The Red-Hot Cajun (5 page)

“Yoo-hoo! Earth to Rene!”

“Huh?” he said, coming back to the present. He shook his head to clear it, which caused water droplets to fly about. “You were the one who started it all by becoming a world-class snitch. In fact, that was the nickname us guys gave you back in elementary school. We could always rely on you to report all our bad deeds back to Sister Clothilde.”

She shrugged. “There were plenty of them.”

“Well, it’s been great chatting about old times, darlin’, but I’ve got work to do.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

He eyed her carefully to see if she was serious. She was still in her thong-peeping position, which gave him ideas he wouldn’t dare suggest to her. Like,
How about another shot?
“How do you feel about hard on... uh, hard labor?”
Mon Dieu, I’m losin’ my friggin’ mind.

“You mean the kind you’re going to do?”

“No. I mean chinking logs.”

She glanced down at her carefully manicured nails, painted a creamy white color. “Not in this lifetime.”

“Why don’t you go for a swim?”

She arched both eyebrows at him. “Are you suggesting I go jump in the creek?”

“Precisely.”
Maybe I’ll jump in, too. Maybe we can both cool off together. Maybe we can do
something about that two-year business. Maybe I can show you the staying power I’ve perfected
over the years.

“Maybe I will. Just to cool off, till the plane comes back. I’m sure your goofball friends will realize the legal danger they’ve placed you in, and hightail it back here before nightfall.”

“Oh, yeah. For sure.”
I
wouldn’t bet on it.

CHAPTER THREE

Beware of snakes with Cajun accents . . .

Wearing a pair of Rene’s black boxer shorts and a white Bite Me Bayou Bait Company T-shirt knotted at the waist, Valerie walked down to the stream and proceeded to wade in, waist-deep.

The slow-moving water was deliciously cool. Despite its tea color—from centuries of bark from submerged trees—it was pure enough to drink. She splashed water on her arms and face and the back of her neck, which was exposed by her high ponytail.

A black water snake cruised by, way too close, but not one bit interested in her. Her upper lip curled with distaste. Having grown up near the bayous, she knew non-poisonous snakes from the baddies, a lesson she still remembered from her father. She wasn’t afraid of them, but she didn’t like the creatures.

“Watch out for snakes,” Rene called out, laughing.

She turned and, without thinking, stuck out her tongue at him. It was an immature gesture that Valerie hadn’t made since she was a child, probably at him. But, hey, the cumulative abuse from the rogue and his wacko friends merited the tongue, in her opinion.

He just laughed some more. “Is that lawyer sign language?”

“Yeah. You’ll get my bill.”

“Hey, if I’m gonna get charged for tongue, I want it in a different way. And I don’t mean with ketchup.”

She rolled her eyes.

He stood on the steps of the cabin, which was on stilts—a necessity when this close to an oft-flooding stream. Holding a drill in one hand, he wiped his forehead with the back of his other arm. He was building a rail up the steep stairs. “Wanna hear a lawyer joke?” he asked out of the blue, his dark eyes dancing with mischief.

“No.”

“Did you hear about the new sushi bar that caters to lawyers?”

“No means no, buster. Besides, that one is as old as the hills.”

“It’s called Sosumi.”

“Ha, ha, ha. Why don’t you go drill a hole in something... like that hollow globe on top of your neck?”

“What’s the difference between God and a lawyer?”

“I am not listening.”

“God doesn’t think he’s a lawyer.”

Her nap apparently over, Tante Lulu came out onto the porch, carrying a metal pail. “It’s hotter ‘n a June bride in a featherbed.” Then she yelled out to her, “I’m goin’ to pick huckleberries fer dessert since you ate all the beignets.”

How nice of her to remind me.

“Wanna come with me?”

Hell, no!
“No, thank you.” The old witch would probably shove her in quicksand or into the jaws of an alligator to get rid of her, just so her stupid love spell, or thunderbolt, or whatever she called it, wouldn’t take effect. Tante Lulu didn’t consider her good enough for her nephew.
Hah!

She did a shallow dive under water and swam. It was too dark to see much, but at least she’d shut out Rene’s teasing chatter and the old lady’s insanity.

When she emerged, she was about fifteen yards downstream and closer to the small island that caused a fork in the bayou. She decided to walk the rest of the way and explore a bit.

The island was small, about half the size of a football field. It might very well disappear the next time a big storm hit the Gulf. That was the bayou, constantly reinventing itself.

If she were a nature lover, she would probably be impressed by the stately live oaks with their dripping moss or the cypresses as old as God, but she was a city girl. All she saw were trees. Birdsong filled the air, which sounded raucous to her rather than melodic. The scent of magnolia blossoms and wild roses was cloying in its intensity.

There were probably alligators in residence in the vicinity, but she didn’t see one. If she did, in her present mood, she would probably karate chop it, turn it inside out, and make it into a handbag.

Plopping down on the edge of the bank, she dangled her legs in the water. The weight of the past two days pressed down on her. If she were a crying kind of gal, now would be the time to let loose. But self-pity was not Valerie’s thing, hadn’t been for a long, long time.
Stop that whimpering, Valerie,
her mother’s voice intruded again.
Your father’s never coming back . Never, never, never!

Bam! Bam! Bam!

Rene was pounding at the rail now, with a vengeance. Maybe he was frustrated by the cards fate had dealt him, too. She almost considered feeling sorry for him. Almost.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

Whatever possessed me to tell him I hadn’t had sex in two years? My brain must be melting in allthis heat.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

Valerie gritted her teeth as he continued his incessant pounding. Every damn bird in the bayou chimed in with protest.

Bam, bam. Squawk , squawk . Chirp, chirp. Eek , eek . Bam, bam
... It was enough to drive a sane person crazy. Not that she felt particularly sane.

Rene reached in his tool belt for more nails, and blessed silence reigned. But only for a second.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

Valerie had been a list maker from the time she was a little girl. Probably an inborn trait with the females of the Breaux family. They were businesswomen, Congress-women, jury consultants, Court TV anchors, chemists. In any case, the first step in solving a problem was understanding the problem and that always began with a list.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

She decided to make a mental list now—of all the reasons she disliked Rene LeDeux.

No. 1: He made too much noise.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

No. 2: He wasted too much time on nonsense, like building a cabin, when he should be doing something bigger, like making gobs of money, or influencing society, or inventing a cure for cancer. Even lobbying to preserve the Louisiana environment, although even she knew that was a losing battle.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

No. 3: He should row that pirogue down the bayou and get help, even if it took three days. She would wait here for him, of course, sipping mint juleps and nibbling on bonbons. Lots of bonbons. There were probably bonbons hidden away in that Vermont-sized handbag Tante Lulu lugged around.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

No. 4: He should stop looking so damned tempting. Even with sweat rolling off him in buckets, even with that annoying smirk, even with way too many muscles, he was one prime specimen. Not her type at all, but prime nonetheless, she had to admit.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

Okay, so much for Rene. She had enough problems of her own.

When Elton Davis, TTN’s “Daily Update” producer, had called her into his office two days ago, she’d been shocked to be handed a pink slip. Not so shocked when she learned that her replacement was Sonja Smith, a twenty-four-year-old former intern, who also happened to be Elton’s girlfriend du jour.
Sonja, you
are way too good to work your way up through the bed sheets.

Valerie should have seen it coming. Five years of jury analyses alone should have given her all the clues. She was asleep at the wheel—uh, microphone—this time. She thought she knew how to swim with the sharks, but apparently she’d let her radar down.

For months, Elton had been hinting that she might want to consider plastic surgery to reduce a few wrinkles.
The nerve! I do not have wrinkles, even if Tante Lulu implied I have grumpy lines. Maybe a
smile line or two. But definitely no wrinkles. I’m only thirty-five, for heaven’s sake!

Then there was the issue of her “coldness.” Elton had actually tried to talk her into personality classes.

She’d told him in no uncertain terms, “The only person in this room who’s in need of a personality transplant has a penis. A small one, at that.”

The final straw must have been when she’d refused to spice up her trial news analyses by doing more
National Enquirer-style
segments. The jerk had lined up, without her permission, actors to re-enact a so-called celebrity rape case, which was still wending its way through the justice system. She’d walked off the set that day, thinking she’d taken the high road. Little did she know it was the road to unemployment.

She could have stayed and fought for her job. But she decided, instead, to come back home and think.

Years of law school and courtroom training had taught her never to act with haste. Cool down, plan, then take your opponent by surprise.

Hard to do when you’re kidnapped, though.

I can still strategize.

The Trial TV bigwigs are probably looking for me already. Elton is no doubt in trouble. They’llbe begging me to come back .

If they can find me.

Hmmmm. I need to think about what to ask for before I go back . No,
if
I
go back .

Now where did that
if
come from? Of course, I’ll go back , with the right incentives. Won’t I?

Even if they beg me to come back , it’s humiliating to be put in this position. Doubly humiliatingwhen you consider I’ve been fired and kidnapped practically in the same day.

Somebody is going to pay. And not just the guy with the little penis.

But enough self-pity. Like that old lawyer joke
—
put a hundred lawyers in the basement and
what have you got? A whine cellar.
Valerie chuckled.
Things must be really bad if I’m telling myself
lawyer jokes.

And Rene doesn’t think I have a sense of humor. Hah!

Alice in who?

“I feel like Alice in Wonderland after she fell down that rabbit hole,” Rend said, propping his chin in one hand, the elbow braced on the table. “My world has certainly been turned into
chaos and nonsense.”

About an hour ago, he had gone into the cabin where Tante Lulu’s cooking had raised the impossibly hot temperature to scalding, which would make indoor dining torture. As a result, he, Tante Lulu, and Val were holding their very own version of the Mad Tea Party outside the cabin, their table being an old wooden door laid over two sawhorses. There was sweet tea, but, instead of the Queen of Heart’s tarts, his aunt served them Cajun gumbo, crusty French bread, dandelion-vinegar salad, and some delicious concoction his aunt fancifully called Blueberry Huckle Buckle.

He sat on a high stump, and the two ladies sat on folding chairs. Their feast took place under a ridiculous tent-like structure of mosquito netting, which he’d erected at his aunt’s insistence to keep away pesky mosquitoes and no-see-ums, those tiny gnats that plagued the bayou.

“Alex in Wonderland would be more like it,” Val said with a soft smile, which she’d probably intended as a smirk. She had a really nice smile, Rene had to admit, when she wasn’t sniping at him, which she did most of the time.