No Place Like Home by Linda Lael Miller Kat Martin Mary Carter & Laura Florand

Author:Linda Lael Miller, Kat Martin, Mary Carter & Laura Florand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Still putting your family last in your life, I see,” Raoul’s grandfather said dryly later that night, when Raoul had escaped outside for a breath of fresh air. He wanted so badly to be comfortable in the uproar of family again, and yet he just couldn’t, quite. “Don’t show up, don’t call. What, were you too sleepy to get out of bed and bother to see your grandfather?”

Raoul shoved his hands in his pockets, squinting at the stars, which shone with a heart-breaking brilliance tonight, in the sky swept clean by the mistral. Around them, hectares of roses stretched, stripped by the winter down to skinny branches and thorns. But still he breathed the scent of them in, a ghost perfume from every summer of his childhood, when he would come in coated with rose oils from a day’s harvest. All the kids were expected to pitch in. “I lost my phone, Pépé. I apologized once already, didn’t I?” He had stolen Damien’s phone to keep calling Allegra, but the meeting with his grandfather had been completely forgotten by that point.

“When I was your age, we didn’t even have phones, and I still managed to go see my grandfather when he asked for me. My father would have boxed my ears if I didn’t.”

“When you were thirty-three?” Raoul asked dryly.

“Are you thirty-three already?” his grandfather asked, offended. A tall man himself for his generation, he was only a few inches shorter than Raoul, even with age. He still stood amazingly straight for ninety, just as his step-sister did at ninety-six. “Why haven’t you had kids yet, then? They won’t even be able to know their own great-grandfather at this rate. What’s the matter with you boys?”

“I’ve been trying to maintain our supply chains in the middle of conflicts and attempted kidnappings, Pépé. It’s not conducive to family life.”

“I met your grandmother when I was smuggling kids out of France in a wagon full of roses and she was their next guide over the Alps into Switzerland. You boys whine too much.”

Raoul set his back teeth and wondered, reluctantly, if his grandfather had a point. The old man always did this to him. Raoul had once driven himself twelve miles to safety with a bullet hole in him, a ghastly experience that had taught him worlds about his ability to persist no matter how much it hurt. He had survived at least ten kidnapping attempts. He had kept Rosier money coming to small farmers whose kids might have starved to death if he let the unrest in their area convince him Rosier SA should turn to other sources. He had used sheer force of personality— aggressive personality—to get a crazy would-be warlord to release four drivers and not kill Raoul himself while he was at it. And yet whenever he determined that enough was enough, damn it, and he was going to come home, his grandfather somehow managed to make him feel like a big baby.

He remembered kids being jealous

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