"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."
T-Grace sniffed and shot a look at Jack. "Some less than there oughta be."
He scowled at her, picking the unlit cigarette from between his lips to gesture with it. "I told you, T-Grace, I couldn't if I wanted to. Besides, you don' need no lawyer. Jimmy Lee's just a pest. Ignore him, and he'll go away."
The older woman stared hard at him, all pretense of teasing gone from her bulging dark eyes, leaving her looking old and tough as boot leather. "Trouble don' just go away, cher. You know dat good as me, c'est vrai."
Laurel watched the exchange with interest. Jack's bad-boy grin had vanished into that hard, intense look she had glimpsed the night before. A look that clearly told T-Grace to back off, a look that most grown men would have heeded. T-Grace pretended to shrug it off and turned away from him. She glanced sideways at Laurel as she pulled a pair of bottles from the cooler and popped the tops off.
"Why for you wearin' dem big glasses, chère? You in disguise or what?"
She moved off to do a dozen tasks at once before Laurel could formulate any kind of answer. Laurel pushed the glasses up on her nose and frowned.
"It's not much of a disguise, angel," Jack said.
"Not compared to yours," Laurel returned. The best defense was a good offense. She didn't like being so easily read, and she had no intention of talking to Jack Boudreaux about her motives for doing anything. She certainly wasn't about to let him escape being questioned himself.
"Mine?" he scoffed. He shook his head, took a long drink of his beer, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "No disguises here. What you see is what you get, sugar."
The wickedness returned, sparkling in his eyes, curling the corners of his mouth, digging those breath-stealing dimples into his cheeks. He leaned close, sliding his hand around to the small of her back. His fingers teased her through the thin cotton of her blouse, rubbing lazy circles.
"You like that promise, no?" he breathed, leaning closer still, his lips just brushing the shell of her ear. Laurel shivered, then gasped as his hand slipped beneath the hem of the loose-fitting blouse.
"No," she said emphatically, batting his hand away. She gave him a look that had made better men back off and ground her teeth when he only smiled at her. "Don't try to change the subject."
"I'm not. The subject is us. I'm just tryin' to get past the talkin' stage, angel."
"When hell freezes over."
"Well, that devil, he's gonna feel a chill one of these days real soon."
She arched a brow at him, thwarting the temptation to be either flattered or amused. "Is that a fact?"
"Oh, absolutely," he drawled, dark eyes shining.
His intent was clear. For reasons Laurel couldn't begin to fathom, he'd set his sights on her. Probably because she was the only female in his territory he had yet to notch his bedpost for. His arrogance was astonishing. But more astonishing was the vague sensation of arousal his words, his touch, his nearness conjured inside her.