She and Luc stared with horror at the two aunts… at the lech and the bimbo… then at each other. Without a word, Luc grabbed her hand, spun on his heel, and fled the scene, pushing her in front of him toward the old carriage house, which had been converted to a four-car garage, then beyond that to a massive magnolia arbor, which was fortunately empty.
Luc closed his eyes and breathed in and out, deeply, to settle his raging temper. The scent of magnolias was cloyingly sweet in the close confines of the bower.
How could he have taken the chance of speaking in a public setting about the lab tests? He should have known better. Secrecy was critical at this stage. He and Sylvie shouldn’t even be seen together. He’d never had trouble protecting his clients’ needs in the past. His only excuse was that he seemed to be under the influence of some madness.
A love potion?
No, that’s impossible. Maybe the stress of hating my father for so many years, and finally having an opportunity to retaliate, has made me snap. Maybe I’ve been alone too long. Maybe Tante Lulu is right when she predicts a big thing is going to happen to me this year. I only hope the big thing isn’t jeopardized by misdirected lust. It’s burning out the circuits in my brain.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that Sylvie had moved to the other side of the arbor, putting some distance between them. Smart woman!
Well, not so smart. Look at the mess she’s made with her stupid experiments. Look at the mess she’s made of me.
Twilight came abruptly, as it always did in the bayou region, like a celestial light switch, hazing the already shady arbor. Against the backdrop of huge blossoms in vivid shades of coral and pearlescent white, Sylvie resembled a paper doll inserted in an impressionistic painting. Unreal and hauntingly beautiful.
Sylvie? Beautiful? He really was going mad.
She wore a long gauzy dress of variegated shades of indigo blue—much like those in the fine fabrics Cajun women still hand-dyed and weaved. With its rounded neck that barely exposed her collarbone, its loose, waistless construction, and ankle-brushing length, it could have passed for an old-fashioned gown of another era, except that the back dipped low, low, low, exposing the delicious curve of her lower back.
He knew this because he’d followed her a short time ago as they’d escaped the prying eyes and ears at the party. He knew because his heart had dropped about two feet when he got his first gander at all that creamy, made-to-be-caressed skin.
No doubt about it, Sylvie Fontaine was pretty. Not that he’d ever been attracted to her in that way. At least not before. Or not consciously. No, he preferred wild redheads. Or wild blondes. And taller. He liked a woman who would fit better against his six-foot frame. And he sure as hell didn’t favor her haughty, touch-me-not attitude.
He didn’t like her one bit. That was why his sudden obsession with her was so confusing and intolerable.
Sylvie had been a thorn in his side for years… a visible reminder of all his shortcomings. For that reason, he jabbed at her whenever they met. Oh, she’d pretended to be timid when they were younger, but she was Ice Breaux to the bone, even then.
“How come you never got married again, Sylv?” he surprised himself by asking. He surprised himself even more by closing the distance between them and leaning against a trellis post mere inches away from her.
Her eyes shot up. Wide blue eyes framed by thick, silky black lashes. It was probably just mascara. As Tante Lulu always said, “Put beauty on a stick and it look fine, but the stick, she is still a stick.” Usually, Tante Lulu was making that remark to his half-sister Charmaine, a former Miss Louisiana who owned a beauty spa over in Thibodaux. Charmaine claimed she could make any woman beautiful.
“Why?” Sylvie snapped, regaining her composure and recalling him to his question about marriage. “How did you know I was married? It was fifteen years ago.”
“Everyone knew you were married, chère. Houma is a small town, after all.” And the speculation over why one of the Ice Breaux would marry a lowly street guitarist had provided meat for juicy gossip. He’d personally given her a mental salute at the time, but later learned that the marriage had lasted only six months. Mama Breaux-Fontaine had come riding to the rescue with a posse of lawyers. Actually, he hadn’t given her all that much thought back then. He’d been in a youth correctional home for a year, till his eighteenth birthday, and had just been offered an opportunity to turn his life around by attending LSU.