Lulu's Recipe for Cajun Sass - Sandra Hill Page 0,71

they passed.

Then stopped dead in her tracks and did a double take.

Disengaging herself from Luc and Sylvie, she moved hesitantly into the tent where many pictures of USOs from Louisiana were displayed. It was the black-and-white photo, enlarged to poster size, which showed her and Phillipe slow-dancing at the Fort Polk USO New Year’s Eve dance in 1943.

Phillipe hadn’t been overly tall. Only about five foot ten, but with her high-heeled pumps and dancing on her tippy toes, there had only been a few inches difference in their height. She, wearing her then-favorite tea-length gown of red chiffon, was gazing up at him with adoration. He, in his Navy dress uniform, Cajun to the core, was smiling down at her. A couple in love, no doubt about it.

Louise remembered that night as if it were yesterday. The band had been playing “Star Dust.” She could still smell his Aqua Velva, and her own musky Tabu. Still feel his nighttime stubble against her cheek. The press of his one hand against her lower back, the other hand holding her palm against his heart, thus displaying her new engagement ring, which had been a Christmas present. The whisper of his “I love you, chère” against her ear.

That’s when all the events of the day, the nostalgia, the jarred memories, good and so painful they still made her heart hurt in her chest, took their toll. There was only so much a lady could take.

Louise, for only the second time in her life, fell into a dead faint.

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Excerpt from Bayou Angel

The angel was wild tonight...

Angel Sabato stood at the edge of the dance floor like a dunce, shaking in his thousand-dollar Tres Outlaws boots as he watched the redhead shake her booty to the beat of “Wild Thing.” For an ex-nun, she sure had moves.

Ironically, he was the one feeling wild. His hands were clammy, his heart was thumping—da dump, da dump, da dump—and, truth to tell, he was scared spitless. Tonight was going to be the night. Do-or-die time.

It was ridiculous, really. He was thirty-four years old. He’d been around the block so many times there were probably street signs named after him. At the least, his “tread marks” were notorious. Shyness wasn’t even in his vocabulary. After all, he was the dick-for-brains who’d once bared it all for Playgirl magazine.

Just then the redhead in question, Grace O’Brien, noticed him and smiled widely, crooking a forefinger for him to come out and join her.

Not a chance.

It wasn’t dancing he had on his mind.

She said something to her partner, one of the young LeDeuxs...a freshman at LSU. Then she left the kid behind and snaked a slow, sensuous boogie toward him, her twinkling green eyes holding his the entire time, her arms held out in front of her, fingers beckoning. She must be half plastered or, more likely, in a teasing mood.

He was not in the mood for teasing.

“Yo, matey,” she drawled at him.

This was the tail end of the Pirate Ball. It was being held here in Houma, Louisiana, to celebrate the successful search by Jinx, Inc., a treasure-hunting company, for Jean Lafitte’s hidden gold. Thus the silly pirate talk. Not to mention silly pirate costumes.

He and Grace had worked on the Jinx team’s Pirate Project these past weeks. Before that they’d been professional poker players. And before that, Grace had been a nun, and he had been in the navy, then construction, and...well, a lot of things.

She was dancing around him now, dressed in a saucy tavern-wench costume with a jagged knee-length hem, while he was in a puffy shirt tied with a red sash. Jerry Seinfeld would be so proud of me.

When he pretended to ignore her sexy dancing, she grabbed his upper arm and attempted to tug him forward. Being about seventy-five pounds heavier at six-foot-one to her measly five-foot-five, he was pretty much immovable.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Come out here and shake a peg leg, you randy buccaneer.”

He had to grin at that. “Who says I’m randy?”

“You’re always randy.”

“And you know this...how?”

“All the satisfied smiles I’ve seen on women exiting your revolving bedroom door the past ten years.”

“You noticed?”

“Stop changing the subject. I wanna dance.”

“Are you blitzed?” he asked with a laugh.

“Just a little,” she slurred.

Luckily, the DJ changed the music to a different pace. Now Mariah Carey was urging “Touch My Body.”

He opened his arms to Grace and adjusted her so that

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