Lulu’s Recipe for Cajun Sass Read online

  Justin nodded but said nothing, studying the two of them. With Adèle’s cheek pressed against hers, staring at the stranger, Louise knew there was a strong resemblance, which she didn’t bother to explain.

  And what he thought was obvious. Louise could almost see the facts click in his bachelor head. Young bayou woman. Not so attractive. A little bit snippy. Has a child. Not for me!

  Not that Louise cared.

  Much.

  But she was annoyed.

  Very annoyed.

  And something shifted inside of her, something important which she would examine later.

  Uh-oh! the voice in her head said, immediately followed by, “It’s about time!” as if Jude were speaking to someone up above.

  When Adèle went inside to get one of her dolls, Louise and Justin carried the produce boxes and the flowers to his truck. “See you around,” Justin said just before lifting himself up to the driver’s seat of his truck. Then he did the worst thing possible. He winked at her.

  To Louise, it was the most patronizing, condescending gesture, when done without any evidence of attraction on his part. Like the most popular boy in school winking at the shy, fat wallflower.

  A pity wink.

  How pathetic! Louise practically growled at what was tantamount to waving the red flag before a bull. A challenge if she ever saw one. How dare he make her feel pathetic?

  In that moment, Louise recalled that there was a time when she was the epitome of Cajun Sass, a bayou girl who could stand up to the most arrogant male, and there were plenty of them in bayou land. It had nothing to do with beauty, exactly. More with attitude, which translated to attractiveness, even sensuality. That young Louise never would have allowed Justin Boudreaux to treat her like she was less than what he was accustomed to.

  The question was: How to regain her Cajun Sass when she’d lost it for five long years?

  On the other hand, did a bayou-born gal ever lose her Cajun Sass?

  Maybe she should check her mother and grandmother’s receipt books to see if they’d written a recipe for Cajun Sass. Which was highly improbable.

  Or was it?

  She laughed out loud.

  And heard laughter in her head, too.

  Chapter 2

  He wasn’t Hank Williams, but, “Hey, good lookin’…”

  It was a week later, on a hot Sunday afternoon, that Justin was back in Houma. He had his brother Leon to thank for his being at this boring-as-hell Crawfish Festival at Our Lady of the Bayou Church. They were leaning against a tupelo tree at one side of the front lawn, secretly sipping at cold cans of Dixie Beer, watching the crowd.

  Justin didn’t get that much time off from his residency at the hospital in New Orleans, and a Sunday afternoon spent watching old geezers play bingo and shrieking kids run around in organized games was not his idea of fun. Yeah, there was the wild zydeco music played by a local band. And the piles of spicy, boiled mudbugs, corn on the cob, boudin sausage, and potatoes being served on newspaper-covered tables were a sloppy delicacy he missed most when up in Cambridge.

  But, really, Justin was beat, physically and emotionally. Doctoring did that to a person sometimes. “No offense, Leon, but I’m gonna head back to my digs in Nawlins and take a nap.” He shared an apartment in a Creole cottage on Lafayette Street with two interns from Charity Hospital. “I was up till two last night.”

  “With a hot date?” Leon asked hopefully.

  “Hah! More like a breech birth of twin boys that didn’t want to join their five sisters. Followed by a stabbing of a sixteen-year-old kid who bled out. And a massive heart-attack victim who survived but is on a breathing machine today.” Justin had no interest in obstetrics as a profession, but he had to admit to a great satisfaction in bringing forth new life. The teenager with a pierced lung had been a goner before they even examined him, but still a soul-rending loss. It had taken Justin and the doctor on emergency duty an hour to stabilize the obese, chain-smoking heart-attack victim, who hopefully had been scared into a change of lifestyle.

  “Ah, my brother, the doc-tor!” Leon teased. “Betcha women crawl all over yer sexy self. Betcha mamas are linin’ up to introduce their daughters to a handsome Cajun who’ll have a money tree in the back yard when he opens his practice. Betcha those Yankee chicks go ga-ga over yer southern accent.”

  Justin elbowed his brother and looked left and right to show there were no women lining up. “In truth, I can’t recall the last time I had my ashes hauled. As for a money tree…me, I don’t have two greenbacks to rub together, and it’ll be years before I get out of debt.”

  “What about all those scholarships?”

  “My scholarships don’t pay half of my bills.”

  Leon shrugged. “You doan see me drivin’ no Cadillac, either.”

  “As for my southern accent, Yankees call that redneck English.”

  “Poor you!”

  They grinned at each other. “You don’t do so bad, especially with the dames. Where’s Lily Rose anyhow?”

  Lily Rose Fortier was Leon’s fiancée, and she was a stunner by any standard, North or South. A pageant princess from a young age, she’d recently graduated from beauty school and was about to open a little shop in the annex to Boudreaux’s General Store, right next to the live bait ice box and the motor oil rack. Justin was the only one who saw anything odd, or amusing, about that juxtaposition. Everyone else thought it was perfectly normal. One thing was for sure, Leon didn’t know whether to check his watch or scratch his ass when Lily Rose was around. If that was love, Justin wasn’t interested.

  Maybe Justin had been up north too long, as more than one person had pointed out. Despite Lily Rose’s obvious physical assets, she held no attraction for a man who liked his women a little more intelligent. If that girl had an idea, it would die of loneliness. Which is mean, Justin immediately chastised himself. It was just that five minutes in Lily Rose’s company, and his eyes started to roll back in his head at the talk of make-up, giggling, the latest fashions, giggling, and who was cheating on whom. Not that his opinion mattered. Lily Rose and Leon were scheduled to get hitched at the end of the month, before Justin returned to Massachusetts for graduation and to get his medical license.

  “There she is now,” Leon said, pointing toward the parking lot, then giving a wave to show where they were standing.

  The first thing Justin noticed wasn’t Lily Rose, even though she stood out in the crowd in a one-piece, white shorts outfit that left about a mile of her tanned legs exposed, a scooped neckline that drew attention to an impressive bosom, a red belt that accentuated her waist, and golden blonde hair that had been teased high and full in that Southern Belle tradition, the higher the hair, the closer to heaven. No, what struck Justin was that Lily Rose was traveling with a posse of two similarly dressed slick chicks, both of them smiling his way, giggling, and he knew he’d been set up.

  “You didn’t!” he accused his brother. “Since when do you play Cupid?”

  Leon waggled his eyebrows, unrepentant. “Those ashes are piling up.”

  “Pfff!” But then, Justin exclaimed, “Hubba hubba!” and he wasn’t remarking on Lily Rose or her whistle-bait friends. No, it was a new arrival on the scene. Walking out of the church activity center was a woman in a knee-length, haltered sundress, white polka dots on a red background. A petite but sensational figure was outlined by the fitted bodice that flared out from the waist over curvy hips. Long, dark brown, almost black hair hung in waves about her bare shoulders. Even from this distance, he could see that red lipstick matched the red in her dress, drawing the eye like an erotic magnet.

  And he wasn’t the only one caught by her allure. As she walked down the steps, a man going up did a double take, and smiled.

  Louise didn’t smile back, if she even noticed the attention.

  “Mon Dieu! Who…is…that?” Justin asked.

  “Who…oh…that’s Louise Rivard. Lulu,” his brother said, finishing his beer and tossing the can into a
waste receptacle.

  “No. No, no, no!” Justin declared, shaking his head emphatically. He got rid of his beer can, too. “I’ve met Louise, and that is not her.”

  “She’s let herself go lately,” Leon admitted, “but this is the way she used to look before her Big Grief. In fact, I remember her decked out in that very dress, cutting a rug at the USO in Nawleans during the war.”

  “Big Grief?” Justin had to laugh. Sometimes he forgot the way Southerners came up with such wacky concepts for every little thing. The War of Northern Aggression (referring to the Civil War), the Big Lazies, Blue Devils, Hissy Fits, and his grandmother’s old standby excuse for why bayou women behaved the way they did, Cajun Sass.

  One time he’d asked gran’mère how come girls got to blame all their bad deeds on Cajun Sass, and she’d told him it was because they needed that defense against the Cajun Brass of bayou bad boys. He hadn’t understood what she’d meant at the time. He did now.

  “Yep. Lost her fiancé in the war and been wallowin’ in her mourning ever since then.”

  “Kind of selfish of her, considering her having a bun in the oven back then. A child needs a mother’s undivided attention.” Justin did volunteer work in a low-income clinic in Boston where he saw numerous examples of neglected children…the war babies delivered to women too young and unprepared for motherhood, many of them illegitimate and unwanted.

  “Oh, that’s not her child. It’s her niece. And she gives the girl plenty of attention,” Leon continued. “Too much, maybe. Nothin’ selfish there.”

  Justin frowned, trying to recall if Louise had introduced the little girl that way, or if he’d just assumed. Yeah, now that he thought about it, the child had called her tante, or aunt. Tante Lulu. A dumb mistake. But, more than that, his assumptions about her appearance bothered him the most. He wasn’t usually so blind. As a doctor, he was trained to see beyond the obvious.

  Even worse, he suspected that he’d been a mite rude. He might have shown his lack of interest in her, single man to single woman, in some inadvertent, but insulting way. Not to mention his questioning the validity of herbal medicine. What an opinionated ass he must have appeared.

  Seeing Justin’s interest, Leon advised, “Forget about lookin’ Louise’s way, brother. You have as much chance with her as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Better men have been shot down.”

  Justin arched his brows at what he considered a challenge.“See you later,” he said and walked away from his brother.

  “Whoa! Where you going?”

  “To make amends.” His mama always said you couldn’t undo burnt roux, but Justin figured he could try to offer Louise a different dish, or rather a different version of himself, hopefully one a lot less opinionated.

  “But…but aren’t you going to wait for Lily Rose and her friends?”

  “Nope.” Find some other sap to occupy your girlfriend’s girlfriends.

  Louise didn’t notice him at first because she’d walked over to the playing field where a children’s game involving balloons and bushel baskets was in full swing. A waist-high, portable fence had been arranged around the perimeter of the designated area. Laughing and cheering before the fence, Louise’s attention was focused on a dark-haired girl with pigtails, wearing a pink, ruffled blouse, pink dungarees, and pink sneakers. He could see why he’d mistakenly believed she was Louise’s daughter. The resemblance was remarkable, but then there was the family connection, according to Leon.

  He was several yards away when he observed that she was taller than he remembered. But then he realized she wore high-heeled, wedge-type sandals that probably gave her a few inches. Even so, he towered over her at a modest five-eleven.

  She was a small package, as he’d imagined in those baggy overalls she’d had on last week, but what he hadn’t imagined was the curves. Perfect breasts the size of halved baseballs, a tiny waist flaring out over rounded hips, and he was guessing an ass resembling an inverted heart, his favorite kind.

  “Lou-ise, Lou-ise, Lou-ise,” he chided. Somehow, he couldn’t think of her by that silly nickname of Lulu when she looked like this.

  Her head jerked to the side. Apparently, she hadn’t been aware of his approach. But she recognized him immediately. He could tell by the flare of her nostrils. Yep, he’d offended her on their previous meeting.

  Not to be thwarted, he bulldozed ahead. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Hiding your light under a bushel basket ain’t the Cajun way, chère. Glad I am to see you turn a new leaf.” He gave her a deliberate, full-body appraisal. “Dare I hope I was responsible?”

  It was the wrong thing to say, he grasped immediately.

  But before he had a chance to backtrack, or apologize, she put a hand on one hip, cocked her head, and said, “Is there anything worse than a turkey who thinks it’s a peacock?” Then she turned back to look at the children’s game, dismissing him.

  “Aw, c’mon, Louise, give me a break. You were looking like Farmer Jane after a day plowing the lower forty. Now…”

  “Now?” she prodded.

  “Now, you’re Hedy Lamar’s body double.”

  He caught a brief flash of a smile twitch at her luscious lips, which he could see now, up close, were a slick Kiss-me-please crimson, but she managed to hold the smile back. “Save the fake compliments, Casanova.”

  He made an X sign over his chest and said, “Cross my heart and hope to die. You are hotter than a goat’s behind in a pepper patch.”

  She laughed out loud. “Such charm!”

  “Oops. It was the best I could come up with on short notice. That’s an expression my grandfather used when teasing my grandmother out of the grumpies. She would tell him he was as crude as a farting horse.”

  She gave him a quick survey that put him in the same farting horse category, but then conceded, “Sounds like they were a fun couple.”

  “They were.” He reached over and took a strand of her hair between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing sensuously. “What did you do to your hair to make it so…” he wanted to say sexy, but figured it was too soon for that intimate word, “…luxurious.”

  “One of my grandmother’s recipes. An herbal remedy.”

  He groaned inwardly, suspecting a trap. “Just don’t tell me it has something in it like gator snot.”

  “I said herbs, lunkhead. Gator snot has its uses, but it’s not an herb.”

  Gator snot has its uses, he repeated to himself, but had the good sense not to say it out loud. He put both hands up in surrender. “Truce?”

  She shrugged. “That depends. Are you still dead set against folk healing?”

  “I never said I was totally opposed…oh, maybe I did give that impression. But, darlin’, I grew up on the bayou, too. I know the value of certain plants. I know that some modern medicines are just sugar-coated herbs I lived with in my backyard.”

  “Well, hallelujah! I do declare, an enlightened physician.”

  He gritted his teeth to keep from making a retort.

  “And I have to make an admission, too. I want to throw up when I go into a drugstore and see something like Dr. Jessup’s Miracle Herb Tonic that cures everything from baldness to toe fungus. In fact, I think it’s on the shelf of your daddy’s store.”

  “It is not!” he swore, but decided he should check next time he was there.

  The whole time they talked, her eyes kept darting to the playing field, keeping an eye on her niece.

  “I thought she was your daughter,” he said.

  “There you go, thinking again. Must put a strain on that Yankee education.” She gave him a look, which pretty much said she knew how bachelors felt about single women with children. “But, frankly, she’s the same as, for me.”

  In other words, if a guy wanted her, it was a bundle package. He wasn’t thinking that far into the future. He couldn’t, not with his career just starting off, and so unclear. But he was tempted. Very tempted.

  “Can I come see you sometime?” he asked suddenly.

&
nbsp; She arched her brows at him. “Why?”

  “Because I’d like to get better acquainted.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re cruel.”

  She shook her head. “No. Just careful.”

  “Why?” he was the one asking now. “I’m not dangerous.”

  “Oh, yes, you are, cher. A dreamboat like you never hears no when he’s hustling a woman.”

  Hustling? Hustling? “I hear plenty of no’s,” he contended, even though he hadn’t done a whole lot of asking, or hustling, the last few years. Too busy with studies, and no money. But inside, he was patting himself on the back. She thinks I’m a dreamboat. I’m practically “in like Flynn.”

  “Listen. My mama allus said, beware of Cajun men. They have a twinkle in their naughty eyes. Sweet words flow lak honey from their fool tongues. And mischief simmers in their blood, sure as rain on laundry day.”

  He grinned. “As I recall, you accused me of turning Yankee last time we met.”

  “Oh, you Cajun, all right.”

  He loved the way she reverted to the language of their mutual roots on occasion. In fact, he suspected that she alternated between what Northerners considered an almost illiterate Southern language with words and sentences that clearly bespoke some education and intelligence. Did she do it deliberately? Probably. And it would fool outsiders. Not him. He could do Cajun with the best of them.

  “Sugah, Ahm thinkin’ y’all need a little joie de vivre.”

  “And you’re the one to put that joy in my life?”

  Her sarcasm was a little bit offensive. But he was undaunted. “I could try. What say we go out on a date Saturday night?”

  She arched her brows in question. “Go where?”

  She probably thought he was inviting himself to her house, to spend the evening on her porch swing, necking…or even petting.

  Which was highly appealing. But even a dreamboat like himself knew that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. “There’s a little club on Bourbon Street where we could dance and listen to music.”

  “You dance?”