The Convent Rose (The Roses) (8 page)

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” he mumbled and began slapping paint.

“My therapist said I should take up my old hobby to help me get over men. Think it’s working? I don’t,” said Renee squinting at her subject’s firm ass.

“You paint pretty good, Renee.”

“If Eve is busy, you can call me for pointers any time. I expected to hear from you before now.”

Bodey didn’t answer. He continued to slop away until Eve returned. “Hmmm, don’t try for so much detail yet. Just try to capture the energy of that bull,” said Eve bending close.

“Eve, I’ve finished mine. Check it over for me.” Renee drew Eve back to her side of the room. “I don’t know what to paint next—unless Bodey would pose for me.”

“Clothes on or off, darlin’?” Bodey said automatically. “Eve owes me a portrait.”

“From the waist up only!” Eve protested as Bodey started to strip off his shirt. “Leave the shirt on.”

“Whatever you want, honey.” Bodey took a seat on a stool.

“Wait, do you have a hat. You need a hat.”

“Got my lucky hat in the truck.”

Bodey retrieved it. The hat was black and battered and had a dented silver concha band around the crown. “Always won when I wore this hat,” he reminisced. “Damn good hat.”

“I think I remember that hat,” Eve said.

“Like I said, my lucky hat. I always wore it when I had something hard to do.”

“That old, holey T-shirt isn’t working for me, Eve. Please, can’t he take it off?” Renee whined.

“Fine. Take off the shirt, Bodey, if it doesn’t bother you.”

Well aware that he was trim and hard-muscled, Bodey took off the T-shirt so slowly his act would have done credit to a Bourbon Street stripper. He tossed it in a corner like a rag and slouched on the stool. He turned his pretty side toward Eve, but she motioned for him to turn the other way where a long, pink scar slashed through his tan across the ribs and around his back. A bull named Yellow Thunder had gored him during the dismount after he rode out the clock. Stitched up and bandaged tight, he’d completed the competition, come in first, too. He told the women that story as they worked. It wasn’t bragging because it was God’s own truth. About the time Bodey’s back started to bother him, Eve said they had to clean up so she could make her class at the Academy.

Bodey shrugged into his T-shirt and casually strolled around to take a look at the canvases. Renee had nearly completed her version. Bodey barely recognized himself. He knew he was well-muscled through the shoulders and chest, but she’d drawn a cowboy on steroids with bulging biceps and six-pack abs. Renee had taken the artistic liberty of portraying his jeans as unzipped nearly down to his crotch—as if he were some Abercrombie and Fitch model. All his scars had vanished. Bodey guessed she flattered him. He’d had more than his fair share of women and had no problem strutting around naked in front of them, but to show him like that in paint somehow made this cowboy uncomfortable.

Bodey moved on to view Eve’s canvas. She had scrubbed in his figure but given most of her time to the face. His stance, his scars, his eyes, though very blue, seemed to say here sat a man sore and weary, looking for a light in the window and a warm bed where he could rest. Did Eve see him like that?—a worn-out man with no one waiting at home. Who would want to marry a man like that? Who would even have sex with this guy?

Renee came up beside him. “Well, Eve doesn’t do portraits very often. I think mine is better. Help me get my things to the car, will you, Bodey?”

Bodey picked up her picture of the buttocks gingerly by the edge and hefted her rather heavy wooden box of art supplies while Renee carried her still very wet cowboy canvas carefully out to a black Lexus.

“Maybe we could do a private session at your place or mine to finish this up,” Renee invited with her hand on Bodey’s arm.

This close, he could tell the green eyes came from colored contacts. The darker roots of her hair showed around the crown of her head, hence that trip to the hairdresser she’d mentioned. As she pressed against him, her breasts felt harder than he remembered. Was there anything real left of Renee Niles?

Eve watched the old friends and lovers standing so close together. What a fool she had been doing that stretching routine for Bodey Landrum’s benefit. Leave it to her to come up with such a feeble attempt at being seductive. For a short while, she’d begun to believe he was very attracted to her. The kiss at the fireworks, the arm he had kept around her waist, the lip-locking this morning that might have led to sex, all of it was probably engraved in Bodey’s genes like the startling blue of his eyes. She carried her own art gear to the trunk of her old, white Toyota, placed it inside and gave the lid a slam that made both Renee and Bodey jump apart. Eve got into her car and turned the ignition. She’d be early for her class, but didn’t care.

“Hey! My stuff is still inside,” Bodey called as she pulled out.

“I’ll keep it safe for you. I’m late. See you next Tuesday.”

“I haven’t paid you!” Bodey waved two twenties at her.

She stopped and rolled down the window long enough to take one of the bills. “Since this wasn’t a private lesson after all.”

“Renee took the other bill from Bodey’s fingers and handed it to Eve. “My share. I’ll pay you back next week, cowboy, or maybe before. That’s eight on Tuesdays, right Eve?”

Eve shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or the other to her. Then, she peeled out spraying bits of broken oyster shells from the driveway on her students.

Chapter Four

Renee Niles Bouchard Hayes finished Googling Bodey Landrum on her home computer. He began to take shape in her mind as more than a passing amusement, perhaps husband number three. From her comfortable home atop one of the small hills in her daddy’s subdivision, she could just see the roof of the Three B’s mansion, a house twice the size of the one she lived in at the moment.

Marriage, Renee felt, should be a well thought out business decision, not some silly Romeo and Juliet affair like her stupid cousin’s involvement with Noreen Courville. Everyone knew the Courvilles didn’t mix with the Niles family because of some ancient grudge and pushing Noreen and Rusty together in that barn had been a hoot.

As Noreen, a student of history and lover of genealogy, told Renee—ad nauseam—the previous attempt to end that feud through marriage had been around 1843 when the youngest son of Maxime and Marguerite Courville went on a sudden two year grand tour of Europe. The eldest daughter of Aaron and Ramona Niles had broken off her engagement to Rufe Courville and married a local doctor while the young man travelled and so caused more bitterness between the clans.

None of Noreen’s family, except for her brother, the priest, had come to her and Rusty’s tiny and rushed wedding in the nun’s chapel at the Academy. If Renee hadn’t volunteered to be maid of honor and taken charge, the whole affair would have been a shabby disaster. True, the feud died down upon the arrival of the first grandchild, but Renee didn’t feel family grudges faded that easily. She knew she’d never forgive her own weak-willed mother.

Bodey would want children, probably. Renee guessed she could endure one or two if he insisted. After all, women these days had epidurals and tummy tucks and nannies. Hardly anyone died giving birth. She’d had the same thought about her carefully chosen first husband, Elias Bouchard, a noted and wealthy heart surgeon, who thought he had picked Renee as his trophy wife after ditching the sagging Liz, mother of his five children. Fortunately, Elias had no desire to ruin another woman’s body with childbearing.

But in the end, she had grown bored with her husband’s long hospital hours and devotion to golf and deep-sea fishing. How had Liz endured the man for so many years without indulging in an affair? Renee had taken four lovers over the span of her marriage—her tennis instructor, her personal trainer, the yard boy, and the pool man. When that afternoon storm blew up, she should have realized Elias would come home early from a day at the links and find her straddled across her trainer on a weight bench, but she had been too preoccupied with the man’s marvelous stamina to hear the thunder, the same thunder masking the arrival of her husband’s car. She despised Louisiana weather.

Fortunately, Elias was an intellectual man and not given to violence. Rather soft, the doctor could never have taken on her hard-bodied trainer anyhow. He satisfied himself with stripping his roving wife legally of everything but the furnished house her daddy had given them as a wedding gift and a few pieces of nice jewelry. If she hadn’t delayed having children, she would have gotten a much better settlement. Make a mental note—when she married Bodey start a family immediately and get it over with.

Renee reviewed the Landrum assets again, a few million dollars made on the rodeo circuit invested in oil and a Texas ranch, a line of western clothing, endorsements for saddles and blue jeans and who knew what else, and of course, the newly inherited Three B’s Ranch and its contents. His body was great, his face handsome, his temper easy-going unless riled, and he’d had staying power in the sack when they’d gone together in high school—but he wouldn’t be indulgent like her second husband, Gerald Hayes.

Renee had found Gerry, bless his weak ticker, a long, bad year after her divorce. He’d been faithful to his fat, diabetic wife until death did they part but was ripe for a well-deserved, shapely, good-looking reward forty years younger than himself. Gerry did everything to please her. He paid for the boob job even though he said her real breasts were a treat, but she needed to renew her confidence after being dumped by Elias. Gerald took Viagra against his doctor’s orders to please her in bed and died on top of her. Even the nitro she’d forced between his lips hadn’t revived old Gerry nor her rather out of practice attempt at CPR, a skill her first husband insisted she learn. His children got everything except for the Lexus, some lavish personal gifts, and a modest cash bequest that kept her comfortable for the past year. Now, she need to husband hunt again like a vampire badly in need of blood.

Bodey Landrum possessed money, looks, and a crude charm. Renee thought she wouldn’t be tempted to stray for a good long time during which she would make the sacrifice and have a baby or two. At least, Bodey had no other children to suck up his fortune. He wasn’t likely to die on her either. On the other hand, if he ever did catch her cheating, Bodey seemed like a man who might take physical revenge on her lover. She’d noticed some scars on his knuckles, maybe from bull riding but possibly from brawling. Strangely, that held some appeal for Renee who shivered deliciously at the thought of men fighting over her.

Who else was there? Not Red Courville who enjoyed playing around on his attractive wife, but would never leave her or their four kids. She’d given him a brief try and had no intention of being only a well-kept mistress. He’d use up her remaining good years, then find someone younger. Nope, her next husband had to be Bodey Landrum.

****

Bodey Landrum looked hard at himself in the mirror. Okay, he had a few tiny lines in the corners of his eyes from being out in the sun too much. He had a lot of scars, but none were disfiguring. Some women liked them. He kept trim now by doing ranch work rather than going to the gym, though during his career he had worked out. His tan was real, not man-made. His dark hair grew thick on top and without any gray. True, he kept it clipped short or else his curls grew out long and girly. Some women preferred men’s hair to be long enough to be gathered in a horse tail like that Evan Adams. Maybe Eve was one of them.

He stood several inches less than six feet tall and was squarely built. Sure, the gals liked longer, leaner men—men with gaunt cheeks and dark eyes like pet cocker spaniels and beaky noses like golden eagles. He regarded his own blunt nose, bright blue eyes, and the cleft chin with a hint of dark beard. Mama always said she thought his daddy might have had Irish blood.

Too bad Bets hadn’t asked, or maybe remembered, his father’s name at that party where she’d had too much to drink and gotten pregnant by a total stranger. The man had passed through town with the rodeo, and Bets did love a bull rider. He’d had beautiful blue eyes was all she could recall. Often, she’d laughed and said Bodey must look like his daddy because he sure didn’t look like her. Betsy Landrum never saw Bodey’s sire again, though she’d taken Bodey to the rodeo every year since birth and tried to match up faces. It was a hard thing to know about your mother.

Bets had put off telling him for sixteen years. Even being in the midst of hormone-driven teenage lust himself when his mama finally came clean hadn’t helped much. To know that his own mother once had been, well, like Renee Niles, or the women he’d slept with on the circuit, was hard to take, but that hadn’t stopped him from accepting their offerings.

After all these years, Renee would have given him a tumble if he’d gone home with her this morning like she wanted. She was still a good-time girl, and they’d had some fine sex between his birthday and the end of his senior year when he’d hit the road to do some rodeo before college started. He had the experience now to know Renee had been a fairly sexually accomplished seventeen-year-old. They’d hooked up now and again when she attended college, once at Noreen’s wedding in fact, and she’d been even more skilled then. With two husbands behind her, she probably had the experience of most high-priced call girls by now. His mother would have been proud that her son hadn’t been very tempted.

He was rich and ready to settle down. He stood up straight and looked at himself in the mirror again. Bodey Landrum was prime property. So, why wasn’t Eve showing more interest? Both times when he kissed her, he’d felt her on the verge of cracking open like a big dungeon door suddenly letting in the white, hot light of day. Both times, the door slammed shut. It galled him that maybe the key to that door lay in the hands of a horse-maned, eagle-beaked, puppy-eyed artist named Evan Adams ready to turn.

****

Eve took her lunch at the Academy as usual. She sat with the two elderly nuns who had influenced her the most during her school years. At the time, she thought of them as ancient, when in reality they had been in their late fifties and vigorous. Now, Sr. Helen’s arthritis and a palsy prevented her from teaching the art classes, though she still taught French. Sr. Inez, a candidate for hip and knee replacement, rarely went riding anymore. The shortage of nuns and a desire to help a former student led to Eve’s taking over their specialties.