She sat up straighter and let the sheet fall to her waist. Taking the mug of black coffee from him, she sipped slowly, eyeing him warily as he walked about the bedroom checking out photographs and knick-knacks, including a few St. Jude statues that Tante Lulu had gifted her. St. Jude was the patron saint of hopeless causes, and if ever there was a hopeless cause, she was it, apparently. At the foot of her bed rested the “Good Luck” quilt Tante Lulu had given her after her marriage to Rusty. Lot of good it had done her. She saw the look Rusty gave the hand-crafted heirloom; he probably recognized it since it had been in their apartment. He must also recognize it as a mark of her failure—well, their failure—and of hopes dashed.
There were no pictures of Rusty in her room, if that was what he was searching for. Too painful a reminder of a short, blissful period in her life. They’d been married for only six months… or so she’d thought till yesterday.
Are we really still married?
How awful! the logical side of her brain exclaimed.
How interesting! another part of her brain countered.
Charmaine was honest, if nothing else, and she had to admit to being a tiny bit thrilled at the prospect of Rusty Larder still being her husband. Not that she was going to hop in the sack with him. Uh-uh!
Still…
And there was definitely exhilaration in knowing that she was no longer a four-time divorcee. Maybe she wasn’t so inadequate, after all.
Rusty seemed to fill the room as he prowled about, poking in her stuff, but not just because of his six-foot-three height and her low ceilings. There had always been something compelling about him. People’s heads turned when he walked down the street. Men, as well as women. No wonder she’d been sucked in before. Well, never again!
Still…
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, once her head stopped spinning and her stomach settled down and she’d pulled her ogling eyes off Rusty’s tantalizing figure. Cowboy charisma, that’s all it was. There was something about women and cowboys, sort of like women and men in military uniforms. That’s all it is, she told herself.
“So, go,” he replied, settling his tight butt—which she was not noticing—into a low rocking chair. Rock, rock, rock, he went, just watching her in a most infuriating way.
“I’m not dressed and I’m not parading my bare behind in front of you.”
He grinned. “Who do you think undressed you, chère? Besides, there ain’t nothin’ you’ve got that I haven’t seen a hundred times… maybe a thousand.”
She bared her teeth at him. The schmuck! Flipping the sheet aside, she stood and walked past him, pretending not to care that she presented a full-monty posterior. No doubt he was comparing her twenty-nine-year-old butt to her nineteen-year-old one and finding her lacking or, worse, exceeding what she’d had before. She wasn’t about to look and see his reaction, but she thought she heard him mutter, “Mercy!”
Once she was done in the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and hair, skinning the whole mess back into a high ponytail. She scrubbed her face clean, and considered putting makeup on—she never went out in public without makeup—but Rusty would probably think she did it for him; so she put that aside. Then, after pulling on a pair of capri pants, she went into the kitchen and turned on the radio. BeauSoleil was singing “C’est un Péché de Dire un Menterie,” their own rendition of that 1930s Fats Waller song “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.”
Rusty soon followed after her, leaning against the doorframe with a casualness belied by the grim expression on his face. He wore the same boots and jeans as yesterday, but somewhere he’d come up with a black T-shirt. And he’d shaved… probably with her razor and, yep—she sniffed the air—with her lilac shaving gel. He looked good enough to eat, and Charmaine was hungry.
“You look about nineteen and innocent as a kitten,” he remarked, taking in her hairdo, scrubbed face, capri pants… in fact, all of her.
Rusty is hungry, too, she realized. But any pathetic notions Charmaine entertained in the feed-the-Cajun category, and she didn’t mean food, soon evaporated with his next words.