Sandra Hill - [Creole] (17 page)

“That’s the damndest feminine illogic I’ve ever heard.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“You’re boring me. Go away,” she said, and resumed walking. “I’ve got a train to catch to Chicago.”

“Chicago? Not bloody likely.”

She stopped again, and tried a more even-tempered approach. “Listen, Etienne, you locked me up. I escaped. No harm, no foul. We’re even. So, hit the road, Jack. I’m not your problem anymore.”

“Oh, you most definitely are my problem. Showing that gold bar in public is comparable to waving a red flag. Pope’s men are going to be swarming all over this city within hours. And you, my dear, will be considered my accomplice.”

A brief spark of fear almost made her gasp, but she bit her bottom lip to halt any outcry. Unfortunately, that simple action caused Etienne’s eyes to linger on her lips. And she
knew by the parting of his lips and the dilating of his pupils that he was remembering way too much about her mouth and its wicked talents, talents even she hadn’t known she possessed.

“I can handle myself,” she said weakly, her fist instinctively clenching the handle on her briefcase.

He understood immediately. “Joleen’s pistols? Do you have any idea how to use a gun?”

“No, but I’m thinking about practicing on you. Guess which body part I’m going to aim at?”

“Guess which body part of yours I’m going to wallop once we get out of this city?”

“Another one of your perversions?” she cooed sweetly.

“God, I’d like to twist your sharp tongue into a knot.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Stroking his fake mustache, Etienne seemed to come to a decision. “You’ll have to come with us now, of course. Not that I relish the prospect of another moment in your company.”

“Thank you for the heartfelt invitation, but no thanks. You had your one-nighter. Go carve a notch in your bedpost and ride off into your MCP sunset.” She stopped walking and scowled at him. “I gave you your walking papers, mister. Scram.”

“So that’s what this is about. A woman scorned and all that?” He grinned.

The grin was the last straw. Harriet raised her closed parasol.

Etienne reacted just in time, deflecting her aim so that she hit him on the shoulder, not the top of his head. Passersby were watching, but she didn’t care.

“Calm down, Harriet. Men have been sowing wild oats from the beginning of time.”

She growled. “I refuse to be your wild oats.”

Etienne laughed. He dared to laugh at her.

She raised her parasol again. In the haze of her anger, though, a large black woman in a tacky yellow dress ac
cidentally walked into her, and then, not so accidentally, grabbed her briefcase. She and her companion, a black man in a Yankee uniform, rushed away.

With parasol still raised, Harriet shrieked her outrage and began to pursue the thieves. Her money was in that briefcase.

“Harriet, stop!” Etienne called after her. “It’s not what you think.”

Just before he tackled her from behind and hefted her into his arms, Harriet got a glimpse of her attackers up ahead. They’d slowed down at the corner and glanced back at her.

She started to laugh hysterically. It was Cain in the army uniform. And, oh, good Lord, Abel was dressed as a woman. While Cain looked debonair and dashing in the Union blue, Abel looked like a six-foot-plus Chiquita banana.

Her attention was diverted by the brute whose arms were locked around her flailing legs and shoulders, pressing her face into his chest so her words came out muffled and indistinguishable. He was explaining to a police officer who’d just walked up, “There is no problem,
capitaine
. My wife swooned. Her monthlies, you know.” He confided that last with a manly cough.

Then he whispered in her ear, “Hush, sweetheart. You have been checkmated.” Pinching a spot on the back of her neck, he added, “I’m not a hypnotherapist, darlin’, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve, too.” He pinched harder, and she felt really strange. If she didn’t know better, she would think that she was experiencing her first true-blue Southern-belle swoon. Either that, or Etienne knew about the carotid artery.

The last thing she heard Etienne say was, “I sure hope you can row, honey.”

Harriet was curled up almost in a fetal position, her face resting on some fabric that smelled vaguely familiar.
Etienne
. The cloth carried the scent of Etienne’s skin.

With her eyes closed, she smiled and burrowed her face deeper. She must still be in the brothel with Etienne. He hadn’t abandoned her, after all. She drifted in and out of sleep then, incongruously comforted by his presence.

Awareness tugged at her consciousness. Harriet couldn’t be sure if minutes or hours had passed. An excessive heat bore down on her, and her body began to ache from its cramped position.

She yawned and tried to stretch. But couldn’t.

Geez, did the lout have to take up the whole bed? Typical of the male species exerting its subliminal force.

But she liked his maleness, she decided. Running her fingers caressingly over the rough surface of the cloth that pillowed her head, she encountered several buttons and realized that it must be his jacket.

When had Etienne dressed?

Ribet, Ribet!

Harriet jerked awake. She was hungry, but surely her stomach wasn’t rumbling that loud. Was it?

Ribet, Ribet!

“What is that?”

“A bullfrog,” Etienne told her matter-of-factly.

“A bullfrog? In a brothel?”

Etienne laughed. And she thought she heard two other male voices laugh, as well.

Now fully alert, Harriet sat up and a blinding heat struck her. Opening her eyes slowly, she saw the most amazing sight. Overhead, bright sunlight barely penetrated a thick green canopy of ancient oak trees dripping moss. And the canopy was moving.

Confused, Harriet leaned back on her elbows and saw Etienne in his shirtsleeves, paddling a big canoe that resembled a hollowed-out tree trunk—a pirogue. Behind him was Cain, also rowing. Stretching her neck to peer behind her, she saw Abel in a yellow dress at the front of the canoe, his sunflower bonnet hanging down his back by its stream
ers. She was stuffed into a narrow space on the floor of the canoe between Etienne and Abel.

She put a hand to the back of her neck, which ached, and memory hit her like a two-ton truck. Etienne had pinched her there, on her carotid artery, just before she’d blacked out.

Oh, God!
The slimeball really had dumped her at Simone’s. And now he was kidnapping her. Furious, Harriet pushed herself upward to get to her feet. “Why you no-good, son of a—”

“No!” all three men yelled at once.

“Don’t stand,” Etienne warned.

But it was too late.

Harriet jumped up. The canoe swayed, then tipped over. Within seconds, they were all in the green, murky water, swimming for shore.

As she stood on the shoreline, her feet sinking in mud up to her calves, Harriet watched an alligator the size of Vermont cruise by with her briefcase in its snout.

“Go get that alligator,” she shrieked to Etienne.

He was tossing his satchel, Cain’s medical bag, and the case holding Abel’s trumpet onto the bank, while the two cursing brothers were righting the canoe. The icy glare Etienne shot her was not promising. Geez, how was she expected to know that the canoe would tip over?

“Okay, I’ll do it myself,” she said huffily. Slogging out of the mire, she grabbed one of the paddles floating by. Then she stomped along the river’s edge through mud the consistency of pudding, which quickly swallowed her tracks. The whole time, she kept in her sights the alligator, who was swimming near shore with her briefcase.

“Harriet, come back here. It’s not worth the money. Besides, Abel put your money in his trombone case.”

“Hah! Who cares about the money? That’s a Louis Vuitton briefcase. Besides, my birth-control pills are in there.”

“Birth…birth-control pills! You’re chasing a dangerous animal over pills?”

“Yep!” Raising her paddle overhead, she brought it down hard on the alligator’s head. The surprised animal gave her an astonished once-over with its protrubent eyes, then released its booty. She used the handle of her oar to maneuver her briefcase closer. Stunned, the beast continued to gape at her through its big, lidless eyes.

She turned to go back and saw immediately that the alligator wasn’t the only one stunned and gaping.

“Hey,” she explained to the three men who clearly had never seen a real woman in action, “a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to survive in the jungle.”

“This isn’t a jungle,” Etienne informed her when he finally got over his shock. “It’s a bayou.”

Tucking her teeth-imprinted briefcase under her arm—the handle hanging by a thread now—she looked up at the plague of her life. “Same difference, hon. Jungle, bayou, Wall Street, the dating scene…you need a machete to get through all of them.” She tapped his chin as she passed, just to annoy him. What she’d like to do was punch out his lights.

“Aaarrgh!”

“Perhaps you could channel some of that hostility into a hobby. Do you have a hobby?”

He spun on his heel and stomped away in front of her.

She followed him. “Anger is just an emotional reaction to a frustrating event,” she explained to his back. “A defense mechanism.”

“Someone must have put a curse on me,” Etienne grumbled.

“I’ve noticed that you’re often stressed out, and that’s unhealthy. Taking more than eighteen breaths per minute is the stress factor I always use for diagnosing—”

“You’ve been counting the number of breaths I take?” His eyes flashed with consternation as he turned on her.

“I do it reflexively,” she admitted.

“How have you managed to live so long?” He pulled his own hair with exasperation.

Geez, the guy really did need an anxiety overhaul. Being a softie at heart, she decided to help. “I’ve developed a good exercise for recovering from an energy drain of negative emotions.”

She waited for him to ask her to elaborate. When he didn’t, merely rolled his eyes heavenward, she went on anyhow. “With your mouth closed, curl your tongue under, and hum for three minutes. It works every time.”

At first, he seemed to consider her words, probably testing how to curl his tongue.

“You have to hum, too.”

He made a grunting sound of disgust. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get to Bayou Noir is find a voodoo priestess to remove the curse.”

Abel, who’d just come up, must have overheard. He appeared to be trying out the tongue routine. Or maybe that humming sound was suppressed laughter.

Actually, all three men were laughing now.

“Do you understand half of what she says, Etienne?” Abel choked out.

“No. Just smile and nod. That works with most women.”

The jerk!
“I’ve decided to make you three the control group for my MCP study. Jerks Anonymous, that’s what I’ll call you.”

“What’s an MCP?” Abel inquired of Cain.

“Male chauvinist pig,” Cain answered, to her amazement. She hadn’t realized he’d been listening so closely.

“You missed all the good lectures Dr. Ginny’s been giving us while you were off cavorting in Memphis,” Etienne added.

“Cavorting?” Abel snapped. “If someone hadn’t been havin’ his rooster groomed at the wrong time back on that train, we would all have been on our way to Texas by now.”

“Texas? You’re going to Texas? Oh, no! I am not going to Texas. That’s too far away from the entry point of this time hole I’ve fallen into.”

“I’m gonna need a whole wagonload of voodoo priestesses to get rid of this curse.” Etienne said, shaking his head.

“Perhaps you should try some tongue humming,” Abel suggested to Etienne. “You’re lookin’ mighty tense. Is it sexual deprivation?”

“Abel, you are a really dumb man with your continual sexual innuendoes. I’ve found that men who talk too much about sex are usually less than proficient in the sack,” she observed. “For example, do you know the difference between a golf ball and a g-spot? What am I thinking? Of course, you don’t.”

“Another dumb-men joke!” the three dumb men complained.

“The answer is: A man will search forty-five minutes for a golf ball.” She folded her arms with a self-satisfied “Hmpfh!”

“What’s a golf ball?” Cain asked, puzzled.

“Damned if I know,” Etienne answered. “What’s a g-spot?”

“Is she questioning my abilities as a lover?” Abel wanted to know.

“Durn tootin’ I am. You have this real fixation with sex, Abel. In fact, all men do.”

Etienne, Cain and Abel all said at the same time, “Who? Me?”

She took a deep breath and threw out one last shot. “Most of all, I think it’s really true what scientists say about men reaching their sexual prime at age eighteen. Everything is downhill from then on. So stop fighting nature, guys. There’s nothing worse than an overaged studmuffin.”

All three sets of jaws dropped in astonishment.

“I’m not downhill. Are you two downhill?” Abel asked.

“What’s a studmuffin?” Etienne asked.

“I can’t believe a lady would talk about such intimate matters,” Cain said.

“I think I’ll put her jokes to music,” Abel announced.

“If you do, I’m going to stuff that trumpet down your throat,” Etienne threatened.

Harriet plopped down to the ground and sighed, suddenly bone-weary. Like a slow-motion recap, all the horrible events of the past two days flicked through Harriet’s mind. The train derailment. Her time-travel. Being locked in a coffin. Making love in a brothel. Her escape, then the kidnapping. And finally, a confrontation with an alligator. It was just too darn much for one woman to handle.

“
Chérie
, don’t cry.”

Harriet looked up to see Etienne hunkered at her side. He reached out a thumb and wiped a fat tear off her cheek. She hadn’t even realized she’d been weeping. How sappy of her! But Harriet came to an even more alarming conclusion in that moment as she met Etienne’s gentle gaze.

Oh, my God! I’m falling in love with a jerk. A ten
.