Leaving Blue Bayou

by JoAnn Ross

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Cajun Heat "A keeper to read again and again." –Angel, Romance Junkies Movie star Gabe Broussard has come back to his Louisiana hometown for some peace, but things only heat up the minute he reunites with Emma Quinlan. With her lush body and hearty appetite, she's no Hollywood matchstick, and oh cher, does he like that. Emma just has to stop thinking about her former Cajun crush, so she makes a list of all the things she wishes he would do to her and buries it in a graveyard at night. Except it's the wrong list--Gabe finds the right one, and he intends to fulfill every blissful one of them. . . Love Potion #9 It's bad enough that Hollywood hotshot Sloan Hawthorne's knowledge of Roxi Dupree's witchcraft comes from comic books and fairy tales. What's worse is that she's falling hard for the outrageously sexy hunk. Pretty soon they're both finding that the steamy Savannah nights are perfect for conjuring up some mischievous magic of their own. . . Plus Bonus Novella, Dear Santa. . . Mystery author Holly Berry's SUV has broken down in the little hamlet of Santa's Village, Washington. Holly hates the holidays--that is until lodge owner Gabriel O'Halloran and his five-year-old daughter rekindle her belief in passion, magic, and Christmas wishes. . .

Release date: October 1, 2012

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

If anyone had told him, back in his hormone-driven teenage days, that a guy could get paid sinfully big bucks for making love to the world’s sexiest women, Gabriel Broussard would’ve hightailed it out of South Louisiana’s bayou country a helluva lot sooner.

The morning after what would permanently be etched in stone as the worst night of his life, he’d loaded up his truck, just like the Clampetts had done in that old sixties sitcom, (though in his case it’d been a black Trans Am), and moved to Beverly.

Hills, that is.

Swimming pools.

Movie stars.

Okay, so technically this house wasn’t actually in the Hills, but on the beach at Malibu, which in Gabe’s mind was a lot cooler and still included its share of swimming pools and movie stars. Of which, though it still blew his own mind to think so, he just happened to be one.

Which explained the panties. Sort of.

“Six pairs,” Angela Moreno announced as she dropped the lacy undies in front of him.

Gabe morosely eyed the pile of silk and satin lace. They were all just like all the others this week—either red or black. Whatever happened to girly pastels? A soft, feminine pink? Or even a sweet virginal white? Though it’d been years since he’d had any interest in virgins, with the right woman, it could make a nice fantasy.

These were flat out forward.

Big fucking surprise. Like throwing underwear with pinned-on telephone numbers over his gate wasn’t?

He plucked a black triangle with two strings the width of dental floss from the pile and held it up to the scant bit of sunlight that was managing to slip through the storm shutters he’d closed to keep out of the range of the vultures—tabloid photographers—who’d been circling ever since Tamara Templeton had tearfully announced on Inside Edition that she was breaking their engagement because she could no longer deal with Gabe’s “addiction to kinky sex.”

That’s when the panty attacks had begun. This particular pair was as transparent as Tamara’s ploy. When the sight of his hand showing through the sheer black fabric didn’t strum a single sexual chord, Gabe wondered if he might be getting old.

Christ, wasn’t that a fun thought?

“Six pair are less than yesterday,” he said.

“The day’s still young.” His assistant had to raise her voice to be heard over the whump whump whump of the rotors from the helicopter circling overhead. It was as if he was under siege. She dropped a blizzard of pink messages atop the underwear.

“Diane Sawyer’s already called three times this morning, Katie Couric twice, and Barbara Walters didn’t exactly come right out and say so, but I got the distinct impression that if you’d throw your interview her way, you’d be a shoo-in for one of her celebrity shows. If I were you, I’d hold out for the Oscar special.”

“If you were me, you wouldn’t be in this mess,” Gabe muttered.

“Good point. And one I was too polite to mention.” She ignored his snort. “Oh, and Leno’s producer called and suggested that coming clean on The Tonight Show could really help your damage control campaign.”

“I don’t have a damage control campaign,” Gabe ground out. Not being nearly as wild as his bad boy reputation made him out to be, he’d never needed one.

“Maybe you ought to get one. I vote for calling Barbara. Hardly anyone makes it through her interviews without crying.”

“And how would me crying like a girl on national television help my image?”

“It’d make you look sensitive. Women love that. Besides, you might pick up some sympathy.”

“I fail to see how accusing America’s sweetheart of lying would gain the sympathy vote.”

Tamara Templeton had literally grown up in viewers’ living rooms. She’d made her first appearance as a plucky orphan sent from New York to live with her aunt and uncle and numerous cousins on the family farm somewhere in the nameless Midwest when she was nine years old.

Amazingly, in a competitive business where the average television show had a shelf life between milk and yogurt, bolstered by its saccharine “family value” stories set in “simpler” times, Heartland—which, in Hollywood high concept terms, had initially been dismissed by critics as Little House on the Prairie meets The Waltons—was still running strong twelve years after its debut.

And Tamara was a multimillionaire several times over.

She had her own clothing line, a perfume label, a series of best-selling books about her fictional character’s adventures, and a doll whose period prairie dresses probably cost more than the average parents spent on their own kids’ clothes.

Her movies, which to Gabe’s mind were even more likely to give their young audience cavities than the damn TV show, were guaranteed blockbusters, and Gabe had heard tales of studios refusing to set a release date for their summer movies until her opening weekend was set in stone.

She was young, beautiful, rich, and appeared, to her legion of fans worldwide, to have everything any young woman could wish for. But there was one thing she was lacking. The respect of her acting peers.

Which is where Gabe had come in.

“Your mistake was letting her announce your engagement in the first place,” Angela pointed out what Gabe had been telling himself over and over again since this mess had started.

“Like I knew she was going to pull a stunt like that.” Gabe clenched his jaw. “Hell, we’d only been out twice.” Both “duty dates” set up by the agent they shared.

Angela shrugged. “Sometimes it happens that way. People meet, heartstrings zing, and the next thing you know, you’re in some Vegas chapel, pledging to love and honor until death do you part, while an Elvis impersonator belts out ‘Burning Love.’”

Knowing that Angela had actually done the Elvis impersonator wedding bit, Gabe refrained from pointing out that he’d rather go skinny dipping with gators.

“Read my lips. Nothing went zing. Nothing fucking happened. Period.”

Not that Tamara hadn’t tried. And she was a fine one to talk about kinky, leaning over and telling him, just as they’d left the limo to do the red carpet walk into the Golden Globes, that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

There’d been a time when an announcement like that would’ve given him a boner the size of Alaska, but ever since his first movie, where he’d been cast in the starring role of the rogue pirate Jean Lafitte, a virtual Aladdin’s cave of gorgeous, available women had opened up to him. In the beginning, he’d done what any healthy male would do when gifted with such a scrumptious smorgasbord of female dessert—he’d feasted.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t taken him long to discover that even the sweetest desserts could become boring. And it was hard to value anything that came too easily.

“Hell.” He dragged his hand through the shaggy hair he’d been growing for an upcoming role as a borderline crooked, New Orleans cop. “I’ve got to get out of town.”

“Like there’s any place on the planet the paparazzi won’t find you.”

He’d spent a sleepless night thinking about that.

“There’s one place.”

Gabe had never planned to return to his hometown of Blue Bayou. Then again, he sure as hell hadn’t planned to end up in a mess like this, either.

Besides, it wasn’t as if he had anywhere else to go.

It was funny how life turned out. Who’d have thought that a girl who’d been forced to buy her clothes in the Chubbettes department of the Tots to Teens Emporium, the very same girl who’d been a wallflower at her senior prom, would grow up to have men pay to get naked with her?

It just went to show, Emma Quinlan considered, as she ran her hands down her third bare male back of the day, that the American dream was alive and well and living in Blue Bayou, Louisiana.

Not that she’d dreamed that much of naked men back when she’d been growing up.

She’d been too sheltered, too shy, and far too inhibited. Then there’d been the weight issue. Photographs showed that she’d been a cherubic infant, the very same type celebrated on greeting cards and baby food commercials.

Then she’d gone through a “baby fat” stage. Which, when she was in the fourth grade, resulted in her being sent off to a fat camp where calorie cops monitored every bite that went into her mouth and did surprise inspections of the cabins, searching out contraband. One poor calorie criminal had been caught with packages of Gummi Bears hidden beneath a loose floorboard beneath his bunk. Years later, the memory of his frightened eyes as he struggled to plod his way through a punishment lap of the track was vividly etched in her mind.

The camps became a yearly ritual, as predictable as the return of swallows to the Louisiana Gulf coast every August on their fall migration.

For six weeks during July and August, every bite Emma put in her mouth was monitored. Her days were spent doing calisthenics and running around the oval track and soccer field; her nights were spent dreaming of crawfish jambalaya, chicken gumbo, and bread pudding.

There were rumors of girls who’d trade sex for food, but Emma had never met a camper who’d actually admitted to sinking that low, and since she wasn’t the kind of girl any of the counselors would’ve hit on, she’d never had to face such a moral dilemma.

By the time she was fourteen, Emma realized that she was destined to go through life as a “large girl.” That was also the year that her mother—a petite blonde, whose crowning achievement in life seemed to be that she could still fit into her size zero wedding dress fifteen years after the ceremony—informed Emma that she was now old enough to shop for back-to-school clothes by herself.

“You are so lucky!” Emma’s best friend, Roxi Dupree, had declared that memorable Saturday afternoon. “My mother is soo old-fashioned. If she had her way, I’d be wearing calico like Half-Pint in Little House on the Prairie!”

Roxi might have envied what she viewed as Emma’s shopping freedom, but she hadn’t seen the disappointment in Angela Quinlan’s judicious gaze when Emma had gotten off the bus from the fat gulag, a mere two pounds thinner than when she’d been sent away.

It hadn’t taken a mind reader to grasp the truth—that Emma’s former beauty queen mother was ashamed to go clothes shopping with her fat teenage daughter.

“Uh, sugar?”

The deep male voice shattered the unhappy memory. Bygones, Emma told herself firmly.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to be tellin’ you how to do your business, but maybe you’re rubbing just a touch hard?”

Damn. She glanced down at the deeply tanned skin. She had such a death grip on his shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Nate.”

“No harm done,” he said, the south Louisiana drawl blending appealingly with his Cajun French accent. “Though maybe you could use a bit of your own medicine. You seem a tad tense.”

“It’s just been a busy week, what with the Jean Lafitte weekend coming up.”

Liar. The reason she was tense was not due to her days, but her recent sleepless nights.

She danced her fingers down his bare spine. And felt the muscles of his back clench.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, spreading her palms outward.

“No need to apologize. That felt real good. I was going to ask you a favor, but since you’re already having a tough few days—”

“Don’t be silly. We’re friends, Nate. Ask away.”

She could feel his chuckle beneath her hands. “That’s what I love about you, chère. You agree without even hearing what the favor is.”

He turned his head and looked up at her, affection warming his Paul Newman blue eyes. “I was supposed to pick someone up at the airport this afternoon, but I got a call that these old windows I’ve been trying to find for a remodel job are goin’ on auction in Houma this afternoon, and—”

“I’ll be glad to go to the airport. Besides, I owe you for getting your brother to help me out.”

If it hadn’t been for Finn Callahan’s detective skills, Emma’s louse of an ex-husband would’ve gotten away with absconding with all their joint funds. Including the money she’d socked away in order to open her Every Body’s Beautiful day spa. Not only had Finn—a former FBI agent—not charged her his going rate, Nate insisted on paying for the weekly massage the doctor had prescribed after he’d broken his shoulder falling off a scaffolding.

“You don’t owe me a thing. Your ex is pond scum. I was glad to help put him away.”

Having never been one to hold grudges, Emma had tried not to feel gleeful when the news bulletin about her former husband’s arrest for embezzlement and tax fraud had come over her car radio.

“So, what time is the flight, and who’s coming in?”

“It gets in at five thirty-five at Concourse D. It’s a Delta flight from L.A.”

“Oh?” Her heart hitched. Oh, please. She cast a quick, desperate look into the adjoining room at the voodoo altar, draped in Barbie-pink tulle, that Roxi had set up as packaging for her “Hex Appeal” love spell business. Don’t let it be—

“It’s Gabe.”

Damn. Where the hell was voodoo power when you needed it?

“Well.” She blew out a breath. “That’s certainly a surprise.”

That was an understatement. Gabriel Broussard had been so eager to escape Blue Bayou, he’d hightailed it out of town without so much as a good-bye.

Not that he’d owed Emma one.

The hell he didn’t. Okay. Maybe she did hold a grudge. But only against men who’d kissed her silly, felt her up until she’d melted into a puddle of hot, desperate need, then disappeared from her life.

Unfortunately, Gabriel hadn’t disappeared from the planet. In fact, it was impossible to go into a grocery store without seeing his midnight blue eyes smoldering from the cover of some sleazy tabloid. There was usually some barely clad female plastered to him.

Just last month, an enterprising photographer with a telescopic lens had captured him supposedly making love to his co-star on the deck of some Greek shipping tycoon’s yacht. The day after that photo hit the newsstands, splashed all over the front of the Enquirer, the actress’s producer husband had filed for divorce.

Then there’d been this latest scandal with Tamara the prairie princess . . .

“Guess you’ve heard what happened,” Nate said.

Emma shrugged. “I may have caught something about it on Entertainment Tonight.” And had lost sleep for the past three nights imagining what, exactly, constituted kinky sex.

“Gabe says it’ll blow over.”

“Most things do, I suppose.” It’s what people said about Hurricane Ivan. Which had left a trail of destruction in its wake.

“Meanwhile, he figured Blue Bayou would be a good place to lie low.”

“How lucky for all of us,” she said through gritted teeth.

“You sure nothing’s wrong, chère?”

“Positive.” She forced a smile. It wasn’t his fault that his best friend had the sexual morals of an alley cat. “All done.”

“And feeling like a new man.” He rolled his head onto his shoulders. Then he retrieved his wallet from his back pocket and handed her his Amex card. “You definitely have magic hands, Emma, darlin’.”

“Thank you.” Those hands were not as steady as they should have been as she ran the card. “I guess Gabe’s staying at your house, then?”

“I offered. But he said he’d rather stay out at the camp.”

Terrific. Not only would she be stuck in a car with the man during rush hour traffic, she was also going to have to return to the scene of the crime.

“You sure it’s no problem? He can always rent a car, but bein’ a star and all, as soon as he shows up at the Hertz counter, his cover’ll probably be blown.”

She forced a smile she was a very long way from feeling. “Of course it’s no problem.”

“Then why are you frowning?”

“I’ve got a headache coming on.” A two-hundred-and-ten pound Cajun one. “I’ll take a couple aspirin and I’ll be fine.”

“You’re always a damn sight better than fine, chère.” His grin was quick and sexy, without the seductive overtones that had always made his friend’s smile so dangerous.

She could handle this, Emma assured herself as she locked up the spa for the day. An uncharacteristic forty-five minutes early, which had Cal Marchand, proprietor of Cal’s Cajun Café across the street checking his watch in surprise.

The thing to do was to just pull on her big girl underpants, drive into New Orleans and get it over with. Gabriel Broussard might be People magazine’s sexiest man alive. He might have seduced scores of women all over the world, but the man Cosmo readers had voted the pirate they’d most like to be held prisoner on a desert island with was, after all, just a man. Not that different from any other.

Besides, she wasn’t the same shy, tongue-tied, small-town bayou girl she’d been ten years ago. She’d lived in the city; she’d gotten married, only to end up publicly humiliated by a man who turned out to be slimier than swamp scum.

It hadn’t been easy, but she’d picked herself up, dusted herself off, divorced the dickhead, as Roxi loyally referred to him, started her own business and was a dues paying member of Blue Bayou’s Chamber of Commerce.

She’d even been elected deputy mayor, which was, admittedly, an unpaid position, but it did come with the perk of riding in a snazzy convertible in the Jean Lafitte Day parade. Roxi, a former Miss Blue Bayou, had even taught her a beauty queen wave.

She’d been fired in the crucible of life. She was intelligent, tough, and had tossed off her nice girl Catholic upbringing after the dickhead dumped her for another woman. A bimbo who’d applied for a loan to buy a pair of D cup boobs so she could win a job as a cocktail waitress at New Orleans’ Coyote Ugly Saloon.

Emma might not be a tomb raider like Lara Croft, or an international spy with a to-kill-for wardrobe and a trunkful of glamorous wigs like Alias’s Sydney Bristow, but this new, improved Emma Quinlan could take names and kick butt right along with the rest of those fictional take-charge females.

And if she were the type of woman to hold a grudge, which she wasn’t, she assured herself yet again, the butt she’d most like to kick belonged to Blue Bayou bad boy Gabriel Broussard.

There was no way she could have missed him. Emma supposed that he’d chosen the plain white T-shirt, faded jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, red Ragin’ Cajun baseball cap and RayBans in order to blend into the locals crowding the terminal, but there was no way Gabriel would ever blend in anywhere.

He was six feet one before tacking on the added height from those wedged heels of the boots and his body beneath that tight shirt appeared as lean and hard as it’d been when he was eighteen. The shaggy black hair curling at the nape of his neck was as black as a moonless night over the bayou and the thin white scar running across his cheekbone added a dashing, dangerous look reminiscent of the pirates who’d once used the bayou as a home base while raiding merchant ships out in the Gulf.

A sexy stubble of beard darkened his jaw, and his mouth was set in a firm, no-trespassing line designed to discourage anyone who might recognize him from speaking to him. He made his way past the newsstands, take-out Cajun food counters, and souvenir stands selling Tabasco sauce and plastic alligators on the loose-hipped predatory stride of a swamp panther.

Emma was wondering if Nate had informed Gabriel about the change of plans, that she’d be the one picking him up, when he honed in on her like a heat-seeking missile.

“Hey, chère.”

His drawl was as rich as the pralines being sold next to those grinning plastic gators. Emma had read that when he’d first gone to Hollywood, he’d been told to sound more “American,” to which he’d responded that the last time he’d looked at a map, Louisiana was in America, and besides, having an accent sure as hell hadn’t hurt Antonio Banderas, Pierce Brosnan, or Sean Connery.

After The Last Pirate was released, and all those earlier detractors realized how sexy moviegoers found that bayou drawl, Gabriel Broussard’s name rocketed to the top of every A list in town.

Case closed. As they say in the movie business, A Star Was Born.

His sensually chiseled lips tilted into a weary, all-too memorable half smile that hinted at dark secrets. The smile that made women want to take him into their arms, coddle him, and make the pain go away. The smile that had coaxed more than one willing female into the backseat of the Batmobile black Trans Am he’d roared around the bayou in back in high school.

Then, even as she braced against it, he folded her in his strong arms.

Because the feel of that hard, male, built-for-sin body against hers made her want to hold on, Emma stiffened.

If he noticed her resistance, Gabe didn’t show it as he put her a little away from him, keeping his long dark fingers curved around her shoulders as he subjected her to an openly masculine appraisal, from the top of her dark head, down to her Sunset Poppy lacquered toenails. The little toe was smeared a bit from putting her brand-new sandals back on before it dried, but from the way his gaze lingered on her breasts, Emma didn’t figure he’d notice the flaw.

“Damned if you haven’t turned into one hot female, you.”

The intimate growl was more suited for a bedroom than the crowded concourse in Louis Armstrong International Airport. As for the words . . . well, they shouldn’t have given her such a secret thrill.

They shouldn’t.

But, heaven help her, they did.

They also gave her a rash, reckless idea.

While Emma wasn’t one of those people who actually believed those tacky supermarket tabloid stories about bat boys and alien babies, and who in Hollywood was sleeping with whom, it was more than a little obvious that while he might no longer be the town’s bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, one thing about Gabriel Broussard hadn’t changed. Seduction still came as naturally to him as breathing.

So, what if she turned the tables? What if she seduced him?

After all, he owed her. Big time.

Emma was proud of how she’d moved on after her divorce from Richard, the adulterous, tax-dodging, embezzling dickhead. But some old habits died hard, and in many ways, although there were times when she aspired to be promiscuous, she was still a good girl. Sometimes too much so, if her best friend could be believed.

Roxi, who could have written a modern girl’s guide to hooking up, had taped all six seasons of Sex and the City and every Wednesday evening, while Richard had supposedly been at his Rotary Club meetings, she and Emma had gotten together to watch them. Unfortunately, while Roxi memorized Samantha’s pick-up lines, Emma identified with the hopelessly romantic Charlotte.

It wasn’t as if Roxi hadn’t tried to liven up Emma’s life, encouraging her to push the sexual envelope, to act on impulse.

Ha! Easy for her to say. Emma didn’t do impulsive. She made lists. Lots and lots of lists. All of which were color coded by day of the week, month of the year, and whether they were business or personal.

Not only was she diligent about crossing items off as she accomplished them, if she did something that wasn’t on one of those pieces of yellow lined legal paper, she’d add it to the bottom of the list, just for the satisfaction of drawing a line through it.

After going back to school to become a professional masseuse, she’d worked on her business plan for Every Body’s Beautiful for eighteen months before buying so much as a towel. Much to Roxi’s frustration, most of Emma’s evenings were spent alone, poring over the day spa’s books and spreadsheets, looking for ways she could improve her cash flow.

Reminding her on an almost daily basis that you didn’t have to be in love with a man to sleep with him, Roxi was all the time also repeating her favorite bumper sticker slogan: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Made History. But being mostly content with the life she’d made for herself after the divorce debacle, Emma didn’t feel a need to make history.

Still, what woman didn’t have a few things in her past she might have done differently? Like marrying the dickhead.

Or believing, back when she’d been a naïve eighteen-year-old wallflower, that Gabriel Broussard would eventually grow tired of all those nymphets who were only attracted to his bad boy aura and tragically beautiful good looks.

Having harbored a secret crush on him for years, Emma had spent long lonely hours fantasizing scenarios where he’d suddenly recognize that there was a gleaming pearl amidst all the flashy cubic zirconium he’d been wasting his time with.

That pearl being her. A nice, caring, good girl who truly loved him for the sensitive, emotionally wounded heart that dwelt inside that devastatingly sexy body. For the man she’d known he could become.

A helluva lot of good that did you.

Maybe it was time, just for the few days he’d be in town, she ditched Emma, the good girl. And tried being Emma, the good-time girl.

Besides, part of Gabriel’s appeal was that he’d always been a forbidden pleasure. Like all things forbidden, the fantasy undoubtedly surpassed the reality. Maybe it was time to find out if the bad boy of Blue Bayou could actually live up to his reputation.

And then, once she’d gotten a long overdue satisfaction, she’d just leave. The same way he had.

Later, when she was thinking clearly again, Emma would remind herself that her own reputation wasn’t exactly that of a wild-woman seductress. And her body certainly wasn’t Hollywood tucked, buffed, and toned.

But it was hard to even think at all when her mind was being bombarded by pheromones from a damn testosterone bomb.

Feeling uncharacteristically reckless—not to mention light-headed—she backed two steps away to give him a good look. Trying not to teeter on the ridiculously high fuck-me stilettos that had seemed like a good idea when she’d seen them in the window of The Magic Slipper, and resisting the urge to lick her suddenly dry lips, Emma smoothed her palms over the hips of the brand-new flowered silk skirt she’d bought after closing up today.

She hadn’t bought the outfit for Gabe. The timing was only coincidence. No way would she risk maxing out her AMEX for any man.

Apparently the money, which could have paid Every Body’s Beautiful’s electric bill for six months, had not been wasted. Emma experienced a sudden surge of feminine power as his gaze followed the provocative gesture.

Channeling her inner Samantha, Emma checked him out in turn, drinking in the mouthwatering sight of broad male shoulders, bulging biceps and the strong V-shaped torso that arrowed down into lean male hips. Allowing her gaze to linger suggestively on the button placket of his jeans, she watched his penis flex beneath the worn denim.

Oh. My. God.

An illicit thrill zinged through Emma. Hot damn if Roxi wasn’t right.

Me. . .