“You’re a pain in the ass. A royal chew rouge.” René was grinning at him.
“I know.” Luc couldn’t help grinning back.
“Let’s hope Sylvie Fontaine has a taste for pain-in-the-ass, over-the-hill Cajuns.”
“Oh, yeah! Ab-so-loot-ly!” Luc shook his head at the futility of this whole mission. “René, my agreeing to come here today isn’t about impressing Sylvie. As if I could!”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to try. You don’t have to nail her, or nothin’. Just be nice.”
Pour l’amour de Dieu! Where does René get these ideas? “Nail her? Where did that brain-blip come from anyhow? Me and Bunsen Burner Barbie? Ha, ha, ha.” He shivered with exaggerated distaste.
Come to think of it, he always felt kind of shivery when he was around Sylvie… nauseous, actually. He couldn’t stand the woman. Never could. Without a word—just a toss of her aristocratic head—she always managed to reduce him to the small, ill-clothed, bad boy from the bayous, anxious for a favor from an uptown Creole girl. Not that he ever showed it. Instead, he played down to her expectations.
“I still can’t see why I have to be the one to approach her, René. You know her, too. I remember her greeting you at the Crawfish Festival last summer. Seems to me she gave you a big hug of welcome. ‘Oooh, René, it was so sweet of your band to come play for us.'” The last he mimicked in a high falsetto voice. Then he added in a grumble, “All I got was her usual frown.”
René laughed. “Sylvie likes you, deep down.”
“It must be real deep.”
“Here,” René said, offering him the rearview mirror, which he picked up off the floor. “Your hair looks like a bayou hurricane just swept through.”
Luc raked his fingers through his windblown hair, then gave up. Was he seriously buying into René’s warped idea of impressing Sylvie?
“I still say you should have worn a suit.”
“A suit! What, you don’t like the way I’m dressed now?” He looked down at his jeans and the black T-shirt emblazoned with the logo “Proud to be a Coonass.” He lifted his chin defensively. “My clothes are clean.”
In truth, his clothes were always clean. Rumpled, yeah. But always, always clean. One time Sylvie had looked kinda funny at his muddy jeans and sniffed, as if he smelled. It didn’t matter that he was only eight years old at the time. His clothes were never dirty again, even when he’d had to wash them in cold bayou stream water in an enamel basin at night, along with those of his younger brothers Remy and René, and wear them damp to school in the morning. A slap or two from his father would be thrown in there somewhere. By mid-morning his head would often droop with exhaustion, and Sister Colette would rap him awake with a ruler to the head, deriding, “You bad boy, you! You’re never going to amount to anything but a gougut… a slovenly, stupid person.”
Lordy, he hadn’t thought of that in years. No wonder it rankled like hell that he had to go to Ms. Goody Two-Shoes for a favor today.
“Well, come on,” he urged as he climbed over the driver’s door, which was rusted shut. “Time to put our pirogue in the water and see if we float or sink.”
“Uh, me, I think I’ll stay here. Better you should dazzle Sylvie with your moves in private.”
Moves? What moves? Watching his brother squirm uncomfortably in the seat, avoiding his eyes, Luc realized that he’d been set up good and proper. René had never intended to go in with him. Whatever. He might as well get it over with. Maybe he’d still get in an hour or two of fishing tonight.
“Bonne chance,” René called after him as he headed for the front entrance of the pharmaceutical research company, where workers were beginning to stream out, ending their workday.
Yep, it is a thing without end, he decided. Sa fini pas. And it wasn’t his father he was thinking of now.
Chapter Two
Samson and Delilah were at it again.
And that was truly amazing, Sylvie reminded herself, since the jelly beans Delilah had been indulging in the past week were placebos. It proved once again that the attraction continued even after the potion wore off, just as she’d told Blanche earlier this afternoon.