Only Love (The Atonement Series) by Elle Chardou

However, you are the one person I have been interested in since Kayla. I do want to sleep with you—don’t get me wrong—but I don’t want it to be a quick wham, bam, thank you ma’am thing. I am truly interested in you as a person.”
    I sipped from my Chardonnay before I questioned, “Why me? What the hell is so special about me?”
    “You’re the whole package, Deirdre. You might not see that but men do and it’s hard to turn down someone as alluring as you are. I would be a fool not to be interested in you. You’re the kind of woman a man can imagine being his wife and the mother of his children.”
    Drake swigged from his wine. “You know how old I am so I won’t repeat it ad nauseum but I have gotten to a certain age when I am looking for the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with and although I don’t know you very well, I hope to rectify that situation and hopefully, we do bridge that gap.
    “I don’t want to move too fast because I know you just came out of a situation that has your nerves frazzled and you’re not quick to trust new people. I get that but I hope knowing I am Drew’s cousin puts you at rest. I am not an absolute, positively complete stranger. I would have him to answer to if I ever broke your heart. Besides, it’s not as if it’s the first time we have met. I suppose your memory isn’t as good as mine. I just happen to never forget a face.”
    I searched my brain and the memory came back to me as if it had always been there and I hadn’t just recalled it. He was right, we had met before and I refused to recall our earlier acquaintance.
    It was at a party Drew held at his parents’ house when we were still at Harvard. We were on our last year of our Masters in Business Administration and he introduced his wayward cousin who had just flown in from Paris and the exclusive Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. It turned out he’d been out of university for the past two years but had been cooking in restaurants around Paris for low wages just to finely craft his culinary expertise. His salary was paltry but the kind of experience he learned over that period of time in his life could never be duplicated anywhere else and had ultimately made him a better chef.
    I remembered thinking how odd it was for them to be named Drew and Drake. They seemed more like twins than cousins but then their mothers’ were very close sisters and both christened their sons with names that started with a ‘D’.
    “Now you bring it up, how could I ever forget? You were with a small petite blonde at the time but she was natural so I assume that wasn’t Mikayla?”
    “No.” He laughed out loud. “That was Gisele and she was a Parisian woman I met while I lived there. We were very close and had a relationship for pretty much the whole time I was there. The only reason why we broke up was because she had no wish to come to the States to live and I knew I wasn’t returning to Paris. Neither of us believed in long-distance relationships. She is still one of my best friends and we speak often.”
    “Is she still single?” I wondered out loud.
    “I don’t know what she would consider her status because she was married to a man who was from Quebec City and they had a two-year-old son but they’re in the middle of an acrimonious divorce. It’s been really hard on her and we have spoken a lot about the situation.”
    I smiled shyly and he turned toward me before he changed the subject and switched to a more pleasant subject.
    That was our night together and I loved that about him already. He had a habit of not really judging people and he certainly wasn’t melancholy in the slightest bit. He was incredibly happy-go-lucky and seemed to have no idea how good looking he was though he could look at me and literally make my heart melt at times.
    I liked his self-depreciating attitude and his easy going disposition. What was there not to admire about him and whether I wanted to admit it or not, I was starting to