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The Cajun Cowboy
By Sandra Hill Warner Forever
Copyright © 2004 Sandra Hill
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-446-61295-2
Chapter One
Give me a buzz, baby ... "I'm a born-again virgin."
Charmaine LeDeux made that pronouncement with a faint feminine belch after downing three of the six oyster shooters sitting on the table before her at The Swamp Tavern. She was halfway to meeting her goal of getting knee-walking buzzed.
The jukebox played a soft Jimmy Newman rendition of "Louisiana, The Key to My Soul." The jambalaya cooking in the kitchen filled the air with pungent spices. Gater, the bald-headed, longtime bartender, washed glasses behind the bar.
Louise Rivard-better known as Tante Lulu-sat on the opposite side of the booth from Charmaine. She arched a brow at the potent drinks in front of Charmaine compared to her single glass of plain RC cola and looked pointedly at Charmaine's stretchy red T-shirt with its hairdresser logo I CAN BLOW YOU AWAY. Only then did the old lady declare, "And I'm Salome about to lose a few veils." In fact, Tante Lulu, who had to be close to eighty, was wearing a harem-style outfit because of a belly dance class she planned to attend on the other side of Houma that afternoon. In the basement of Our Lady of the Bayou Church, no less! But first, she'd agreed to be Charmaine's designated driver.
"I'm sher ... I mean, serious." Charmaine felt a little woozy already. "My life is a disaster. Twenty-nine years old, and I've been married and divorced four times. Haven't had a date in six months. And I've got a loan shark on my tail."
"A fish? Whass a fish have to do with anything?" Tante Lulu sputtered.
Sometimes Charmaine suspected that Tante Lulu was deliberately dense. But she was precious to Charmaine, who teared up just thinking about all the times the old lady's cottage had been a refuge to her whenever she'd run away from unbearable home conditions. Being the illegitimate daughter of a stripper and the notorious womanizer Valcour LeDeux had made for a rocky childhood, with Tante Lulu being a little girl's only anchor. She wasn't even Charmaine's blood relative; she was blood aunt only to Charmaine's half brothers, Luc, René, and Remy.
So, it was with loving patience that Charmaine explained, "Not just any fish. A shark. Bobby Doucet wants fifty thousand dollars by next Friday or he's gonna put a Mafia hit on me; I didn't even know they had a Mafia in southern Loo-zee-anna. Or maybe they'll just break my knees. Jeesh! Yep, I'd say it's time for some new beginnings. I'm gonna be a born-again virgin."
"What? You doan think the Sopranos kill virgins?" Tante Lulu remarked drolly. "And, yeah, there's a Mafia in Louisiana. Ain't you never heard of the Dixie Mafia?"
"The born-again-virgin thingee is a personal change. The loan-shark thingee would require a different kind of change ... like fifty thousand dollars, and it's going up a thousand dollars a day in interest. I gotta get out of Dodge fast."
Tante Lulu did a few quick calculations in her head. "Charmaine! Thass 10 percent per day. What were you thinkin'?" Tante Lulu might talk a little dumb sometimes, but she was no dummy.
Charmaine shrugged. "I thought I'd be able to pay it off in a few days. It started out at twenty thousand, by the way."
"Tsk-tsk-tsk!"
"I don't suppose you could lend me the money?"
"Me, I ain't got that kind of money. I thought yer biz-ness was goin' good. What happened?"
"The business is great." Charmaine owned two beauty shops, one in Lafayette and the other a spa here in Houma. Both of them prospered, even in a slow economy, or at least broke even. Apparently, women didn't consider personal appearance a luxury. Nope, her spas were not the problem. "I made a lot of money in the stock market a few years back. That's when I bought my second shop. But I got careless this year and bought some technology stocks on margin. I lost more money than I put in. It was a temporary problem, which spiraled out of control when I borrowed money from Bucks 'r Us. Who knew it was a loan-shark operation?"
"Well, it sure as shootin' doan sound like a bank. Have you gone to the police?"
"Hell's bells, no! I'd be deader'n a Dorchat duck within the hour if I did that."
"How 'bout Luc?" Lucien LeDeux was Charmaine's half brother and a well-known local lawyer.
She nodded. "He's working on it. In the meantime, he suggested, maybe facetiously, that I hire a bodyguard." Tante Lulu brightened. "I could be yer bodyguard. Me, I got a rifle in the trunk of my T-bird outside. You want I should off Bobby Doucet? Bam-bam! I could do it. I think."
Off? Where does she get this stuff? Charmaine groaned. That's all I need ... a senior-citizen, one-woman posse. "Uh, no thanks." With those words, Charmaine tossed back another shot glass filled with a raw oyster drowning in Tabasco sauce, better known with good reason as Cajun Lightning, then followed it immediately with a chaser of pure one-hundred-proof bourbon.
"Whoo-ee!" she said, accompanied by a full-body shiver. "Back to that other thing," Tante Lulu said. "Charmaine, honey, you caint jist decide to be a virgin again.
It's like tryin' to put the egg back together once the shell's been cracked. Like Humpty Dumpty."
Hump me, dump me. That oughta be my slogan. Oughta have it branded on my forehead.
A more upbeat song, "Cajun Born," came on the jukebox, and Charmaine jerked upright. Shaking her fifty-pound head slowly from side to side, she licked her lips, which were starting to get numb. "Can so," she argued irrationally. Or was that rationally? Whatever. "Be a virgin again, I mean. It's a big trend. Some lady even wrote a book about it. There's Web sites all over the Internet where girls promise to be celibate till their wedding day. Born-again virgins."
"Hmpfh!" was Tante Lulu's only response as she sipped on her straw.
"Besides, I might even have my hymen surgically replaced."
Tante Lulu was a noted traiteur, or healer, all along the bayou, and she was outrageous beyond belief in her antics and attire. For once, Charmaine had managed to shock her. "Is hey-man what I think it is?"
"It's hi-man, and yes, it is what you think."
"Hey, hi ... big difference! You are goin' off the deep end, girlie, iffen yer thinkin' of havin' some quack sew you up there."
Deep end is right. "I didn't say I was going to do it, for sure. Just considering it. But born-again virgin, that I am gonna do, for sure."
"Hmmm. I really do doubt that, sweetie," Tante Lulu said, peering off toward the front of the tavern, which was mostly empty in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.
Frankly, I shouldn't be here, either, Charmaine thought. She should be at one of her shops, but she was afraid Mafia thugs would catch up with her in advance of the deadline.
"Seems to me that all yer resolutions are 'bout to melt," Tante Lulu chortled.
Charmaine turned to see what Tante Lulu was gawking at with that strange little smirk on her face. Then Charmaine did a double take.
It was Raoul Lanier, her first ex-husband. Some people called him Rusty, a nickname he'd gained as an adolescent when his changing voice had sounded like a creaking, rusty door. She'd preferred his real name in the past. He always said he liked the way it sounded on her tongue, slow and sexy, especially when ...
She'd been a nineteen-year-old student at LSU and former Miss Louisiana when she'd married Rusty. He'd been twenty-one and a hotshot football player and premed student at the same school. As good as he'd been at football, which earned him a scholarship, his dream had always been to be a veterinarian. His last words to her before they'd parted had been, "Once a bimbo, always a bimbo." She would never forgive or forget those words. Never.
Charmaine had been avoiding Rusty for weeks, ever since he got released from prison. And, yes, she was bound and determined to think of him as Rusty now. She thought about ducking under the table, but he'd already seen her. And he had a look in his dark Cajun eyes, unusually grim today, that said, "Here I come, baby. Batten down the hatches."
Man-oh-man, her hatches had always been weak where Rusty was concerned. All he had to do was wink at her, and she melted. He wore faded Wrangler jeans with battered, low-heeled boots, a long-sleeved denim shirt, and a cowboy hat. He was six-foot-three of gorgeous, dark-skinned, dark-haired Cajun testosterone. Temptation on the hoof.
Good thing she was a born-again virgin.
Women are the root of all trouble, guar-an-teed!
Finally, after a month of off-and-on bird-dogging Charmaine, Raoul had finally caught up with her. She wasn't going to escape.
"Ladies." He took off his hat and nodded a greeting, first at Charmaine, then at Tante Lulu, who together made an odd couple, with Charmaine being so tall at five feet nine and the old lady such an itty-bitty thing at barely five feet. And Tante Lulu was wearing the most outlandish outfit. Looked like a belly dancer suit or something. But then, Charmaine wasn't any better. She wore her usual suggestive attire designed to tease, which didn't bear close scrutiny in his present mood. Not that he wasn't teasable, especially after two years in the state pen.
But, no, he couldn't blame his reaction to Charmaine on his two years of forced celibacy. She'd always had that hair-trigger arousal effect on him. When she'd dumped him ten years ago, he'd about died. Quit school for a semester. Lost his football scholarship. A nightmare. Every time he'd heard about her remarrying, he'd relived the pain. He couldn't go through that again, especially not with all the current problems in his life.
Steel yourself, buddy. She's only a woman, the logical side of his brain said.
Hah! the perverse side said.
He pulled up a chair and sat down, propping his long legs, and crossing them at the ankles on the edge of Charmaine's side of the booth, barring any hasty departure on her part. He was no fool. He recognized the panic in her wide whiskey eyes.
After taking a swallow from the long neck he'd purchased at the bar, he set the bottle down, noticing for the first time the line of oyster shooters in front of Charmaine. Holy shit! Had she really drunk four of them already? In the middle of the afternoon?
"What are we celebrating, chère?" he asked.
"We aren't celebrating anything," Charmaine answered churlishly.
Hey, I'm the one who should be churlish here, Ms. Snotty.
"We're celebrating Charmaine's virginity," Tante Lulu announced.
"Is that a fact?" Raoul said with a grin.
Charmaine groaned at Tante Lulu's announcement and downed another oyster shooter, first the oyster, then the bourbon. Gulp-gulp! He watched with fascination the shiver that rippled over her body from her throat, across her mighty-fine breasts, her belly, and all her extremities, including her legs encased in skintight black jeans. Then his eyes moved back to her breasts, and her nipples bloomed under her sizzling red hooker T-shirt. Charmaine watched him watching her and groaned again.
Was it possible he still affected her the way she affected him? Don't go there, Raoul, he advised himself. Tante Lulu chuckled. "Yep, Charmaine's a born-again virgin. She's joinin' a club and everything. Might even have her doo-hickey sewed back up."
Raoul wasn't about to ask Tante Lulu what doo-hickey she referred to. Instead, he commented to Charmaine, "Hot damn, you always manage to surprise me, darlin'." He immediately regretted his words when Charmaine batted her eyelashes at him and drawled, "That's my goal in life, darlin'."
He gritted his teeth. He was so damn mad at her, not because she was being sarcastic now, but because she'd made his life miserable the past few weeks ... in fact, the past ten years.
Tante Lulu giggled. He glanced toward the old lady, not wanting to rehash old-or new-business in front of her. "Charmaine and I shouldn't be squabbling in front of you."
Tante Lulu just waved a hand in front of her face, and said, "Doan you nevermind me, boy. Squabble all you want. Jist pretend I'm not here."
Right. Like everything we say isn't going to be broadcast on the bayou grapevine by nightfall.
"Was you framed?" Tante Lulu asked him all of a sudden.
He hesitated. Getting sent to Angola for drug dealing was a sore subject with him and not one he was ready to discuss. "Yes," was all he disclosed in the end.
"I knew it!" Tante Lulu whooped, slapping her knee with a hand, which set her bells to jingling. "This is yer lucky day, boy, 'cause I been thinkin' 'bout becomin' a dick."
That pronouncement boggled his mind till he realized that the old lady meant private eye and that she was offering to help clear his name.
He heard Charmaine giggle at his discomfort. "Uh, thanks for the offer, but no thanks." "Are you still an animal doctor?"
Raoul's heart wrenched with pain, and he couldn't breathe for a second. This was definitely a subject he did not want to discuss. Finally, after unclenching his fists, he said tersely, "I lost my veterinary license when I went to prison."
"Oh, Raoul." That was Charmaine speaking. Her eyes were filled with sympathy.
Yep, that's what I want from you, babe. Pity. And now you call me Raoul. Talk about bad timing!
"Being a vet was always the most important thing in the world to you."
Not the most important thing. "I'll get it back." "I hope so," she replied softly.
Before Tante Lulu had a chance to voice her opinion, he steered the conversation in another direction. "What's the reason for the binge, Charmaine?"
"None of your business." She licked her flame red lips, which were probably desensitized from all the booze.
He'd like a shot at sensitizing them up.
No, no, no! I would not. That would be a bad idea. I am not going to fall for Charmaine again. No way! Still, if she doesn't stop licking those kiss-me-quick lips, I might just leap over the table and do it for her.
Back at the beginning of time-probably post-Garden of Eden since Adam was a dunce, for sure, when it came to Eve-men had learned an important lesson that even today hadn't sunk in with women. The female of the species should never lick anything in front of the male. Licking gave men ideas. Raoul would bet his boots good ol' Eve had licked that apple first before offering it to Adam. So, keep on lickin', Charmaine, and you might just see what's tickin'.
"The Mafia is after her," Tante Lulu said. "And her life's in the outhouse."
"The toilet," Charmaine corrected her aunt, with another lick.
"Huh?" Raoul had lost his train of thought somewhere between Charmaine's new virginity and her licking exercise.
"You asked why Charmaine's on a binge. And I said the Mafia is after her," Tante Lulu explained.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Cajun Cowboy by Sandra Hill Copyright © 2004 by Sandra Hill. Excerpted by permission.
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