Snow on the Bayou: A Tante Lulu Adventure (23 page)

She squirmed under him and said, “What is it about you and making love in the daylight? I must look a wreck.”

“You look sexy as hell and hot as heaven,” he said. “Besides, haven’t you heard the best thing about sex in the morning?”

“No,” she said hesitantly.

“It’s like you have a secret the rest of the day. An image you carry in your head, but can pull out whenever you want and get turned on all over again.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

“You’re impossible,” she said. “But I love you.”

“Ditto, darlin’. I can’t wait to make plans with you for our future. We’ll get married, won’t we, Em?”

“Uh. Was that a proposal?”

He tilted his head to the side. “I thought that was
understood. Love, marriage, the whole works. Oh, damn! I should get down on one knee, shouldn’t I?”

She grabbed his shoulders when he started to move off her. “No, I don’t need a formal proposal.” Besides, he’d asked her once when she was sixteen, and for her that was the one she wanted to remember forever, now that the heartache that followed was over.

“But you will marry me?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Probably. I mean, there’s so much else we need to talk about first.”

“No, you’re wrong. As long as we love each other, we’ll find a way to work out the details. They’re incidental. Do you believe me?”

She nodded, although the logical side of her brain told her that life wasn’t so simple. On the other hand, maybe they would come up with a solution that worked for them. Possibly not a traditional one, but one suited to their particular situation.

He kissed her and caressed her idly as he talked with so much enthusiasm that she didn’t have the heart to disagree with any of his plans. “I have at least three more years before I can retire after twenty years in the Navy. I always thought I’d be a lifer, but now…” He shrugged.

“I thought you loved being a SEAL.”

“I do, but we all burn out sooner rather than later. Most SEALs don’t last as long as I have.”

“Why?” She was tracing his jawline, making little circles on his chest hairs, occasionally leaning down to kiss his shoulder.

“We see and do some awful things, Em. After a while, it eats away at the soul. Oh, I’m not apologetic about the fact that SEALs get real good at killing because, frankly, the terrorists we go after deserve to die. Still, a man can
do that only so long before he goes over the edge, or backs off.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said and hugged him.

He hugged her back and ran the palms of his hands over her shoulders and back and rump.

“What would you do if you left the military?”

“I’m not sure. My options are wide open really. Private security. Police work. Even teaching. Heck, maybe I’ll buy a shrimp boat and take up my PawPaw’s old business.”

She smiled at that possibility. “You would want to move back to Louisiana?”

“Yeah, I think so. You know what they say about bayou mud being in a man’s veins?”

“And Cajun music in his heart,” she completed for him.

He squeezed her shoulder. “That’s right.”

“But in the meantime… three years is a long time.”

“Maybe you could take on that museum job you were offered. I have a two-bedroom condo in Coronado. We could turn one of them into a studio. You could work on the masks there some of the time. Then when I’m out on active ops, you can travel back here to work in your shop, or complete the mask work here. I don’t know, it’s not ideal, but maybe we could figure out some kind of schedule. It would only be temporary, until I retire.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?”

“All the time.” He kissed her long and deep and he played with her breasts until she was arching up and pulling his head down to suckle her. “So what do you think?” he asked when he’d ministered to one breast and was about to take care of the other.

“About what?”

“Our future together.”

She grabbed his head and yanked him down. “The only future I care about is now and how you’re about to make me come just by doing my breasts.”

He laughed against her breast and he did, in fact, bring her to climax just by suckling her, with a few nips and licks tossed in.

When he raised her knees then and spread her wide, his eyes were half-slitted with arousal and his mouth parted. “Look at you, darlin’.” He stared down at that most intimate part of her. “Can I say one more thing, Em?”

She rolled her eyes. “If you must.”

“Let’s make a baby.”

She blinked. This was not what she’d expected, with herself widespread and aroused to the pitch of madness, and him with a hard-on that was poised to drill. “
What?
Are you crazy? Later—we can talk about this later.”

“No, listen, honey. You want a child, and it would be the greatest gift I could give my grandmother before she goes. Let’s skip the condom. Okay?”

He had the foil packet in his hand and was about to toss it when she grabbed his wrist.

“How do you know I want a child?”

“That artificial insemination nonsense, you know, but we can discuss it later.” He held the condom in front of her. “Yes or no, sweetheart?”

“Neither,” she said, and shoved him off her.

“What the hell?” He actually looked confused as he righted himself.

She sat up and pulled the sheet up and over her breasts. “Your grandmother wants you to have a baby?”

“Yeah. It’s the one thing she told me would make her life complete. She told me that the first day I came home.
It was only wishful thinking, of course. I told you about that.”

“No, I’m pretty sure you never told me that your grandmother wanted you to have a baby.” Any arousal Emelie had been experiencing was fading fast. Justin looked crushed, and still aroused. Too bad. “How did you know about the artificial insemination?” She was going to kill Belle if she’d blabbed to him. Belle was the only one who knew.

“That day I stumbled onto your shop. When I was waitin’ for you out in the courtyard, I saw a paper under the table. From the sperm doctor. I just put two and two together.” He stared at her as if it were no big deal.

It was a very big deal. The dummy! “And you just figured, why not have a baby with Emelie? Em and my grandmother want one, so no big deal!”

“That’s not exactly how it was.”

“I think that’s exactly how it was. You had a goal even before you set out to seduce me.”

“Me? Me seduce you?” Justin stood angrily and began to pull on his tuxedo pants, obviously no longer aroused. “You’re the one who sucked me right back in, even when you knew all the things your father had done to me and my family. Was this some kind of revenge thing?”

Huh?

Justin bundled up all his clothes and shoes and was about to storm out the door. He stopped midway and shook his head at her. “I still love you, Em. All I wanted to do was give you a baby. Is that so wrong? My baby in your body.”

“You could have told me,” she argued.

“Is it my baby specifically that revolts you? Some anonymous donor will do, but not the bad seed of the bayou?”

“Don’t you dare turn this around on me,” she cried.

“This is a monumental stab in the back! I can’t believe that you, of all people, would be so deceptive. Admit it.
My
baby, that’s the problem.”

She was weeping and angry at the same time now. Somehow he had managed to make her the bad guy here. That was the only excuse she had for blurting out, “Been there. Done that. Had the T-shirt.”

He turned slowly, inch by inch, and stared at her incredulously. A roaring grew and grew in his ears. “That’s it. The missing piece of the puzzle. You were pregnant with my baby. That’s it, isn’t it?”

She nodded, horrified that her secret would come out this way.

“You were pregnant with my child when I left,” he accused her.

She nodded again, unable to speak over the lump in her throat.

“What happened? Did you give it away? Bad seed and all that?”

She picked up the fan she’d got as a favor at the museum ball and threw it at him. “No! Don’t you ever say anything like that. I miscarried at five months.”

To her chagrin, he caught the fan and said, “I was hit by bomb schrapel in the back in Kabul a few years back. I thought that was the greatest pain I’d ever experience. Not even close!”

That was a low blow, but she couldn’t back down now. “You’re not the only one hurting here, bud.”

He stared at her for a long moment. “Ah. The reason why you married Bernie, to give
my
child
his
name. Seriously?” He frowned with confusion.

“Don’t be so damn judgmental. I was confused at the
time, and my dad was pressuring me, and I was so young.” Her excuses sounded lame, even to her.

“Excuses!” he spat out. “Why didn’t you let me know?”

“I tried,” she cried out. “The letters.”

“And since I’ve been back? What’s your excuse for not tellin’ me these past few weeks?”

“Come on, Justin! It was seventeen years ago. I never heard from you either. Not once in all those years. What was I supposed to think?” When he didn’t answer, she continued, “I thought you didn’t care. I thought you’d moved on.”

“I wish I had.”

She gasped.

He stared at her for several long moments, with disgust or pity, she wasn’t sure, but then he turned and left. He just left.

“Don’t come back,” she yelled after him, tears streaming down her face. “If you leave now, don’t come back.”

But he was already gone.

Thad came in and put his chin on the bed next to her, as if he sensed her pain. And pain there was. Excruciating, through the heart, agony.

Heartbreak, all over again.

Dumb men do dumb things…

C
age called Em later that morning and got her answering machine. He left a message, “Em, we need to talk. Call me.”

An hour later, while he was in the shower, a message had been left on his answering machine by Em. Short and sweet. “Justin, we do
not
need to talk. Do
not
call me. If you ever cared for me at all, leave me alone.”

Yeah, right. As if! Now that he’d calmed down, he realized that fault could be spread just about everywhere, and he was ready to forgive. But what was with that “if you ever cared for me at all” bullshit? Women!

So that afternoon after working out with the physical therapist on his knee and meeting with his team members to get an update on Project Boom, he tried Em again, figuring she’d had time to calm down, too. And got her answering machine again, surprise, surprise. He tamped down his annoyance and tried for a lighter tone. “Em,
remember how good we were together. Maybe I should just come over and lay you down to work out our differences in the way we communicate best. Call me.”

She didn’t respond immediately. It was after a dead zone on his way back to Bayou Black that he got her message. “No, I don’t recall how good we were together. It’s a blip on the screen of what’s important to me. As for communication, don’t bother calling.”

He immediately responded, to her answering machine, which she must have on permanently now, “Fuck that!” Pulling over to the side of the road, where he knew he had a good number of bars on his cell phone, he waited, not wanting her to get his voice mail again.

But somehow Em outwitted him, and he was unloading groceries and fumbling for his phone when she sent him a blunt reply, “Been there, done that, not gonna do it again.”

We’ll see about that!

Now the calm was gone, and he was even angrier, having been betrayed, lied to, insulted, and generally made to feel like a fool. Besides that, he’d had a baby that had died and he’d never been given a chance to mourn. Had it been a boy or a girl? Did Em even know? Had MawMaw known about the pregnancy? How many people had been in the know while he’d been kept in ignorance?

Watching his frustration as he played phone tag with Em and kept mumbling his opinion of stubborn women, his grandmother pulled out one of her cornball proverbs. “There are three kinds of men who doan understand a lick ’bout women. Old ones, young ones, and middle-aged ones.”

“That’s a lotta help,” he grumbled.

“Ya know what the worst thing is ’bout anger betwixt a man and woman?”

He refused to rise to her bait.

“The juice ain’t worth the squeeze, and it can be bitter as green persimmons.”

“Now that definitely makes no sense.”

“It does if ya realize that anger only makes ya more bitter.” His grandmother just grinned then.

Maybe it was a conspiracy of women.

Once dinner was over and he was sitting on the couch with his grandmother watching
Wheel of Fortune
, he got up the nerve to ask her, “MawMaw, did you know that Em was pregnant when I left Loo-zee-anna?”

She went immediately alert and turned to stare at him directly. “What?”

Well, that answers that question. MawMaw hadn’t known.
“Em was apparently pregnant when I left seventeen years ago. That’s why she married Bernie.”

“You have a baby?” The light of joy in his grandmother’s eyes was precious and pitiful.

“No, no, MawMaw. The baby died at five months, before it was born, about seventeen years ago.”

Before he had a chance to console her, his grandmother reached out and took one of his hands in both of hers. “Oh, sweetheart, I am so sorry. Was it a boy or a girl?”

He shook his head slowly, unable to speak at first over the lump in his throat. “I don’t know,” he rasped out.

For the next half hour, he explained everything that he knew, and he surprised himself by weeping with his grandmother over his unborn child. Cage had never been big on having kids, not after he left Emelie leastways, and he never would have suspected that he could care so much now.

“Did they bury the child? I’d like ta visit the grave,” his grandmother floored him by saying.

“MawMaw, the fetus was only five months along.”

“Sometimes they give them a regular burial in the Catholic Church, I think. Even unborn babies.”

“They do?” More questions for which he had no answers.

His message to Em that night was short and not-so-sweet. “Call or suffer the consequences.”

Her response was equally short and not-so-sweet, “Don’t call. Suffer away. How’re the blue balls?”

It was in a foul mood the next morning when he pounded on the door of Bernie’s house in Lafayette. A very nice, ranch-style home on about two acres in an upscale neighborhood. Not for the first time, Cage mused that Bernie must be riding high cotton in the firecracker business.

Bernie opened the door a crack and said to someone behind him, “It’s just my crabby cousin, Justin LeBlanc.”

You don’t know crabby yet, dipwad!
Cage shoved the door open and faced a woman in a low crouch with two hands holding a pistol, aimed at him. “Whoa!” he said, putting his hands in the air.

“It’s okay,” Bernie told the undercover cop Cage had seen at the warehouse meeting. Bernie shut and locked the door behind him. Then he had the nerve to say, “What do you want?”

“Hey, great welcome, cuz. Especially after bargin’ into my grandmother’s house a few weeks ago, invitin’ yourself to dinner, and generally makin’ a nuisance of yourself ever since.”

Bernie flushed and continued dressing. He knotted the tie on his dress shirt and put on his suit jacket.

“Goin’ somewhere?” Cage asked.

“Yeah, some of us have to work,” Bernie answered snidely. He was clearly acting biggity to impress the lady.

“Hi, I’m Justin LeBlanc.” Cage extended a hand. “We met briefly at the Project Boom meeting.”

“Simone LeDeux.” She took his hand and shook it firmly. Simone was tall, slim, dark-haired, with dancing brown Cajun eyes. A babe! If Bernie the Wuss was making any hay with her, Cage would eat his dirty sweat socks.

“LeDeux? Any kin to Tante Lulu?”

“Not that I know of, but who knows, maybe some distant connection that I’m unaware of.”

“That crazy woman!” Bernie commented. “Tante Lulu suggested I visit her niece Charmaine’s beauty spa for a makeover. Me? A man? Claims she has a male section.”

And you think that’s crazy? More like on the mark.
Turning back to Simone, he said, “Be careful. If Tante Lulu gets a whiff of another LeDeux here in the South, you’ll have a hope chest in your backyard before you can say ‘Dixie.’ ”

“Huh?”

He just smiled. “Would you mind lettin’ me have a minute alone with Bernie?”

“Sure. I’ll go into the kitchen and make some coffee.”

The minute she left the room, Cage clipped Bernie a good one in the chin, knocking him backward. Bernie barely caught himself by clinging to the door frame.

Rubbing his chin, Bernie whined, “What was that for?”

“For not tellin’ me that Em was pregnant.”

He kept rubbing his chin and said, “Ouch,” a time or two.

“Don’t be a wuss. I just gave you a little tap.”

“Why blame me? I told you to ask Em.”

“Well, now I’m askin’ you.” He flexed his fists in
warning; not that he intended to hit Bernie again. That particular rage was over.

“Em was really distraught after you left… I know, I know… her father finagled your leaving so suddenly, but Emelie didn’t know that at the time. I was working a Fourth of July Fireworks Extravaganza in Houma that year, and her father was the sheriff. I never knew Emelie very well in school; she was two years younger than me, and we didn’t travel in the same crowds.”

“Who are you kiddin’, Bern? You didn’t travel in
any
crowds.”

Bernie shrugged as if it didn’t matter, which it didn’t.

“Her dad took a liking to me, said I was ‘enterprising,’ and started inviting me over to their house for supper and stuff. At first, to try to get her interested in some other guy besides you.”

I’d like to bust his enterprising nose.
Cage made a growling noise, which Bernie noticed but wisely passed over.

“Later, when he found out that Emelie was pregnant—with your child, which he likened pretty much to demon seed—he talked me into proposing to Emelie. He honestly thought he was doing the best thing for his child.”

“Bullshit!”

“Keep in mind, Justin, we didn’t know then what her father had done. None of it. And marrying to give a child a name might seem old-fashioned to you, but I was willing.”

“And Em? Was she willing?’

“Not at first. All she talked about was contacting you somehow. She wrote. She made phone calls. She badgered your grandparents. It was pitiful to see her come home disappointed every time. Then when she discovered
she was pregnant, she became even more frantic, unable to believe that you wouldn’t want to know about your own baby. I remember the day she finally gave up. Somehow she’d gotten an idea in her head that if she went to the Navy recruitment center in N’awleans and explained her predicament, they would just hand over your address and phone number. Instead, the guy laughed and asked Emelie if she’d never heard about sailors having a girl in every port. ‘Go find yourself a nice dependable plumber,’ he advised her. Instead, she accepted me.”

Didn’t help matters that when Cage had come home immediately following basic training, Em was married to another man. “What a travesty!” Cage muttered. “All due to a failure to communicate.”

Just then, he noticed two cats walking by, strolling the way cats do, as if they owned the world. One was the one he’d sort of pushed on Bernie those weeks back. Behind scrambled a litter of kittens.

He arched his brows in question.

“You didn’t tell me the cat was pregnant,” Bernie complained.

“I thought it was a kitten.”

“Even small cats can get pregnant,” Bernie informed him, as if he didn’t know that.

“Oh, Bernie, you just made my day.” In the end, turning serious, Cage had to ask, “Was it… the baby… buried?”

Bernie seemed to understand immediately and nodded. “Em insisted.”

Cage felt as if a vise was squeezing his heart as he waited for the final shoe to drop. “Mary Delphine LeBlanc, September 20, 1997, Our Lady of the Bayou Cemetery.”
Named after our two grandmothers! And me!
Even when she’d been married to Bernie. How many hits can I take today?

Cage left soon after that. As he drove away, he began to calm down, for about the fiftieth time in this roller-coaster of emotions that had become his life. He was beginning to understand the reasons for all the “sins” against him, which weren’t really sins, of course. Fear, it was all about fear. Even that asshole Claude had acted out of fear. And Em… sweet Em… she’d only been sixteen at the time. She must have been terrified.

Okay, he was glossing over the fact that no one had bothered to tell him the truth since he’d come home. And that included his grandmother about some things.

Feeling a bit shattered, he called Emelie, about to make some major amends. Of course, he got her frickin’ answering machine. Gritting his teeth—he hated leaving this particular message on voice mail—he said, “Hey, honey. I just learned more about Mary Delphine LeBlanc.” He paused to get his voice under control. “I am so sorry.”

She never responded to that message.

Luckily, during that week and a half, he was kept busy with Project Boom. The private practice nurse he’d hired, thanks to help from Adele, had proven invaluable, especially because her hours were flexible; Mrs. Ryan, a middle-aged widow, came from Houma whenever she was needed, which was a godsend when he was called on suddenly to be in Lafayette for a meeting.

In the end, it was almost anticlimactic the way Project Boom worked out. Because of the expertise of all the professionals involved working together, they were able to locate all the explosives, where they were currently stored, and where they had been set to go off at four spots
along the parade route. After that, it was only a question of bringing in all the tangos to be interrogated and imprisoned… ten in all.

The outcome could have been monumentally disastrous. Any one of those explosives had the power to devastate up to a two-block perimeter, and with the crowds expected on Fat Tuesday in the Crescent City, well, suffice it to say, tragedy was averted. The mayor of New Orleans was particularly thankful that word of this terrorist plot hadn’t leaked out; otherwise, tourism—the lifeblood of the city—would have been severely curtailed.

His SEAL buddies hadn’t returned to California yet because they wanted to see the Mardi Gras parade in two days, especially F.U., who’d apparently been amassing a large supply of beads to be thrown to women at the parade, a practice that usually resulted in the baring of female breasts. John LeDeux had pulled a few strings to get them a prime viewing spot for the parade on the second-floor balcony of a Bourbon Street hotel.

But suddenly, there was a lull in his frenzied activity, and he had to face the mess he’d made of things with Em. Unfortunately, while he was ready to kiss and make up, she still wanted nothing to do with him. He called repeatedly and always got her blasted answering machine message.

“Thass the trouble with young folks t’day,” his grandmother said when he confided in her. “Ya think everythin’ kin be handled with a phone or a text message or an e-mail. I thought ya were smarter than that.”

“Em was in the wrong, too,” he insisted. “She’s the one who should be makin’ the first step.”

“First step. Last step. No steps. Who cares? If ya really love that gal, you’ll crawl if that’s what it takes.”

Well, that was a lot of help.

But he did suck it up and drive to her shop in hopes he’d have more luck in person. Thad greeted him with loud, unfriendly barking, as if they hadn’t been best pals just a few weeks ago. The dog sensed that Cage was in the doghouse more than he was.

When he walked into Em’s workroom without knocking, she glanced up at him. No warm welcome. In fact, there was hostility in her dark eyes, and she told him in no uncertain terms that she wanted nothing to do with him.