“Sylvie,” he rasped out, breaking their kiss with a groan. He put his hands on her upper arms and set her away from him. “Sylvie, let’s go somewhere. To my place. Or yours.”
She blinked at him, as dazed as he was by the explosive chemistry that had ignited between them with just one kiss.
Chemistry? That’s right. He’d forgotten. He was under the influence of a chemical concoction. But what was Sylvie’s excuse? Her glazed eyes and parted, kiss-swollen lips could only be attributed to… what? He had no chance to figure out the answer because Sylvie’s expression was morphing quickly from “Kiss me” to “Kiss off.”
“The only place you and I are going is our separate ways,” she stormed, grabbing for the magnolia in her hair and tossing it to the ground.
She was right. He had to get out of there… before he made a complete fool of himself. But he was pleased to have learned a few things about Sylvie Fontaine tonight. Like where the chinks were in her armor. No way did she have ice in her veins.
Not that he was planning to stick around for the deep thaw.
He wouldn’t mind a little ice sculpting, though.
“I’ll see you Monday afternoon, then,” he said, deciding to give her a break. He headed out of the arbor, and had just reached the end of the carriage house when he noticed that the band had changed its program to swing music, allowing the partygoers to dance up on the patio.
He turned back to Sylvie, whose shoulders were propped against the arbor like a rag doll. Yep, the heat was definitely on, and the ice was about to flow.
“You wanna dance, chère?”
“In your dreams!”
He winked at her. “Guar-an-teed!”
Chapter Four
Sylvie had thought her life was hell. Little did she know there were degrees of hell, like Dante’s Inferno, and she’d only entered the first level.
When she awoke late the next morning—suffering from the aftereffects of the previous night’s numerous margaritas—Sylvie shuffled out to the front stoop of her town house in a Dilbert nightshirt and a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers. With an open-mouthed yawn, she reached down to pick up the Sunday edition of the Times-Picayune.
And went stiff as a show dog on point.
She wasn’t sure if it was the pouring rain that caught her attention or the strange flash of light. Peering upward from her bent-over position—luckily, her rear end was facing the open doorway and not the street—Sylvie saw a photographer raise his camera and then another brief flash of light. Then she noticed Matt Sommese, leaning against her car.
“Nice negligee, Sylvie. Victoria’s Not-So-Secret?” Matt inquired with a smirk. His photographer sidekick, who continued to click away, snickered in agreement. “Can I assume the love potion hasn’t kicked in yet?”
Swiftly, Sylvie spun on her heel and was back in her hall, closing the door, even as Matt called out, “Come on, Sylvie, gimme an interview. I just wanna know a little more about your… ha, ha, ha… love potion. And those lab tests. Is LeDeux in there with you? He hasn’t been answering his phone for the past eight hours.”
Oh, no! Blanche had confessed last night that she might have blabbed a little too much to the reporter, under the influence of those stupid watermelon margaritas. Sylvie had been hoping Blanche’s concerns were unwarranted. Now she knew better.
She opened her door a crack, with the chain attached. “No, Luc isn’t here. I can’t imagine what would make you think he would be. There is no love potion. It was just one of Blanche’s sick jokes. Now, go away. I wouldn’t give you an interview if you were Dan Rather.”
With that, she slammed the door.
An hour later, Dan Rather called.
Then Larry King, Sally Jessie Raphael, Sylvie’s mother, her aunts, a dozen newspaper and magazine reporters, Blanche, an enraged woman who claimed to be a voodoo priestess, a lawyer for Cypress Oil, even Valcour LeDeux, and most ominous of all, her boss, Charles Henderson.
Sylvie didn’t talk to any of these people. She just let them spout off into her muted answering machine while she chugged down cup after cup of thick Creole coffee, and stared blankly at the frontpage articles in the Times-Picayune. Somehow, Matt had managed to piece together two stories based on what he’d pumped from Blanche at last night’s party; the rest he’d filled in with conjecture.