Free Tempting Donovan Ford by Jennifer McKenzie Page B

that displayed a French life in stunning black-and-white imagery. They were part of the restaurant’s tradition.
    “I want to keep the photos on the walls,” she told Donovan, turning her face from the pictures to look up at him. He leaned over her, one hand planted on the table as he, too, reviewed the papers on the table.
    He glanced down, a lock of hair falling over his forehead. “Why?”
    Julia swallowed, told herself she should really break this eye lock or at least shift in her chair so their bodies weren’t so close to touching. “They’re part of the restaurant’s history. Of all the people who worked here.” At his furrowed brow, she explained. “They’re our pictures. Alain’s photos of his childhood home, a picture I took of the Tuileries Garden my first winter in Paris, one that my mom took of me the first time she took me to France, one that Sasha took when she went to the French Alps last year.”
    He glanced behind him at the closest wall and the photos displayed there. “I didn’t know.”
    “And now you do.”
    He straightened up. “Show me.” He started toward the wall she’d been staring at only a minute earlier. “Which ones are yours?”
    Julia stood, too, slowly, trying not to drag her feet and wanting to all the same. There was no reason to think this was anything more than polite interest, and it provided her an excellent opportunity to sway him to her side. The photos weren’t just displayed at La Petite Bouchée; they were part of the restaurant. “This one.”
    She pointed to the garden photo she’d taken when she’d first moved to Paris. She could still remember the day she’d taken it. A bad day when she’d been feeling lonely and lost, still working hard to be fluent in the language, and had just been thrown out of her first kitchen among extremely loud and spittle-laden cursing.
    She knew it was a rite of passage, one that all young chefs experienced in this particular kitchen, but it was still difficult, and she’d promised herself that when she ran her own kitchen, she’d never do the same to anyone else.
    “It’s beautiful.” Donovan stepped closer, really looking at the picture then back at her. And even though she hadn’t told him about the day she took it, she felt exposed, as if she’d just bared a piece of herself to him without realizing it. “Where’s the one your mom took? I’d like to see it.”
    She felt her heart hiccup. She shouldn’t. She really shouldn’t. She pointed it out anyway. “It’s one of my favorites.”
    He was quiet as he studied the picture. “You can see the love.” And Julia felt her heart hiccup again. “The way you’re looking at her. You love her.”
    “I do.” She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat. “It was hard when she died.”
    He only nodded and opened his arm, offering support if she wanted to take it. She did; she so did. But she was afraid to move.
    “I was living in Paris when she got sick,” she told him. “But I haven’t gone back.” Hadn’t been able to. Not yet. “We had six months together.” To say those goodbyes that so many people never got the chance to say.
    Julia knew she should consider herself lucky, but sometimes she was infuriated. She’d had only one parent. One lone family member. And that person had been stolen away. While other people had piles of family—aunts and uncles, parents and stepparents, brothers and sisters, and all sorts of second cousins and cousins once removed that they needed a spreadsheet to keep track of all of them. It wasn’t fair.
    “And I don’t know why I’m unloading all of this on you.”
    “I want to hear. Tell me about her.”
    Julia clasped her hands together and looked at the picture of herself in the fountain as a little girl. Donovan was right; there was love in every aspect of the photo. The splash of the water. The way the sun shimmered on the water. The gleam in her eye. She knew her mother would have been looking at her with the same