Then Luc saw Sylvie sitting in the front row, wide-eyed and slack-jawed with amazement. Good thing it was the end of their song. He did the only thing he could think of. He winked at her.
And bless her heart, she winked right back.
Was it a sign?
Luc would have jumped right off the stage to find out, but Remy and René grabbed him by the forearms and pulled him back. As they exited the stage area, the crowd was going wild.
“They want us to do an encore,” René announced enthusiastically.
All the rest of them gave René a look that pretty well translated to “Get a Life!” and scooted off before he could talk them into something they might regret.
It was almost impossible for Luc to make his way through the tightly packed crowd to the front-row area where he’d seen Sylvie. Instead, he found himself drawn along with Remy and René toward a beer stand off to the side.
Along the way, they got lots of pats on the backs and more than a few propositions from the ladies. Some of them even brought a blush to his face.
Remy swore one woman pinched his butt. And he liked it.
The band was warming up for the next act, and through the fuzziness in Luc’s brain—he was still feeling euphoric over Sylvie’s wink—he began to register an increasingly worrisome fact. It sounded as if the band was about to play that old rock ‘n’ roll song “Love Potion Number Nine.”
He almost dropped his beer.
He glanced at his brothers, who were suddenly grinning. He glanced at the stage, where four women had just come out wearing dark sunglasses and raincoats that covered them from neck to stiletto-heeled feet. Then he glanced at his aunt, whom he’d just noticed behind the bar wearing a sarong, a lei, and a black pageboy wig. God knows what kind of vehicle she had now… probably a boat. She waggled a St. Jude medal at him and smiled encouragingly.
But he couldn’t think about that now. To the beat of the rock music, the women in raincoats strutted up to the four microphones planted along the front of the stage. With orchestrated panache, they flipped their sunglasses off and into the audience, then removed their raincoats, tossing them back and out of the way.
“Oh, my God!” he and Remy and René all said at once.
Sylvie, Blanche, Claudia, and Charmaine were wearing short-sleeved spandex dresses with rounded necklines that dipped practically to their butts in the back. They were so short they should have been outlawed. The colors were flame-red, pink, black, and white, with matching high-heeled shoes. About four miles of black silk stockings were displayed, ending in those sexysexysexy shoes… the kind of shoes that prompted a man to picture his woman wearing them, and nothing else.
Sylvie was the one in flame-red… which brought to mind something else she’d worn for him in flame-red. A nightie. Had she worn this red dress deliberately for him? Was it a message? Nah, he was dreaming again. Aside from the hooker dress, he noticed that her hair was a little… poufy. He recognized Charmaine’s work. Most of all, he noticed that Sylvie looked scared as hell.
Why is she doing this?
Sylvie was a Creole chemist with no real ties to the Cajun community.
Sylvie was too high-class to wear such low-class clothes, especially in public, even for a good cause.
Sylvie was too mad to go anywhere near where he might be.
Sylvie was too shy to put herself on exhibition.
Why is she doing this?
With a crash of cymbals and roll of drums, the band ended their rendition of “Love Potion Number Nine,” which the Happy Hookers had been singing while his mind had been wandering.
The stage darkened, except for a spotlight on Sylvie. Charmaine, Claudia, and Blanche stepped back a bit and took on the role of backup singers. Then Sylvie held onto the standing mike for dear life and began to sing that old torchy rock ‘n’ roll song “Do You Wanna Dance?”
She’s singing to me, was the first thing Luc realized.