“No, not that I noticed her lips,” he added.
“The cranky woman in the meeting? She definitely had a thing for you.”
“Not her either, although I doubt that she has a thing for me.” He lifted her chin with his fingertip so he could look into her eyes. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”
“No,” she said, hating that she was and hating it even more that he knew it.
“Yes, you are. My God, I love this. You’re jealous of me.”
“Shut up,” she said, thumping his chest. “It couldn’t be Anna. She’s pretty enough but you couldn’t sleep with your publicist and keep working so closely with her. And she didn’t show her claws at all, at least not beyond trying to get you to do what she wanted you to. So who?”
“It was Josephine, cher, and it was years ago.”
Julie raised her head, feeling her eyes go wide. Josephine was undoubtedly an attractive women, but she had to be decades older than Eric.Still, she considered.
“I can hear you thinking. Why does this matter to you? It was a lifetime ago.”
She didn’t answer him because she didn’t have a good one, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to know the details.
“It was years and years ago. When I first came to the city. I didn’t know anything or anyone. Here I was this hot young chef, and I had no idea how anything worked. I would have made a mess of everything if Josephine hadn’t taken pity on me and told me what to do. She helped me. We were both lonely; her first marriage had just ended. It was an easy step from there to sleeping together. We helped each other and then we moved on.”
“You’re obviously still fond of each other,” she said, trying desperately not to be jealous of Eric’s sixty-year-old former lover.
“Of course. We started as friends and ended that way. We were never in love with each other, but she’s helped me avoid more than one disaster over the years. I value her, and I think she does me.” He tipped up her face to kiss the end of her nose. “What about you, Jules. I’m not sure I want to know, but certainly there have been other men.”
“None that mattered,” she answered, honestly.
He brushed a kiss over her lips, looking content not to press the issue. “You have to know, I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel about you. There’ve been other women but none of them is you. I fell in love with you that summer ages ago, and I’ve never stopped loving you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, pressing a kiss to his chest.
Her stomach let out a loud rumble, and he smiled. “Are you still sure you don’t want to go out?”
“Positive. We could eat junk food from the corner market.” He made the nasal French noise she knew he would, and she laughed. “Or we can get a pizza delivered. Surely one pizza won’t destroy your palate.”
“You sound very smug,” he said, running his fingers up the bare bumps of her spine and making her wriggle at his teasing touch.
“Not smug, just sure,” she said putting a little extra squirm in her hips and grinning when she felt him start to thicken underneath her.
“First sauce in a jar and now take out pizza. You’re a bad influence, cher.”
“You have no idea,” she said, sitting up to straddle him.
