Jonquils for Jax: The Rousseaus #1 (The Blueberry Lane Series Book 12) by Katy Regnery

he said sourly, pursing his lips.
    Her eyes flared with surprise again and her shoulders started trembling. She let the weights fall to her sides as she started giggling.
    He understood it was amusing to get a massive boner from talking about breasts, but she didn’t know how long it had been since he’d been with a woman. He felt frustrated and embarrassed, out of control and annoyed. He needed a cold shower or a long walk, and getting naked and showering here at her gym didn’t seem like a very good idea. She lifted and lowered the weights a final time and he took them from her, depositing them back on the rack.
    “One,” she said softly, and he wasn’t sure if she was finishing off his curl count or counting the number of erections she’d given him. In the case of the latter, she was way off. Since meeting her on Saturday night, she’d given him at least half a dozen.
    He headed for the gym door, grumbling, “I’ll be back Wednesday, Jax” over his shoulder without looking back at his hot, sexy, funny, boner-inducing new “friend.”
    ***
    The door clicked shut behind him and Jax stared at it, her breathing shallow, her breasts rising and falling with each rapid breath.
    She felt exhausted and exhilarated, unsatisfied and excited. Her lips still twitched, but now that he was gone, she didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
    Lesson one was over.
    She reached for a bottle of water, took a sip, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again.
    Lesson one was— gulp —over.
    She looked at the door and sighed long and low.
    Merde.
    There was no point denying it: Jax Rousseau officially had a scorching crush on the Englishes’ new gardener.
    She moaned softly, remembering the roughness of his fingertips under her chin, the hunger in his eyes as he’d gazed at her, and later, the telltale bulge in his pants. He was tall and muscular with thick dark-blond hair and deep, coffee-brown eyes that had seen better days.
    And he was mysterious, this gardener with a past. How did someone born in New Orleans become a cop in Philly? Why had he left the South? Why had he stopped being a cop? What had happened to the skin around his eyes? She had so many questions and not enough answers. Who was this beautiful, enigmatic man who lovingly tended moonlight gardens but could also teach her how to disarm an assailant by gouging his eyes out? Gentle and lethal. Protective and taciturn.
    One thing she knew for certain: they were both hiding from the world. She at her family’s home, away from the prying eyes of a public she’d never intended to enamor. And he in a little studio tucked away on a grand estate, biding his time in a garden when he’d once had, according to Weston English, a decorated career.
    Maybe that’s why she was drawn to him so strongly—because they were both hiding, and she sensed that neither of them wanted to hide, but they had accepted their secluded existences because they had to. She didn’t know for sure that she was right, but she felt inexplicably drawn to him, as though they shared a bleak commonality that made her feel a certain camaraderie toward him. She liked him. As the heat of his presence faded second by second with his absence, she felt the cold of her aloneness, her loneliness, surround her.
    Buzz, buzz. Buzz, buzz.
    Her cell phone sat on the table by the gym door buzzing.
    “Hello?”
    “Jax?”
    “Hi, J.C.,” she said, turning off the lights in the gym and heading through the door. “What’s up?”
    “I’m not good at this shit, so I’m going to cut to the chase.”
    “Ooooo-kay.”
    “Mad’s worried about you. Chewed my fucking ear off in the car this morning. She thinks we need to get you into the city more often.”
    Jax walked through one of the sliding glass doors that led to the pool and sighed. “I’m fine.”
    “Yeah. That’s what I said, but you know Mad.”
    She cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder, then reached for the waistband of her leggings,