by Sandra Hill
“I do not want any more animals.” He enunciated each word for emphasis. “And don’t be giving me those come-hither eyes unless you’re ready to hither.”
The image of their shared dream shimmered in the air between them.
Samantha could feel herself blush.
Daniel just grinned.
“Holy Sac-au-lait! Doan get yerself in a snit,” Tante Lulu said to Daniel. To Samantha, she whispered, “Mebbe ya should ask Aaron instead. He ain’t so persnickety.”
“I am not persnickety, whatever the hell that is,” Daniel protested. “By the way, old lady, I don’t appreciate your setting up a medical practice for me, either.”
“Oh, did all them poor sick folks come t’day?” Tante Lulu inquired with the innocence of a cobra.
“Where’s Aaron?” Samantha asked, trying to defuse the situation, although she had no idea what they were talking about. Another of Tante Lulu’s machinations, she was sure. Although, if it had anything to do with Daniel being a doctor, she could understand.
“He was here all morning. Not sure where he disappeared to,” Daniel said, frowning, as if he’d just realized his brother was missing.
Tante Lulu, who had started to climb the steep steps in front of them, had the answer. “He’s over at the Dugas gator farm, tryin’ ta sweet-talk Del.”
“That’s just great,” Daniel remarked. “He’ll be back soon, or I’ll go drag him back. He’s not leaving me here alone to handle this mess.”
Samantha homed in on only one thing. “Gator farm?”
“Don’t ask,” Daniel warned.
Off Tante Lulu went then, talking away, irregardless of whether anyone was listening.
Turns out, the old lady was an excellent tour guide, Samantha had to give her that, as Tante Lulu interspersed her descriptions of the various rooms with a bit of the history of the house and the property that she knew so well. In fact, old sepia photographs of the house as it had looked in the mid and late 1800s were tacked on the wall of the entry hall.
Still other photos showed the exterior and interior of the house as it had been during more prosperous days. Unfortunately, all the furniture, fine Aubusson and Tabriz carpets, and paintings were missing, even the lighting fixtures, but the painted-over woodwork, ornate crown molding, and ceiling medallions on the fifteen-foot ceilings remained, along with the wide, carved stairway that ran up the center of the main floor’s hallway, and the eleven-foot-high sliding pocket doors, a Victorian-era addition, separating the rooms. Although they were scuffed and ingrained with decades of dirt, the random-plank cypress floors would be magnificent when refinished. And the tall, floor-to-ceiling windows remained intact, albeit with wavy glass.
Rooms on each of the three floors were separated by a twelve-foot corridor . . . wasted space in today’s house designs. On the main floor, there were two parlors, a dining room, library, and office. Six bedrooms on the second floor and four on the third floor, along with a nursery or schoolroom, and servant quarters. There were a total of four full and three half bathrooms, which had been installed at the turn of the last century . . . as in clawfoot tubs and pedestal sinks and shaving mirrors . . . on these three floors, along with the ground level where the kitchen, pantries, laundry, and other storage rooms were located. Only two of the bathrooms were functioning, and one of them had recently been modernized by Aaron with luxury improvements, including a rain forest shower, not at all in keeping with the historic nature of the building, but the kind of thing a bachelor would consider essential. There was no basement because of the high water table here in Southern Louisiana.
“Did you know the original owners?” Daniel asked.
“Idjit!” Tante Lulu jabbed him with an elbow. “How old ya think I am?”
“I meant the last owners,” Daniel amended.
“Oh, okay, then. Yep, the Gaudette fam’ly lived here when I was growin’ up. Left suddenly ’bout thirty years ago. Rumor was there was some kinda hanky panky takin’ place with Missy DuBois and them dogs.”
Samantha wouldn’t touch that last observation with a telephone pole.
Daniel made a sound that was halfway between a snort and a chuckle.
Time for another change of subject. “Forget about the kennels. This would make a wonderful family home,” Samantha remarked. “I can see all the possibilities for restoration, but also ways to make it a comfortable living space. Children would flourish in this setting.” In fact, it was the type of home she’d always dreamed of. Before she’d become disillusioned by Nick and her failed marriage.
Her Garden District home in New Orleans was more than adequate, but not perfect, for kids who needed, or would appreciate, open spaces to run and play, not to mention the bayou for swimming and fishing. If she’d gotten pregnant with Nick (hopefully, three times . . . two girls and one boy), she would have moved. Maybe that was another reason Nick had been unhappy with her. He was definitely a city person.
She glanced up to see Daniel watching her closely before he asked, “Is this the type of home you grew up in?”
“Hardly. We had nice homes, don’t get me wrong.” In fact, lavish for the most part. “But my father married five times, and changed houses each time. My mother cavorted around Europe, never spending more than a year in any one place. She practically invented the word cougar for older women, younger men.”
“And you?”
“I spent most of my time in boarding schools since I was eight. Same for my younger half brother Wallace. Plus, we grew up in different homes with different mothers. We were never close.” Suddenly, she realized how much she’d revealed and turned away from him.
Luckily, Tante Lulu picked up the conversation. “If yer grandma Sophie hadn’t been ill fer so many years before she died, things woulda been different fer you, Samantha. I guarantee it. Yer grandpa Stanley and grandma Sophie were good God-fearin’ people, but they let their chillren run wild and neglected the grandchillren whilst Sophie was ailin’ and then when Stanley was grievin’ after her passin’.”
“I hardly remember her,” Samantha said. “I was away at boarding school, like I said, and when I came home, they didn’t allow her many visitors.” Her grandfather was a good man, and they’d bonded in the last few years, but he hadn’t been there for her when she was young, or even in her Nick/marriage period.
“How’s yer mama, by the way?”
“Just great. Colette is still living in France.” Her mother insisted that her daughter call her by her name, not Mother, or, God forbid, Mama, which would age her, apparently. “Still taking on one gigolo after another. I haven’t seen her in two years, at least.” And then she’d been living with a twenty-year-old artist who fashioned himself the next Salvador Dali. To Samantha, his paintings resembled nothing more than splotches of color thrown on a canvas.
“A cryin’ shame, thass what it is,” Tante Lulu said, patting Samantha on the arm. “Family is the most important thing in the world, honey.”
Tante Lulu stared at Daniel then, as if with some hidden meaning.
“What? I didn’t disagree.”
“Then do somethin’ about it.”
“About what?”
“Makin’ a family.” On those words she stomped away.
He gasped. “Me? Start a family? Are you crazy?”
Samantha burst out laughing, so comical was the expression of horror on his face.
“Go ahead. Laugh. You do realize that she means that I should start a family with you.”
It was Samantha’s turn to be horrified.
Her and Daniel? A family? No way!
But then a blip of a picture flashed into her mind. Her and Daniel. In bed. Doing what usually led to making a family. “I need to get out of here,” she said.
Daniel’s laughter followed after her.
And then the other shoe dropped . . .
Daniel couldn’t keep his eyes off Samantha the rest of the afternoon. He tried. Really hard. To no avail.
Her words about
a bleak childhood caught him unawares. It was contrary to the impression he’d had of her before. Stone-cold bitch. Raised in a rich family that spoiled her rotten. Everything handed to her on a silver platter.
And of course there was the dream.
He could guess what would be featured in the next ones. Freckles.
The clothing she wore today wasn’t exactly sexy, but the clingy, off-one-shoulder blouse, leaving all that exposed skin, was more sexy than if she’d been nude. Well, not really. But it was a turn-on. The freckles should have been unattractive . . . there were so many of them, but instead they’d become a turn-on for him. He could picture all kinds of sex games he could play with those freckles. Connect the dots. Where’s Waldo? Hide and seek. Etch-a-Sketch. And she was tall, too. Really tall for a woman. Only a few inches shorter than himself. He usually preferred more petite women. Usually. Somehow, suddenly, the idea of sex with a woman almost his height posed lots of interesting ideas.
He’d stuck it out through the extravagant meal, Tante Lulu style. Can anyone say Peachy Praline Cobbler Cake? Through the show put on by the snake catcher who’d gathered a scary fifty-seven adult reptiles from the property. Through all the landscaping projects that included clearing a garden which, remarkably, still had some viable rosebushes to be brought back to life. The St. Jude birdbath was already in place, a regular tweety-bird spa.
There would be months . . . hell, years of work yet to be done here. Still, everyone expressed satisfaction with jobs well done. Aaron had been working closely at his side all day. They made a good team, always had, no matter what they were doing.
Some of the younger kids were running around . . . the LeDeux kids and grandkids, a veritable tribe. Playing tag, or hide-and-go-seek. Screeching, laughing. They were just being kids. Normal, healthy kids.
That’s when he felt the need to escape. The depression began to weigh him down, the memories overpowering. Would he ever be able to forget those last days on the job in Alaska? The day he’d been forced to surrender one more child to that beast, cancer. Deke.
Doctors were warned not to become attached to their patients. But how could he have resisted Deke?
He headed back to his digs. He figured Aaron could do the honors in saying good-byes and thanks to all their guests.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Aaron said, a short time later, coming up the steps to the second floor living room of the garconniére where he was lying on the sofa, longneck Bud Light in one hand, TV remote in the other. Max cuddled at his feet. He should have known Aaron would follow him, sensing his mood.
“Just watching the races,” he lied. Nascar had never been a big attraction to him, though it was practically a sacred obsession here in the South.
“Since when do you have a cat? I thought you hated cats.”
“I do.”
Max looked up and hissed his opinion, then resumed licking his private parts.
Aaron took a beer out of the small fridge, swallowed half the bottle in one long swig, then raised a questioning brow. His brother knew him too well.
“So, where’s De-li-lah?” Daniel asked.
“She wouldn’t come.”
“Shy?”
“Just the opposite. Did I tell you she can wrestle a two-hundred-pound alligator?”
“You might have told me a time or twenty.”
Aaron made a face at him.
“I take it she isn’t shaking the sheets with you yet.”
“Hah! I can’t even get her near the bed. In fact, she won’t even go out on a date with me. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Meaning Tante Lulu?”
“Got it in one.”
“She’s already crocheting doilies for you, y’know.”
“Don’t snicker, bro. She’s doin’ the same for you.”
“She is the most interfering busybody. Her family, too.”
“Our family,” Aaron reminded him.
“Our family,” he conceded. “But I gotta tell you, there are times when I feel as if I can’t breathe.”
“Like today?”
“Near the end, yeah.”
“Do you wish we’d stayed in Alaska?”
For a moment Daniel considered the question, then said, “No. This feels like home now.”
“Did I push you into this Bayou Rose Plantation business?”
“Hell, yes!”
Aaron, not a bit repentant, sank down into the leather recliner Daniel had just bought, pulled the lever ’til he was almost prone, then clicked on the vibrate button. “Wow!” he laughed and played with the different settings, like a kid with a new toy.
They heard a huffing noise coming up the steps. Then Tante Lulu emerged into the room. “Ain’t this nice?” she said, “but you need a few knickknacks.”
Daniel rolled his eyes.
Tante Lulu looked closer at the cat, which was lying on its back now, stretching its big body like some porno stud. “That cat is preggers,” she announced.
“What? No! Max is a guy.” Isn’t he?
“Boy, you studyin’ ta be a half-wit?”
Daniel leaned down to check, and, yep, a bunch of little nipples. Some kitty! And if pregnant, it was clearly not this cat’s first ball game.
“Max? More like Maxine,” Tante Lulu chuckled.
Samantha must have known when she gave him this gift that it would keep on giving. “I’ll kill her. I swear I will.”
Aaron was bent over, laughing.
“I got good news,” Tante Lulu announced, sinking down into a chair and cooling herself off with her Richard Simmons fan. Back and forth, Daniel was treated to the exercise nut’s smiling face. “I jist got off the phone with Aunt Mel.”
He and Aaron sat up straight, then said, “Uh-oh!” Since when did Tante Lulu know Aunt Mel, or know her well enough to call her “Aunt”?
“Aunt Mel is thinkin’ ’bout movin’ ta Loo-zee-anna.”
Well, that wasn’t so bad. He and Daniel had known Aunt Mel was lonely since their mother had died and they’d moved here. Oh, my God! It just occurred to Daniel that Aunt Mel was the person Tante Lulu was considering to run an animal rescue operation from their house.
“She and I are gonna be best buddies.”
Aaron choked on his beer.
“If she comes, she’ll bring her Barry Manilow collection. She’ll stay in the big house, of course.”
Daniel tried to keep a straight face as Aaron went bug-eyed with shock, his lifestyle not being conducive to a chaperone.
“You two are the first to know,” she announced, pausing as if hearing a drum roll in her head. “I’m thinkin’ ’bout turnin’ gay.”
Did the old bat even know what a homosexual was? “Gay as in happy, or gay as in . . . ?”
“Gay as in less-bean, idjit.”
Chapter Nine
Unexpected company . . .
When Samantha returned home that evening, it was barely five p.m., but the motion detector lights were on in the backyard. She pulled into the detached garage at the end of the yard, by the alley, and pulled out her cell phone with the 911 number at the ready.
She wasn’t really worried. One of the animals had probably tripped the sensor again. Even though she’d locked them inside, sometimes one of them banged against a window or glass door, which triggered the sensitive security system. Still, it was best to be safe. She picked up the metal bat she kept in the backseat.
If it was Nick, she’d enjoy whopping his lying, two-timing, greedy ass.
As for burglars, the sound of Axel barking like a maniac, as he was now, announcing her arrival, was enough to give any creep second thoughts. If that didn’t work, Clarence, her cockatoo, kept squawking “Holy shit!”
When she emerged carefully from the garage, it wasn’t her ex-husband or a trespasser she found, though. It was her stepbrother Angus. Well, stepbrother-by-marriage, actually, since Angus was the son of her father’s third wife, Darla, by a previous husband. No blood relative. Angus huddled against the buil
ding, in the shadows under the overhang, along with a pregnant, young woman sitting on the ground, leaning against him, legs extended. Her feet were bare. A pair of white sneakers sat on the ground beside her. They’d probably been pinching her, by the looks of her swollen feet and ankles.
Samantha hadn’t seen Angus in more than a year, and he wasn’t looking so good. Even in the shadows, she could see that he was very thin. His blond hair was disheveled, and he wore a rumpled T-shirt and dirty jeans with a pair of old Nikes. Angus had to be at least twenty-five by now, but he looked about fifteen with his boyish features. Growing up, people always said he looked like Opie on that old Andy Griffith show. He still did, somewhat. An older Opie.
They’d never been close, because of the age difference and the fact that they’d been raised in different homes. Plus, Angus had been a geek with a superiority complex, even from a young age, considering the rest of mankind subpar to his intellect. Which was probably true when it came to anything electronic. Angus had built his own computer when he was only ten years old, and he bought every techie toy on the market the minute they became available.
Despite his skinny, geeky appearance, Angus had a line of tiny gold rings up the side of both ears, along with an eyebrow piercing, something he’d started doing as a teenager, rebelling against his inner Opie. And his arms were still covered with those old tattoos that had practically given his mother a heart attack. Rebel without a cause, Samantha had always said.
“Jeez, Angus, you should have warned me you were coming. I could have hurt you.” She held the bat out for emphasis.
“Sorry, Sam. I didn’t know where else to go.” He held his side as he stood up and groaned. He must have been sitting for a long time. She noticed that he had a leather laptop bag over his shoulder, with an iPad and several other electronic devices peeking from a side flap. A cell phone was clipped to his belt. Some things never changed.