Page 43 of Frankly, My Dear

“Why is beauty more important than brains for a blonde?”

“Selene, don’t push me,” he warned in a soft voice, staring straight ahead.

“’Cause plenty of men are stupid but not many of them are blind.”

“I’ll tell you what’s stupid, chérie,” he said, standing abruptly. “It’s you and your—”

“What does a blonde say when you blow in her ear?”

He sat back down. That question clearly caught his interest. His eyes held hers while he waited impatiently.

She ran a forefinger around the edge of her chipped cup and pretended to forget she had stopped in the middle of a joke.

“Well?” James prodded finally.

“What?” she asked with unnaturally wide eyes.

“Don’t you flutter your spider lashes at me. Finish the damn joke and be done with it. What does a blonde say when you blow in her ear?” he prompted.

“Thanks for the refill.”

They all stared at her, puzzled. Mr. Gastoneau hadn’t seemed to get any of her jokes. “Me, I don’t understand,” he kept saying, asking Fergus to explain.

“You know…blondes have only air in their heads, not brains,” she started to explain.

“I understood your joke, Selene,” James said, moving closer. Before she grasped his intent, he leaned close to her exposed ear and whispered, “What do you say when I blow in your ear?” Then he expelled his hot breath softly into her ear.

Sweet, sweet ripples of pleasure spiraled out from her sensitive ear to her breasts and the vee between her legs. She parted her lips on an involuntary sigh. “I say…I say, ‘Could you do it again?’” she admitted candidly.

James couldn’t possibly have heard what he thought he had. Had Selene really said she would like him to…?

He jolted away from her and her enticing temptations. Her subdued admission painted all kinds of impossible pictures in his mind. His tongue laving the tiny ear lobe. His tongue tracing the shell-like whorls of her outer ear. His tongue plunging into its inner depths in imitation of other even more pleasurable activities.

His long fingers flexed nervously around his coffee cup, and he pressed his parted lips together into a firm line. The woman was driving him mad with need. He was almost tempted to take up the offer of Gastoneau’s nubile daughter, but he was not quite that perverted yet. Or that desperate.

The future! 1996! He was having a hell of a time accepting Selene’s stories, but how could he not? The facts were there in black and white…and color…in the blasted magazine she’d carried with her. Still, time-travel! Maybe he was the one finally driven insane by all the pressures of his never-ending problems. Maybe the maladies of Giselle and his mother had rubbed off on him.

Finally, when he got his emotions under control, he looked back at Selene, who grinned from ear to lovely ear, gloating that she’d disconcerted him with her ridiculous blonde riddles. Well, he would show her. With seeming consideration, he asked, “Tell me, Selene, how did you enjoy your dinner?”

His question clearly surprised her. Good!

“It was delicious, especially the chicken. I’ve always liked chicken.”

“Ah, yes, the chicken…the swamp chicken,” he said smoothly, allowing mirth to tinge his voice. “You do know what swamp chicken is, don’t you?”

“Wha-at?”

“Rattlesnake,” he said flatly and cast her a “Voilà!” look.

Her red face turned greenish and she clamped a hand over her mouth. Then she jumped up and ran toward the privy. Oddly, he didn’t feel quite so much the winner of their verbal sparring as he followed after her to see if she was all right.

Merde, maybe he really ought to turn his boat around and take Selene back to New Orleans as she’d suggested…before he did a whole lot more than blow in her ear.

Chapter Eight

The next afternoon, when Selene got her first look at Bayou Noir and James’s sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish, she realized why they called it Bayou Black. Bayou Bleak was more like it.

The flatboats had docked at the bottom of an incline, which at one time would have been a carefully clipped alley of lawn, almost a city block long, leading up to the plantation house. The centuries-old oak trees, about thirty feet apart, had been trained to form an arch over the alley, but now their gnarled branches stretched out in distorted shapes, dripping moss.