavior was very much on target. But if she ascribed his discretion to gallantry, she was sadly mistaken. His first inkling of the true nature of his parents’ marriage had been gleaned from a conversation he’d overheard when he was just six years old. It was the memory of the angry, anguished confusion he’d felt when he’d listened to two supposed friends of his father crudely comparing notes about liaisons with his mother that kept him silent about his sexual affairs. The possibility that some careless comment of his might hurt someone as he’d been hurt was untenable to him.

His thoughts shifted without warning to his first sexual experience. He’d been seduced during his sophomore year of high school by the wife of one of the many men with whom his mother had broken her wedding vows. While the experience had been physically pleasurable, it had left him with more than a few psychological scars.

“Luc?”

Drawing a long, deep breath, he turned his gaze back to Peachy. She’s bound and determined to do it, he reflected. If not with me, then with someone else. And if she does it with someone else—

No! He didn’t even want to think about that scenario!

Luc exhaled in a rush, his mind suddenly latching on to an astonishing idea.

What if…what if he agreed to do what Peachy had asked, then stalled consummation until she came to her senses and called the deal off?

She would come to her senses, he assured himself. Eventually.

He’d meant what he’d said earlier, about facing down death tending to reorder a person’s priorities. What he hadn’t said—but what he knew from personal experience to be true—was that such reorderings were seldom permanent.

Of course, he conceded, there was always a minuscule possibility that the passage of time would not erode Peachy’s single-minded desire to get rid of her virginity. And if that were the case…

Thirteen years ago, Luc Devereaux had found himself standing in the door of a military plane, preparing to make his first parachute jump. Half of his brain had been urging him to make the leap. The other half had been screaming that there was still time to turn back from what probably was the stupidest stunt he’d ever contemplated.

He’d glanced at his instructor, a Special Forces captain named Flynn. Flynn had grinned, his teeth flashing a predatory white against his deeply tanned skin. Then he’d leaned in, put his mouth close to Luc’s ear and counseled, “Go with your gut, kid.”

“All right,” he said abruptly.

Peachy blinked. “All…right?”

“I accept your proposal.”

“Oh, Luc—”

“But not tonight.”