It baffled J.C. that étienne had somehow managed to move past their parents’ fucked-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 fuck, but he loved a conquest, and he sensed that fucking 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 fucking 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 fucked, 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.
Wait. Staring at her?
No.
Eyefucking her, same as he’d been doing since last night when he sidled up to her at the rehearsal dinner and tried introducing himself with so much innuendo, she almost couldn’t hear his words through the cloud of smarm.
Jean-Christian was a predator, plain and simple, and every lazy eye blink, every sexy smirk, every deep breath he took was premeditated to make a woman rip her panties down the middle and mount up with abandon.
And the thing is? Libitz had no problem with that.
Though she wanted, one day, what KK had found in étienne, she had no illusions that it was going to happen any time soon. She’d dated boys from prep school, from summer camp, and from college. She’d met them through well-intentioned mothers at her parent’s temple; through sorority sisters whose boyfriends had brothers; through J-Date, an online dating service for young Jewish singles; and occasionally at posh hotel bars, where she wasn’t above a quick fuck in a coatroom if she felt like it.
Libitz was no prude, and despite her longing, she had no fanciful ideas about a happily-ever-after around the next bend. Whatever romantic bones she had in her body were protected so far beneath the surface, she wasn’t even positive they still existed. If she hadn’t hidden them away, after all, her veritable parade of Mr. Wrongs would have surely crushed them all to dust.
No, Lib didn’t mind that Jean-Christian Rousseau was on a mission to screw every human being with a vagina in a ten-mile radius, but she refused to be added to his list.
Why?