Boudreaux 01 Easy Love (16 page)

“Well, I have ulterior motives.” She grins as her hands travel up my back and down again, over my ass.
 

“Do tell,” I reply and kiss her forehead.

“I was thinking about doing this.” She stands on her tip-toes, but she’s still too short to kiss me, so I happily oblige her, leaning down to take her lips with mine. It starts as a soft, simple nibble, and quickly escalates to tongues and panting and me gripping onto her lower lip with my teeth.
 

“There’s a child ten yards away,” she whispers against my mouth.

“I know.” I cup her face in my hands, kiss her forehead one more time, and breathe in her fresh, Kate scent, then lead her down the brick walkway between the enormous, ancient oak trees. “They were planted hundreds of years before the house,” I begin.

“It’s so cool out here,” she says.

“Yes, thanks to the river just on the other side of that levy, and with the way the trees were planted, it creates a wind tunnel effect. No one ever imagined that air conditioning would be a thing. This was the first form of AC.”

“Amazing. Look at how some of the branches rest on the ground!”

Jesus, I can’t take my eyes off of her. She’s pulled her thick, auburn hair into a knot at the back of her head. She’s wearing a strapless sundress and flip flops.
 

I wonder if she’s wearing panties under there.

I intend to find out very soon.

“This is seriously the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” I reply, my eyes trained on her gorgeous face, just as she turns to me and smiles shyly.

“Way to lay on the Southern charm,” she says.

“I am Southern, and it may have sounded charming, but it doesn’t make it less true.”

“Miss Kate! Miss Kate!” Sam comes running down the walk at full speed, the way only a young boy can, with Kate’s phone waving in the air. “He wants to talk to you!”

“I’m dizzy,” Rhys says dryly, as Kate takes her phone and smiles at her cousin.

“He looks happy,” she says.

“He talks more than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, and that includes you. Cute kid.”

“I have to go tell Mom!” Sam takes off back to the house, and I begin to follow him.

“I’ll be up at the house,
cher.
Take your time.” She shakes her head, as if to keep me here, but I simply kiss her hand and smile. “I have to say hi to Gabby.”

Her soft laugh follows me as I saunter behind the excited boy to the house. I glance around at the freshly mowed grounds of the plantation and the flowers around the house. Birds are singing in the trees, and the breeze Kate mentioned brushes through my hair.

Why haven’t I ever noticed before how lovely it is out here?

Because I haven’t noticed much for years. I haven’t given two fucks about anything for years.
 

Except for my family and the business, and not necessarily in that order.

I climb the steps of the porch, then turn and look out at the trees and the amazing woman chattering away at her phone, smiling and laughing.
 

She’s the reason I’ve come alive.
 

***

“Gabby makes incredible cookies,” Kate says, as she pops the last bite of an oatmeal raisin in her mouth and tilts her head back to the let the sun warm her cheeks. “I could get used to this.”

“What, cookies?”

“Cookies and sunshine and just…” she shrugs.

“Just what?”

We’re wandering through the gardens behind the house, toward the slave quarters and caretaker’s home, which is where Beau currently lives. I take her hand in mine and bring us to a stop, turn her to me, and cup her neck in my hand. “Just what?”

“Just being happy.” The last word is said in a whisper, tugging at something unfamiliar in my gut. Before I can pull her into my arms, she smiles and continues walking. “What’s over there?”

“Slave quarters,” I reply. “Gabby had them refurbished, just enough to make them safe, so guests can learn and check them out.”

“You owned slaves?” she asks with a gasp.

“Not me personally, no.” I chuckle and tuck her hair behind her ear. I can’t fucking stop touching her. “Many generations ago, slaves lived here, yes.”

She frowns and bites her lip.

“It was two hundred years ago, Kate. That wasn’t uncommon in the South.”

“I know.”

“This way.” I lead her away from the slave quarters, through a rose garden in a riot of color.

“I want to check them out,” she says, pointing to the small slave buildings.

“Later. Let’s walk through the gardens.”

“What’s over there?” She squints her eyes, looking in the nearby field. “With the fence?”

“That’s the cemetery.”

“Is it old?” she asks with glee.

“Yes.” I raise a brow. “Do you have a thing for cemeteries?”

“I know it sounds weird, but yes. Especially old ones. They’re so interesting. Can we go look?”

“Let’s go.”

She walks quickly through the gardens, barely paying attention to the flowers. The gate to the graveyard is rusty, and a bit stuck, and I make a note to have it repaired, as I wrench it open and Kate hurries inside.

“I bet this is creepy at night,” she says reverently, looking about like she doesn’t know where to start, then makes a beeline for the very back and studies each headstone as she walks by. “There are dates here that go back to the 1700’s.”
 

“And there are graves on the property older than that, but the Boudreaux family started this graveyard around that time.”

“Why aren’t these graves above ground like the ones in the city?”

“Because the water table is different here. We’re close to the river, but we sit higher. Even during Katrina, we didn’t flood. We simply had wind damage.”

“Amazing.” She folds her arms and continues to walk through. The headstones have moss grown over them. Some are so faded that you have to really get close to read them. Several oak trees are planted throughout the space, giving shade and shelter from the elements, but their roots have made some of the stones go a bit cockeyed.
 

It is exactly what it looks like: an old cemetery.

“Oh, there are babies,” she murmurs sadly, trailing her fingertips over a lamb carved in the stone.
 

I simply nod, my hands shoved in my pockets, my fingers rubbing the half dollar I keep there. The closer we get to a certain grave, the more nervous I become.

And that’s ridiculous. He’s been dead for two fucking years.

“The dates are getting more recent. Here’s 1977.” She sighs. “And these are sisters. Look,” she points at the dates on the stone. “They were only two years apart. Died in the same week.”

“They were spinster aunts,” I inform her, remembering the stories I’d been told of the old maids. “They lived together, here, their whole lives. They were odd.”

“Odd?”

I grin. “This is the Bayou, dawlin’. Let’s just say they enjoyed the eccentricities that living here brought them. And if you ever made one of them mad, well…Bad things usually happened.”

“They were witches?”

“Of course not.” I chuckle and kiss her cheek. “They were simply Bayou women.”

“Oh, this one looks new.”

It is new.

She reads the stone and her eyes grow wide. “Your daddy.”

I nod and read the stone for myself.

Beauregard Francois Boudreaux

1947
 
2012

Beloved Husband & Father

I’ve adjusted my sails.

“I’ve adjusted my sails,” Kate reads aloud, and looks at me with a raised brow.

“Daddy always said, you can’t control the wind, but you can adjust your sails. It was his way of reminding us that you can’t control most of what happens in life. You can only control your reaction to it. I imagine he did the same in death.” I smirk. “I’m quite sure he’s running Heaven by now.”

“I met him once,” she says. “You get your height from him.”

“Yes, and if you ask Maman, I got my stubbornness from him too.”

“Naturally.” She tilts her head as she watches me. The coin in my pocket is hot in my fingers, from me rubbing it hard, but I can’t stop. “You’re tense.”

“As I always am when I’m around my father.”

“You didn’t get along?”

I shrug a shoulder, every instinct in me screaming at me to shut it down, walk away from the conversation and take Kate back to our room where I can sink inside her for about two days.

“I loved him fiercely,” I say instead, surprising me. “And there were days that I hated him just as much.”

“Those are extreme emotions.”

“I spent my entire life trying to live up to what he wanted me to be,” I say quietly, and remember the man now six feet under the ground. His loud laugh. His cold hazel eyes. His disapproving shake of the head.
 

“I’m sure he was very proud of you.”

“No,” I reply, and let Kate fold herself into my arms for a long hug. “He wasn’t.”

“How do you know?”
 

“He told me.”

“What?” She pulls back with a frown. “He
told
you that he wasn’t proud of you?”

“Let’s sit.” I guide her to the bench beneath a nearby magnolia tree. She sits facing me, waiting to hear more.
 

Am I seriously going to tell her something that I’ve never spoken aloud before?

“He told me to pull my head out of my ass and do what I was born to do, which was take care of my family’s business.”

She blinks for several seconds. “That seems harsh.”

“He was right.” I sigh and rub my hand down my face. “He’d already groomed Beau to take over as CEO of Bayou Enterprises, which makes sense because he’s the oldest. I have a master’s degree in business, but I spent ten years partying, taking advantage of the perks that money brings. Fucking random women.”

I sigh and shake my head. “I was irresponsible and old enough to know better. I would have been disappointed in me too.”

“You’re not those things now,” she says.

“No,” I agree. “Sitting beside my father as he took his last breath, his last words being, ‘You can be so much better than this’,” will turn a man around.” She takes my hand in hers and places a sweet kiss to my knuckles. “So, I focused all of my energy on the business, on the family. I work stupid hours.”

“That’s a good description.”

“It’s accurate. Working twenty-hour days is stupid, but I can’t stop. I work, I look in on my family, and I go back to work. Occasionally, I call up one of the several women I know to hook up with and scratch that particular itch, and then I go back to work.”

Kate flinches. “You seem to respect women more than that.”

“Of course I respect women,” I reply. “My mother would kill me herself if I treated any woman with anything other than respect. But sex is sex, Kate.”

She nods. “I’m following.”

“Women don’t usually understand that.”

“I do.” She shrugs. “I haven’t been divorced long, and the relationship I just came out of was…
combative.
I’m not looking to replace it.”
 

“Combative,” I repeat, and just like every time she begins to talk about the hell—a hell I don’t even fully understand yet—that her ex-husband put her though, my hands want to clench and I want to simply kill him.

With my own bare hands.

“Mmm,” she confirms with a nod.
 

“He hit you.”

“I told you he did.”

I nod. “What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play stupid, Kate. You’re a smart woman. Did he ever put you in the hospital?”

“Pshaw,” she tips her head back, staring up into the branches above, but doesn’t directly answer. I grip her chin in my fingers and thumb and pull her gaze back to mine.
 

“You don’t have to tell me everything, just don’t ever lie to me, Kate. Did he put you in the hospital?”

“Once,” she whispers. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “So, you see,” she clears her throat, “I’m in no hurry to jump into anything serious.”

“I wasn’t trying to warn you off,
cher.
”

“I know. But even if I did want something serious, this,” she points back and forth between us, “has an expiration date.”

“Really.”

“I’ll be gone in a few weeks. But I need to make something very clear, Eli.”

“Keep going.”

“While you’re doing…
stuff
with me, you’re not doing that same stuff with anyone else.”

Is it any wonder that I can’t get enough of her? She’s fucking adorable.

“What kind of stuff?” I grin as she blushes.

“You know perfectly well what kind.”