“Here,” she said, tearing one of the sheets off her tablet and shoving it at him.
“Remy’s Rules,” he read aloud. Was she crazy? Sittin’ here making lists of rules for me? While my brain, and other body parts, are about to implode with testosterone overload? He had no idea what the other lists still attached to her tablet detailed, but he sure as hell wasn’t amused by her making a list for him, as if he was a little kid.
“Rule One. No sex, including hands, tongues, lips, intimate body parts, hot looks or sexy talk. Trade-off, no discussion about Remy’s sterility.” He winced at her verbal mention of his condition. It looked so black-and-white and insignificant on paper, when he knew it was monumentally significant. “Rule Two, no deliberate tempting from either side, including lack of clothing, sexy talk, hot looks, touching, etc.” He looked at Rachel, who waited expectantly until he was done reading, and asked her, “Are you for real?”
“What? You disagree with my rules?”
“Yeah, I disagree. Bigtime. You’ve got this agreement formatted all wrong, and not just because you failed to put a trade-off item next to your latest rule.” He took her pencil and tablet from her, flicked through to a blank page and began to write. Then he tore out his sheet and handed it and the tablet back to her.
She read aloud:
“Rule One. No sexual intercourse. Trade-off, no sterility discussion.
“Rule Two. No kissing. Trade-off, to be decided.
“Rule Three. No deliberate touching. Trade-off, to be decided.
“Rule Four. No sexy talk. Trade-off, to be decided.
“Rule Five. No deliberate flaunting of bare skin, or showing of buttocks or nipples. Trade-off, to be decided.” He looked at Rachel and asked, “So, what do you think?”
She looked as if she’d like to wallop him over the head with the tablet. “I have never deliberately flaunted those things you mentioned.”
“You mean nipples and buttocks?” he asked innocently.
“Yes, those.” She took a deep breath which caused two of those body parts to come to his attention. “Look, we already agreed to the one trade-off. What makes you think you get four more, when all I added was one more rule?”
“Your first rule was too all-encompassing. The best rules are flexible—made to be revised when necessary. Your rules are in need of a major revamping.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “So what kind of tradeoffs were you thinking of?”
“Hmmm. I hadn’t really thought that far.” Mon Dieu, it’s all I can think about. “Okay, in return for no deliberate flaunting of bare skin, unless a person gives warning in advance, like, ’Hey, Rachel, I’m about to go swimming now. You might want to close your eyes.’ Or, ’I’m in the shower and forgot a towel, could you hand me one .. . and no fair peeking.’ That kind of thing. Well, in return for that—”
“You are not taking this seriously at all.”
I am very serious when it comes to bare skin. Especially yours, babe. “Yes, I am. Anyhow, the trade-off for the bare skin thing could be one dance.”
“Huh? What kind of dance? Where? How?”
“There’s an old tape player inside with René’s cassettes. Assuming it works, one song of my choice. One dance.”
“Can I assume this would be a slow dance?”
“Darn tootin’.” Reeaaal slow.
“You’re impossible,” she laughed, but then added, “Agreed.”
Man, this is easier than taking candy from a baby. “On to the rule about no deliberate touching—other than the dance, of course—how about you agree to let me give you a massage? I do good massage, honey. Learned during my physical therapy days in the hospital.”
“You already gave me a massage at Charmaine’s spa. Remember?”
Are you kidding? I will never forget. “This is another type of massage. This is normal, therapeutic massage.” Man, I am on a roll.
“Fully clothed?”
“Sure.” Here, baby. Here, baby. Here, baby. “On to no sexy talk. Hmmm. That one shouldn’t be too hard. I usually don’t talk sexy unless intercourse is involved, or right around the corner. How about you?”
She appeared speechless for the moment.
Speechless is good. Real good. “Anyhow, I’ll give you that one for a freebie. See how easy I am to get along with?”
She remained stiff as a board and suspicious as hell. She should be. He was going for the kill now.
“As to the no kissing rule, well, my trade-off calls for one kiss to seal the deal. Just one kiss.” Believe that and I’ve got a bridge to sell you. “Don’t go puckering your mouth up like you swallowed a lemon. I’m not trying to trick you.” Much. “Honest. Just one kiss. After all, I deserve that for the freebie I just gave you.” He stopped when he realized he was overselling this last trade-off.
“I agree. Just so we can get along and survive these next four days. But I have to say I’m surprised at you. You’ve made it clear, just as I have, that things are over between us, that we have no future. Why would you ask any of those things of me, those trade-offs, when you know they are pure temptation?”
He could have given her a flip answer, but he didn’t. Instead, he went for honesty. “I don’t want you for a wife . . . just as you don’t want me for a husband.” He quickly added the latter when he saw hurt flash across her face. “But I sure-God want to have mind-blowing sex with you. I have a powerful, very powerful, need for you that I can’t argue away logically. So, I figure that it’s like tossing a piece of candy to a sugar addict. Maybe it will appease the hunger for awhile.”
“Oh, Remy.” Tears misted her eyes, and he understood her silent message. She shared the hunger.
“If it were up to me, we would screw each other’s brains out over the next four days, get it out of our system, then go our separate ways after that. Sex, but no commitment, no strings, just sex.”
“Men view sex differently than women do, Remy. We can’t separate the sex from emotion. Getting laid is a man thing. Making love is a woman thing.”
“I know. That’s why I agreed to your silly rules.”
They both stared at each other, aware of the hopelessness of their situation.
Then he smiled at her. A weak smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Speaking of hunger,” he said, trying to lighten both their moods, “how do you feel about worms?”
“Eating them?” she asked with horror. “You Cajuns are crazy, I swear. The things you eat. Okra is bad enough. I refuse to eat worms.”
“No, not eating worms,” he replied with a laugh, chucking her under the chin. “You said Feng Shui-ers think it’s bad luck to kill a snake. How about worms? Is it okay to kill worms?”
“I suppose so,” she answered tentatively, unsure where he was going with this conversation. “I’ve never seen worms mentioned in a Feng-Shui manual.”
“Good, because there’s something I would like to do with you. It can get wet, and slippery, and downright dirty at times, and on a day like today, hot as hell, but it can also be very satisfying and lots of fun.”
“Reeemy,” she cautioned.
“Tsk-tsk, Rachel. Get your mind out of the gutter. What I want you to do with me is . . .” He paused for a ta-da ending.
“What?”
“Fish.”
Gone fishin
“I got one, I got one!” Rachel shrieked with delight, almost knocking the Vanderbilt baseball cap off her head. Vanderbilt was the Catholic high school in Houma.
“And probably scared every other fish away with your screams,” Remy grumbled, but with a smile on his face.
At her insistence, he’d donned the same T-shirt, Tulane cap and athletic shoes he’d worn before, to comply with the new and revised rules, but he was still tempting as all get-out. That was beside the point. Rachel had a fish to catch, and Remy just stood there at the edge of the water, net in hand, waiting for her to haul it in.
“What do I do now?” she asked. “Holy cow! Look at how taut the line is. Look at the
way the rod is bending. I’m gonna catch a fish. Yippee!”
“What you’re gonna do is lose a fish if you don’t stop squealing and start working, babe,” Remy told her, shaking his head at her enthusiasm.
“Tell me what to do, Mr. Sarcastic.”
“Set the hook.”
“Huh?”
“Pull back hard. Harder than that. C’mon, I know how strong you are, Rachel. I’ve got bruises on my head from your okra thwap to prove that.”
She shot him a glare, then jerked her rod back as hard as she could.
“Keep the pressure on now, sweetie. Nice and easy. You want to keep the line taut at the same time you’re reeling him in. Just like a woman, tease a little, tug a little, tease a little, tug a—”
“I got the message,” she snapped.
He grinned at her, slow and sexy. The wretch. He’d been teasing her.
“Remember, no hot looks,” she reminded him.
“That was not a hot look. You would know if I gave you a hot look, believe me. That was only lukewarm.”
“Whatever.” She started to panic then. “The line is going out farther, even though I’m reeling it in.”
“That’s the drag. A good thing. Relax. This sucker will play itself out in good time.”
“My arms are starting to hurt. Maybe you should pull it in.”
“Pull it in?” he said with a laugh. Then, “Uh-uh, sugar, this is your fish. You do the work.”
“I see it, I see it,” she yelled.
Remy put his hands over his ears, pretending that her screams were piercing his eardrums. Meanwhile, he stepped into the water. Just when she thought the fish would get away, he swooped down with his net and captured a big fish.
“What is it?”
“A red fish. About five pounds. Not really big for a red fish, but then they usually aren’t found this far inland. You did good, baby,” he said, and appeared as if he was about to give her a hug, then thought better of it, probably because of the rules she’d insisted upon. Darn it. No, not really darn it. Well, sort of darn it. Aaarrgh!
Rachel loved watching Remy fish, and she loved the gentle patience he’d exhibited in teaching her how to bait a hook and hold a rod. She loved his teasing sense of humor when she fumbled and made dumb mistakes. He was a dark man with a lighter side long buried and fighting to come out. He would make a wonderful father. But, no, Rachel had promised Remy not to bring up that subject, and, frankly, it hurt too much for her to even think about all that he would never have. It was a crying shame that this gentle man would never have children of his own. And it was a crying shame that she would never have children, or anything else with him.
Rachel shook her head briskly to rid it of these morose thoughts. She refused to allow negative energy to spoil this nice day.
After that, Remy caught a speckled trout, a Bream, and a Black Drum, all of which he deemed too small and threw back in. An egret perched on a nearby limb swooped down and caught the Bluegill before it even hit the water and took off for its nest, she supposed, where he and the egret-wife and birdlets would share a tasty dinner. Remy caught a couple of Sac-a-lait, a fish known as “sack of milk” because of its fine-textured meat. These were a local version of crappies, he told her, and, although smaller than the other fish he’d rejected, he kept all three of them.
“I don’t think I want to eat something with crap in its name,” Rachel said.
“You’ll love ’em,” Remy promised, “fried in butter and garlic. Yum.”
She was doubtful, but deferred to his better judgment on the matter. Next, Rachel caught what had to be the ugliest fish in the world.
“It’s a catfish, Rachel. They’re not supposed to be pretty,” Remy chided her.
“It has whiskers. Yeech!”
“There is nothing better for breakfast than a slice of hot fried catfish on a piece of crusty bread,” Remy told her. “Luc and René and I ate it all the time when we were growing up. We’d have a nice wood fire going down by the stream, and cook the fish right after we caught them.”
He didn’t say it, but Rachel suspected that it was all they’d eaten sometimes. She imagined the three little boys having had to fend for themselves when their father went off on a binge or a beating rampage, running off to hide by some bayou stream, camping out, feeding off of what nature offered.
“Did you and your brothers come here, to this cabin, when you were growing up?”
“Not much. It was too far out when we were younger, a good two hours by boat, but we did come occasionally when we were teenagers and older. It’s Luc’s cabin, him being the oldest, passed down through my mother’s family, but he’s always shared it with us. I don’t think he’s been here in the last few years, though, judging by the overgrown bushes and dusty interior.”
“I know I’ve said it before, but you are so lucky to have your family.”
He nodded, giving her an odd look, almost bleak. “Family is important to you, isn’t it?” It wasn’t the first time he had asked her that question.
“Isn’t it to everyone?”
He shrugged.
Rachel suspected that there was more to his question than met the eye, but had no time to ask him because there was another tug on her line now. What she pulled up about caused her to have a heart attack. At her first view of her latest catch, she screamed, threw her rod on the ground, and jumped back about three yards.
“Oh, my God! I caught a snake, a big, fat, slimy snake! You didn’t tell me I might catch a snake. Why didn’t you warn me? Oh, my God! Is it poisonous? What kind is it? Betcha it’s a water moccasin. Oh, my God!”
Remy picked up her rod and began to reel the snake in. “It’s not a snake, Rachel. It’s an eel.”
“Hah! If it looks like a snake, and slithers like a snake, it must be a snake.”
“It’s an eel.”
“Whatever it is, let it go.”
“Why? You’ve never eaten eel? It’s a real delicacy.” Remy laughed at her.
She flashed him her fiercest glower.
“Are you going to give me the finger again?”
“No.”
“What? Eel catching isn’t finger-worthy?”
“Remy,” she cautioned through gritted teeth. “Let it go.”
He did, more slowly than necessary, if his continuing laughter was any indication.
Despite the eel, Rachel really enjoyed her day with Remy. Even without sex, or the prospect of sex, it soon became clear that she enjoyed his company. In different circumstances, they might have even become good friends. No, that wasn’t true. Too much sizzle existed between them to ever become just friends. Still, it had been a nice afternoon, which reminded Rachel of something she hadn’t considered before. She and Remy had jumped right into a sexual relationship without ever getting to know each other. Minus the usual dating rituals, she and Remy were strangers in many ways.
The problem was, the more she got to know Remy, the more she liked him.
Chapter 17
Crazy little thing called love—lust—whatever
Remy sat down at the table with Rachel to a meal that would have pleased the finest New Orleans restaurant palate.
Blackened redfish, which he’d cooked over a wood fire outside, not wanting to smoke up the inside of the cabin. Stirfry Crappies with improvised vegetables, including wild onions and mushrooms, canned corn and frozen green peppers from Tante Lulu’s supplies, all served over plain white rice; Remy had picked up the recipe from Sylvie after many of her dinner parties. And his Cajun tour de force, a sinfully rich bread pudding made with their leftover, stale French bread topped with whiskey sauce using the half-cup of booze left in a bottle under the sink.
They’d both taken short showers to conserve water. The humidity remained horrendously high, but the rain hadn’t come yet. He worried about depleting the cistern’s resources.
And now Rachel sat across from him wearing a very respectable Daisy Mae kind of puffy short-sleeved shirt with an elast
ic neckline, which would probably pull down real easy and become instantly unrespectable. Her hair, which was unusually frizzy in a cute kind of way due to the humidity, was pulled back off her face with a headband, but that only made her ears and the sweet curve of her neck stand out as if in invitation. . . for what, he didn’t even want to venture. For God’s sake, she looked like Little Orphan Annie with breasts. On her bottom, she wore something she called pedal pushers, which reminded him that he’d like to push her pedal, for damn sure. The pants went all the way down to her calves. No bare skin there, but did she have a clue how tightly they fit her backside and just what a view of every nuance of her ass he got every time she turned around?
She ooh-ed and aah-ed over his culinary prowess, when he wanted nothing more than to show his prowess of a different kind. It was crazy, this Ping-Pong game they played with each other. Lunatic Rules. Insane pretensions that they didn’t want to jump each other’s bones. A demented testing of the erotic currents that zigzagged between them. A mad kind of constant shifting of the line they’d drawn in the sand between them.
Am I crazy?
Is she crazy?
You’re both crazy, St. Jude pronounced with decided disgust.
“Who’s crazy?” Rachel said, sipping at the last of her ice water.
Remy was really going bonkers if he spoke his thoughts aloud. “Nothing. It’s just the heat getting to me, I guess.”
“It is horribly humid. Do you think it’ll rain soon?”
He shrugged and downed the last of his own ice water. He needed an icing-down all right, and not just in his mouth. “Hopefully, we’ll get a real soaker sometime during the night, but there are times when it takes a day or two to let loose.”
“Thanks for the meal, Remy. Everything was delicious. Tomorrow it’s my turn to cook.”
Soft Cajun ballads played in the background on René’s tape player, which did indeed work just fine. Two mismatched candles on the table provided soft lighting, although it wasn’t quite dark yet. The ambience was perfect. Too perfect.
Remy shifted in his seat and tried to think of normal, everyday conversation, something to take his mind off that other thing. “Think you can make a meal out of the oddball things my aunt sent and what’s been left in the cupboard here?” Like I care!