Crazy Rich Cajuns

by Erin Nicholas

  “So, I’m taking Kennedy to Savannah for the weekend,” he said to Ellie and Leo once he saw the coast was clear.

  He wanted to get a read on the family reaction to him and Kennedy spending more time together, and Ellie and Leo were the best ones to start with. For one, they had no filter and would tell him exactly what they thought. For another, they liked him.

  He knew that the guys—Sawyer, Josh, and Owen—liked him, too. Mostly. But that was, at least in part, because he’d helped save their business and was willing to come down and lend some muscle to whatever project was going on. He wasn’t sure how they’d feel about him dating their little sister-slash-cousin.

  “You’re going to introduce her to your family?” Ellie asked. She wasn’t wearing quite as big a smile as Bennett might have hoped for. Or expected.

  He nodded. “Yeah. It’s my dad’s retirement party. I’ll be there for the weekend and thought it would be fun to take her along.”

  “Why do you want her to meet your family?” Leo asked, frowning slightly.

  Yeah, definitely not the bright smiling faces he’d been wanting. Bennett shifted on his stool. “Because I talk about the bayou and all of you a lot. Thought it would be good for my family to get to know one of you. To see what has me so…charmed down here.”

  Leo shrugged. “I’m free this weekend. I could go with you.”

  Ellie nodded. “Me, too. I haven’t been to Savannah in years.”

  Bennett’s eyebrows lifted. “Um. You two want to go to my dad’s retirement party with me?”

  Leo and Ellie shared a look. Ellie nodded. “We could. I mean if you want your family to meet some people from down here, we’re a great choice. We’ve been here the longest.”

  “We’re the fucking backbone of this community,” Leo agreed. “We know all the stories, the whole history. You want your family to have a taste of the bayou, you can’t go wrong with us.”

  “I can whip up some food to bring along. Leo can bring his fiddle.” Ellie gave them both a grin. “We can even take some bayou whiskey with us. Really give ’em a party bayou style.”

  “And hell, we charm people every fuckin’ day, don’t we, darlin’?” Leo asked his wife. Who had been his ex-wife for a while. Then was his secret girlfriend for a while. Then just his girlfriend. And was now his wife again since they’d “eloped” to New Orleans a couple of weeks ago.

  Ellie gave him a smile. “We sure do. Leo drives the tourists around on the bus all day every day and I feed and water ’em. Nobody more charmin’ than the two of us down here.”

  Bennett nodded slowly. He could imagine Ellie and Leo showing up at his parent’s estate with crawfish pie, bayou whiskey—aka moonshine made in the backyard—and a fiddle, and entertaining the guests with the colorful stories from the bayou, including, of course, plenty of legends and myths mixed in with the hard-to-believe-but-mostly-true stories of real people living here. Not to mention some of the crazy tourist stories.

  The governor and the millionaires and the local celebrities would all be very…entertained…by it all. Or something. It would be entertaining for Bennett at least.

  His mother would hate it.

  Of course, once her family showed up—the crazy Cajun side of his family—Ellie and Leo would fit right in. Someone would probably set something on fire. Someone—or more than one someone—would end up naked in the swimming pool. And his mother would end up in bed with a migraine for the rest of the weekend.

  “Is there a reason that you think Kennedy would be a bad choice to go along with me?” he asked, attempting to turn the tables a bit. A near impossible feat with these two but worth trying.

  Ellie narrowed her eyes. “Why don’t you tell us why you’re really wanting to take her to Savannah.”

  Leo leaned in closer.

  Bennett swallowed hard. “I do want my mom and dad to meet her.”

  “Because?”

  “I…like her.”

  Leo chuckled. “’Course you do. Everyone likes Kennedy. But not everyone wants to spend three days straight with her.”

  Bennett couldn’t help but smile. He wasn’t going to tell them it was going to be five days.

  “Do you want her to go to Savannah with you because of her or because she’s a single woman you know that you’re attracted to who might be willing to spend the weekend with you at a fancy party?” Ellie asked.

  Bennett swallowed. That was a fair question. “Because of her,” he said honestly. “Not to sound like an asshole, but there are a lot of beautiful, single women I could have asked.”

  Ellie nodded. “I figured. Just wanted to be sure.”

  “But if you take her to Savannah with you, you can’t leave her there and you can’t send her home early and you can’t pawn her off on someone else,” Leo said.

  Bennett shook his head. “I’d never do any of those.”

  “Ha,” Leo said. “You can’t actually say that. You’ve only spent a few hours at a time with her. Most of your talkin’ has been on the phone.”

  “And you’ve already asked how high when she said jump,” Ellie pointed out.

  Bennett frowned. “How so?”

  “She called you today, told you she was being arrested, she clearly wasn’t, but you still backed her up.”

  “You wanted me to not take her call? Not help her out?” Bennett asked.

  Ellie shook her head. “I want you to help her, if she needs it. I want her to be able to call you, if she needs to. But I want you to also know when she needs it and when she’s just messing with you.”

  “She was messing with me today.” Of course she was.

  Why had she called him? Suddenly Bennett realized that there’d been no reason for that. Between her, Tori, Leo, and Owen, the plan to completely confuse and overwhelm Bailey—probably while someone else in the family was hiding the wolf and her pups and cleaning up any evidence they’d ever been there at all—had been right on track. Bennett hadn’t done a thing. That was right up there with telling him about the stuffed alligators.

  “She was messing with you today,” Ellie confirmed. “I mean, she used you as a distraction with Bailey, too, I suppose. But mostly she wanted to see what you’d do.”

  “And what you did was try to fix something she didn’t need fixed and then jump in the car and head down here to ask her to a big fancy, weekend-long party,” Leo said.

  “Trying to help her out and then ask her out was the wrong thing to do?” Bennett asked slowly, trying to process it all. His head was starting to hurt.

  “Listen, I like you,” Leo said. “So I’m gonna let you in on some insider information.”

  “That would be…great.” Bennett was ninety percent sure that Leo’s insider information would be useful.

  Unless Leo was messing with him, too.

  Okay, he was seventy percent sure that Leo’s insider information would be useful.

  “The guy she settles down with…” Leo trailed off and narrowed his eyes at Bennett. “You are thinking about the settling down part, right?”

  These people definitely got right to the point. Bennett knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. “I am,” he admitted. “You’re the first ones I’ve told though.”

  “We’re often the first ones people tell stuff,” Ellie said with a wink.

  “We’re very good listeners,” Leo agreed.

  “And we’re very wise,” Ellie said.

  They both nodded. Then burst out laughing.

  “You’re not actually wise?” Bennett asked, with a shake of his head. He grinned at them. “Damn, I’ve been bamboozled.”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Ellie said. “We pay attention and we love everyone who hangs out around here. You put those together and you notice a lot. When you notice a lot, you can come off as pretty insightful.”

  “Fair enough,” Bennett said.

  “So here’s what you need to know about the guys in Kennedy’s life,” Leo said.

  Bennett actually felt anticipati
on tighten his spine. He wanted to know this. He wanted to know what it would take to be a part of Kennedy’s life. He wanted to know how to win her over.

  Damn, that had happened fast.

  But again, that was the Landrys. He’d sat around a couple of crawfish boils now, drank some beer and moonshine with them, gone out fishing. That meant he’d heard the stories. The big, over-the-top, love-at-first-sight, burn-the-world-down-for-the-one-they-loved stories that made up the history of this family. They laughed and fought and worked and loved hard. Big. Loud.

  He had very little experience with any of that. But he wanted it.

  “There are four types of guys,” Leo said. “First, there are the ones who come through, see how gorgeous and different she is, who like her sass, and like to flirt. The tourists, the delivery guys, the ones just passing through. She’s not interested in them and usually puts up with them for just a few minutes at a time.”

  Bennett had actually seen that in action himself. She was friendly, but simply polite, not giving them much encouragement at all.

  “Second, there are the guys who actually ask her out,” Leo went on.

  Bennett definitely liked those guys less. He hadn’t seen Kennedy with any actual boyfriends, but of course she had them. A woman like Kennedy probably got asked out all the time.

  “She goes out with them, checks them out, and if she’s even a little interested, she calls them to come over to fix something,” Leo said. “But, inevitably, when they come over, they bring their town tools, fix it all by themselves, and then offer to take her out for dinner.”

  “Okay,” Bennett said, not sure where Leo was going, but more than a little fascinated by all of this.

  “Then there’s the guys like her dad and brothers. When she calls them over to fix something, they come, insist that she help, give her shit while they do it, and then clean out all the cookies they know she baked that morning.”

  “Okay.”

  “Finally, there’s me,” Leo said. “When she calls me over to fix something, I sit my ass in a chair, hand her tools, talk to her the entire time, and then tell her what I want her to make me for dinner.”

  Bennett looked at the older man. “So those are the categories?”

  “Yep.”

  “I can just flirt and nothing more. I can do everything for her. I can help her do stuff. Or I can make her do everything while I watch.”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay.” It wasn’t okay. Bennett wasn’t sure what to do with that at all. But he’d fallen into that second category today, clearly. He’d fixed the problem she’d called him about—or tried to anyway—and had then asked her to go to Savannah for the weekend.

  “You want to know which of those guys she calls the most often?” Leo asked after a moment.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me.”

  It was no secret that Kennedy had a huge soft spot for her grandpa. They were very close. They also gave each other the most shit.

  “Because you’re so charming and insightful?” Bennett asked.

  Leo laughed. “It will come as no surprise to you that Kennedy doesn’t consider me either of those things.”

  Bennett grinned.

  “It’s because when I’m there, we talk,” Leo said. “Not about the project or the business or whatever. And I don’t let her just feed me cookies.”

  Bennett turned his stool fully toward the other man. “What do you talk about?”

  “The Saints. LSU. The sociology of small towns. The eroding of the Louisiana coastline. Climate change. Why Becky Gardner can’t seem to choose a good man no matter how hard she tries.”

  Bennett blinked at him. Sociology? The eroding of the coastline? Climate change? Gossip and sports? “That’s…a lot.”

  Leo nodded and took a draw of his beer. “We’re both very interesting people.”

  Bennett couldn’t help but chuckle at that. They were also very humble. Clearly. “But her cookies suck?”

  Leo swallowed and shook his head. “Her cookies are amazing.”

  “But you don’t let her make you cookies.”

  “Right. Because she’s able to do so much more. I’m not going to settle for cookies from someone who can make a crab and shrimp souffle or crème brûlée that’s so good it will make you wanna cry.”

  Bennett felt his eyebrows rise. He’d heard them all say that Kennedy was amazing in the kitchen, but she refused to help out at Ellie’s because Ellie and Cora squabbled all the time. “No kidding.”

  “If you’re in the mood for snickerdoodles, she’s your girl,” Leo said. “And if you’re in the mood for more, she’s your girl.”

  He was in the mood for…everything Kennedy had to offer.

  “So, you make her do more, but she likes you best,” Bennett said. “You think that’s just because you’re her grandpa?”

  “It’s because I know what she’s capable of and I don’t let her half-ass stuff,” Leo said. “And I’m funnier than all those other guys,” he added.

  Bennett grinned as he thought about that. “This works out well,” he said, dryly. “Rewiring kitchens and overhauling transmissions are the things she gives me shit for not knowing.”

  “Yeah, because it’s easier for her to convince herself that she doesn’t need you down the road when she doesn’t, you know, need you,” Leo said with a shrug.

  Ellie nodded. “You gotta give her something to need you for. Something real.”

  “Like Leo does?”

  Ellie smiled at her husband. “Like Leo does. Like the whole family does. People to be there when she calls but to understand what she really needs.”

  “What should I have done when she called me to legally defend her against an arrest that wasn’t actually happening?” he asked.

  “You should have told her to handle it and that you wanted her lemon orzo shrimp for dinner,” Ellie said.

  “Better yet,” Leo piped up. “Tell her that you’re craving something with rosemary in it and what can she do about that.”

  “Just give her a challenge,” Bennett said.

  “Exactly. Along with the assumption that she’ll rise to it,” Ellie said.

  That was interesting. He was going to keep that in mind.

  “I did more or less tell her that I was taking her to Savannah. Didn’t really ask. Just assumed she’d be the perfect one to come along,” Bennett said.

  Ellie nodded. “That’s not bad.”

  Thank God. He’d been feeling like he’d failed every Kennedy test so far.

  “Now, just don’t be too sweet or romantic, don’t get wrapped around her little finger,” Leo said.

  “Oh, he’s already wrapped around her finger,” Ellie said. “I mean, he’s in here talkin’ to her grandparents about how to be the right guy.”

  “Good point,” Leo agreed with a nod.

  Bennett sighed. He was definitely getting a headache. “I just want her,” he finally said. Blunt. That was what this family understood. “Just how she is. And this place. This town. The business. All of this.”

  Ellie and Leo shared a glance.

  “What?” Bennett asked.

  “That’s a good start,” Ellie told him.

  A good start? Dammit. He was kind of thinking of that as the finish line.

  But he should have known better than to think that any Landry, especially Kennedy, would be easy.

  He looked at Leo. “So, crème brûlée, huh?”

  “You keep your hands off my crème brûlée,” Leo said. “You can have her Bananas Foster though. That’s pretty amazing, too.”

  Sure. That would be great.

  Except that he was allergic to bananas.

  Of course, he was.

  3

  “It’s extortion.”

  Maddie snorted. “No. It’s really not.”

  Kennedy tossed a skirt—black, of course—into her suitcase the next morning. Of course it wasn’t extortion. “How is it not?”

  “He threatened you?” Jul
iet asked. “If you didn’t go to Savannah with him, something bad would happen?”

  Yeah, she might not get an orgasm from him for several more weeks.

  Bennett was hardly forcing her to go. But she had to play this as if she wasn’t completely eager. She’d made a big deal of Bennett not being the best thing since they’d invented peanut butter flavored whipped cream in a can, and she couldn’t let down her cool façade now. She had a reputation to uphold.

  Truthfully though, the last time she’d been this excited had been when Gus, the river otter that lived near their docks, had showed up with a girlfriend. Seriously, being that excited about an otter really meant Kennedy needed more in her life. A sexy trip to Savannah was a good start.

  Kennedy shrugged. “He’s my boss. When your boss tells you that you have to do something, you have to do it, right?”

  Maddie outright laughed at that. “You’ve never in your life done something one of your ‘bosses’”—she lifted her fingers in air quotes—“told you to do just because they said it.”

  “Which means…you want to go to Savannah with Bennett?” Juliet asked, looking between Maddie and Kennedy.

  Juliet was the newer of the group of girlfriends and hadn’t been there when Bennett had first walked into the Boys of the Bayou office and knocked Kennedy’s world off-kilter. She also hadn’t known Kennedy long and didn’t know that she preferred blue-collar guys who got their hands dirty for a living.

  Or that she insisted that was the case anyway.

  Truth was, until Bennett, she’d basically believed it.

  The bayou was her home. She didn’t know anything else. She didn’t really need to know anything else. Not everyone was made to live and work on the bayou, but this was where karma or God or the universe had put her down. Seemed like as good a reason as any to stay put. She loved it here. The heat and humidity and bugs and leftover dinosaurs they called alligators were all a pain in the ass, but at the same time, she couldn’t imagine leaving. She intended to grow old here alongside her crazy family. The guy who was next to her through it all would have to not only put up with said family, he’d also have to deal with the wildness of living here. All that considered, being able to fix the AC and ceiling fans, kill the bugs, and deal with those gators were definitely must-dos.