The crowd in the bar greeted her like the conquering heroine, calling to her, raising their glasses. A sense of warmth and importance flowed through her. This was her turf. These were her people, much to the dismay of Vivian and Ross. Here she was appreciated. She smiled and waved, the kind of all-encompassing, regal gesture of a beauty queen.
"Hey, Savannah!" Ronnie Peltier called from over by the pool table, where he stood leaning on the butt of his cue. "Dat's some tongue you got on you, girl."
"So I've been told, honey," she drawled.
He grinned and shifted his weight. "Oh, yeah? Well, why you don' come on over here, jolie fille, and show me?"
Savannah tossed her head and laughed, assessing his charms all the while. Ronnie was big where it counted and cute as could be. Conroy Cooper could go to hell. She had just found herself a fun-loving Cajun boy to play with.
Leonce Comeau swiveled around on his bar stool and slid his hand down her back as she passed. "Hey, Savannah, when you gonna marry me? Me, I can't live without you!"
She slid him a sly look over her shoulder, mentally shuddering at the grotesque scar that bisected his face, the long, shiny-smooth pink line that began and ended in strange knots of flesh. "If you can't live without me, Leonce, then how come you ain't dead yet?"
"I yi yiee!" He clutched his hands to his heart as if she'd shot him, a big grin splitting across his bearded face. "You heartless bitch!"
Laurel watched the proceedings with a sinking heart and a churning stomach. It tore her up to see this side of her sister-the seductress, the slut. Savannah had so much more to offer the world than her sexual prowess. Or she once had. Once she had been full of promise, full of hope, bright-eyed at the possibilities life had to offer. Once upon a time…
"You want a toothpick, 'tite chatte?"
The voice was unmistakable. Whiskey and smoke and a vision of black satin sheets. His breath was warm against her cheek, and she jerked around, cursing herself for bolting.
"Why would I want a toothpick?" she demanded indignantly.
Jack grinned at the flash of temper in her dark blue eyes. It was a hell of an improvement over the sadness and guilt he'd glimpsed there a moment before. For a moment she had looked like a lost child, and the impact of that impression had slammed into him like a truck. Not that he really cared about her, he assured himself. Miss Laurel Chandler was hardly his type. Too serious by half. Too driven. He liked a girl who liked her fun. A few good laughs, a nice healthy round of mattress thumping, no strings attached. Laurel Chandler was a whole different breed of cat-as evidenced by the mincemeat she'd made of Jimmy Lee Baldwin.
"Why, to pick all those pieces of Jimmy Lee out your teeth, sugar," he said. "You sure chewed him up and spit him out. Remind me not to get on your bad side."
She scowled. "You're already on my bad side, Mr. Boudreaux."
"Then why I don't just buy you a drink, angel, and we can make up?" he suggested, smiling, leaning down just a little closer than he should have. Her frown tightened, but she held her ground.
"I'd rather be left alone, thank you very much," Laurel said primly, avoiding those dark eyes that had managed to see past her carefully erected defenses once already. She fixed her gaze on one deep dimple and did her best to ignore its blatant sex appeal.
"Oh, well, then you came to the wrong place, sugar."
He draped an arm casually around her shoulders and steered her toward the bar, completely ignoring her wishes. She held herself stiffly, resisting his herding. She looked up at him sideways. He wore a battered black baseball cap that had "100% Coonass" machine embroidered on the front in glossy blue thread. A blood red ruby studded the lobe of his left ear. The wild Hawaiian print shirt he wore hung completely open, revealing a broad wedge of tan chest, well-defined muscle lightly dusted with black hair, a belly that looked as hard and ridged as a washboard. A line of silky-looking hair curled around his belly button like a question mark and disappeared into the low-riding waist of his faded jeans, as if beckoning curious female eyes to wonder about the territory that lay beyond.
She jerked her gaze away, pushing her glasses up on her nose in an attempt to hide the blush that bloomed instantly on her cheeks.
He wasn't her type at all, she reminded herself. He wasn't the kind of man she usually allowed to touch her. He wasn't the kind of man she would ordinarily have known at all. And he wasn't charming her. She was only letting him shepherd her toward the bar because she didn't want to watch Savannah seducing the pool players.
"Talk about chewing ass," he said, an unholy light in his eyes. "What's black and brown and looks good on a lawyer?" Laurel shot him a scowl, which he fielded with an incorrigible grin. "A doberman."
The laugh that rolled out of him may as well have been a pair of hands that skimmed boldly over her. Laurel ground her teeth at her unwanted reaction, berating her body for its inability to judge character.
"Hey, Ovide!" Jack called. "How 'bout a drink here for our little tigress?"
Laurel blushed again at the name and climbed up on a bar stool, figuring she would at least be rid of Jack Boudreaux's touch now. She was wrong. He merely stood beside her, arm hooked around her loosely but possessively. Worse than standing beside him, she was now at eye level with him, and he didn't hesitate to lean close and murmur in her ear.
"That's Ovide," he said, his voice as low and intimate as if he were whispering words of seduction. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and dangled it from his lip. "'Frenchie' Delahoussaye. The man you were stickin' up for out there."
The man behind the bar was in his late sixties, short and stout with sloping shoulders and no neck. He was bald as a cue ball on top, with shaggy steel gray hair ringing the sides of his head and sprouting in fantastic tufts from his ears. A cloud of curly gray hair spilled out of the V of his plaid shirt, and a thick mustache draped across his upper lip and trailed down past the corners of his mouth. His eyebrows were so bushy, they could have been pads of steel wool glued to his forehead. He looked like a nutria that had taken human form by enchantment. He moved purposefully if slowly, filling tall mugs with beer from a tap.
In contrast, the woman behind the bar with him moved at the speed of light, dashing to fill glasses, grab a pack of cigarettes, call an order for a po'boy back through the window to the kitchen. She was younger than Ovide, though not by a lot, and her face showed every day of her years, with lines etched beside her eyes and thin mouth that was painted poppy orange to match her tower of hair. Her skin had the leathery look of a lifelong smoker. It was stretched taut and shiny against the bones of her skull, giving added emphasis to the large dark eyes that bulged out of her head as if she were perpetually startled. Despite her obvious age, she was still petite, with a hard, sinewy body beneath tight designer jeans from the seventies and an electric blue satin western shirt.
She snatched the two mugs from Ovide and plunked one down on the bar in front of Laurel, scolding Frenchie nonstop.
"What'sa matter wit' you, Ovide? Jack, he don' wan' no damn glass, him!"
She snatched a long-neck bottle of Pearl from the cooler and popped the top off while she grabbed a rag with the other hand and wiped a trail of water off the bar, her mouth going a mile a minute.
"Ovide, he don' know which way is up, cher, what wit' all this preacher and ever'ting all the time carryin' on outside our door." She sucked in a breath and cast a glance heavenward that looked more like annoyance than supplication. "Bon Dieu, what dis world comin' to wit' the like of dat Jimmy Lee callin' himself a man of the cloth? Mais, sa c'est fou! It pains me to see."
She cocked a thickly penciled brow at Jack and chastised him for being remiss in his manners, as if he could have gotten a word in edgewise. "So, cher, you gonna introduce me to une belle femme or what?"
Jack threw back his head and laughed, his arm automatically tightening around Laurel. She stopped breathing as her breast came into contact with his side.
"T-Grace," he announced, "meet Miss Laurel Chandler. Laurel, T-Grace Delahoussaye, Frenchie's right hand, left hand, and mouthpiece."
T-Grace slapped at him with her wet towel, even as her attention held fast on Laurel. "You say some pretty smart things to dat horse's ass Jimmy Lee, chère."
"Miz Chandler is a lawyer, T-Grace," Jack offered, a comment that made T-Grace lean back and eye Laurel as dubiously as if he had announced she was from outer space.
Laurel shifted uncomfortably on her stool and tried in vain to discreetly tug some of the wrinkles out of her blouse. "I'm not practicing at the moment. I'm just in town to visit relatives."
T-Grace eyed Laurel critically, then said, "Ovide, he's jus' beside himself over dis 'End Sin' thing with dat preacher and all," as she accepted a tray of empty glasses from a waitress and whirled to set them next to the bar sink.
Laurel glanced at the impassive Ovide, who stood beside his wife, silently pouring drinks and lining them up on the bar for distribution. Either T-Grace was psychic or the man's moods were too subtle for normal human eyes to detect.
"You say some pretty hard things to make a man think, oui?" She gave a snort and swiped a fly off the bar with her rag. "If dat Jimmy Lee can think. He's all the time so busy talkin', him, can't be nothin' much left in his head to think about. So you gonna be our lawyer, chère, or what?" she asked baldly, crossing her arms beneath her bosom impatiently while she waited for an answer.
Laurel gaped, stunned by the question, left speechless by T-Grace herself. The proposition was ludicrous. She wasn't a lawyer here in Bayou Breaux; she was just Laurel Chandler. The idea that she could be both was the furthest thing from her mind right now. She had come here to rest, to heal, not to take up the fight.
"Oh, no," she said, shaking her head, nervously stroking a finger through the condensation on her beer mug. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Delahoussaye. I'm only in town for vacation. All you really need to do is file a complaint for trespassing. If you feel you need help, I'm sure there are any number of local attorneys who would be glad to represent you."