The Royal Pain (19 page)

Take a peek at JoAnn Ross's
sizzling romantic novella
“Cajun Heat”
from the upcoming
BAYOU BAD BOYS
anthology available next month from Brava!

I
t was funny how life turned out. Who'd have thought that a girl who'd been forced to buy her clothes in the Chubbettes department of the Tots to Teens Emporium, the very same girl who'd been a wallflower at her senior prom, would grow up to have men pay to get naked with her?

It just went to show, Emma Quinlan considered, as she ran her hands down her third bare male back of the day, that the American dream was alive and well and living in Blue Bayou, Louisiana.

Not that she'd dreamed that much of naked men back when she'd been growing up.

She'd been too sheltered, too shy, and far too inhibited. Then there'd been the weight issue. Photographs showed that she'd been a cherubic infant, the very same type celebrated on greeting cards and baby food commercials.

Then she'd gone through a “baby fat” stage. Which, when she was in the fourth grade, resulted in her being sent off to a fat camp where calorie cops monitored every bite that went into her mouth and did surprise inspections of the cabins, searching out contraband. One poor calorie criminal had been caught with packages of Gummi Bears hidden beneath a loose floorboard beneath his bunk. Years later, the memory of his frightened eyes as he struggled to plod his way through a punishment lap of the track was vividly etched in her mind.

The camps became a yearly ritual, as predictable as the return of swallows to the Louisiana Gulf Coast every August on their fall migration.

For six weeks during July and August, every bite Emma put in her mouth was monitored. Her days were spent doing calisthenics and running around the oval track and soccer field; her nights were spent dreaming of crawfish jambalaya, chicken gumbo, and bread pudding.

There were rumors of girls who'd trade sex for food, but Emma had never met a camper who'd actually admitted to sinking that low, and since she wasn't the kind of girl any of the counselors would've hit on, she'd never had to face such a moral dilemma.

By the time she was fourteen, Emma realized that she was destined to go through life as a “large girl.” That was also the year that her mother—a petite blonde, whose crowning achievement in life seemed to be that she could still fit into her size zero wedding dress fifteen years after the ceremony—informed Emma that she was now old enough to shop for back-to-school clothes by herself.

“You are so lucky!” Emma's best friend, Roxi Dupree, had declared that memorable Saturday afternoon. “My mother is so old-fashioned. If she had her way, I'd be wearing calico like Half-Pint in
Little House on the Prairie
!”

Roxi might have envied what she viewed as Emma's shopping freedom, but she hadn't seen the disappointment in Angela Quinlan's judicious gaze when Emma had gotten off the bus from the fat gulag, a mere two pounds thinner than when she'd been sent away.

It hadn't taken a mind reader to grasp the truth—that Emma's former beauty queen mother was ashamed to go clothes shopping with her fat teenage daughter.

“Uh, sugar?”

The deep male voice shattered the unhappy memory.
Bygones
, Emma told herself firmly.

“Yes?”

“I don't want to be tellin' you how to do your business, but maybe you're rubbing just a touch hard?”

Damn
. She glanced down at the deeply tanned skin. She had such a death grip on his shoulders. “I'm so sorry, Nate.”

“No harm done,” he said, the south Louisiana drawl blending appealingly with his Cajun French accent. “Though maybe you could use a bit of your own medicine. You seem a tad tense.”

“It's just been a busy week, what with the Jean Lafitte weekend coming up.”

Liar
. The reason she was tense was not due to her days, but her recent sleepless nights.

She danced her fingers down his bare spine. And felt the muscles of his back clench.

“I'm sorry,” she repeated, spreading her palms outward.

“No need to apologize. That felt real good. I was going to ask you a favor, but since you're already having a tough few days—”

“Don't be silly. We're friends, Nate. Ask away.”

She could feel his chuckle beneath her hands. “That's what I love about you,
chere.
You agree without even hearing what the favor is.”

He turned his head and looked up at her, affection warming his Paul Newman blue eyes. “I was supposed to pick someone up at the airport this afternoon, but I got a call that these old windows I've been trying to find for a remodel job are goin' on auction in Houma this afternoon, and—”

“I'll be glad to go to the airport. Besides, I owe you for getting your brother to help me out.”

If it hadn't been for Finn Callahan's detective skills, Emma's louse of an ex-husband would've gotten away with absconding with all their joint funds. Including the money she'd socked away in order to open her Every Body's Beautiful day spa. Not only had Finn—a former FBI agent—not charged her his going rate, Nate insisted on paying for the weekly massage the doctor had prescribed after he'd broken his shoulder falling off a scaffolding.

“You don't owe me a thing. Your ex is pond scum. I was glad to help put him away.”

Having never been one to hold grudges, Emma had tried not to feel gleeful when the news bulletin about her former husband's arrest for embezzlement and tax fraud had come over her car radio.

“So, what time is the flight, and who's coming in?”

“It gets in at five thirty-five at Concourse D. It's a Delta flight from L.A.”

“Oh?” Her heart hitched. Oh, please. She cast a quick, desperate look into the adjoining room at the voodoo altar, draped in Barbie-pink tulle, that Roxi had set up as packaging for her “hex appeal” love spell business. Don't let it be—

“It's Gabe.”

Damn. Where the hell was voodoo power when you needed it?

“Well.” She blew out a breath. “That's certainly a surprise.”

That was an understatement. Gabriel Broussard had been so eager to escape Blue Bayou, he'd hightailed it out of town without so much as a good-bye.

Not that he'd owed Emma one.

The hell he didn't. Okay. Maybe she did hold a grudge. But only against men who'd kissed her silly, felt her up until she'd melted into a puddle of hot, desperate need, then disappeared from her life.

Unfortunately, Gabriel hadn't disappeared from the planet. In fact, it was impossible to go into a grocery store without seeing his midnight blue eyes smoldering from the cover of some sleazy tabloid. There was usually some barely clad female plastered to him.

Just last month, an enterprising photographer with a telescopic lens had captured him supposedly making love to his co-star on the deck of some Greek shipping tycoon's yacht. The day after that photo hit the newsstands, splashed all over the front of the
Enquirer
, the actress's producer husband had filed for divorce.

Then there'd been this latest scandal with Tamara the prairie princess…

“Guess you've heard what happened,” Nate said.

Emma shrugged. “I may have caught something on
Entertainment Tonight
about it.” And had lost sleep for the past three nights imagining what, exactly, constituted kinky sex.

“Gabe says it'll blow over.”

“Most things do, I suppose.” It's what people said about Hurricane Ivan. Which had left a trail of destruction in its wake.

“Meanwhile, he figured Blue Bayou would be a good place to lie low.”

“How lucky for all of us,” she said through gritted teeth.

“You sure nothing's wrong,
chere
?”

“Positive.” She forced a smile. It wasn't his fault that his best friend had the sexual morals of an alley cat. “All done.”

“And feeling like a new man.” He rolled his head onto his shoulders. Then he retrieved his wallet from his back pocket and handed her his Amex card. “You definitely have magic hands, Emma, darlin'.”

“Thank you.” Those hands were not as steady as they should have been as she ran the card. “I guess Gabe's staying at your house, then?”

“I offered. But he said he'd rather stay out at the camp.”

Terrific. Not only would she be stuck in a car with the man during rush hour traffic, she was also going to have to return to the scene of the crime.

“You sure it's no problem? He can always rent a car, but bein' a star and all, as soon as he shows up at the Hertz counter, his cover'll probably be blown.”

She forced a smile she was a very long way from feeling. “Of course, it's no problem.”

“Then why are you frowning?”

“I've got a headache coming on.” A two-hundred-and-and-ten pound Cajun one. “I'll take a couple aspirin and I'll be fine.”

“You're always a damn sight better than fine,
chere.
” His grin was quick and sexy, without the seductive overtones that had always made his friend's smile so dangerous.

She could handle this, Emma assured herself as she locked up the spa for the day. An uncharacteristic forty-five minutes early, which had Cal Marchand, proprietor of Cal's Cajun Café across the street checking his watch in surprise.

The thing to do was to just pull on her big girl underpants, drive into New Orleans, and get it over with. Gabriel Broussard might be
People
magazine's sexiest man alive. He might have seduced scores of women all over the world, but the man
Cosmo
readers had voted the pirate they'd most like to be held prisoner on a desert island with was, after all, just a man. Not that different from any other.

Besides, she wasn't the same shy, tongue-tied, small-town bayou girl she'd been six years ago. She'd lived in the city; she'd gotten married only to end up publicly humiliated by a man who turned out to be slimier than swamp scum.

It hadn't been easy, but she'd picked herself up, dusted herself off, divorced the dickhead, as Roxi loyally referred to him, started her own business and was a dues paying member of Blue Bayou's Chamber of Commerce.

She'd even been elected deputy mayor, which was, admittedly, an unpaid position, but it did come with the perk of riding in a snazzy convertible in the Jean Lafitte Day parade. Roxi, a former Miss Blue Bayou, had even taught her a beauty queen wave.

She'd been fired in the crucible of life. She was intelligent, tough, and had tossed off her nice girl Catholic upbringing after the dickhead dumped her for another woman. A bimbo who'd applied for a loan to buy a pair of D cup boobs so she could win a job as a cocktail waitress at New Orleans' Coyote Ugly Saloon.

Emma might not be a tomb raider like Lara Croft, or an international spy with a to-kill-for wardrobe and a trunkful of glamorous wigs like
Alias
's Sydney Bristow, but this new, improved Emma Quinlan could take names and kick butt right along with the rest of those fictional take-charge females.

And if she were the type of woman to hold a grudge, which she wasn't, she assured herself yet again, the butt she'd most like to kick belonged to Blue Bayou bad boy Gabriel Broussard.