Chapter Thirteen

Kara squeaked before slapping a hand over her mouth. Isabelle, Raphaël and bloody Lucas were staring at her. But she could clearly tell the difference in their stares. Isabelle and her husband's were tender in a way... filled with compassion, whilst Lucas just stared coldly at her like his primary goal was to torment her.

Kara closed her eyes and sighed.

Why, oh why couldn't she have robbed a more agreeable person? Someone less prone to saying and doing things that made her want to either cry or die.

"Answer!" he barked and Kara jumped in her chair.

"Hey, give the girl a break!" Isabelle snapped at Lucas with narrowed pale blue eyes.

Lucas scowled at her and pulled a bottle of wine closer to him, which Isabelle immediately pulled away.

She then turned to Kara with a soft smile.

"Don't let him bully you, honey. He's a big softie, my one year old twins can get him to do whatever the hell they want him to," she stated .

Kara forced a smile, her fingers pulling at each other beneath the table.

Why did Lucas have to open his big mouth? And how does he even know Rein in the first place?

"Well...?" Isabelle prodded gently. Kara looked back up at her in askance. "What was a beautiful young thing like you doing in a place like Rein? Because honey, all three of us," she pointed to herself, Raphaël and Luc in a sharp triangle. "We've all been there for one matter or the other."

Kara's eyes widened.

"What? But... you're rich people. Not like the ones...no, you're like clean rich people," she said, baffled. What on earth had people like them been doing in Rein?

"We had to hunt someone down and preferred to get it done ourselves instead of sending one of the guys," Raphaël stated as he swirled wine. "Lucas was already there, when it was time for me to go and join him, my meddling wife decided home was too safe for her. She wanted to be where the bullets were flying."

Isabelle scowled at him. "I took out a guy who was aiming for your head, husband."

"And he could have been aiming for your head, which is much worse, wife," Raphaël responded sternly.

Kara saw Isabelle's scowl soften, then disappear and eventually replace with a sweet blush as she leaned forward and kissed her husband gently. Kara averted her shocked gaze when Raphaël pulled Isabelle closer and deepened the kiss. A few seconds later, they were really going at it.

Good God! Her poor eyes.

"Hey, cut it out!" Lucas complained and placed a hand over Kara's eyes. "Young eyes are present.

"I'm twenty-three!" she said, glad she could at least move her lips. His big hand was heavy.

"You're still a little baby, you know nothing," he said in an annoyingly mocking tone.

"Get your big, smelly paw off me!" Kara snapped and heard Isabelle erupt in laughter.

Suddenly Luc's hand was lifted, giving her back her sight. "Big, smelly paw..." he repeated, looking at her with a bored expression. "How immature."

Kara felt the blush stain her cheeks. She wasn't immature! She was already past her teens and had seen a man's... that thing...once! That made her mature, didn't it? Lucas just had a big mouth.

"You're twenty-nine, Lucas Cartier, not fifty," said Isabelle. "Karen's only six years younger than you."

"Whatever," Lucas said, annoyed that Isabelle gave out so much information about him in one sentence. The table quietened.

Kara realized they were still waiting on her.

"I'll just go see if Celeste needs some help..." she started, ready to escape this situation.

"I saw François sneak around to the kitchen door, I don't think you should go in there just now," Isabelle said with a grin.

Kara's mouth fell open. Did she mean that he and Celeste were...they were... in the kitchen?! People did that?

"Oh," she simply responded.

"You looked positively shocked by that," Raphaël said, amused.

Kara was about to agree, to say that she had never before come across this practice of having sex in the kitchen when she caught Lucas looking at her with those mocking eyes.

She wasn't immature.

"Oh, of course not," Kara began, waving a careless hand. "I just didn't think they would do it, you know?" She chuckled and Isabelle laughed with her.

Lucas gave her a curious stare over his shoulder and Kara gave him a nasty side eye, wishing she hadn't sat next to him. His massive thighs were less than five inches away from hers and his heat just enveloped her.

And his scent...

"Kara..." Isabelle's voice penetrated through the fog that had begun to cloud Kara's mind.

"Yeah..."

Isabelle remained silent, only tilting her head to the side, a small smile on her lips.

Kara stared at the woman's beauty.

"Is she trying to seduce a reaction out of me?"

It was only when Isabelle burst out laughing and Raphaël grinned that Kara realized she'd said it out loud.

"It only works on Raphaël," Celeste said coming out through the glass sliding doors that led to the cozy dinner setting. Kara looked up at her as she passed bowls of ice-cream around from a silver platter. The little strands whisping out of Celeste's hairdo and the pink glow on her face had Kara silently gasping.

They had been doing it in the kitchen, Isabelle was right.

While Isabelle fussed excitedly over which flavor she got, Kara felt Lucas lean in towards her ear, both their eyes on Celeste.

"What are you staring at?" he murmured. Kara started. One second he's there, next second he's practically inside her head.

"Nothing, mind your own business," she responded. Her eyes trailed back to Celeste who was playing tug-of-war with Isabelle, the last chocolate ice-cream between them. Her skin was absolutely glowing, her eyes a little glassy as she laughed playfully. Kara wondered if doing it was what made her look that way.

"Looks thoroughly fucked, doesn't she? Are you wishing for that? Wishing you could have a man drive you to come over and over again?" Lucas' alcohol deepened voice drifted into her ear again and Kara gasped.

How could he use such dirty language when people were there? With ears tingling from his murmured voice, Kara watched as Lucas threw back another small glass of wine. Kara squinted at the bottle.

Liquid courage, eh?

She had to get it away from him, else he would keep murmuring things in her ear and very soon what happened in the morning would happen again. Those... sensations. God, they were so good... but, bad! Very bad and she wouldn't let it happen again.

Celeste placed a big bowl of chocolate chip ice-cream in front of Kara, saying she got to have it before Isabelle and her killed each other over it.

Kara smiled and picked up her spoon, eyeing the mouthwatering ice-cream. Maybe the ice would cool down her heated thoughts. She hoped it would.

The first spoon absolutely sent Kara into space. It was so good! She had never tasted anything this good in her life. She'd had ice-cream before, but it had been watered down vanillas from a run-down corner store. This was heaven.

The table was alive with jokes and laughter as François returned to the table and sent his wife a sexy wink. Isabelle cooed and poked him in the ribs, making François blush, much to everyone's amusement.

Kara wanted to interact, she really did, but the ice-cream was honestly taking up all her focus.

Another spoonful sent her head back and her eyes closing. A moan escaped as she drew the spoon out.

"How does it taste?" a deep voice murmured.

"So good," Kara murmured back, glancing up at Luc before remembering that he's the enemy and turning away again. "Hey, quit minding my business!"

He ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. "I would if you stopped purring like a cat and pulling that spoon out of your mouth like that."

Kara froze, halfway through the very act of pulling the spoon out from between her lips. Irritated that she couldn't even enjoy her ice-cream in peace, she turned her head to glare at him as he leaned back in his seat, bringing his face exactly five inches from her face.

She found herself caught up in his stare from eyes made heavy lidded and smoky by wine as she slowly and automatically pulled the spoon out of her mouth. Lucas' eyes followed the movement, his face strained as though he were in great torment.

"Hey, make sure you don't drool on the table over there, Luc," Raphaël called and broke the spell.

Lucas' gaze snapped away from Kara, an immediate scowl transforming his features from a gorgeous male specimen to an irritated gorgeous male specimen.

Kara sighed at how the damn scowl only made him so much more alluring. Oh, darn she should have sat by Isabelle.

"Shut up," Lucas said and tossed a paper towel at Raphaël. He was going to say that he's not getting caught up on a little street thief from Rein, but he caught himself. Because it would be a damn lie.

"You alright, Karen?" Celeste asked, pushing a hand towards Kara on the table.

Kara nodded. "Yeah, just think I'm a little tired now. Think I want to go to bed."

Both Celeste and Isabelle's expressions fell. Kara felt bad already. She was lying to the people already, the least she could do was sit at the table and eat some damn ice-cream.

"Okay, maybe I'll stay a little longer," she said with a smile and Isabelle cheered loudly.

"Party uuppp!!" she screamed pouring more expensive wine in everyone's glasses. Raphaël grinned.

"I'm definitely carrying you up the stairs tonight," he murmured.

Celeste laughed, knowing Isabelle would never get drunk with her four sweethearts asleep just in the other room.

Kara sighed in her seat. She wanted to stay, but her heart kept leaping halfway into her throat every time someone said her name. Were they about to press her to explain her presence in Rein in front of Celeste and François? Where they going to ask her more questions she didn't want to answer because it meant lying?

Eventually, things flowed and Kara's heartbeat steadied.

Then sometime around eleven-thirty pm, when the kids were fast asleep in their absent friends' rooms and the ranch was quiet and the only sounds you could hear were the merry slash drunken laughter of the group of friends, Lucas lifted his tipsy gaze to her face and stared.

"So when am I getting the twenty thousand you stole back?"

The whole table went dead silent.