Lulu’s Recipe for Cajun Sass Read online

  Louise smiled. She could almost hear her mother’s words of wisdom with their deep southern accents.

  Back to her telephone conversation, Louise told Marie, “I’ll bring Adèle over later this morning, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Much obliged. Do ya have any of that tea fer cramps? I’m about ta get my monthly, and my belly is painin’ me somethin’ awful.”

  “Sure.” Louise made a chamomile-peppermint mix that eased the cramps better than any drugstore medicine she’d ever tried. It was one of her most popular products. “I also got something new fer the bloat.”

  Once she had Adèle settled at the kitchen table with her usual breakfast of coush-coush—fried cornmeal mush with raisins, milk, and cane syrup—along with her Silly Friends coloring book and crayons, Louise went in to dress for the day. Reverting back to her Cajun Sass thoughts before the phone had rung, Louise decided that she wasn’t going to make any special effort to attract Justin. It would appear too obvious. Bib overalls, like she’d had on before, tucked into calf-high rubber boots, worn over a long-sleeved undershirt, all to protect as much skin as possible from the swamp elements and animals, including the sun and insects, the pudding-like mud, and snakes, thorny bushes, and aggressive gators during mating season. She did take extra care with her hair, though, pulling it off her face into a high ponytail, but leaving some curly strands to frame her face. And she did add a belt, which really hadn’t been necessary, though it made her waist appear unusually small.

  That little smudge of tinted anti-chapping balm on her lips made her mouth look luscious, but that was an unintended side effect. It wasn’t because she was trying to appeal to Justin. Okay, maybe she did want to show him what he was missing, but that was only a small part of her reasoning. At least, that’s what she told herself.

  When Justin arrived around noon, Louise was laying out supplies on the kitchen table. At his knock on the back door, she called out, “Come in, come in. The door, she’s open.” After entering the cottage’s living room, he unapologetically began checking everything out …the pictures on an end table, an open children’s picture book on an overstuffed easy chair, a toy box overflowing with dolls and games. Her mother’s basket of yarns. A stack of records atop an RCA console phonograph.

  Like her, he was dressed appropriately for the bayou, wearing khaki pants and leather boots, a long-sleeved, faded blue button-down shirt open over a white undershirt, and the same straw hat as before. He’d obviously shaved that morning, showing off a deep tan, the result of his summer in the South, she surmised. No doubt he was pale as a Yankee when back in the North.

  “Bonjour, Louise,” he said, coming forward and leaning down to kiss her cheek.

  In that brief second of closeness, she got a whiff of the slightly medicinal carbolic acid in the Lifebuoy soap he must have bathed in, softened by the delicious tones of his Aqua Velva aftershave. Neither were overpowering. Rather pleasant.

  Suddenly, she felt like a breathless virginal girl of sixteen, instead of an experienced almost-twenty-six. And she did not like it. At all! The skittering of her senses put her at a disadvantage, she decided, as if this were a contest of some sort.

  “Bonjour Justin. Ça va?” she greeted him, forcing a casualness to her voice. She forced herself to not step back from his closeness.

  “Ça va très bien,” he replied, “especially since I’m here.”

  She arched her brows at him.

  “I’m looking forward to our day together...” he paused and added, “…foraging.” His attention was caught then by the items she’d laid out on her Formica and chrome table, a pretty oval style with a red top matching the seats of the red vinyl seats and backs of the the four chrome chairs. The dinette set had been a proud purchase of hers two years ago when she’d gotten a belated life-insurance check from the government on her fiancé Phillipe. “Wow,” he commented. “You are really organized.”

  His eyes took in the large canvas carry bag she’d made with special pockets for certain things, like the packets for plants and seeds, small jars and bottles, a pen and gummed labels, a hand spade, secateurs and a sharp knife, her homemade bug repellant, a machete, and a pistol. But then, he said, “Whoa! What are these for?” He was pointing to the last two items.

  “The machete is needed for those places where the weeds are high. You never know when some snakes might be lurking about. Same is true of the pistol. I’m too small to wrestle an alligator.”

  He didn’t laugh at her weak attempt at humor. “Do you know how to use a weapon?”

  She nodded. “I do. It belonged to my brother Frank, and he taught me when I was scarcely a teenager.”

  “Have you ever had to use it?”

  She gave him a look which pretty much said, “Are you kidding me?” Then she laughed. “It also comes in handy to ward off randy men who come a-callin’ with naughty intentions.”

  “Point taken,” he said with a grin. “I recall you telling me before that all Cajun men have a twinkle in their eyes…a naughty twinkle.”

  “I said that?”

  “You did. I believe it was when you mentioned my being a dreamboat.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

  She bit her bottom lip to prevent herself from smiling. Justin was way too charming. And full of himself.

  “Speaking of your brother Frank, where’s his little girl?” he asked then.

  Louise felt her face heat with color. She wasn’t ashamed of being Adèle’s mother, but it wasn’t something she shared with many people either. In fact, now that her mother was gone, and an old parish priest they’d confided in had been transferred, almost no one knew. “Adèle is playing with Anna Belle today.”

  “Ah. So Anna Belle has recovered?”

  “Totally. As I told you before, you did a good job with her.”

  “Another compliment?” He bowed his thanks at her.

  She cringed. “I haven’t been that bad, have I?”

  “Mais oui! You have been hard on me. I must admit, though, that it has been well-deserved.”

  “Meaning that you have naughty intentions?”

  He laughed.

  “So, we’re even?”

  “Well, you may need to offer me a little extra incentive…to heal my wounded pride.”

  “Hah! Your pride could take a few notches down. I haven’t met a man so biggity since I don’t know when.”

  “Biggity?” He put a hand over his heart, as if wounded. “You think this…” he waved a hand between the two of them, “is about pride? Hah! When I’m around you, I get light-headed. My brain goes mushy. And I blurt out things I normally wouldn’t say…leastways, not this early in a relationship.”

  She was stunned speechless, for a moment. “That is so much malarkey. And, just so we’re clear, you and I don’t have a relationship.”

  He just stared at her.

  Unspoken before them was the word “yet.”

  “Anyhow, let’s get this show on the road…uh, bayou,” he said. “What exactly are we looking for today?”

  She chastised herself silently for falling into the charmer’s sexy banter. Breathing in and out to calm herself down, she then explained, “There are three particular plants I need.” She sat down at the table and flicked carefully through one of her grandmother’s receipt books. The spine of the hard-backed book, the kind that had been used since the Civil War for small business accounts or rent tallies, was broken, and the stained, sepia-toned pages were mostly loose, the whole held together with a rubber band. “Burdock and dandelion and nettle, those I can find just by walking along the stream, but it’s these other more rare ones that I have to resupply.”

  She showed him one page for lizard’s tail with its accompanying pencil sketch. The handwritten instructions…which must have been written by her grandmother, or maybe her mother—it was difficult to tell the difference—said, “For poultice on wounds, mash boiled roots. Also, for baby cutting teeth, put roots in glass of water with elm shavings, change wate
r every day, add to milk or mix in honey for flavor.”

  “Where did you get these?” He pointed to the books.

  “My grandmother started them. Then my mother added to them. Now me.”

  “These are fantastic,” he said. “They remind me of the Audubon sketches of birds here in Louisiana.”

  She shouldn’t care that he approved, but she did. Darn it! “This is the other plant I’m looking for today.” She turned to a later page in the first book. “The mamou, or coral bean plant.” The drawing showed beautiful crimson flowers with red beans inside black pods. This particular sketch had been hand-colored. Although the colors were faded, they were still vivid enough to differentiate, in fact, more lovely because of the shadings. The directions said, Boil seeds. Drink liquid 3 x day for newmoanya, colds, bronkeyeyetis.

  Justin scoffed at this one, whether for the misspellings or the cures, she wasn’t sure, and didn’t ask.

  “I’d really like to get to a sweet gum tree I’ve visited in the past. You’re probably aware that healing herbs sometimes make use of all parts of a plant—the roots, the stems, the bark, the twigs, the flowers—and each has a different purpose. One part can even be poisonous, while another is beneficial. And the time of year they’re harvested can make a difference, too. Anyways, I use the sweet gum leaves for headaches.” She paused and asked, “Am I boring you?”

  “Not at all.” He tapped one of the receipt books and remarked, “These are a treasure, you know. They probably belong in a museum or something.”

  “Pfff! Museum people don’t care about anything lowdown like Cajuns.”

  “Someday they will,” he predicted. “But I know what you mean. From the beginning, when the Acadians first fled France and Canada, they were considered a lower class, ignorant people. Little credit was given to the fact that they were survivors, willing to live in the swamps, do the grueling, dirty work of shrimping or trapping, eat foods no one else would touch, like possum or gator, and cook them in a simple style without fancy sauces, play music that to the more refined ear sounds raucous rather than melodic, and—”

  She was laughing, which caused him to stop and blush.

  “I do get carried away.”

  “I take it you’ve had to defend our culture up north.”

  “A time or two,” he admitted.

  Louise wrapped one of the books in oilcloth…the one that had the plants she was seeking today…to protect it against any dampness or accident while traveling in a pirogue through the bayou.

  “I’m ready,” she said when she was all packed up. “Are you sure you want to spend your day off out on the bayou?”

  “Well, I can think of a few things I’d rather do.” He gave her a quick once-over and stepped closer.

  She backed up and hit the counter. She wasn’t dumb enough to ask what he meant. She knew. His arrogance was maddening…and unwarranted. At least, she didn’t think she’d given him welcoming signals. “That’s the only activity on the agenda.”

  “Not even a kiss?”

  “No! Why would I kiss you?”

  “To be friendly?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to be friends. Besides, I don’t make a habit of kissing my friends.”

  “Because you like me, then.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I can tell. Your cheeks are flushed.”

  He put a hand to the side of her face, and she felt an electric shock, accompanied by a dizzying current of heat that traveled to all her extremities. She hadn’t felt this kind of instant arousal since Phillipe.

  Before she had a chance to object to his touch, his hand moved lower, and his fingertips brushed her mouth. “Your lips are parted,” he pointed out.

  She would have been hugely embarrassed, except that his voice was whispery raw. He was equally affected.

  “Sorry. That was a bit too much…too soon,” he said, stepping back.

  “I should say!” She put her hands to his chest, about to shove him away.

  But he leaned in quickly, took her hands in his, and brushed her lips with his, soft as a butterfly, fast as a dragonfly. Then, just as quickly, he backed up, grabbed her carry bag, and said, “You gonna dawdle all day, chère?”

  Louise was stunned speechless, but only for a moment. Time to tie a knot in this boy’s tail. As she walked out the door in front of him, she put a little extra swing in her hips, knowing without looking back that his eyes were glued to her hiney. She was pretty sure she heard him murmur, “Mon Dieu!”

  Yep, the rascal should be praying. She intended to show him what a bayou gal with Cajun Sass could do to an overconfident man, with or without Cajun Brass.

  Chapter 4

  Love is a burning fire, or is that lust?…

  Justin was playing with fire. He knew, sure as sin…and, yes, sin was exactly what he had in mind…that he was treading too close to the inferno where Louise Rivard was concerned. That little swish of her hips was a challenge he found both tempting and dangerous.

  His stay in Houma would end with his brother’s wedding at the end of the month. When he returned north to complete his medical studies, he would no doubt stay there; the opportunities were so much greater. And he liked it there, dammit. Sure, he was bayou-born and Cajun to the bone, but he was sick of the blistering hot weather, the bothersome gnats and dangerous snakes, the violent storms, the ignorance of some of the people.

  Bottom line: he had no business playing with a Cajun girl when they had no future. He needed to ignore the gauntlet she’d thrown down with that wicked roll of her hips, which caused the fabric of her overalls to tighten over a bottom that was…yes, yes, yes!...in the shape of an inverted heart, just as he’d suspected. And, yes, it had caused the fabric of his pants to tighten, too, over an important part of his body.

  Futile or not, he was sooo tempted. And like men, North or South, he was thinking with an organ other than his brain.

  It didn’t help that Louise was on to him, and was playing him with an erotic expertise that surprised him. Not just the thing with her hips, either. She must have put something on her lips to make them extra luscious. And the way she looked at him through half-lidded eyes…Holy sac-au-lait! Heat curled in his stomach and skittered out to all his extremities, lodging between his legs, which was already standing at attention, with an embarrassing flare. Good thing she wasn’t looking at him there.

  He tried to be a gentleman. He really did. Was it fair for him to start something with Louise when there was a fairly good chance he wouldn’t be around for the long haul? But then, there was just as much chance that he was the one who’d be scorched in this play with fire.

  With a grin, he decided all was fair in love and all that. And Louise was not so young that she needed a handicap in this contest of wills. He suspected she was not an innocent, especially having had a fiancé during the war. At least, that’s how he justified his upcoming all-out assault.

  “Why are you smirking?” Louise asked as she dumped her canvas bag into the center of the pirogue which was beached up on her lawn that abutted the stream. She untied the mooring line attached to a nearby tree and shoved the vessel out onto the shallow water, holding onto the rope so it wouldn’t drift away until they were inside.

  “I do not smirk,” he said, taking the long-handled paddle she poked him with and stepping into the stern of the narrow canoe, then sitting on the seat at the back.

  She jumped into the pirogue, just front of center with an expertise born of years of practice, and dropped the rope. Still standing, she spread her legs for balance and used a long pole to punt them out onto deeper water. The canoe wobbled from side to side at first before righting itself.

  “Holy shit!” he exclaimed, grabbing onto the sides of the pirogue, before using his oar to guide them with steady strokes in the traditional J-pattern. “You could have warned me.”

  She eased down onto the front seat, setting her pole in brackets along the side, then looked back at him over her should
er. She was grinning. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry don’t make the gumbo boil,” he muttered. One of his mother’s old sayings. Damn! They hadn’t even started their trek, and Louise was making him feel like a namby-pamby idiot, almost falling out of the pirogue, and channeling his mother, for heaven’s sake! Was that her intention? Of course it was. Lure the city sucker into the swamp and make him look like a fool.

  He narrowed his eyes at her back, and vowed to make her pay.

  In a way he would enjoy.

  “Are you smirking again?” she asked, without turning around.

  “Just smilin’, sugar,” he lied.

  They remained silent then. With him paddling, they streamed steadily eastward. The earlier balmy weather had turned blistering with humidity. Sweat streamed down his forehead and its saltiness stung his eyes. He blinked several times, then swiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt, only then to be hit by a swarm of gnats.

  He swore under his breath and blew outward so the little buggers wouldn’t enter his mouth or nose.

  “Here,” Louise said, turning adeptly on her bench seat and handing a small jar back at him. “Smear on a little of my insect repellant. The no-see-ems hate its smell.”

  No-see-ems was the name given in the South to the tiny midges or biting gnats because they were able to pass through screen doors with ease. Justin wasn’t sure if they had them in the North, too. He didn’t recall ever being bothered by them.

  Another plus for the North.

  Not that he was keeping count.