by Nancy Warren
It wasn’t that they were faking, exactly. Since practice made perfect, Gabe had been able to spot a phony orgasm before he was legally old enough to drink. But there was a certain artificiality about the way they arranged their bodies so as to always ensure they looked good, the way they never expended enough energy for their carefully coiffed hair to get sweaty, the way their faces, while portraying passion, never went lax with spent lust.
Emma was nothing like that.
Her eyes were closed, squeezed so tightly, lines fanned out from them, nearly into her hair. Her head was flung so far back, the tendons in her neck strained and her mouth was open, encouraging erotic thoughts of what those voluptuous ripe lips would look like surrounding his cock.
She was totally into the moment. Into him. Oblivious to the rain pelting down on her expressive, upturned face like stinging needles, oblivious to the fact that they were parked along the highway, risking discovery at any moment.
A sudden, ear-splitting blast of an airhorn blared through the rain.
Emma’s eyes flew open as the eighteen-wheeler rumbled by. Her leg slid back down his to the ground.
“I can’t believe I . . .” Her face, her lovely, flushed, wet face was bemused. “On a public road . . . Out in the open.” She looked up at the sky. “In the pouring rain.”
“Yeah.” Timing, Gabe thought again with a frustration that did nothing to soothe his still rampant hard-on, was everything.
He released her hands. When she used one to cover her mouth, he braced himself for tears.
Emma surprised him yet again.
She laughed. “That was the most reckless thing I’ve ever done.”
She put her freed hands against his chest. Then her eyes, which had begun to clear, started turning all sexy and soft focused again.
“Talk about reckless,” Gabe groaned. “If you don’t stop looking at me that way, I’m going to take you right here and now, and believe me, darlin’, once I get inside you, not even an entire convention of long-haul truckers leaning on airhorns is going to be able to make me stop.”
Her face lit up. “Even better.”
It was Gabe’s turn to laugh. Although his erection was still throbbing painfully, her unmasked excitement at the sexual threat was the first thing in a very long time he’d found to laugh about.
Her hair had tumbled down around her shoulders. The tangled curls looked like wet copper silk and smelled like peaches. Gabe ached with the need to feel them draped over his chest. His thighs. His penis.
“We’re all wet,” she murmured, seeming surprised at the discovery.
“Seem to be.”
The flowered skirt clung damply to her womanly convex stomach, rounded thighs, and mound. Her blouse was rendered nearly transparent by rain. Beneath the silk she was wearing a white lace bra that matched the panties he’d nearly ripped off her. Her taut nipples were the same raspberry pink hue he hadn’t even realized had remained imprinted on his memory all these years.
“But it sure as hell looks better on you,” he said.
She tilted her head. Her lips tilted in a faint, somewhat indulgent smile. “What is it about men that whenever they see a woman they imagine her naked?”
“I don’t.”
She folded her arms beneath those amazing breasts. “Of course you don’t.” Her tone was a great deal drier than the weather.
“When men look at women they picture them in garter belts, silk stockings, and mile-high stiletto heels.”
She rolled her eyes. “That is so chauvinistic.”
“What can I say? Men are pigs,” he agreed easily.
Gabe cupped her breasts, watching her eyes widen as he pinched those nipples. Hard.
She exhaled a short, surprised breath; the yielding flesh swelled in his hands.
“You are, without a doubt, the most responsive woman I’ve ever met.”
Struggling against the urge to drag her into that little red car, rip their wet clothes away, throw his naked body on top of hers and devour her, Gabe lowered his forehead to hers and drew in a deep, painful breath that was meant to calm.
But damn well didn’t even come close to tempering the male need to mate that was rampaging through every pore of his body.
“I’m going to put the jack in the trunk,” he said. “Then we’re going to the camp, where I’m going to take a long time to finish what we started ten years ago.”
She shuddered against him; there was so much heat emanating from both their bodies, he was amazed they weren’t surrounded by clouds of steam.
“After I have you, I’m going to feed you.” He’d always liked to cook. The idea of cooking for Emma was nearly as appealing as making love to her. “Then we’re going to spend the rest of the night seeing just how reckless we can be.”
“I don’t have any clothes with me.”
“Don’ worry ’bout it. You won’t need any for what I have in mind.”
“What if I have plans?”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” She hooked an arm around his neck, went up on her toes, and gave him a quick, hard kiss. “I’m planning to spend the night with you.”
Seven
Gabe offered to drive the rest of the way, but feeling the need to maintain some vestige of control over the situation, Emma declined.
“Just as well,” he said agreeably. “This way I can play with your leg.”
“Just my leg,” she said.
“Spoilsport.”
“Unless you want to end up in the bayou.”
“Good point.” He sighed. “And one I’d reluctantly already thought of myself right before we got that flat.”
As she drove away from New Orleans, deep into bayou country, a comfortable silence surrounded them, the quiet of the night broken only by the metallic percussion of the rain on the roof of the Miata, the hiss of waters beneath the rolling tires, the music flowing softly from the car speakers.
They’d gone about two miles when Gabe unbuckled his seat belt, turned around and went up on his knees, giving Emma an up-close-and-personal view of threads beginning to unravel beneath his right cheek.
Down, girl.
Needing a distraction, she glanced up into the rearview mirror and watched him unzip the duffle bag, and figured he must be getting out a dry shirt. Which was a shame, because she really, really loved the way that white knit T-shirt clung to his chest, defining pecs and six-pack abs that had instilled lust in female moviegoers from Seattle to Shanghai.
It turned out he wasn’t after a shirt, after all. But a CD.
“Thought we could use a change from the snooze stuff,” he said, pressing the eject button on her dashboard player.
“That’s Celtic Grace.” The Irish group was hugely soothing as background music to her massages. “They’re very popular.”
“If you happen to like New Age.” His dismissive tone put them right up there with polka bands and Barney tunes.
“A great many people do.” Including her. “Life’s become very hectic. New Age is relaxing.”
“There’s a difference between being relaxed and comatose.”
He exchanged her CD with his, pushed play, leaned back in the leather bucket seat, stretched his long athletic legs out in front of him and laced his fingers behind his dark head.
Cutting him a surreptitious sideways glance, Emma found the sight of those dark biceps bulging anything but relaxing.
A smoky, female voice drifted out of the speakers.
“Now, that’s music,” he said approvingly. “Doesn’t get any better than Lady Day.”
Although they’d been about as intimate as two people could be only minutes before, being alone with him, in this dark car in the rain, with Billie Holiday’s sultry, sex-tinged voice singing about how she couldn’t help lovin’ that man, caused Emma’s stomach muscles to knot.
Did he remember playing that exact same CD on another drive to the camp ten years earlier? The night before he’d left for California?
Emma had never been so nervous. Not even the night before her wedding to Richard, when she’d tossed and turned, futilely chasing sleep, afraid that she was making a terrible mistake.
The next morning she’d told her mother that she wanted to postpone the ceremony, to give herself time to sort out her confused feelings, but Angela Quinlan had briskly pointed out that with five hundred of their “closest friends” arriving at the Church of the Holy Assumption within the next six hours, canceling was not an option.
So, behaving like the dutiful daughter she had always been, with the exception of those stolen hours with Gabe, Emma had walked down that long white satin runner on her father’s arm, feeling like a condemned prisoner being led to her execution.
That was before she’d learned the hard way to stand up for herself. To make her own decisions.
Decisions like spending tonight with Gabriel Broussard.
Emma might feel like putty in his hands, but she didn’t want Gabe to mistakenly believe that she was still that fat red-haired girl who would have done anything to get him to notice her.
To want her.
To love her.
No! This wasn’t about love. Gabe was talking about sex, pure and simple.
Could she actually go through with it? Could she throw caution to the wind and share a night of mind-blowing passion, knowing that it wouldn’t lead to anything but multiple orgasms?
And your point is? the Samanatha inside her head asked.
It was the right thing to do, Emma assured herself. The way to get the man out of her system once and for all. In fact, looking at it that way, having sex with Gabe wasn’t so reckless, after all. It was eminently logical.
But, for the time being, if she didn’t stop thinking about getting naked with him, she really was going to risk driving into the bayou.
“You know, I never doubted that you’d be a star,” she said. He’d always had charisma, what Roxi had called his red-hot aura. “But it must have been difficult, breaking into a business as competitive as the Hollywood filmmaking industry.”
“I doubt anyone has it that easy. And I know damn well I wasn’t the only wannabe actor to live in a car my first month in L.A.,” he said.
“That sounds terrible.”
“At the time it didn’t seem like that big a deal. The weather was nice and I just kept driving around to different beach parking lots to stay ahead of the cops.
“My first place was a seedy apartment on Hollywood Boulevard, which is not, by the way, anywhere near as glamorous as it might sound. There were four of us crammed into a space not much bigger than the Trans Am.”
“Were they actors, too?”
“Two of them were. The third was a wannabe screenwriter who moonlighted as a waiter at this trendy Rodeo Drive restaurant five nights a week. He also pulled in a few extra bucks making porno films under the name of Stone Mallet.”
A laugh burst from her. “Stone Mallet? Really?”
“My hand to God.” He grinned as he raised his right hand. “Porn names aren’t exactly subtle. But, I suppose it looked better on credits than James Klozik, which was his real name. He offered to help me break into the business. Promised me that with all his connections, I could be a big star.”
“Did you? Make any of those movies?”
“And have my dick turn green and fall off from some STD? Hell, no.”
“I’ll bet you could’ve,” she said. “Not have your—uh—penis fall off. But be a porn star.”
It was dark inside the car, but she could feel his smile. “Seen a lot of porn flicks, have you, chère?”
“No.” She could feel the heat rise in her face. “But I have a very good imagination.... So, I remember reading that you got a job in construction?”
“As a day laborer.” Gabe liked that she’d cared enough to read about him. “The work was hard and dirty, paid peasant wages, and most of the guys on the crews tended to take off running whenever La Migra showed up looking for aliens to deport; but the upside was that it gave me time to make the rounds of casting calls.”
Where he’d discovered that the legendary casting couch did, indeed, exist, and women weren’t the only ones having to dodge sexual harassment.
He’d managed to dodge the females with the bad boy grin that had charmed the panties off more than his share of females back here in Blue Bayou. Usually they’d shrug off his rejection, give him their home phone number, in case he ever changed his mind about tangling the sheets, show him the door, then call in the next guy
A big-shot agent famous for his A list parties, had not been so easily put off. Gabe hadn’t been real comfortable with the way the interview was conducted in a circular conversation pit built into the office floor, but had already figured out that Californians weren’t exactly like the folks he’d grown up with in Louisiana. And movie people were even more skewed than most.
His instincts had proved right on the money when, after glancing through the black and white glossies, Gabe had spent three weeks building a rock retaining wall. It was meant to keep a popular sitcom star’s Pacific Palisades mansion from sliding down onto the Coast Highway and to pay for it, the guy lunged for Gabe’s crotch.
Gabe left the agent rolling on the glacier white carpeting, hands cupping his balls, cursing like a drunken sailor and screaming that he might as well go back to the fuckin’ swamp because the redneck trailer trash son of a bitch sure as hell wasn’t going to ever work in this town.
Having been threatened by a lot tougher guys than the pervert wearing a pink and lavender paisley shirt, mauve leather pants and a toupee that looked like roadkill, Gabe hadn’t been exactly trembling in his boots.
“So,” he said, “how about you? Nate tells me that you run a massage parlor.”
“Every Body’s Beautiful is a day spa. Roxi Dupree’s my partner. We offer massages, manicures, pedicures, Tarot card and palm readings, love spells—”
“I’m not real familiar with spas, but are palm readings and love spells usually part of the business?”
“Not as a rule,” Emma allowed. “But Roxi’s grandmother, Evangeline, who owned Hoo Doo Voo Doo—”
“That place on Magnolia, over by the cemetery, with all the gator heads and teeth in the window?”
“That’s the one. Evangeline died about six months after we opened up. Roxi got rid of all the heads and teeth and was going to dissolve the business, but all these people kept showing up at the spa wanting spells like the ones they’d bought from her grandmother.
“She didn’t want to turn them down, so she started studying Evangeline’s shadow books—they’re sort of like a witches’ cookbook—and decided to concentrate on mixing up the lotions and oils, since they fit in nicely with the spa concept.”
“Where do the spells come in?”
“A lot of our business comes from people who book massages for relaxation. Since romance tends to be one of the things that seems to stress people out, it only made sense to include Hex Appeal into our menu of treatments.”
“You actually believe in magic?”
From his disbelieving tone, Emma suspected Gabe didn’t. “I suppose everyone has their own idea of what magic is. I believe there’s some invisible force that connects everything in the universe. And that everything we do affects that force, like ripples in the water. And I believe in destiny . . .”
She paused.
“And I’ll bet you don’t,” she said, reading his silence.
“Sure. I just believe we all make our own destiny.”
She wasn’t surprised, given his own personal history. Gabe had not only grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, his father had been the town drunk.
According to Charlotte Cassidy, the day checkout clerk down at the Cajun Market, who served as Blue Bayou’s unofficial town crier, Claude Broussard had once been considered the person in Blue Bayou most likely to become famous.
Supposedly—and the photographs in the trophy case at the high school backed Charlotte up on this fac
t—he’d been a mouthwateringly handsome quarterback on the Blue Bayou Buccaneers state high school championship football team.
He’d been recruited by every major football program in the SEC, and from other colleges as far away as Notre Dame and UCLA. Athletic shoe companies were salivating for a chance to sign the charismatic Cajun kid to an endorsement contract.
Then, on Homecoming Day, 1956, a tackle from Houma had broken through the offensive line and slammed into Claude while he was searching the field for a receiver. The hit the Baton Rouge Advocate’s headline referred to as “The Sack Heard Around Louisiana,” not only shattered the promising quarterback’s knee, it brought his entire world crashing down around him.
Things went downhill from there.
He began to drink. His cheerleader girlfriend, Angeline Beloit, got pregnant; rumor had it that it had taken Angeline’s daddy’s Ithaca 12-gauge to convince the high school dropout to marry the girl. Gabe was born six months after the shotgun wedding; he was eight months old when Angeline ran off with an oil rig worker from Houston.
Everyone knew Claude beat his son, but since a lot of people in the rigidly Catholic, conservative bayou town believed in that old maxim about sparing the rod and spoiling the child, authorities were never called in. Besides, no one in their right mind wanted to get on the wrong side of Crazy Claude Broussard.
So, he continued to drink and brawl, until that New Year’s Eve, two years ago, when he drove his truck off the bridge leading into town. There was no funeral since the only people who might have shown up would have been those wanting to see for themselves that the bully of Blue Bayou really was dead.
No one, least of all Emma, had been surprised when Gabe didn’t return home for his father’s interment in the far corner of the cemetery once known as Paupers’ Field.
Eight
While so much had changed in both their lives since the last time they were together, the cabin was exactly as Emma remembered it.
Like most other bayou camps, it had been built on stilts to allow for rising water to pass underneath; the cypress had weathered to a soft silver hue and a dark green metal roof slanted low over a front porch.