The Red-Hot Cajun (2 page)

Tante Lulu calling someone wacky was like the alligator calling the water snake wet. But they
were
eccentric. Like, right now, J.B. wore his old Marine camouflage fatigues; the only things missing were an ammunition belt and rifle. Maddie wore an orange jumpsuit that had a former life on either an airplane mechanic or a prisoner. Probably a prisoner. She and J.B. had both served time on occasion when their participation in peaceful protests had become not-so-peaceful. J.B. was a well-decorated soldier who had come home to emerge as a “soldier” in domestic causes.

“Holy crawfish! Where do those two shop? Goodwill or Army Surplus?” Tante Lulu whispered to him.

He had no time to answer or warn his great aunt to be nice. Not that she would ever deliberately hurt anyone... unless she perceived them to be a threat to her family. She did have a tendency to be blunt, though.

“Hey, Joe Bob. Hey, Maddie. Whatcha doin’ here?” Tante Lulu asked as they approached.

Yep, blunt-is-us.
Rene groaned inwardly but smiled. “J.B., Maddie. Good to see you again so soon.”

Whatcha doin’ here?

They didn’t smile back.

Uh-oh! The serious expressions on their faces gave Rene pause. Something was up.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Now, Rene”, don’t be gettin’ mad till you’ve heard us out,” Maddie urged.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up on high alert. “Why would I get mad at you?” The last time he’d lost his temper with them was two years ago when they’d used their shrimp boat as a battering ram against a hundred thousand dollar sport-fishing boat out on the Gulf. The sport fishermen’s crime: hauling up almost extinct species of native fish as by-catch, which meant they just tossed them back into the water, dead. It had taken all of his brother Luc’s legal expertise to extricate J.B. and Maddie from that mess.

“You’ve got a lot of work done since we were here last week,” J.B. remarked, ignoring both his wife’s and Rene’s words. The idiot obviously made polite conversation to cover the fact that he was as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

“Forget the casual bullshit. What’s going on?” Rene insisted on knowing.

It was Maddie who answered. “Remember how you said one time that what we need out here in the bayou is some celebrity to get behind our cause? Like Dan Rather or Diane Sawyer. TV reporters or somethin’ who would spend a week or two here where they could see firsthand how the bayou is bein’ destroyed. Put us on the news, or make a documentary exposing the corruption.”

Man oh man, I hate it when people quote back to me stuff I don’t recall saying.
“Yeah,” he said hesitantly. “So, did you bring Dan and Diane out here? Ha! Like that would ever happen!”

“Well, actually...” J.B. began.

Rene went stiff.

Tante Lulu whooped. “Hot-diggity-damn!”

It was then that Rene noticed how J.B. and Maddie kept casting surreptitious glances toward the plane.

“What’s this all about? What’s in the plane?”

“Jumpin’ Jehosephat! They musta brought Dan Rather here,” his great aunt said, slapping her knee with glee. “Great idea! I allus wanted to meet Dan Rather. Do ya think he’d give me an autograph?”

“It’s not Dan Rather,” Maddie said, her face flushing in the oddest way. Odd because nothing embarrassed Maddie. Nothing.

This must be really bad.
“Spit it out, guys. If it’s not Dan Rather”—he couldn’t believe he actually said that—”then who is it?”

“Oh,
mon Dieu!
It mus’ be Diane Sawyer then. I allus wanted her autograph, too. Betcha she could introduce me to Richard Simmons.”

“What’re you wantin’ with that flake Richard Simmons?” J.B. asked.

Tante Lulu smacked his upper arm. “Bite yer tongue, boy. He’s a hottie.”

“Are you nuts?” Maddie asked.

“No more’n you,” Tante Lulu shot back.

“Unbelievable!” Rene said, putting his face in his hands. After counting to ten, he turned on J.B. “Is there a human being on that plane?”

J.B. nodded.

There is! Son-of-a-bitch! I sense a disaster here. A monumental disaster. And I thought I wasescaping here to peace and tranquillity.
“Why is that human being not getting off the plane?” he asked very slowly, hoping desperately that his suspicions were unfounded.

“Because the human being is tied up.” J.B. also spoke very slowly.

Tied up? Holy shit! Holy freak in’ shit! I’m getting the mother of all headaches. St. Jude, whereare you? I could use some help.

A voice in his head replied,
Not when you use bad language. Tsk -tsk -tsk !

It was either St. Jude, or he was losing his mind. He was betting on the latter.

A
celebrity who could do a TV documentary, that’s what they hinted at.
“A network TV anchor?”

he finally asked, even though he was fairly certain they weren’t that crazy. Best to make sure, though. “Did you kidnap a major network TV anchor?”

“Not quite,” Maddie said.

Not the answer I want to hear.
He sliced her with an icy glare. “What the hell does ‘not quite’ mean?”

“Not from a major network. And she’s not an anchor, more of a news analyst.” She glanced at her husband and said, “I told you Rene would get mad.”

Mad doesn’t begin to express how I’m feeling.
“What the hell does ‘not from a major network’ mean?”

“She’s on Trial TV. And you don’t have to yell.”

You haven’t heard yelling yet, Maddie girl. “She?
You kidnapped a female TV celebrity?” His headache had turned into a sledgehammer, and visions of lawsuits began doing the rumba in his brain.

Trial TV.

Celebrity.

Female.

He looked at Tante Lulu, and Tante Lulu looked at him. At the same time they swung around to the dingbat duo—who were holding hands, for God’s sake—and exclaimed, “Valerie Breaux!”

“Yep,” the dingbat duo said.

“You kidnapped Valerie ‘Ice’ Breaux?” Rene choked out. “The Trial Television Network regular? My sister-in-law Sylvie’s cousin?”

J.B. and Maddie beamed at him, as if he’d just congratulated them, not raised a question in horror.

“Why her?” he asked through gritted teeth. Valerie Breaux was such a straight arrow she would probably turn her mother in for tasting the grapes in the supermarket. Even worse, he and Val went way back, and not in a good way.

J.B. shrugged. “She was available. She’s from Louisiana. I heard she had a crush on you at one time.”

“You heard wrong. Valerie Breaux can’t stand my guts.”

“Oops,” Maddie said.

“Maybe you could charm her,” J.B. advised. “You can be damn charming with the ladies when you wanna be.”

“Charm that!” he said, giving J.B. a finger. Luckily Tante Lulu didn’t see him.

“She’s the answer to our prayers,” Maddie asserted.

“Oh, no! She cain’t be the one,” Tante Lulu wailed, now that the implications of their conversation sank in. “I won’t let that snooty girl be the one. She’s so snooty she’d drown in a rainstorm. I remember the time she asked me iffen I ever looked in a mirror, jist cause I tol’ her she could use a good girdle. She’s not a Cajun, even if she does have a Cajun name. Her fam’ly likes ta fergit that Breaux skeleton in their closet from about six generations back, which makes her only one-tenth or mebbe one-twentieth Cajun. Nope, she’s a Creole. Her blue blood’s so blue she gives the sky a bad name. She looks down on us low-down Cajuns. All them Breaux in her family do. Take her back. I doan want her to be the one fer Rene. St. Jude, do somethin’ quick.”

Rene’s jaw dropped open. He wasn’t sure which surprised him more. That his friends considered Valerie Breaux the answer to their prayers, the woman who’d called him a “crude Cajun asshole” more than once in their years of growing up together in Houma. Or that Tante Lulu feared this woman might be his soul mate. As if the Ice Princess would let him touch her with a ten-foot pole, let alone his own lesser sized pole! Not with their history. Not after the infamous, uhm, incident.

They’d been fifteen. There’d been a party. He’d been perpetually horny, like most teenagers. She and her girlfriends had been sucking up sickeningly sweet Slo Gin Fizzes. Suffice it to say, he’d somehow found himself naked with Val in someone’s bedroom. Suffice it to say, he became a member of the Hair-Trigger Club that night. Suffice it to say, she still retained her virginity after the fiasco. If all that hadn’t been embarrassing enough, she’d jumped off the bed afterward and spewed pink barf all over his instrument of non-pleasure. Teenage hell, for sure!

He blushed just thinking about it, and he hardly ever blushed.

Could life get any worse?

Yep!

J.B. had waded out to his water plane and was now carrying the “answer to their prayers” over his shoulder. She was squirming wildly but unable to say anything because, of course, the goofballs had duct-taped her mouth shut. That should merit at least one felony count, on top of the others for the restraints that bound her wrists behind her back and her ankles together.

But that wasn’t the worst thing of all... or best thing of all, depending on one’s viewpoint. And Rene’s viewpoint right now was fixed on Valerie Breaux’s bare white behind.

She was going to kill them all for that indignity alone, after she’d filed every legal charge in the world against them.

The Trial TV celebrity wore what could probably be called a
Sex and the
City-type power suit, which meant it had a very short skirt. A very short skirt that had ridden up with all her struggles, exposing her thong panties.

And thus the sun shone bright on Valerie Breaux’s buttocks.

Very nice buttocks, by the way.

“Is she moonin’ us?” Tante Lulu wanted to know.

“I never could figure out why women want to wear those thong thingees,” Maddie mused. “Seems to me they’d be mighty uncomfortable, up in your crack and all.”

“I like ‘em,” J.B. said.

Maddie probably would have hit her husband if he hadn’t had his hands full of Valerie. Instead, she suggested, “You wear ‘em then, honey.”
Honey
was not said as an endearment.

Rene felt like pulling his hair out, one root at a time, over the irrelevance of this chitchat. Meanwhile, Valerie’s tempting tush was waving in the wind.

J.B. turned slightly and Rene got a good look at Valerie’s face. Her shoulder-length, wavy black hair hung lose all over the place, but still he was able to see her dark Creole eyes, which flashed angrily.

Against the duct tape, she screamed something that sounded pretty much like, “Flngukkk yuuuaauu!” It probably wasn’t Howdy.

Grabbing a knife out of his toolbox, he walked over and lifted her off J.B.’s shoulder. She was unsteady on her high-heeled feet, but he managed to stand her against a tree and cut away the restraints.

He saved the duct tape for last.

Once the tape was off, the first thing she did was shimmy down her skirt. Then the fireworks began.

“Rene LeDeux! I should’ve known you’d be behind these shenanigans.”

“Hey, I had nothing to do with this.”

“Save it for the judge, bozo.”

Rene glanced over at the St. Jude statue and murmured, “Now would be the time to perform a miracle ‘cause I sure am feeling hopeless.”

He could swear he heard a voice in his head answer back,
You ‘re on your own, big boy.

CHAPTER TWO

Once a rogue, always a rogue . . .

When Valerie Breaux had lost her job last week as trial news analyst at TTN, she’d thought her life couldn’t get any worse. But being dropped, practically butt naked, practically in the lap of Rene LeDeux, her worst nightmare, well, that had to rank right up there with life’s defining moments of misery. She and Rene were the same age and had gone to the same Houma, Louisiana, schools for twelve years, every minute of which the rogue had chosen to torment her with his teasing ways. Then there had been that one humiliating incident, even more humiliating than this.

Someone was going to pay.

“You are going to pay, big-time, mister,” she told Rene, who stood there looking hunky and way too roguish, as usual, in his skimpy attire. And a tool belt! Holy moley, he looked like some model for a beefcake calendar. He had really broad shoulders and a really small waist and hips. Hell, her behind was probably bigger than his cute little butt.
God above! I’ve landed in hell and I am looking at the devil’s butt.
His black hair was over-long, and his dark Cajun eyes danced with wickedness. She was in big trouble, and it had nothing to do with being kidnapped.

“I did not have anything to do with this, Val,” he said, smiling at her.