“The thing is, Matt, what if she’s not your girlfriend?” Raoul asked. Raoul was just being a bastard tonight, wasn’t he? “You’ve never introduced her to us before.”
“Yes, well, who wants to introduce a girl to you vultures,” he retorted, sliding an arm possessively around her waist, where she still sat on the bar. It made her curls tickle his shoulder. He grinned, delighted with them. “Don’t listen to them,” he told her. “They’re just jealous.”
Damn, did he want her to know they were jealous and therefore let her realize they would be interested in her? One problem with having so many cousins nearly his size and nearly his age and sometimes with even more money was that it made for one hell of a lot of competition.
“About that girlfriend of yours,” Bouclettes said to Raoul, rather desperately. She tried to sidle away from Matt’s arm, but she ran into some more wine bottles packing the bar, so he tightened his arm to protect her from them.
“Right.” Raoul turned, looked around the crowd of laughing, drunk dancers, and then proved he was more than a bit drunk himself by finally tilting his head back, opening his mouth, and loosening a boom that shook the rafters: “Allegra!!”
Allegra turned her dark head and shook herself free of what remained of the chain dance with some difficulty—several people kept pulling her back to dance—and appeared beside Raoul, fixing him with a minatory gaze that made Matt’s heart tighten in jealousy. That chiding look was so, so...cozy. As if Raoul could be as annoying as he pleased and still be loved for it. Matt was annoying, too, and all he’d gotten for it so far was an astoundingly bad dating history.
He snuck a glance at Bouclettes hopefully. No time like the present for changing a man’s luck with women.
“I’m not a dog,” Allegra told Raoul severely.
Raoul grinned and shook his shaggy rust-and-charcoal head, instantly pseudo-meek, lifting up both her hands to kiss them. “Pardon, bonheur. I thought you might help us not scare Matt’s new girlfriend to death.”
“Or you could try backing off,” Matt told him resentfully. “I was doing just fine until the three of you started crowding her.” Of course that would be too much. Four big guys like that. He and his cousins had been pretty stubborn about trying to outgrow each other as kids. He tried, with considerable difficulty, to imagine what it might be like to be surrounded by a group of guys when your head didn’t reach their shoulders, but he couldn’t manage to get the angle right. In his head, he was always looking down, not up. Still, it had to be crappy, to have so many people towering over you, so he squeezed Bouclettes’s waist reassuringly.
“I’ll take care of you,” he whispered to her. Very intriguing green eyes started to crinkle, as if she was about to laugh, which was a good sign. A man didn’t get to thirty without knowing the value of making a woman laugh, so he pursued that line of attack: “Don’t worry about them. Do you want me to hit one of them?”
Her eyes widened again, the laughter retreating.
“His aunts are here,” Allegra told Bouclettes.
“Where are they?” Bouclettes asked rather desperately.
Allegra waved a hand to the dance floor, where Damien’s mom, Tata Véro, was chopping her arms up and down in an exuberant robot dance, grinning up at his uncle Louis as she got him to try to imitate her.
“Is she still sober?” Bouclettes asked doubtfully. She had a really weird idea of his hospitality, if she thought his guests might still be sober at this hour of the night. What did she think he was serving people, water?
“I’m sober!” Allegra said indignantly, settling her weight against Raoul’s side as if her bones might not support her by themselves. “I’ve only had a couple of glasses. I think.” She looked up at Raoul, as if he might have kept track, but Raoul shrugged in clear indifference.
“Thanks for coming.” Even if Bouclettes had gotten there a little late. They’d already sung “Joyeux Anniversaire” and everything. Matt frowned suddenly. “Are there any choux left? She didn’t get any! Here.”
He hauled Bouclettes off the bar, holding her pressed to his side as he worked his way through the crowd to a long folding table that had been pushed against a wall and was littered with remnants of the cakes that had been on it.
“Look. There are still some left.” He picked one of the pastry puffs from the giant pièce montée they had once formed—it was about like his family to offer him a Ferrari made out of pastry puffs instead of the real thing—and proffered it right to her rosebud lips.