The Red-Hot Cajun (8 page)

“Back to your passion for the bayou. Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. I am not going to help you.

But I’ll give you a bit of advice. You are not going to change people’s minds about the Louisiana environment with some dull documentary on saving the snail darter.”

“There are no snail darters in the bayou.”

“Whatever! Smaller coastline. Missing plants. A disappearing animal no one has ever heard of. People just don’t give a damn unless it hits them personally. Remember Bill Clinton’s campaign for president? His advisers kept harping, ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ Well, I’m telling you that you’ve got to find an issue that screams, ‘It’s about you, stupid!’“

She made a good point. The problem was, he had no clue what that issue could be.
Unless..
.
?
He smiled as an idea came to him. “That’s why I came home and gave up the fight. Even I know that plants are about as exciting as a lawnmower manual. But let me be the first to tell you, baby, there are going to be a whole lot of Cajun men, and their women, who are going to be unhappy campers come ten years or so down the line when they discover the Juju plant is no longer available.”

She waited for him to elaborate, but he was no fool. He knew how to play her strings. Well, some of them. He held his silence, like a regular Cool Hand Luke.

“All right, I’ll bite. What’s a Juju plant?”

Yeeees!
He gave himself a mental high five. “It’s the substance that gives Cajun men that extra zip, if you know what I mean.”

“Puh-leeze.”

“Really. When the oil fields were going gangbusters over in Texas, lots of Cajun men went over there to work. The Texas women went ballistic, practically jumping their bones, because they were such great lovers.”

“Puh-leeze,” she said again.

But that didn’t deter him. She was listening, which he took as a good sign. “When the Texas men wanted to know what their secret was, the Cajun men told them that their mamas had been giving them Juju tea ever since they were old enough to get the notion.”

Val was shaking her head from side to side, as if he were a really hopeless case. “I’ve heard that story before, except they usually credit the fat in crawfish as the secret to their supposed virility.”

“Both of them work,” he continued with a wink.

“Nice try, Rene”.”

He put up both hands. “Hey, I’m only reporting what they say. I’m not saying it’s true or not.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I think you made up this whole story just to distract me. You like to tease me, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because you’re so teaseable.”

“How immature!”

“That’s me.”

“Let’s go eat. I’ll probably gain twenty pounds before I emerge from this nightmare, for which you will be responsible.”

“Is that a crime, too?” He laughed. “A fat felony?” “If there isn’t a charge for that, I’ll create one.” “I know a real good exercise,” he offered. She sliced him with a glare. “Or maybe not.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Professor Doolittle, that’s who he was. As in do little . . .

One day later, and Valerie was still sitting not-so-pretty in the middle of bayou hell.

It was only mid-afternoon but the skies were dark and a high wind was rising, which had prompted all the bayou animals to run for cover. Humidity was hovering around the hundreds, if the perspiration pouring off her body was any indication. Hopefully they would get some welcome rain soon to relieve the sweltering heat. If nothing else, Valerie was hoping the cistern would finally be filled so she could take a shower instead of bathing in the stream.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor before Rene’s bookcase, she was trying to find something to read, but all she saw were nonfiction books, almost all of them dealing with the bayou, everything from simple swamp biology to Mike Tidwell’s
Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun
Coast.
Behind her, a humming Tante Lulu was cooking up another zillion-calorie Cajun feast for dinner, happily content to wait till someone in the freakin’ world came looking for them.

Rene also appeared happy with so little, which amazed Valerie.

He was outside on the porch, where a Baton Rouge country-western station blared on the satellite radio. A Toby Keith marathon was apparently going on, and he sang along with each good-ol’-boy song:

“How Do You Like Me Now?” “I Love This Bar.” “Who’s Your Daddy?” Rene had a really nice voice, she had to admit. She could see why the Swamp Rats, the musical group he played with on occasion, were so popular throughout Southern Louisiana. As he sanded the stair railing, he occasionally danced, too. Hands upraised. Fingers snapping. Hips rolling to the beat. Needless to say, he was a good dancer.

She wondered idly what else he did well.

No, I don’t. Definitely not.

With a grunt of disgust, she picked up a notebook she’d found under the bottom shelf of the bookcase, rose to her feet, and went outside. Instead of being embarrassed at being caught singing and dancing by himself, Rene smiled at her and started to stretch out his arms and waggle his fingers in a beckoning fashion for her to join him in a dance. But then, his eyes latched onto her attire, and he stopped dead in his tracks.

“Mercy!” he exclaimed.

She was wearing a red-and-white striped tube top of Tante Lulu’s that was about two sizes too small with flame-red spandex shorts that were straining at the seams. Why the old lady would need or want such garments was beyond Valerie. “Hey, I’m here without any extra clothes, and you don’t have any more clean shorts or shirts, and it’s hotter than hell,” she said defensively.

“Honey, you’ve been spouting legal charges ever since you got here, but I’m telling you now, it’s a true-blue crime for you to go within a mile of any red-blooded male dressed like that And right now, my blood is pumping crimson red. Whoo-eee!” He was looking at her as if she were naked. The lout!

She could feel her face heat up, but she wasn’t about to tuck tail and run like an overly sensitive teenager. “Don’t get any ideas,” she warned.

“Hah! Ideas are popping up in my brain like erotic popcorn.” He grinned at his analogy, then waggled his eyebrows at her.

“I’ve got more clothes on than you do,” she countered. And that was the truth. Rene wore only a pair of cut-off jeans.

“Sweetheart, the only way we would be on equal footing in that department would be if I shucked my shorts.” He put both hands to the waistband of his cut-offs and unsnapped the button.

She shrieked, “No!” He was probably just teasing, as usual, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

He continued to grin and give her a head-to-toe scrutiny, over and over. Thankfully, he re-snapped himself.

“Listen, Mister Lech, I want to talk to you about something.” She waved the notebook in front of her and asked, “What is this?”

“My doctoral thesis.”

“What do you mean, doctoral thesis? Don’t tell me you hold a PhD.”

“Not yet. Probably never. I haven’t worked on it in two years.”

That made sense. The notebook was full of pencilled remarks in all the margins, indicative of a work-in-progress. “It reads like a futuristic novel,” she remarked. “Even the title, ‘Southern Louisiana 2075: Land of the Lost.’“

He shrugged. “That’s what it is, a prediction of what’s going to happen over the next seventy or so years. Southern Louisiana is eventually going to disappear into the sea, that’s a fact, unless something drastic happens to change things.”

She cocked her head at him. “I just can’t imagine you in a college classroom.”

“I’m insulted.”

“No, you’re not. You could care less what I think. Where did you get your master’s?”

“Tulane.”

“In what?”

“Biology.”

She nodded. “What would you do with a doctorate?”

“I don’t know. Teach at the college level. Maybe.”

A college professor? Lordy, Lordy! Indiana Jones had nothing on him.

“Hell, Val, I was bored for a couple of years so I decided to go to school. Big deal!”

She wasn’t buying that self-deprecating crap a bit. This man liked to portray himself as a simple fisherman and an accordion player in a low-down bar band. She had no trouble accepting his role as an environmental lobbyist, figuring his love of the bayou and a glib tongue had gotten him the job. It had never occurred to her that he had a college education—an
advanced
college education.

“Who
are
you?” she asked suddenly, kicking into jury analyst mode.

“Me, I am just a simple Cajun man.” He gave her another head-to-toe onceover. “A simple Cajun man who is enjoying the view immensely.”

As frustrating as he was, there was a small part of Valerie that delighted in her being able to turn on the bayou bad boy.
I
can’t believe I’m letting him get to me like this.
Holding the notebook up to her chest, she spun on her heels to walk into the house and get some kind of covering. “Stay right there till I come back,” she ordered. “I have more questions to ask you.”

“Like I can go anywhere.”

Within minutes she was back outside, wearing one of Rene’s dress shirts she’d found hanging in a closet. The shirt was open in front, but she was reasonably covered... though hotter than Hades.

Rene half-sat on the porch rail
,
with a longneck bottle of Dixie beer dangling from his fingertips, watching the rain begin to come down. The drops were light at first, like a fine mist, but the precipitation soon came down in blinding sheets, turning the parched earth into muddy pools. The stream would no doubt overflow if this kept up much longer, and the flooding might even reach the cabin. No reason for alarm, though, since the cabin was on stilts.

It was a moment out of time. The pelting rain, which had a unique, pure scent, created a cocoon around them—as if they were separate from the rest of the world. Just the two of them. Not even Tante Lulu, still inside, could intrude on this sense of intimacy.

She coughed to break the spell.

He turned and took a long swig from the bottle while staring at her. She watched his throat move as he drank and was amazed. Who knew a man’s neck could be so sexy?

His gaze was hot and raw.

She felt naked, even with the shirt.

Those two years must be catching up with me.
Sinking down into the Adirondack chair, she tapped the notebook in her lap and said, “Tell me about this.”

Her voice betrayed her and came out in a choked whisper.

He smiled at her as if he understood. “Why? Are you suddenly converted to our cause? Sort of a Stockholm syndrome kind of thing?”

“You mean, where the prisoner falls in love with her captor?”

“Yeah.” He smiled even wider. The jerk.

“Get real. The day I fall in love with you will be a cold day in the bayou. And, no, I am not converted to your cause. I don’t even know what your cause is. But at least you’re finally admitting that I’m a captive here.”

“I had nothing to do—”

She waved a hand dismissively. “Enough with the excuses. Tell me about your research,” she said, patting the notebook.

“In a way, I’ve been studying the bayou since I was a three-year-old toddling after Luc. He protected me and my younger brother Remy from our father most of the time, taking the majority of the lickings. The way he protected us was to take us down to the bayou for what he called a campout. It was his way of alleviating our fears.”

“My childhood wasn’t so hot, either,” she confessed.

He raised his eyebrows skeptically.

“But I never became a bayou scientist as a result.”

He shrugged. “From an early age I loved the bayou, but I recognized that some things were wrong.

The biggest wake-up call came when my dad sold the family land, poor as it was, to an oil company.

Almost immediately, the landscape changed. We could no longer drink the water. They dug canals. Pipes burst. Hell, our rusted-out trailer soon sat in a foot of water.” He shrugged again. “But that was only one nail in the coffin. The biggest culprit by far is the levees.”

“The levees?” She frowned with confusion. “Levees prevent massive flooding. Levees are a good thing, aren’t they?”

“Not in Southern Louisiana. The annual flooding of the Mississippi over thousands of years is what put the rich alluvial deposits here that make up the bayous. The levees have straitjacketed that process. Taming the river has sparked a chain reaction of devastating proportions. Now mud deposited by flooding, which would normally have settled into swamps of Atchafalaya or Barataria Bay, is just carried out to the Gulf.

Do you know that we are losing land the size of a football field every twenty minutes or so? In a year’s time, we lose a landmass equal to Manhattan.”