Steamy Southern Nights (4 page)

The banging on his front door roused Claude from a sleep as deep and sweet as it had been short. A glance at his bedside clock confirmed he’d been in bed for less than two hours.

Muttering a string of obscenities, in French, because that’s the language he’d first learned to swear in, he grabbed the gun from his bedside drawer and made his way to the window in his bedroom that overlooked the front door.

“Merde.
” What was his all too appetizing cousine doing on his doorstep at seven in the morning?

For a brief moment he wondered whether she’d go away if he ignored her, then realized his car was still out front so she’d assume, rightly, that he was in the house. Sure enough, another banging on the door accompanied by the peal of his door bell informed him that his visitor wasn’t going away.

Stuffing himself into a pair of plaid boxers, and deciding that if she came calling at this time of the day, that’s all the trouble he was going to take to protect her modesty, he shoved the gun back in the drawer and shuffled his way downstairs to the front door.

She was already knocking again when he yanked the door open, so she almost fell inside. He resisted the grin that tried to surface at her surprised expression.

“What?” he demanded.

She looked as fresh and cool as the country she hailed from in a white top that showed a hint of cleavage and denim cutoffs that gave him ideas about how fast he could get them off her. When he got a good look at her face he saw dark circles under her eyes. She started to speak and was interrupted by a yawn. Hmm. Maybe she hadn’t had any sleep either last night. Wishing she’d taken him up on his offer?

“You want coffee?”

She blinked in surprise. “You’ve made coffee? I thought…”

“I haven’t made coffee yet. I was in bed.” He looked at her skinny but muscular body and thought about how it would feel wrapped around him. “I could be back there in under a minute, and you with me,” he said, reaching to cup her cheek in his palm.

Even as her eyes darkened in response, she looked away from him and turned her head so his hand fell away.

What had happened to the passionate woman who’d been as into him last night as he’d been into her. Well, almost. He wouldn’t have ended the night at the same point she did, but he didn’t think she’d called a halt because she didn’t want him.

“What?” he asked looking, puzzled, at her averted face. “What is it?”

“Nothing. I came to tell you that your mother’s got the stones for the patio. She wants to know if you can start laying them today.”

“Yeah, I can come over,” he said, not taking his eyes off her. “What’s happened since we were — getting friendly last night — and seven o’clock this morning?”

As he watched, she ran a thumbnail over the fluted edge of the Directoir table in the hallway. He doubted she even knew she was doing it. Her face was still turned away, the skin was fine-textured and creamy with a scatter of pale freckles across the bridge of her nose and upper cheeks.

“I saw you last night,” she said, talking to the table.

“We saw each other. We had a date.” He dropped his voice. “A date that ended too soon.”

She turned to look straight at him and there was a hint of hurt swiftly hidden in the depths of her green eyes. “After that. Around two. I watched you go out the back way.”

Merde. Fils de putain. Christ
!  He’d felt her watching him, he remembered now. He’d felt something and looked back at his mother’s house to find it dark and still. He held his expression and his tone in check, saying evenly, “That’s right. I went out.”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “Whatever your personal life is, it’s none of my business.” She said it with a tone of finality and an unspoken addendum: and it never will be. Then he understood what she was getting at.

“Lucy, I wasn’t with another woman last night.”

Her gaze searched his and a tiny crease appeared between her brows. “Then where were you at that time of night and why did you sneak out the back way?”

He opened his mouth and a dozen lies popped up. But he didn’t spout any of them. Instead he took her hands and held them. “I can’t tell you where I was and I’m sorry about that. But believe me, I’m not interested in any woman right now except you.”

Her hands twitched in his grasp but she didn’t pull away. She looked puzzled, frustrated, pissed. “I’ve known you less than twenty-four hours.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” he said, letting his impatience show. He held her hands against his chest and heard her quick intake of breath. Her fingers clutched, then relaxed as though she’d forced them to let go. “I don’t get this kind of rush every time I touch a woman. I’m guessing you don’t get it with the men you’ve known either.” He paused long enough for her to decide to answer the implied question, which she did with a shake of her head.

“It wasn’t pleasure that took me out last night, Lucy. It was business. I can’t tell you any more. I’m sorry.”

She gazed at him for a long moment more. “I’m only down here for three weeks. A vacation fling is a really bad idea, anyway.”

“Seems like a good idea to me,” he said, keeping his tone light.

She sent him a swift smile and took her hands back. “Well, I’ll tell cousin Beatrice the handyman’s on his way,” she said, backing out the door.

Merde,
he said, as he’d said far too many times this morning considering how early it was.  He shut the door and stumbled back to the kitchen. When he opened the coffee tin he found a scattering of black at the bottom, exactly enough to tease his nostrils.

“Aaaw, shit.” He tossed the tin in the sink where it made a nice, loud clang and then decided that, based on the first half hour, his day was going to be a real winner.

What if he told her? What if he came right out and told her where he’d been?

No, he decided. Too dangerous.

Lucy kept herself busy all that day. This was a working holiday, after all. She was glad she’d made her decision not to get involved with Claude. Glad he hadn’t tried to argue her into his bed when he wore nothing but boxer shorts. And she would not even think about how that man looked in nothing but boxers, his body still warm from sleep, his eyes heavy lidded and — No.  There were too many excellent reasons why sex with Claude was a very bad idea. And only one reason why it was a good one. Because her body wanted his.

Now she had two burning questions. Where had the family money really come from?

And what possible business did an antiques dealer conduct between the hours of two and five a.m.?

Lucy puzzled over this as she rode the St. Charles Streetcar to Tulane University campus where she was doing some local research.

Lucy loved research. Not only would she dig into the campus library and archives while she was here, but she wanted a sense of place. The atmosphere and conditions her ancestors would have faced. She wanted to feel their plight so that when she wrote about the expulsion and starting over in Louisiana, her book would be more than a series of dry facts.

Victims of the wars between France and England, the Acadians had been French settlers to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They’d displaced the Micmac Indians and settled the land for themselves and their families. Some of the Acadians had been there for generations when the British expelled the French settlers from the rich land. More than eight thousand of them were thrown out. They’d forced the young men and boys out first. The present and future soldiers were sent off on boats. The women and children to follow. She could never think about that part without hearing the wails and the tears, the begging that must have gone on. Longfellow’s Evangeline always made her cry.

The men were shipped off, or escaped to hide in the bush. And later, when the women and children were sent away, they didn’t always end up in the same place as their fathers, husbands and sons.

So many families broken apart, or finding each other but having to begin again from nothing. What must it have been like?

After a day with genealogy charts and obscure texts, sometimes in old French, Lucy was glad to leave. She made her way back home only to find Beatrice and Claude working together on the masonry.

Her girly bits got pretty excited when they spotted Claude. Could the man never be fully dressed when she saw him? He was shirtless again, looking manly and sweaty as he hefted flagstones in a pair of well-worn leather gloves. Beatrice was happily aiding him.

“Oh, honey, here you are home and I haven’t even started supper. We got carried away in the garden. Give me a minute to clean up and I’ll get your dinner on.”

“No, really,” Lucy said. “I’m not that hungry. And I’ve been inside all day. Why don’t I change and then I can help you get the rest of those paving stones in.”

So, she found herself five minutes later outside in one of her old running T-shirts and a pair of shorts.

It was good to have something manual to do after a gorgeous day spent inside a stuffy library. She liked the feel of the cool, rough flagstones and the dirt creeping under her nails, and there was something satisfyingly artistic about the emerging pattern. They left the big pieces to Claude, naturally, and if she indulged herself with the odd sideways peek at his muscular torso at work, that was her business.

“So, what’s this book about exactly?” Beatrice asked her.

“I’m planning to write about the expulsion of the Acadians through the eyes of one family. Ours. We’ve got a great network because of the family newsletter and we try to have the odd family reunion, so lots of us are in touch. I’m trying to trace what happened to the ones who left and what happened to the ones who remained. I want to make it a sort of living history, I guess.”

“So you’re going right up to modern time?”

“That’s the plan. It’s why I was so excited to discover we were related.”

“Will I be in your book?”

“If you give me your permission, I’d love for you to be in my book. I’ve brought my camera. I think photographs add so much.”

“Well, imagine that. Claude? We could be in Lucy’s book.”

“It’s an interesting project,” he said. Not sounding as excited as his mom about being in her book.

Beatrice wasn’t a silent stone layer, and while they worked, she chattered about her day and the people she’d seen at the market and the women she’d had coffee with. She’d pause to fill Lucy in on who the characters were every once in a while, until Lucy was certain she’d recognize these people if she bumped into them at the market. Even the gossip was entertaining until Beatrice said, “Oh, and Claude, you must have heard about the robbery last night.”

She glanced up sharply to find Claude’s gaze flash her way for a second before flicking away again. “Yes. I heard. Some customers talked about it in the shop.”

“What robbery?” Lucy asked.

“The Guillotine diamonds. They’re famous.”

“The what?” She dusted off her hands and stood straight.

“Well, they’re famous here. A French noblewoman who was to be guillotined during the French revolution bartered her release and that of her children with a priceless set of family diamonds. Some greedy revolutionary took the diamonds, one piece at a time as her children were smuggled out of the country. I always thought she must have had a sense of humor, for she swapped the final piece, her tiara, for her head.”

“That’s quite a story.”

Beatrice chuckled, like someone about to share a favorite joke. “The best part is that she bargained with the paste copies she’d had made years earlier. She rarely wore the real jewels – too frightened to lose them I suppose. Anyway, her copies fooled the revolutionary and I’m sure she and her children enjoyed wearing them even more after they escaped to England.

Her grand-daughter came here, to Louisiana, bringing the set with her. They were only sold out of the family a couple of years ago.” Beatrice shook her head. “They’d held on to those jewels through so many turbulent times, it was a tragedy. And dreadful dot.com people bought them. But they got a very good price so the woman who had to sell them was able to keep her home, at least. Claude can tell you more. He handled the sale.”

“You did?”

“Yes. Cousine you are mangling that plant.”

She hadn’t even noticed, but sure enough, her right hand was pulling on a pretty flowering plant in the walled planter behind her. “Oh.”

He was at her side, his skin gleaming with exertion, smelling like a hard-working sexy man. Carefully he took out the plant, used his gloved hand to make a dent in the earth. Where had he been last night? She wondered, as she watched him engrossed in saving a small plant. Did his mysterious disappearance have anything to do with stolen diamonds? He was so close to her that his arm brushed hers when he turned the plant and carefully spread its roots before re-planting it. “There,” he said, turning and looking down at her. “Now it will grow better.”

“Thank you.” She watched him. “Were they very beautiful, those diamonds?”

“I’ve never seen so flawless a set.”

“Must have been hard to let them go?”

“If I kept everything for myself, Cousine, I wouldn’t have much of a business.”

She smiled, as he’d meant her to, but she wondered.

There could be all kind of things that took a man out in the middle of the night, she decided as they resumed work. The coincidental timing did not make Claude a thief.

Three days later, she still didn’t know whether her distant cousin Claude was a thief. But she knew for damn sure that he was a liar.

She was jogging early to avoid the heat and to get her exercise out of the way before she went to the university for a few hours. Her days were already falling into a routine after being here less than a week. She ran early, although this morning was earlier than ever. It was five thirty and she would still be asleep if some bird hadn’t mistaken her for its mother or love interest and trilled at her from outside her window.

Oh, well, Lucy decided, it was a gorgeous morning, the early light soft and mellow and if she ran now she’d have time to catch up on her emails while she drank her coffee.

Then, she and Beatrice would breakfast together and afterward she’d take off for the library and her hostess would go shopping or lunch out or go to one of her many activities with her wide circle of friends. Lucy soon discovered her hostess was a respected New Orleans socialite and philanthropist, and few charitable or social committees existed that she wasn’t involved in. She was also an inexhaustible source of information about New Orleans society past and present.