Lulu's Recipe for Cajun Sass - Sandra Hill Page 0,25
“The flowers are enormous and colorful, like one of those French paintings, too vivid to be real.” He glanced to the right where a giant magnolia bush was covered with white flowers the size of lunch plates. “And their scents? Enough to draw a thousand bees. I know, I know, cornball to the max. And then there’s Cajun cooking? Gumbo, jambalaya, beignets. My mouth waters just thinking about my mother’s shrimp étouffée.”
“But…?” she prodded.
“But I hate this blistering heat, and I hate gators and snakes, and I hate the slow pace of living here. Sometimes I just want to shout at my dad, or his customers, or the car in front of me on the highway, ‘hurry the hell up!’ Oh, Louise, you have no idea how wonderful the change of seasons are up north. The summers are hot, occasionally, but never as uncomfortably steaming as it is here on the bayou, and when autumn comes with its crisp air and changing colors, it’s well, a welcome change. I even like winter when a body just wants to stay inside snug before a cozy fire with snow coming down like goose feathers from the sky. The food is simpler. You have to try Maine lobsters with melted butter and Boston Cream Pie. Yum! The hospitals I’ve worked in are incredible, and—”
She put a hand up to halt further words and said, “It sounds pretty much like you’ve decided to live up north, for good.”
Oh, hell! Had he ruined all his chances with her? “No, no, no,” he disagreed. Honestly, he hadn’t made that decision yet. “I’m just giving you a comparison, to show why I say I love and hate the bayou.” No comment on how the scales were teetering. “Besides, I just thought of something else I like about bayou land.”
“What’s that?”
“You.”
“What a load of hooey! You don’t even know me.”
“You wound me,” he said.
She arched her brows with skepticism.
“A man doesn’t need to know a woman to like her. First impressions count for a lot…maybe fifty percent of the chances for a connection to blossom.”
“Is that some kind of northern statistical nonsense, or just a male line?”
He laughed. “Seriously, I knew the first time I saw you…I mean last week, not when you were a skinny little brat running around the bayou in your bare feet.”
“You remember me from that long ago?”
“Well, a little. You were a lot younger than me.”
“Anyway, you were probably in your bare feet, too.”
“That’s not important. Stop interrupting me. I knew when I saw you last week that there was some chemistry between us. And I wanted to see where we would go.”
“That has nothing to do with liking me. It just means that you were attracted to me sexually, that you want to get me into your bed.”
“There is that, but—”
“Besides, you weren’t attracted to me when you first saw me last week, in my bib overalls. You only decided you would pursue me when I got my Cajun Sass on at the church festival.”
She was probably right, but he wasn’t about to admit that. In fact, he sensed a sort of destiny thing between. How cornball was that? “You’re wearing bib overalls today, and I’m still attracted to you.”
“That’s because you now know what I’m hiding.”
He shook his head at her bluntness and pretended to leer, as if he could see through her clothes, visualizing her naked body. But then he laughed and said, “You don’t make it easy for a guy.”
“If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worthwhile.”
“Let me ask you this. If you’re so on to my devious ways, how come you’re with me today?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked with a little smile. “I like you, too.”
His silly heart skipped a beat at her words, or maybe it was an organ down lower. But then, before he had a chance to react to her tantalizing words with something witty or provocative, she noticed a small island they were passing and she yelled, “Whoa, whoa. Turn around. This is where I found the lizard’s tail plants a few months ago.”
With some maneuvering on both their parts, they had the pirogue beached, then walked through the pudding-like mud on the banks up to a more grassy area. The island was no bigger than half a football field, he guessed…one of those bits of land in the bayou that were here today and gone tomorrow after a big storm.
He took the machete out of her carry bag and she picked up the