Something occurred to him then. “Oh, my God, I hit on a nun.”
“Yes, you did.” She smiled at him, and, man, she had the sweetest smile. It reached all the way up and encompassed her whole face, especially her dancing eyes. “Actually, I was flattered.”
“And you shot me down. Zap! I don’t get shot down very often, so I was crushed.”
She smiled some more. “Liar! You just moved on to the other females in the casino that day.”
“Hey, it was about that time that I posed for Playgirl. Did you know about it?”
“Oh, yeah.” She grinned at him. “You were already a name in poker, and the title of your feature was ‘His Poker Is Hot.’ ”
His face heated up. That stupid stunt was going to follow him to the grave. “So, did you look at the picture?”
A wider grin, accompanied by twinkling green eyes. “What do you think?”
“A nun ogling soft porn. Tsk, tsk!”
“What makes you think I was ogling?”
He pretended to be hurt.“You didn’t like my… uh, attributes?”
She leaned over and smacked him on the arm. “You are such a wuss, fishing for X-rated compliments.”
“So, is that why you left the convent?”
She laughed. “Because I was checking out naked guy pictures?”
“No. Because of the card playing?”
“Uh-huh. I won a tournament, and my picture was in the newspaper. I was politely told to resign or get booted out.” Grace stood and brushed some pieces of bark off her rear end.
Angel uncoiled his body and stood, too. “Were you upset about that?”
“No. I wasn’t meant for the religious life, though there were good people there. Religious, yeah, but way different from my parents.”
“When was the last time you saw your parents? Oh,” he quickly added, having forgotten how old they were at her birth, “are they still alive?”
“I have no idea. And that is the end of confession for today, Father Sabato.”
Angel started to ask more, then stopped himself. He suspected there was a whole lot Grace hadn’t told him, but he could wait. He’d learned more about her today than he had in the past ten years. And he needed to think over everything she had disclosed to find the missing pieces of her puzzle.
“I’m glad we can at least talk to each other like this—like old times,” Grace said as they walked side by side back to the trailer site.
If she says we can still be friends, I am going to throttle her… or kiss her senseless.
Lawyers and poker players know how to fake it…
Most everyone had left by the time they returned, except for Tante Lulu, Luc, and a new arrival Grace recognized as Samantha Starr, who would be running the joint Hope Foundation once it got under way officially.
“C’mere, Angel,” Tante Lulu said. “I cain’t explain these drawings to Samantha nohow.”
He walked over without giving Grace another look. Which was fine. Really. And she wasn’t jealous of the appreciative once-over Samantha gave Angel, even if it was obvious that she liked his belly button, too. The show-off hadn’t put a shirt back on yet.
Besides, there was no contest in comparing herself to the stunning auburn-haired beauty. Samantha was tall, and Grace had always wished she was taller, and even though her hair was red, it wasn’t brassy red like Grace’s but a deep mahogany. Of course, she had a ton of freckles; Grace didn’t envy those.
“What’s up?” she asked Luc.
“Everyone had dates or commitments. Charmaine took the kids back to your cottage. She’ll stay until you bring Tante Lulu.”
Grace nodded. “Well, we got a lot done here today, didn’t we?”
They both scanned the clearing, which really was a clearing now. No more trailer. The Dumpster was full, and sheets of metal siding lay in a huge pile.
“If Tante Lulu and Samantha approve those drawings,” Luc said, pointing to the picnic table where the three were studying what appeared to be blueprints, “Angel will order the supplies today and get started tomorrow laying a foundation.”
“So quick!”
“Yep, but that’s what they need. The house will be up in two weeks. Lots of inside finishing to be done after that, but the kids would be able to move in within a month. If everything goes smoothly, that is.”
“Are you as worried as I am that this is not going to work?”
“Yes. Well, no. Somehow, even the most outrageous of Tante Lulu’s schemes always work out in the end.”
“Of course they do. She’s got St. Jude on her side.”
“Ain’t that the truth?”
They smiled at each other. Luc, even though he’d passed the fifty mark, was a very handsome man. A very handsome married man with three teenage daughters.
Just then, they heard a car approaching. Someone must be returning.
But no, it was a strange vehicle. A strange vehicle with a logo on the side.
“Uh-oh,” she and Luc said at the same time.
A man and a woman got out of the car and walked toward them. They wore serious business suits and serious expressions on their faces.
A sideways glance showed that Tante Lulu, Angel, and Samantha had also noticed the new arrivals and were coming up to stand beside her and Luc.
“What are you people doing here?” the man asked. He was about forty with horseshoe hair, bald on top, bushy on the sides. Lines bracketed his eyes and lips, but they probably weren’t due to smiles. Even as he spoke, he pulled a pack of antacids from his pocket and popped one into his mouth.
“What are you doing here?” Luc countered.
That didn’t go over big.
Mr. Tums was already unfolding a wallet and showing them a CPS identification card. “I’m Merrill Olsen from Child Protective Services, and this is my assistant, Jancie Pitot.” Jancie was thirty-something, a very plain, almost homely woman, who weighed at least two hundred pounds, and by her pinched lips, she looked as if she could use a stomach settler, too.
Tante Lulu, never one to mince words, whispered, “That feller ’pears as ornery as a bee-stung dog, and that gal has a four-pocket behind if I ever saw one.”
“I’m Luc—Lucien LeDeux, representing the Hope Foundation. This is my aunt, Louise Rivard, and that is Samantha Starr, cochairman of the foundation. And these two are Angel Sabato and Grace O’Brien. What can we do for you folks?”
“What are you people doing here? And where the hell’s the trailer that was standing here yesterday?”
“Gone, gone, gone,” Angel quipped.
Neither Mr. Tums nor Ms. Pitot was amused.
In fact, Tante Lulu muttered under her breath again, “Those two gots hearts as cold as a cast-iron commode.”
“Who tore it down?” Ms. Pitot asked.
“We did,” Angel replied for all of them.
“What right did you have to do that?” Mr. Tums wanted to know.
“Right of ownership. The legal papers are on file in the parish courthouse, in case you’re interested,” Luc said in a lawyerly voice.
Face reddening, Ms. Pitot said, “Where are the kids who were living here? Did you buy the place from them? Because, believe me, you might be Lawyer McDreamy, but you’re in big trouble if you did.”
Everyone looked at Luc at the mention of Lawyer McDreamy.
Lips twitching with suppressed mirth, Luc told them, “This plot was a long-abandoned railroad right-of-way with an old trailer on it. It was legally purchased four years ago.”
“By whom?” Mr. Tums’s eyes widened as he seemed to notice for the first time the pile of rubble that once was a trailer. He sputtered, “Something fishy’s going on here. I demand some answers.”
Luc shrugged. “Sue me.”
“Don’t you people have something better to do? Like reform the foster-care system? Or take care of kids who are in abusive homes? Or help families stay together?” Grace’s outburst surprised not only the CPS workers, but everyone else there, incl
uding herself.
Ignoring her, Mr. Tums and Ms. Pitot were about to turn on their heels, but first Mr. Tums warned them, “We’ll be back. With the police. You won’t be such smart-asses then.”
“Jancie Pitot,” Tante Lulu said suddenly. “I know you. Yer the one what peed yer pants on the Our Lady of the Bayou quilt at the church bazaar when you was a chile.”
Jancie’s face bloomed pink with embarrassment.
“How’s yer mama, chère? She still got the gout?”
Jancie muttered something about her mother being okay, and the two stomped toward their car.
Once they left the area, Luc sighed.
“What?” the rest of them asked.
“We’ve got trouble.”
They all turned to him, waiting for an explanation.
“Minors can’t buy property in Louisiana.”
Chapter Seven
And then he invited the green-eyed cat to stop by…
Once they had discussed the problems they would be facing with CPS and how to speed up the building project, Angel said, “I’m outta here.”
Luc slapped an arm over his shoulder. “Hot date?”
“We shall see. Whether it turns out to be hot or not.” Angel cast a quick glance at Grace to check if she was listening.
She was.
“Who you datin’?” Leave it to Tante Lulu. Blunt as usual.
Angel didn’t suppose she would appreciate him telling her it was none of her business. “Larise Dupree. Charmaine introduced us.”
Tante Lulu muttered something about him being a dumb doodle and Charmaine needing to be whacked upside the head.
“Hey, I know Larise,” Samantha said. “We went to school together. Isn’t she a model? In fact, I heard she posed nude for Playboy last year.”
“That figures,” Grace mumbled under her breath. “Birds of a feather.”
“What did you say?” Angel inquired sweetly.
She pretended not to hear him.
“I like models,” Luc said. “Especially nude ones.”
“Remind me ta tell that ta yer wife,” Tante Lulu said.
Luc just hugged his aunt.
“Hey, Samantha. I got a good idea. Mebbe you could double-date with Angel. I could fix ya up with my nephew Daniel. You met him. Remember? The doctor who ain’t gay.”
“Don’t. You. Dare. I don’t need to be fixed up with anyone, and certainly not with a sarcastic Doctor McDreamy.”
“Ya doan hafta shout.” Tante Lulu had her head tilted to the side and was hitting the side of her head with the heel of one hand. “And ain’t it cool that we gots a Lawyer McDreamy and a Doctor McDreamy in our family?”
“How about you, Grace?” Angel gave her another of his sweet, innocent looks, which she wasn’t buying one bit. “Do you want to double date?”
“What do you think?”
“Hey, if you don’t have anyone special, there’s this bartender over in the French Quarter I met yesterday. He used to be a navy SEAL… about twenty years ago. Of course, he’s bald, but some women like that. And you know what they say about navy SEALs. Staying power out the ying-yang. I told him about you, and he was really, really interested in doing—I mean, meeting an ex-nun. What do you say?”
Grace folded her arms over her chest and flashed him the cutest glower. “Do you have a death wish?”
“Okay, maybe some other time? How about you, Sam? You interested in the SEAL?”
“Get a life!”
Angel just smiled to himself. A good day’s work. He couldn’t wait to get back to the houseboat, take a shower, then lie down with a cold beer and watch a Braves baseball game on TV. Alone. “Can I give anyone a lift?” he offered.
He thought he heard Grace say something crude about a part of his anatomy that had done way too much lifting already.
Tante Lulu winked at him.
His plan was progressing very nicely, if he did say so himself.
Was she going to be in the jailhouse now?…
There were eighteen bleepin’ people seated at the long conference table in the new Hope Foundation headquarters in New Orleans: nine on the LeDeux side, including himself, and nine on the Starr family side. This was the first official meeting of the board of directors of the new charity.
With that number, they would never get anything done, but apparently there had been nine Starrs on the previous board, who weren’t about to give up their seats. Therefore, Tante Lulu insisted on matching that number.
In the background, Elvis music played. It had been louder when they’d first entered, Stanley Starr being a huge Elvis fan—in fact, the walls were covered with Elvis memorabilia, even a pair of Elvis socks, suitably framed—but Samantha had insisted he at least turn down the volume. He’d grumbled something about them all being hound dogs with no taste in music.
Angel smiled to himself. The guys back in the Newark slums would be amazed at his being on the board of directors of anything. Too highfalutin, as Tante Lulu would say. In fact, they’d be more inclined to predict him being in jail by now, or dead.
To the left of him was Grace, who kept trying to cozy up to him as if they were now going to be best buds. Not in this lifetime! She’d whispered to him earlier, on first plopping down next to him, that this was the least of the things the old lady had talked her into. Like the time she’d gone on a rattle hunt, as in the rattles of shedded snake-skins, which apparently had some healing property—Who knew!—and ran into a humongous ol’ slitherer that had been in the process of doing nature’s bump and grind, i.e, stripping, and was not happy about being interrupted.
Speaking of stripping, if Grace only knew what he was thinking as he looked her over while she chatted about this and that. Like how much fun would it be to undo, slowly, all fourteen buttons on the front of her fitted white blouse? And yes, he’d counted them. Several times. Her perfume wasn’t overpowering, that same enticing citrusy smell. Which of course prompted him to think about a program he’d watched on the History Channel last night about the history of birth control. It appeared that Casanova had done some interesting things with lemons. Whoo-ee! No wonder the ol’ boy had been considered a great lover!
He shook his head to clear it before Grace suspected that he’d lied when he said he had no romantic feelings for her anymore.
Scanning the table, he saw Luc, Remy, René, John, and Charmaine, as expected, along with another “What the hell am I doing here” person, Daniel LeDeux, a physician. Daniel seemed to have a permanent bug up his ass, which wasn’t helped by Tante Lulu, who kept telling everyone that he wasn’t gay, as if there were some question about his sexual preference.
Holding court in the center of their side was Tante Lulu, who today wore wobbly high heels, enough makeup to plaster a wall, a floaty multicolored dress that Grace told him in an aside came from the Mary Kate and Ashley collection, whatever that meant, sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed black straw hat with a big honkin’ rose and a little veil. Greta Garbo for the oldsters!
And if that didn’t beat all, the old codger across the table—Stanley Starr—resembled a thinner, shorter version of Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, goatee, white suit, and all. And about a gazillion freckles, or were they age spots? He was staring at Tante Lulu as if she were an old-guy wet dream. Eeeew!
In fact, the Starr family would give the LeDeux family a run for the money in the wacky department:
Aunt Dot, who was about seventy and butch as they came in her man haircut and husky voice—clearly a lesbian.
Douglas—pronounced in a Scots dialect as Dooglass—was a fifty-year-old, hair-dyed, Drakkar-reeking, Armani-clad ladies’ man; in fact, he’d been giving Grace the eye ever since they walked in. If his chances weren’t so ludicrous, Angel would have been over the table by now to clean his clock.
Angus—yeah, he was named like a cow—was a barely twenty-year-old geek to the max, complete with a superiority attitude, as if the rest of them were idiots. A bunch of gee-whiz techno toys we
re spread before him, like a cell phone that could probably launch a rocket, a constantly beeping pager, and a mini-laptop at which he kept clicking away. Is he taking minutes? Or visiting Internet porn sites? Or just bored?
Maire, spelled M-A-I-R-E, she was quick to point out, had to be a Mary Kay rep, or else she’d swallowed a gallon of Pepto-Bismol; she wore a pink suit, pink shoes, pink lipstick and rouge, and a pink diamond ring the size of a golf ball, and she even had pink-tinted blonde hair.
Wallace, Samantha’s brother, about twenty-five, who was off to the races. Literally. Apparently, he was responsible for Starr Foods owning a thoroughbred farm, and one of the horses was racing this weekend.
Bruce, Samantha’s father, took his Scottish heritage seriously. Thus the kilt, the knee socks, and something called a sporran, which resembled a furry fanny pack, except it hung down his stomach.
Lilith, Bruce’s wife and Samantha’s stepmother, had some kind of turban on her head with a matching, loose, ankle-length gown. She was an honest-to-God voodoo priestess and proud of it. She and Tante Lulu had been gabbing like crazy about love potions and such when they first arrived.
Maybe I need a love potion.
You need something, the voice in his head said.
I was wondering, he said to the St. Jude in his head—hey, he was bored—when they play the song “When the Saints Come Marching In,” do you feel like, well, marching?
Saints don’t march. They float.
Oh. Doesn’t have the same ring, does it?
“Who are you talking to?” Grace asked.
His face heated up as he slumped lower in his seat, declining to answer.
The only normal one on the other side of the table was Samantha, the chairman, who had apparently taken an instant loathing to the perpetually frowning Daniel. He had to give the lady credit for chutzpah for her attire, which was beyond hot. She wore a serious black fitted suit over a not-so-serious white silk Victoria’s Secret–type thingee that drew male attention like a high-powered magnet. Donald Trump in a bustier, that’s what she was. Her skirt was barely knee-high over black silk stockings that went on forever down to black strappy stilettos. Even Daniel gulped a few times on first getting a gander at her getup.