Sylvie poised her notebook on her lap, looking businesslike. “What’s your name?”
Oh, God! She’s going to bore me to sleep
. “Lucien Michael LeDeux.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Health?”
“Perfect.”
“No problems?”
“None.”
“Have you ever had a vasectomy?”
He almost choked on his beer. “Hell, no. Have you had your tubes tied?”
She blushed. “These are just routine questions, Luc.” She was fidgeting around now, scribbling in the notebook, and he could tell she was avoiding asking him her next question.
He perked up, and waited.
Sylvie didn’t disappoint him.
“How old were you when you had your first sexual experience?”
“How old was I when I had my first sexual experience?” he repeated, biting his bottom lip to stifle an outright laugh.
She nodded her head.
“Solitary or in the company of another person?” he asked, still trying to keep a straight face.
“Well, solitary, for starters.”
Starters? Damn, she is something
. “Five.”
“Five what?”
“Five years old. You asked me when I had my first solitary sexual experience, and—”
“Five years old!” Her eyes almost popped out, but then she seemed to recall the fact that this was a professional interview. “Can you recall the circumstances that prompted your…uh, arousal?”
“Sesame Street.”
“Whaaattt?”
“Yep, the letter B.” He nodded his head, as if in
remembrance. “I’ve had a fondness for the letter B ever since then.”
“Luc, could you please be serious?”
“I’m being very serious. Would you like to tell me about
your
sexual experiences?”
“Dream on.”
“Dreams. Oh, yes! Of course, I’ve had
lots
of dreams. I’ll tell you about my dreams if you’ll tell me about yours.”
“Would you stop with the dream business? I was not dreaming about you.”
“Whatever you say,
chère
.”
“You look idiotic when you smile at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Slow and sexy.”
“Who’s the liar now, Sylv? Slow and sexy do not go with idiotic. No way.” He shook his head. “So, you think my smiles are slow and sexy, huh?”
“Aaarrgh!”
“Do you have any more questions for me before I take a little afternoon snooze? Some of us didn’t sleep all morning,” he pointed out.
“All right. When did you have your first sexual relationship…one that involved sexual intercourse?”
Well, no beating around the bush with Sylvie. Nothing like coming straight to the point. Well, I can be blunt, too
. “Twelve.”
She closed her eyes as if her questions, or his answers, were painful to her.
“Could you elaborate, please? No, don’t tell me details. Just an overview.”
“An overview?” He grinned. Lord, but she was
some kind of a nutcase. “The cloakroom of Our Lady of the Bayou School, during recess.”
Sylvie’s mouth went slack-jawed, and he knew she was imagining him as a twelve-year-old kid. That was the same year he’d asked her to dance with him, and she’d refused. She had to be wondering who the girl had been.
“You were certainly precocious,” she commented when she was finally able to speak.
He ducked his head sheepishly. “I probably set a record with my world-class, thirty-second screw.”
“It was Mary-Louise Delacroix, wasn’t it?” Sylvie blurted out. “The slut!” He could tell she immediately regretted her hasty words.
“Syl-vie! It’s not nice to call people names. Mary-Louise wasn’t really a bad girl. One thing just led to another and bingo-bango. We were just two kids, experimenting…and rather clumsily, at that.”
“I did not need to know all that,” Sylvie muttered under her breath. “Let’s fast-forward to the present. We can fill in some of these other details later.”
“Whatever you say, babe.”
“When was the last time you had sex?”
“Define sex.”
She groaned.
He took mercy on her. Besides, her face was so red he feared she might have a stroke. “I had sex
with a woman
six months ago.”
“Six months?” She was clearly surprised, no doubt expecting him to live up to his wild reputation. She probably thought he had sex daily, even several times a day.
Hardly
.
“I’m selective,” he explained. “And one-night stands don’t have the appeal they did at one time.”
She nodded, apparently in agreement.
“How often do you come to orgasm during a typical sexual encounter?”
He shot a startled glance her way. Well, she’d certainly blindsided him with that one. When he regained his breath, he chuckled. “Six times.”
She peered up at him with skepticism. “Liar.”
He winked. Then decided to elaborate. “I never lie, but occasionally I do bend the hell out of the truth.”
Her upper lip curled with distaste.
“When did
you
have sex last?” he asked, turning the tables on her.
“This interview isn’t about me,” she said primly.
“Fair is fair.”
She thought a minute, then revealed, “A year ago.”
“Unh, unh, unh. Isn’t that a wee bit of a fib, sweetheart? I saw birth-control pills in your briefcase yesterday.”
She sliced him with a glare. “I take birth-control pills all the time, to regulate menstrual flow. Lots of women do. So, believe me, when I say it’s been a year, it has been.”
“Well, holy moley, Sylv! The pump should be primed on both of us, then, even without the love potion. Why don’t you hop up on this hammock with me, and we’ll see what swings?”
She sliced him with a glare which he assumed meant, “No hopping! No hammock! No swinging!
Nada
.”
“Back to
my
questions,” she said. “How often do you think about sex each day?”
What a question!
He exhaled with a whoosh. Hadn’t he read an article one time that said men think about sex every fifteen seconds or so? And it hadn’t even been in
Playboy
; it had been in
Psychology Today
, or one of those airplane mags. He didn’t want to appear too sex-crazed, though, so he said, “Once every five minutes, I suppose.” It was probably more than that when he was fishing and less when he was in court, but what the hell.
“And since the love potion?”
“Once a minute.”
“Okay, let’s get down to the intimate stuff.”
“This wasn’t intimate already? Maybe I’d better go for a cold swim before we start.”
“Stop teasing.”
“Who’s teasing?”
“Tell me, in general terms, how you’ve been feeling since you took the jelly beans.”
“Like hell.”
“Could you be a little more specific?”
“You said ‘in general.’ How was I supposed to…oh, all right. If you keep frowning like that, your face is gonna freeze…that’s what Tante Lulu always says. Let’s see…at first, I experienced just a twinge of arousal, thinking about you. It didn’t happen when I thought about anyone else. I even tested that theory the first night. I tried thinking about some very sexy ladies I know. Only a mild response. Even thoughts of Pamela Anderson, who isn’t really my type, but, let’s face it, she has a body that could turn an Apostle to sin…well, even she only generated a spark. But
you!
Bonfire city!”
She blushed becomingly and tried to hide it by lowering her head. But he saw, and was pleased.
“JBX is about more than sex. Have you experienced any emotional reaction?”
“Does a frog have warts? Yes, yes, yes. And that’s the worst part of this whole jelly-bean mess. I hate it, Sylv. I really do.”
She tilted her head in confusion. “Explain.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was falling in love with you,” he confessed unwisely, “which is ridiculous, of course.”
“Of course,” she said, but couldn’t hold back a wince at his hurtful sentiment.
“Not that I really know what
love
-love is.”
“You’ve never been in love before?” She didn’t even try to hide the surprise in her voice.
“Never. In like, yeah. In lust, lots of times. But not really love of the man-woman kind. How about you?”
She astounded him by answering, without protest. “No. I thought I was a few times, but it couldn’t have been love if I got over it so fast.”
“Not even with your husband?”
“Nope.”
“Not even Charles?”
“Most definitely not Charles.” Then: “Stop looking so smug.”
He couldn’t help himself. There was an inexplicable satisfaction in knowing Sylvie had never loved another man, as if she’d been waiting for him.
Aaarrgh!
He chose to blame that brain blip on the love potion. Love was dangerous territory he had no intention of entering. Best to steer clear of that land mine. He hadn’t teased Sylvie in a second or so, so he opted for that love sinker. “Hell, Sylv, I can’t be having the woman who dreams about me lovin’ another man.”
“I told you, I was not dr—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “When do we get to the good part with this interview?”
“The
good
part?”
“Physical stimulus to test sensory results.” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Interpretation: making out.”
“You are impossible.”
“Yeah,” he agreed amiably. “So I guess that means never.”
“That would be correct.”
“I’d even let you take notes.”
“Dream on, buster.”
“I intend to,” he said, closing his eyes, suddenly bone-weary and in need of a little nap. Yawning, he decided, “We’ll have to finish the interview later, babe.”
“Okay.”
He cracked one eye open to watch her walk toward the house, notebook in hand, heart-shaped ass swaying to and fro in his nylon shorts. “I hope my dreams are as
interesting
as yours were,” he called out to her.
Sylvie’s bare feet faltered in the dirt, but she didn’t turn around.
He drifted off to sleep then, and as the breeze swung him gently in the hammock, Luc did dream. And the star of his dreams was slow-dancing, nude.
It was Luc who had taken the love potion, but Sylvie was the one who felt as if she were under the influence.
Earlier, Luc had likened the effects of JBX to a
wave…not a steady, overpowering arousal, but something that ebbed and flowed. It was different with Sylvie, who didn’t even have a love potion to blame. In her case, there was a steady buildup of sexual tension in her body that threatened to explode eventually into the Big Kahuna of all waves of excitement.
She’d better be prepared to surf or swim when it finally hit; otherwise, Luc was going to mow her down. And not with his surfboard, either.
“Sylv, you’re not paying attention,” Luc chided her. He was sitting next to her at the kitchen table chopping meats and veggies for a potluck jambalaya, while Sylvie was peeling some of the crawfish to throw in his pot.
“I am so paying attention,” she lied. “You were telling me another of your crazy Cajun legends…this time about crawfish.” That was what Sylvie said, but what she was thinking was,
Boy, does he smell good! I wonder if I smell as good to him. After all, we both used the same pine-scented soap in the shower
.
And he looked good, too, even wearing a plain old white T-shirt and jeans, with no shoes or socks. She probably looked like Orphan Annie’s big sister in her sink-laundered but wrinkled slacks and silk blouse, also without shoes, and wearing no makeup.
While Luc had taken a nap in the hammock that afternoon, she’d gone inside and taken a shower, then lounged about the cabin, sipping strawberry wine from a Wile E. Coyote tumbler and reading a copy of John Grisham’s
The Firm
, which she’d found upstairs in the loft bedroom. Luc had come in an hour later, yawning, with outstretched arms,
which caused his denim cutoffs to drop lower on his hips. That image of exposed hipbones, flat abdomen, and half a navel would be imprinted on her memory forever.
He’d gone off to shower, as well. Now, still convinced that she wasn’t paying attention, he remarked with a chuckle, “First, you dream about me; now you daydream about me. Hot damn.”
“I did not…I was not…oh, never mind,” was her brilliant response.
He chucked her playfully under the chin as they continued to prepare an early dinner. “As I was saying, some people believe that the crawfish is descended from lobsters who followed the French Acadians when they were booted out of Canada and were forced to travel down to Louisiana. The farther they traveled, the tireder and smaller the lobsters became, till they were whittled down to the size of these little mudbugs here.” He cracked one of the critters and stuck the head in his mouth to suck out the rich meat, raw, then made a smacking noise of appreciation with his lips.
As Sylvie watched with fascination the sucking motion of his lips and the mischievous glimmer of his dark eyes, something new and primeval tugged inside her heart. He was a sinfully attractive man.
Luc winked at her.
Sylvie was mortified that he’d seen her reaction to him.
Then he shoved a crawfish in her mouth with the order “Suck.” She did, and was pleased to see his mouth part and his eyes darken and dilate as he watched her make quick work of the delicious meat.
“I think you make up half these stories,” she
said, not wanting to think about his mouth or his eyes.
“
Mais oui, chère
, but that is the best part of being a Cajun. Back to my legend, which you so rudely interrupted. Those crawfish-nee-lobsters who emigrated from the north liked the Cajuns so much that they emulated them, even down to the way they built their homes with mud chimneys. In some low-lying streams, around water-logged cypress trees, you can still see dozens of those chimneys—a village of crawfish—each chimney telling you there’s a crawfish sleeping below, just waiting to be caught.”
“You’re a great storyteller, Luc.”
He grinned at her. “I know.”
“Did you hear about the Creole who went to heaven? When he arrived at the Pearly Gates, he asked St. Peter if they had crawfish there. When St. Peter said no, the man told him he might just as well go home.”
“Tsk-tsk, Sylv. I’ve heard that story before, but it was a Cajun, not a Creole. And it was gumbo, not crawfish.”
She laughed. “The one thing your people and mine…the Cajuns and the Creoles…have in common is good food,” she remarked.
“Yep, except that the Cajun dishes are more down-home and basic, while the Creole dishes are uptown-fancy.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Really? Do you know why red beans and rice is a popular Cajun meal?”
She shook her head slowly, smiling to herself. This pleasant Luc was a new person to Sylvie, and one she was enjoying very much.
“Red beans were traditionally cooked by Cajun women on a Monday, which was, of course, wash day.”