Tonight Inez Breaux-Fontaine was holding a cocktail party for a few of her closest friends…about two hundred people. Some of the men and women wore bathing suits and were enjoying a swim, but most had come for the political and social networking. Sylvie and Blanche, in sundresses and sandals, were people-watching as they sucked down watermelon margaritas like salt addicts, and listened to Paul Trebel’s band playing soft jazz over by the archway of live oak trees.
Sylvie licked the crust on her stemmed glass and continued her observations. “God really must be a man, don’t you think? Either that or He has a warped sense of humor. Why else would a woman’s behind blossom into Rubenesque proportions after a certain age, while a man’s behind just disappears?”
“C’est la vie,” Blanche slurred with margarita-inspired wisdom. “What kind of buns does Charles have?”
“How would I know?” Sylvie was still in a state of shock over Lucien LeDeux eating the jelly beans intended for her boss. She hadn’t lost faith in her potion, but she wasn’t about to try her experiment on Charles or anyone else till she was sure Luc wasn’t lurking about. He’d promised to stay away for a week, but she wasn’t taking any chances. And no way did she believe his contention that Charles was gay. No way. Blanche grinned at her, as if reading her thoughts.
“It’s not funny,” Sylvie said.
“Oh, yes, it is, Sylv. You and ‘The Bad Boy of the Bayous.’ Ay-yi-yi!” She fanned herself dramatically. “Seriously, hon, isn’t this the greatest test you could give your potion…two archenemies? You should take advantage of the situation. I hear those Cajuns are fab-u-lous lovers.”
Sylvie arched a brow with skepticism.
Blanche finished off her second margarita and nodded her head as if agreeing with herself. “Best of all, their buns stay hard longer…not to mention other body parts.” Blanche rolled her eyes meaningfully.
Sylvie couldn’t help laughing. “You should say that on your talk show. You’d have women flocking to Louisiana like homing pigeons, searching for a hot Cajun. The tourist commission would declare you a state treasure…just like that John Berendt guy promoted Savannah with his book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”
“It’s the truth, honey. Didn’t you ever hear the story about the beginning of the oil boom in Texas?”
Sylvie groaned. There was nothing Blanche liked better than to tell a story…her own embellished version.
“All these Cajun men crossed the border to work on the oil rigs, and the Texas women went full-tilt-boogie wild for them,” Blanche said. “Pretty soon all the Texas men were wondering what those swaggering Cajun men had that they didn’t…what made them so vir-ile.” She jiggled her eyebrows at Sylvie on that last word. “Well, the wily Cajuns told them that it was the fat in those ol’ crawfish they ate all the time. And sure enough, those dumb Texans commenced scarfing up mud-bug fat. Some people say that’s what started the popularity of crawfish.” The whole time she talked, Blanche gave her story the drawn-out, Southern Creole accent that endeared her to thousands of radio fans.
Sylvie reached over and squeezed Blanche’s hand. Thank God for this good friend who could make her smile, even when her world might conceivably be about to self-destruct. All because of Lucien LeJerk.
“Sylvie Marie, you know Mr. Sommese, don’t you?” her mother said, having come up behind them unexpectedly. The cool stare Inez leveled her way said clearly that Sylvie was failing in her responsibilities as a dutiful daughter to mix with the crowd. Sylvie had always failed in her mother’s eyes, in one way or another.
As usual, Inez Breaux-Fontaine was decked out in understated elegance, from her Cartier diamond-stud earrings to simple pleated slacks of cream linen topped by a tailored, rose silk blouse. A lady never makes herself conspicuous, Sylvie Marie. Inez’s face was tight-skinned perfection that would do a forty-year-old woman proud, let alone one of fifty-five, thanks to a lifelong regimen of Erno Lazlo facial products and a few nips and tucks. Have you been out in the sun again, Sylvie Marie? Tsk-tsk. A real lady does not freckle. Not a single hair on Inez’s trademark chic black bob would dare be out of place or, God forbid, turn gray. When are you going to find a hair style that suits you, Sylvie Marie? Do you like being so plain?
Sylvie and Blanche both stood, though they were a little wobbly on their feet, which drew another icy glare from Inez. Sylvie was bound to hear more about this indiscretion later. A lady never overindulges, Sylvie Marie.
“Hi, Matt,” Sylvie and Blanche both said at the same time.
Matt Sommese was a Times-Picayune reporter they’d met on innumerable occasions over the years. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Inez drifted off to perform her hostess duties. Inez had drifting down to an art form, while Sylvie still suffered inside from chronic shyness, a condition she fought to hide and overcome. Blanche excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.
After some small talk, Matt asked, “So, Sylvie, when you gonna let me examine that voodoo journal of your great-grandmother’s?”
“It belonged to my great-grandmother many times removed,” she corrected. “And the answer is the same as it was last time you asked. Never. It’s a private family possession.”
Matt was working on an in-depth series of stories about voodoo and its continuing existence in Louisiana. In fact, there had been two suspicious ritual-type deaths during the past year that locals attributed to powerful gris-gris. Matt probably hoped to get a Pulitzer Prize, the way his fellow journalists at the New Orleans paper had gotten one for a 1997 series on the failing bayou ecosystem. Well, he wasn’t going to get it with her family secrets…especially since she already had reservations about having used some of the information from the voodoo journal for her formula…especially since there was an unwritten family agreement that the journal’s contents were to be kept secret.
“It’s a piece of Louisiana history, Sylvie, and you know it. Don’t you have any community spirit?”
Sylvie was spared making an answer when Blanche returned, grinning from ear to ear. Sylvie made a mental note to cut off her friend’s supply of margaritas. But then Blanche jabbed her in the arm with an elbow and whispered, “Here comes boot-scootin’ trouble.”
She peered toward the house through eyelashes that felt intensely heavy. Then she gasped.
Lucien LeDeux.
Uh-oh!
Chugging down the last of her margarita, she tried to remember if she’d had two or three…whatever, it wasn’t enough.
The brute had promised to stay away for a week. One day had passed, and already he’d broken his word.
As to Blanche’s reference to “boot-scootin’ trouble,” well, trouble didn’t begin to describe the long, tall Cajun in jeans, white T-shirt, navy-blue blazer, and scruffy boots, headed in her direction with fire in his eyes.
With hysterical irrelevance, Sylvie wondered how much crawfish fat he’d ingested over the years.
“Sommese, Blanche,” Luc said, greeting the other two with a nod, then adding bluntly, “Get lost.”
Matt and Blanche glanced at each other, then back to the spectacle about to unfold before them. “Hah!” they both muttered, not budging an inch.
Directing his attention to Sylvie, Luc pulled her off to the side and got right to the point, barely able to keep his voice down to an outraged undertone. “What the hell have you done to me? That love potion you invented is driving me up the wall.”
“Shhh.” She put a hand of caution on his arm. Even though they were several feet away from Matt and Blanche, she worried that they might be overheard. “What are you doing here? You promised to stay away.”
He shrugged her hand off angrily. “I went deep into the bayou, just like I promised, and the only thing I could think about was you.”
“Did Luc say that Sylvie has invented a love potion?” she heard Matt ask Blanche. “I wonder if she got her ideas from that voodoo journal?”
Oh, Lord! The man must have a reporter’s sixth sense, or else he could read lips.
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Luc noticed and deliberately turned his back on them. He whispered raspily, “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t even fish. All I do is daydream about a woman I loathe.”
Loathe? Sylvie cringed.
“Dieu, you have me picturing you in some hokey Acadian house on stilts, along a stream, with a white picket fence and a horde of grimy-faced kids with blue eyes and heart-shaped asses. But that’s not all. I—”
“I am not flattered by that heart-shaped business, you know.”
“I picture you in my boat, in a thong bikini. Red. Made of some lacy material. And you know what the best thing is about lace, don’t you, chère? All the holes.”
Sylvie inhaled sharply. “I have never worn a thong bikini in my life. In fact, I don’t even own a bikini.”
“Worst of all, I picture you in my bed…oh, Lord, do I picture you in my bed! Hot damn, I didn’t even know they could do that with licorice whips.”
Licorice whips?
“Then there were those black fishnet stockings. Man, I about had a heart attack.”
Oh, my God! Sylvie thought her face would burst aflame. Even if she weren’t chronically shy, that last remark would be embarrassing. Lucien LeDeux made a habit of not only crossing the line between good taste and crudity, but pole-vaulting over it with great glee…at least, he did when around her. “You are making this all up,” she accused him huffily, and punched him in the chest.
“Am not,” he asserted, making a cross over his heart with a forefinger. “Really, can a man die of a perpetual hard-on? And mushy emotions are banging against the walls of my brain like ping-pong balls, and each of them has your picture on it, sweet cakes.” He took a glass of Scotch off the tray of a passing waiter and belted it down in one long swallow, then let out a whoosh of exasperation.
Forget about Luc dying of…that thing he’d said; Sylvie was the one who felt like dying…of mortification. It wasn’t that Luc was speaking loudly. Far from it. His words came out in more of a low growl.
“Give me an antidote. Right now,” Luc demanded.
“There is no antidote.”
He appeared taken aback by that news. “Well, then, you’d better be prepared to spend the next week or so on your back, sweetheart.”
He couldn’t mean what she thought he meant.
“And another thing…did you start on the pollution tests I asked you to do? Shrimp are dying as I speak. Am I going through this torture for nothing?”
“Shhh,” Sylvie warned once again. Matt had taken out a small notebook and was engaged in some serious scribbling, the whole time inclining his head toward Blanche, who was babbling away. “I did some of the preliminary tests, you jerk,” she gritted out. “And the results were just as you expected. Worse, even. Wait till you see the components in that sample. You may be able to make a direct connection with Cypress Oil. I’ll mail them to you in the morning.”
“Mail? Mail?” he sputtered.
“Hold the bloody presses!” Matt came up and hooted at Luc, as if suddenly enlightened. “I just made the connection between you and Sylvie…a lawyer and a chemist. Don’t tell me you’re representing that bunch of ragtag fishermen that are trying to fight Cypress Oil? ‘The Swamp Solicitor’ and the shrimpies? Man, you guys must have a death wish. And isn’t your father involved with Cypress?”
Luc blinked at Matt. Horror soon replaced the expression of fury on his face as he realized how much he’d risked by coming to a public place to confront Sylvie. Of course, it was all guesswork on the newshound’s part thus far. Still, Luc would have to be more careful. “You’re way off base, Sommese,” he lied. “And if you print one word, I’m gonna sue the pants off you. Then I’m gonna cut you up into gator bait, starting with that flapping tongue of yours. Don’t think I’ve forgotten the last hatchet job you did on me.”
“You mean, the one about the dingbat Vermilion Parish farmer who sued the electric company? The guy whose ducks stopped laying eggs when the power went dead for a day, cutting off the Cajun music piped into their pens?”
Luc put his hands on his hips and glared belligerently at the foolhardy reporter. “I won, didn’t I?”
“That’s because the judge was a Cajun. And you kept playing ‘Jolé Blon’ in the courtroom to illustrate your case. The judge couldn’t stop tapping his feet. The atmosphere in the jury box was like a regular fais do-do…a Saturday night dance down on the bayou.”
Luc told Matt to do something anatomically impossible to himself.
Out of her peripheral vision, Sylvie saw her Aunts Margo and Madeline approaching. The fire in Luc’s eyes was nothing compared to the bonfire in theirs. The legal-eagle gate-crasher, now chugging down another Scotch, had represented a client five years earlier who’d prevented them from expanding their herbal tea company onto a neighboring trailer park property. He’d claimed he was preserving local culture. Apparently, there were some antique trailers there…pieces of rusted-out Cajun Americana, much like the vanishing steel highway diners of the past.
Luc had lost the case, but managed in the process to give the trailer park so much publicity that its market value increased dramatically, beyond her aunts’ willingness to pay. Now, every time they looked out their office windows, they were forced to view a neon-sign-blinking tourist attraction.
But her advancing aunts were only a small part of the soap opera that was becoming her life.
Behind her aunts, Sylvie saw two late arrivals. Valcour LeDeux—an older, alcohol-dissipated, though still handsome, version of Luc in an expensive, tailor-made suit—strolled forward with a bourbon in one hand and his nymphet common-law wife in the other.
Luc’s body went completely tense the minute he noticed his father.
Rumor claimed that the man had physically abused his sons when they were children, and Sylvie could recall Luc with black eyes or a limp. At the time, she’d assumed he’d been brawling with boys his own age. Now she wondered. It would seem that Luc’s father had a lot to answer for.
Despite his unsavory reputation, Valcour LeDeux had money and power, thanks to his dumb-luck interest in Cypress Oil, and for that reason alone, he was her mother’s guest. Probably, he’d donated a pigload of cash to her last campaign.
She and Luc stared with horror at the two aunts…at the lech and the bimbo…then at each other. Without a word, Luc grabbed her hand, spun on his heel, and fled the scene, pushing her in front of him toward the old carriage house, which had been converted to a four-car garage, then beyond that to a massive magnolia arbor, which was fortunately empty.
Luc closed his eyes and breathed in and out, deeply, to settle his raging temper. The scent of magnolias was cloyingly sweet in the close confines of the bower.
How could he have taken the chance of speaking in a public setting about the lab tests? He should have known better. Secrecy was critical at this stage. He and Sylvie shouldn’t even be seen together. He’d never had trouble protecting his clients’ needs in the past. His only excuse was that he seemed to be under the influence of some madness.
A love potion?
No, that’s impossible. Maybe the stress of hating my father for so many years, and finally having an opportunity to retaliate, has made me snap. Maybe I’ve been alone too long. Maybe Tante Lulu is right when she predicts a big thing is going to happen to me this year. I only hope the big thing isn’t jeopardized by misdirected lust. It’s burning out the circuits in my brain.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that Sylvie had moved to the other side of the arbor, putting some distance between them. Smart woman!
Well, not so smart. Look at the mess she’s made with her stupid experiments. Look at the mess she’s made of me.
Twilight came abruptly, as it always did in the bayou region, like a celestial light switch, hazing the already shady arbor. Against the backdrop of huge blossoms in vivid shades of coral and pearlescent white, Sylvie resembled a paper doll inserted in an impressionistic painting. Unreal and hauntingly beautiful.
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sp; Sylvie? Beautiful? He really was going mad.
She wore a long gauzy dress of variegated shades of indigo blue—much like those in the fine fabrics Cajun women still hand-dyed and weaved. With its rounded neck that barely exposed her collarbone, its loose, waistless construction, and ankle-brushing length, it could have passed for an old-fashioned gown of another era, except that the back dipped low, low, low, exposing the delicious curve of her lower back.
He knew this because he’d followed her a short time ago as they’d escaped the prying eyes and ears at the party. He knew because his heart had dropped about two feet when he got his first gander at all that creamy, made-to-be-caressed skin.
No doubt about it, Sylvie Fontaine was pretty. Not that he’d ever been attracted to her in that way. At least not before. Or not consciously. No, he preferred wild redheads. Or wild blondes. And taller. He liked a woman who would fit better against his six-foot frame. And he sure as hell didn’t favor her haughty, touch-me-not attitude.
He didn’t like her one bit. That was why his sudden obsession with her was so confusing and intolerable.
Sylvie had been a thorn in his side for years…a visible reminder of all his shortcomings. For that reason, he jabbed at her whenever they met. Oh, she’d pretended to be timid when they were younger, but she was Ice Breaux to the bone, even then.
“How come you never got married again, Sylv?” he surprised himself by asking. He surprised himself even more by closing the distance between them and leaning against a trellis post mere inches away from her.
Her eyes shot up. Wide blue eyes framed by thick, silky black lashes. It was probably just mascara. As Tante Lulu always said, “Put beauty on a stick and it look fine, but the stick, she is still a stick.” Usually, Tante Lulu was making that remark to his half-sister Charmaine, a former Miss Louisiana who owned a beauty spa over in Thibodaux. Charmaine claimed she could make any woman beautiful.
“Why?” Sylvie snapped, regaining her composure and recalling him to his question about marriage. “How did you know I was married? It was fifteen years ago.”