His two Benedict Arnolds nodded eagerly and left for the bunkhouse to wash up. He just scowled. He knew he sounded ungracious, but Charmaine was hauling in his two workers like a couple of bayou catfish. He refused to be her catfish. Not again.
Still, she had gone to some trouble. And he was hungry. “Do you have enough food?” he asked.
“Tante Lulu insisted I load up the car,” she answered brightly.
“I wondered about her T-bird out there. Why didn’t you drive your own car?”
Pink color bloomed on her cheeks, and he could tell she didn’t want to tell him. But she did, finally, with a haughty lift to her chin. “I gave my BMW to Luc to sell. Hopefully, Bobby Doucet will accept that as part payment on my bill and set up a reasonable plan for repaying the rest. Luc is handling it all.”
“A BMW, huh?” He leaned against the archway, crossing his arms over his chest. He was dying for a glass of water, but he didn’t want to step on her clean floor with his muddy boots. “You always said that someday you’d own your own house, your own business, and a fancy car. It must’ve been hard for you to give up the car.” He wasn’t being sarcastic. They both knew what Charmaine’s childhood had been like, and her dreams had been understandable.
“I got all three, Rusty, and giving up the car wasn’t all that difficult. I can always buy another.”
“Well, I’ll go shower,” he said, awkward with the silence that enveloped them suddenly.
“Wait a minute.” She went out through the pantry, then returned with a pile of folded, sweet-smelling towels.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You did my laundry?” Holy shit! She probably did my underwear, too. “Charmaine . . .” he started to chastise her.
“Oh, don’t get in a snit. I did it for me as much as you. Your towels had mold on them, and there were boot prints on your sheets.”
“I haven’t had much time to—”
She waved a hand dismissively, then shoved the towels into his hands. He spun on his heels, about to go.
Just then Michael Bolton’s old ballad “When a Man Loves a Woman” came on the radio. He stopped dead in his tracks, still near the kitchen. It had to be the hokiest chick song ever made, but it was the song he’d always put on the tape deck when he was “in the mood” because he’d known Charmaine loved it, and, frankly, it got her “in the mood.” What a stupid thing to recall! She probably didn’t even remember. He turned slightly and cast a quick glance her way.
Yep, she remembers.
Charmaine had a fist to her mouth, and tears were welling in her eyes. Hell, he probably had tears in his eyes, too. He exhaled loudly. Less than ten minutes in the same house, and he was ready to take her in his arms.
He set the towels on the dining room table and was about to walk over to her and do just that, muddy boots be damned, but Charmaine put up both hands. “No!” She swiped at one eye, then the other with the back of a hand, smearing her mascara. Only Charmaine would scrub floors in full-battle, armed-to-the-teeth makeup. “I’m all right now. Just a little memory blip.”
More like a full power outage for me. “You better go home, Charmaine. Go while the gettin’ is good.”
She arched her eyebrows at him, back to her haughty ol’ self. “Why?”
“Because you are in way more danger here with me, chère, than you are from some measly mob.”
The way to a man’s heart . . .
Charmaine sat at the kitchen table with Rusty, Linc, and Jimmy, all of them sipping at thick Cajun coffee, even Jimmy. She was well satisfied with herself, with good reason.
Every bit of food was gone. Two loaves of the fresh-baked bread. A hot endive salad. A bowl of rice. The whole apple pie. A box of store donuts. And the crawfish étouffée? Well, suffice it to say, she could have quadrupled the recipe, and it still wouldn’t have been enough.
There was something about feeding a hungry man that filled some primordial need in a woman. These men had been more than hungry. She suspected they’d been living on whatever they could grab for weeks.
And they all looked so nice. They’d shaved. Well, Rusty and Linc had. They wore faded but clean clothes. All their hair was slicked back wetly off their well-scrubbed faces.
“Can you make meat loaf?” Jimmy asked all of a sudden.
Everyone turned as one to stare at him.
He ducked his head sheepishly, his face flaming with embarrassment. “My mother used to make meat loaf and mashed potatoes and brown gravy. I just thought . . .” He shrugged.
Charmaine’s heart went out to the boy. From what Rusty had mentioned during dinner and the little he’d disclosed in whispered asides, she’d learned that his mother had died of cancer a few years back, and Jimmy had become an increasingly troubled kid. Hanging out with a wild crowd. Playing hooky from school. Shoplifting. Running away from home. His father, a feed company sales rep, was trying to pay off a mountain of medical bills from his late wife’s lengthy illness and probably not spending enough time with his child, though he was doing his best.
“I’m sure I could find a recipe for meat loaf on the Internet.” She glanced at Rusty. “You do have an Internet connection on that computer I saw in your office, don’t you?”
He nodded, equally touched, she could tell, by the boy’s simple request. “It’s a dinosaur of a machine, though. Slow as Mississippi mud.”
“As long as it works.”
“I can help,” Jimmy offered.
Everyone looked at him.
“Really. The problem with that machine is they cut some corners so it wouldn’t cost so much to build. It’s really not a bad machine on the inside. If you put on another half gig of memory, get it a faster hard drive, and put in a sound card and faster video card . . . well, that machine’s never going to scream down the walls, but, hey, it wouldn’t be half the dog it is.”
Three jaws dropped with amazement.
“I knew you were good at math, but I didn’t know you could speak another language. Computerese,” Rusty remarked.
“Maybe you’d be better off utilizing Jimmy inside instead of working him outside,” Charmaine observed to Rusty. Then, changing the subject, she asked Rusty, “Do you have ground beef in the freezer that isn’t old enough to walk?”
He grimaced. “I don’t know. You’ll have to check the freezer package dates.”
“You know, I threw away a whole trash bag full of stuff from your fridge. Talk about mold! You could have started a terrarium in there.”
“Hey, it’s all about priorities. The cattle have to come first if I’m ever going to turn this place around. Man, we must have fifty young bulls strutting their stuff all over the place.”
“Fifty bulls are bad?”
Rusty smiled at her.
And her traitorous heart turned over. At just his smile. Jeesh!
“Fifty bulls are definitely bad.” He smiled some more.
And she developed a sudden fondness for the crinkles that bracketed his eyes and mouth. Really! One smile, and all two thousand of her hormones stood up, and said, “Howdy!”
“And what a bunch of horndogs they are, too. Whooee, those bulls’ll screw anything with four legs. I saw one yesterday that tried to mount a wheelbarrow.” It was Jimmy giving out that wonderful information.
Linc gave Jimmy a light punch in the arm to shut him up, and the boy blushed even more than he had before. “Sorry, ma’am.”
Enough with the ma’am business. I don’t need any reminders that the big Three-Oh is coming up. “You can call me Charmaine. And no offense, honey. I know all about horndogs.” She gave Rusty, who was grinning to beat the band, a pointed glower.
“Did ya see Rufus today?” Jimmy asked Linc. “I swear that bull has a dick the size of a fireman’s flashlight.”
Apparently, the boy had a one-track mind . . . and the sense of a flea.
Rusty and Linc put their faces in their hands.
“What? Golly, I did it again, didn’t it? I really am sorry ma’am . . . I mean, C
harmaine. I know I talk too much. My dad usta say that if tongues were race cars, I’d a won the Nascar. My mom never complained, though. She always said that she liked my babbling.”
He stopped suddenly, and silence pervaded the room.
“You should meet my half brother Tee-John,” Charmaine said with a laugh. “You would get along so well.”
“Why? Does he talk too much, too?”
She ruffled his hair. “Yeah, he talks a lot. He’s about the same age as you, and he’s always coming out with things that make adults blush.”
“Do I make y’all blush?” Jimmy asked with surprise.
“Oh, yeah,” Linc said. “Even a black guy like me.”
The conversation moved on to ranch stuff then, things like fence posts, tagging, breeding stock, and market prices, none of which Charmaine understood. She just kept the coffee coming.
“We’ll send all the bulls and steers to market next week, along with about half the cows,” Rusty concluded. “That’ll leave us with about three hundred cows. After we buy some new bulls, we should be set to start a new herd.”
“I don’t ’spect you’ll make much on the sales,” Linc said. “Never saw a scrawnier bunch of animals, even during a drought one time down in Texas.”
“I know,” Rusty said grimly.
“Why do you have to sell them if you won’t make much profit?” Charmaine wanted to know.
“The bulls have got to go because no one has been tagging and keeping track of the stock for the past couple years. Without the tagging, you might have a bull mounting his sister.”
“Or his mother,” Jimmy offered.
“So inbreeding is bad in animals, too?” Charmaine asked.
“It can be.” Rusty rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine what my father was thinking to let things go so badly. His doctor tells me he wasn’t sick.”
“What’s the cause of death listed on the death certificate? I mean, at the funeral everyone said he had a heart attack. I assumed that was it.” Charmaine was as puzzled as Rusty by his father’s behavior. Charlie Lanier had loved this ranch and had been proud of carrying on the family tradition. Presumably, five generations of Laniers had held this land, since just after the Civil War.
“Cardiac arrest,” Rusty answered.
“Let me guess. His doctor says he had no history of heart disease?” Charmaine remarked.
“Bingo,” Rusty said. “But that’s a mystery left for later. Right now we have to work on the cattle. Do you want us to help clean up the dishes?”
“Good heavens, no! Go do your cow thing.”
They all laughed at her wording.
Linc and Jimmy thanked her once again for the meal and left for the bunkhouse. Rusty stayed behind. Of course he would. This was his home. Where he slept.
Oh, boy!
“Cleaning up keeps me busy. I have too much energy to just sit still. Can I do anything else for you?” Charmaine said nervously.
There was a long pause as Rusty seemed to be considering her offer. Her poorly worded offer.
“Well, we do have a big job tomorrow. Maybe you could help us with that.”
“Anything,” she said eagerly. “What’s the job?”
“Castrating cattle.”
“Oh, you!” She threw a wet dish towel at him.
He caught it with one hand and winked at her.
The image of that wink stayed with her long after he was gone.
In the still of the night . . .
Raoul tossed and turned for more than an hour before finally giving up the fight.
Glancing at the lighted dial of his bedside clock, he saw that it was midnight. Only five hours till he had to get up again, but it was useless trying to sleep when all he could think about was Charmaine next door.
He’d heard her shower. And smelled her shampoo even from that distance.
He’d heard her puttering around her bedroom and setting her alarm.
He’d heard her mattress shift when she’d gotten into bed.
He’d heard her flip the pages of a magazine.
He’d heard her flick off her lamp, finally.
And he could swear he heard her breathing now as she slept.
Did she wear a nightgown? Or nothing?
Did she dream about him? Ever?
Was she as hot and bothered by his proximity as he was by hers?
With a whooshy exhale of surrender, he got up and pulled a pair of jeans over his briefs. Barefooted and bare-chested, he padded through the hall down to his father’s old office—a small cubicle off the living room. His feet would probably be dirty once he returned to bed, but then again maybe not, depending on whether his very own Cajun cleaning maid had hit this area yet.
The quiet of the house should have been a soothing balm, but he sensed an underlying turbulence. There was trouble brewing. And it wasn’t just Charmaine.
He flicked on the desk lamp and booted up the computer. Slipping on a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses, he began to tackle the receipts and scribbled notes that littered the small room in monumental piles. Each of these he methodically transcribed to the computer in a hunt-and-peck method dating back to the Stone Age of typewriters. The whole job should take him about a year or two at this rate, he figured. By then he expected to be dead of frustration or boredom or out-and-out brain freeze.
He had been working for about a half hour when his head shot up with alertness. He smelled her before he saw her.
Charmaine stood in the open doorway behind him. He spun his swivel chair halfway around to face her.
“Holy cow, Charmaine! Are you crazy? Coming here in the middle of the night, dressed like that?”
“What?” she said, glancing down at the old, oversized LSU T-shirt she wore, and presumably nothing else. The sleeves went halfway down her upper arms, and the hem reached midthigh of her long legs, but she looked sexier than a buck-naked Playboy centerfold. “I’m covered. You can’t see anything.”
I can imagine, and believe you me, I am imagining. “Is that my shirt?” he choked out.
“Yeah. I forgot to pack my nighties.”
Nighties? Well, thank God for small favors. “Charmaine, go back to bed. This house is not big enough for the two of us.”
She ignored his words and said in a breathy voice, “You’re wearing glasses.”
Huh? Since when do breathy and glasses go together? “I wear them for reading and computer work.” He took them off.
She moaned softly.
Cocking his head to the side, he asked, “What did I do that made you moan?”
“You took your glasses off.”
“Have you been drinking?”
She shook her head. “Is there anything sexier than a man when he takes his glasses off?”
Never rocked my world.
“Especially when he does it kinda slow and looks at a woman when he’s doing it, which you did. Sort of implies he’s about to get down to serious business.”
A torpedo to his groin area exploded with about a million testosterone pellets. Be still, my heart . . . and other places.
“Not that I’m interested in that kind of business with you.” She flashed him a shy grin.
Charmaine shy? My brain must be fried from all these numbers. She was probably just pulling his chain, but then, you never knew with Charmaine. “You should not be telling me things like that, chère. It gives me ideas. And I definitely do not want to be having ideas about you.”
“Me neither,” she said with a sigh that could have meant just about anything. Her eyes scanned the room then, and she concluded, “What a mess!”
“Yep.”
“What are you doing? I could hear your painfully slow tapping all the way to my bedroom.”
“Sorry if I woke you. I never did learn to type very fast.”
“You didn’t wake me.”
There was some meaning in those words, as there had been in the sigh, but he wasn’t about to investigate. He explained what he’d
been doing.
“Hey, I can help you.”
I doubt that sincerely, unless you plan on spending a week or so in my bed. No, no, no, I did not think that.
“With your computer,” she added. “Not with all that computer geek business Jimmy mentioned, but inputting data is a no-brainer.”
Oh. That kind of help.
She pulled over a chair, forcing him to wheel himself a bit to the right, making room for her. Once again, he was assailed by the scent of Charmaine, all flowery and feminine.
“Why would you want to help?” he asked churlishly. It was that or make a grab for her, which he was not going to do. I hope.
She gave him a sidelong glance, which pretty much put him in the category of ungrateful cretins, but then she spoiled the guilt trip she laid on him by pointing out, “It’s my ranch, too.”
With a few quick tap-taps of her fingers, Charmaine familiarized herself with his programs, which really impressed him. “Where’d you learn to do all that?”
She shrugged. “I use different software with my businesses. Before that, I needed to develop computer skills for some of the jobs I took when I dropped out of college.”
Concentrating on the screen, she didn’t notice the frown that furrowed his brow. Her dropping out of college had been a sore point between them, one of the reasons for their break-up. How could she mention it so casually?
“Stop frowning and hand me some of those papers,” she ordered.
Apparently, she was aware, after all.
“It’s too late to do much tonight, but give me an idea what you’re doing, by going through a couple of papers. I might be able to wade through some of these piles during the day while you’re out chasing cows, or whatever it is you do.”
He smiled at her assessment of ranch life.
“Don’t smile.”
“Why not?”
“Because I get butterflies in my tummy when you smile, and then I can’t concentrate.”
“Oh, Charmaine.” Truth to tell, I get butterflies, too, but they’re more like kamikazes, and they’re aiming a bit lower in my anatomy.
“Don’t ‘Oh, Charmaine’ me. Just because you give me butterflies doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it.”