J.C. and the Bijoux Jolis (Blueberry Lane 3 - The Rousseaus #3)(4)

Faced with his wife’s hostility when they returned home, his father would slap thirteen-year-old J.C. on the back and use father-son bonding time as the excuse for them missing dinner or coming home so late on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday evening. Her face, a mixture of brittle and betrayed, would search J.C.’s eyes for a truth he was unable to offer. After a while, he couldn’t look into his mother’s eyes without flinching, so he stopped. He stopped looking into them altogether.

And he promised himself he’d never, ever make a woman look that way at him. And the best way to achieve that goal? Stay loose. Stay free. Enjoy women, as his father had, without the caustic damage to a disillusioned wife while using his young son as an alibi.

“Do you, étienne Xavier Rousseau, take this woman, Kathryn Grey English, for your lawfully wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony?”

“I do,” said étienne softly, his gravelly with emotion.

“Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, keeping yourself for her only, as long as you both shall live?”

étienne’s head jerked in a small nod before he whispered, “I will.”

“Kathryn Grey English, do you take étienne Xavier Rousseau to be your lawfully wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony?”

Kate English locked her gaze on étienne, her eyes full of tears, her lips tilted up in a smile so sweet and genuine, it was unbearable to see, and J.C. had to look away.

“I do,” she said, her voice soft and tender.

“Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, keeping yourself for him only, as long as you both shall live?”

“I will,” she murmured, her voice breaking just a little.

It was a promise.

A promise J.C. had no doubt she meant. He could hear it in the sweet seriousness of her voice. He could see it in the glistening vulnerability of her eyes. She meant it.

But hadn’t their mother meant it once upon a time? Hadn’t their father meant it too?

It baffled J.C. that étienne had somehow managed to move past their parents’ f*cked-up marriage to find a committed, loving, stable relationship of his own. But then again, J.C. had never allowed étienne to be the one to join their father in the city. He’d always shoved his brother aside and volunteered to go instead. And besides, at age fifteen, étienne had been sent off to military school in the Deep South, only home for a few weeks at Christmas and in the summertime. He’d missed a lot of their parent’s wildly dysfunctional relationship, and the twins—his sisters, Jax and Mad—had had each other for comfort. J.C. had had both the exposure to his father’s infidelity and no one with whom to process it.

Not that it mattered at this point. He’d chosen how he wanted his life to be—free of the sort of emotion that could break your heart or someone else’s—and for the most part, he was happy with the way things were.

Looking past étienne and Kate, he checked out Libitz again, wondering what it would take to get under her skirt…because f*ck, but he loved a conquest, and he sensed that f*cking Libitz would pay off in spades. Angry chicks were always nuts in bed, and she was the angriest he’d ever seen.

Kate had mentioned that, like him, Libitz had an interest in art. In fact, if he recalled correctly, she had a gallery in New York while he was in the process of opening his own gallery in Philadelphia. Now that was an interesting bit of information, because one of the few things in life about which J.C. allowed himself to feel genuine passion was art. He loved it. He f*cking loved it.

It was honest.

It was raw.

It was ugly.

It was beautiful.

It was real in a way he could never be, and yet it allowed him to experience infatuation, repulsion, lust, and even love in a way that kept him, and others, safe. Art combined every emotion he didn’t allow himself to feel and offered it up in a beautiful, untouchable package. He could feel about it and for it, but it couldn’t hurt him and he couldn’t hurt it. It was an almost perfect relationship and, aside from that with his siblings, the only other to which he felt truly and wholly committed.

But conveniently, there was also no harm in using art as a topic to woo a woman trying to appear disinterested in him.

Like most serious women stuck in their own heads, he suspected that if he could get Libitz to talk about business—her business: art and galleries—she would feel powerful and equal. If he was right, it would also make her defenses fall, and maybe she’d think she was seeing another side of him through his enthusiasm for a shared passion. Of course he could never extend such emotion to her, a living, breathing human being with a heart capable of breaking. But that wouldn’t be an issue. Before they f*cked, he’d make sure that she—like every other woman on the face of the earth—knew that Jean-Christian Louis Rousseau offered nothing except his eager tongue, his fat cock, and the desire to make her come all over both.

***

Libitz felt his eyes on her again, but she refused to look at him.

Between Kate and her cousin Stratton, whom Lib had known for most of her life, she knew all she needed to know about Jean-Christian Rousseau, and very little of it was favorable. She knew from Kate that her cousin Barrett was sometimes referred to as “the Shark” in business circles, but as far as Libitz was concerned, the only shark at the English-Rousseau wedding today was the one staring at her.