So ignoring a tiny voice inside telling her that this wasn't compatible with career planning, she walked with Ace, hand-in-hand, alongside the pasture while following a path leading to a bayou that bordered both properties before emptying into the Vermilion River, all the while her mind was awhirl that maybe one more kiss wouldn't necessarily mean the beginning of the end of her career. Just one kiss and she'd regroup and be done with tempting fate.
CHAPTER 11
"Where are you taking me?" Piper asked, while walking alongside the pasture to the far end, where the animals were chucking, dribbling, butting and lobbing the ball between them.
Ace gave her hand a little squeeze. "A place where we can get better acquainted."
It dawned on Piper that Ace could be planning a make out session, a kind of follow-up to their heated kiss several days before. They'd had no time together since then, with her schedule divided between exercising Rags and Henri's horses, and her father's horses, and Ace's daily ranch work with his brothers. But if a continuation of the kiss was Ace's plan, the bigger question was, how would she respond? There was no denying he'd been on her mind of late, a little obsessively if she was honest with herself, and another steamy kiss could lead to serious temptation, so she needed clarification.
"What, exactly, do you have in mind when it comes to getting better acquainted?"
Ace eyed her with amusement. "Not what you think, sugah babe. I mean just what I said. Our families have been feudin' for generations and against all odds you and I have a mutual cause that goes by the name of Ragamuffin."
"Against what odds? My father put her in a claiming race and you claimed her."
"Except she was the last horse my brothers and I intended to claim that day, and I didn't wake up that mornin' tellin' myself I was gonna plunk down $5500 on a horse who'd lost every race she'd run and go it alone. And you're here on enemy territory exercisin' her, and if the right cards turn up you'll be runnin' her in her next race. I'd say those were fairly improbable odds."
"Okay, I see your point, but again, what do you have in mind when it comes to getting better acquainted?" Piper asked, as they moved increasingly farther away from the ranch compound.
"Relax, chère. All we'll be doin' is sittin' on the banks of the bayou talkin' and maybe catchin' a couple of Gaspergou to bring to Momma for makin' goo fish courtbouillon. She can whip it up in an hour and you could come to dinner and see what it's like eatin' with the folks livin' on the other side of the cane field."
"I'd still be a Harrison among Broussards. I don't imagine I'd be very welcome. I'm sure your folks figure one Harrison in the family's enough. I know for sure one Broussard in my family's the end of it as far as my father and grandmother are concerned, although my mother being the peacemaker in the family would pragmatically accept whatever life tossed at her."
"Umm, I was only askin' you to eat with us, not marry me."
Piper felt her face grow hot. "Okay, that came out wrong, my point being, our families have been feuding for generations for reasons that don't make much sense, but that's the way it is, so I figured any cozy contact between us, whether it's me coming for dinner, or showing up for a fais do-do and dancing with you, would have them thinking the worse."
"The worse bein' what? That I danced with the girl next door?"
"No, that yet another Broussard could lose his mental faculties and fall into the clutches of another Harrison female."
Ace slid her a sideways glance. "Or we could let 'em all know we intend to live our lives the way we want, not the way they decide."
"Actually, I've been doing that for years," Piper said. "I wouldn't be here exercising Rags and the other horses if I lived the way my family wanted me to. I wouldn't even be a jockey. I'd be making my debut and flitting around to debutante parties and probably being queen of some random Mardi Gras ball, and marrying a man who lives in a suit and tie and knows how to shuffle a dozen pieces of silverware when eating dinner."
Ace looked at her, curious. "Does your family actually eat like that every night?"
Piper chuckled. "No, that's reserved for Easter, Christmas and upscale company. As for the rest of the time, Nana drummed in our heads from as far back as when we could string five words together and eat in a high chair with a spoon with a curved-back handle, which piece of silverware was for what. Using the other pieces of silverware came along one at a time."
"And Joe? Does he follow the eating rules?"
Piper let out an unladylike snort. "He's never been to our house to eat. Not once. He's been invited but he always has an excuse. Male stubbornness, I suppose. But Joey's learning Nana's etiquette. He's got his own little silver spoon and fork along with a silver cup with his initials engraved on it. And he sits in his high chair at the table with his Beatrice Potter Bunnykins bib on while shoving his food around his Beatrice Potter Bunnykins bowl."
"Okay, I give up. Who's Beatrice Potter?"
"She wrote and illustrated a slew of children's books, including the Tale of Peter Rabbit, and her bunnies decorate porcelain plates and bowls for kids. Nana made sure we each had our own Beatrice Potter set when we graduated from diapers, so the tradition lives on with Joey, and she already has a set wrapped for baby Susanna when she arrives."
"And you? Are you into all this fancy eating stuff?"
Piper shrugged. "As they say, when in Rome do as the Romans. I eat to please Nana when I'm home, mainly because it's less stressful than having to listen to a tutorial on proper dinner table protocol, and you saw the way I whooshed down those crawfish and pecan pies at the fais do-do. I adjust to the occasion. Are we really going to fish for goo fish?" she asked, wanting to get off the subject of table manners and proper etiquette, which was a major line in the sand between the Harrisons and Broussards as far as her family was concerned, although catching fish was as alien to her as eating with her family would be to Ace, since she'd never been fishing, largely because all her life she'd been focused on horses.
"We can fish if you want, but mainly I want an excuse to sit on the pier and watch the bayou drift by while learnin' a little more about our local joustin' champion."
Piper chuckled. "That was kind of a fluke. Beyond that there's not much to learn about me. I'm pretty obsessive compulsive when it comes to having horses in my life, especially Rags, and I've got tunnel vision when it comes to being a jockey."
"So I've noticed, but I can't help thinkin' there's more. Meanwhile, here we are."
Piper had been so wrapped up in their repartee she hadn't realized they'd arrived at the bayou. On looking around, she said, "What is this place?"
"Our fishin' camp." Ace pointed to a pier with a couple of flat-bottom boats tied to it. "Those are Pike's pirogues. He makes them by hand and sells them."
"Is that where he makes them?" Piper asked, indicating a sturdy-looking shack with its own covered porch with a mini refrigerator on it, an array of fishing poles leaning against the front wall, a couple of fishing tackle boxes, and a pair of hip boots and several crawfish traps hanging from hooks secured in the porch ceiling.
"No, that's just a supply house for equipment."
"It's been a while since I ventured this far up the bayou," Piper mused. "Actually I was still in high school. A friend and I snuck along the banks in an attempt to catch Anne and Joe kissing. We didn't catch them, but none of this was here either."
"The fishin' hut's a little more recent. My Tante Beebe owns BEEBE'S BAIT AND TACKLE across the bayou from your place, and my sister, Mary, runs the shop since Tante Beebe's gettin' up in years and needs help, and this is where the bunch of us come to fill the ice box at the bait shop and the freezer at home. It's always good fishin' up and down this bayou."
"That bait and tackle shop's been there forever," Piper mused, while reflecting on the active business on the bayou where it joined the Vermilion River, something Nana had, for years wanted to see shut down, considering it unsightly. "I didn't know your aunt owned it."
Ace gazed acros
s the water. "At one time my family owned over a thousand acres of land on that side of the bayou, but over the generations it's gotten chopped up. Tante Beebe's held onto her piece though. You'd never get her off this bayou."
Piper looked to where moss-draped oaks and huge cypress trees rose out of the slow-moving, tea-colored water. Dense undercover lined both banks, and in the distance where the bayou made a gentle turn, a great blue heron stood on a moss-covered log, peering down at the surface of the water. There was a serene and ethereal beauty to the bayou. And a calmness. She'd never felt it before, mainly because her entire focus had been on horses while growing up.
"The bayou just kinda gets under your skin," Ace said in a reflective voice. "We all grew up fishin' these banks, the reason Mary started workin' at Tante Beebe's after high school, and now she pretty much runs the place. She also likes meetin' folks and there's always plenty stoppin' in."
"Then that's basically all she does?" Piper asked, realizing she knew almost nothing about Mary Broussard, the girl next door who'd be about her age.
"Not all. Mary has some cattle too and she helps at the ranch when we're cuttin' out calves for weanin' and vaccinatin' or movin' herds. But mostly she's at the shop, since the place is open year around and they're always busy. Tante Beebe knows everything that's goin' on around these parts because the customers hang out talkin', so she's kinda the information center."
"A bait and tackle shop seems an odd place to hang out, with all the fishy smells."
"It doesn't smell like fish. It smells like jerky and sausages. Tante Beebe keeps a smoker runnin' with alligator and beef jerky, and a spit turnin' with boudin sausages, and she serves the sausages on buns with all the fixin's, includin' five kinds of chips, and there's always a big ice chest filled with pop and cold beer. And that big wide pier out front has tables and chairs for settin' back and chewin' the fat."
"I didn't know they served food in there," Piper said. On occasion, when she'd wandered to the far end of the property, she'd noted all the activity at the bait shop, but not having an interest in fishing she'd never ventured in. "Then I take it Mary helps catch the fish they sell as bait."
"Yeah, but she also sells live crickets she breeds and raises."
"That's odd," Piper said. "Most girls don't like bugs."
"Mary's a bayou girl. She started raisin' crickets to sell to Tante Beebe and other bait shops when she was in high school, and she got her kicks puttin' them in our lunch pails. She started out raisin' them in a couple of big plastic tubs in her bedroom, but when they kept gettin' out, Momma banned them from the house and Daddy ordered my brothers and me to build the cricket hut, and Mary moved her operation here."
"So that hut's filled with crickets in plastic tubs?" Piper asked.
"No, one end of the bait and tackle shop's lined with containers with screened lids, heat lamps, bags of cricket food, and an ice box for fruit and vegetables for slicing for the crickets. Mary ships them around the country, and now she's settin' up for processin' cricket flour for makin' energy bars. They're gettin' popular."
"Hold it! Is eating crickets a Cajun thing?" Piper asked, wondering just how backwoods the Broussards really were. She'd always figured half the accounts her family told were fabrication.
One corner of Ace's mouth lifted slightly. "No, we confine our cuisine to road kill. We refuse to scrape crickets off the windshield. Check out the internet. High-protein cricket bars are the latest fad. Mary plans to start out sellin' cricket flour in small bags so people can add it to pancakes, cookies, oatmeal or anything else for extra protein."
"And you've eaten some of this so-called flour?"
"Oh yeah. Mary made cookies and the bunch of us wolfed 'em down and learned afterwards what was in them. Being Mary, we should've known better. She'll eventually get her comeuppance."
Piper laughed. "When I was growing up I rarely saw Mary because we attended different schools, but whenever our paths crossed, we acted as if we hadn't noticed each other, both of us following the family rules. I wonder now how my life might have been if I'd snuck off with Mary to catch crickets for playing jokes on her brothers." She turned to find Ace smiling.
"I wonder too. Maybe you would've figured at least one of her brothers wasn't so bad."
"Maybe." She looked at the water slowly drifting by, and in the quietness she heard the tiny splash of a bayou inhabitant, maybe a fish snapping at a bug on the surface. Mary Broussard would have been out there hooking that fish and bringing it home for dinner…
Unexpectedly, she had an urge to try her hand at fishing, though she had no intention of letting Ace know she'd never fished before, which would affirm any preconceived notions he might have that the Harrisons were above getting their hands soiled by something as backwater as snagging fish. "Okay, let's fish and get acquainted," she announced.
"You serious?"
"Sure, and if I catch a fish I just might take it home and cook it."
Ace eyed her with skepticism. "From what Anne told Joe, none of you learned to cook while growin' up because you always had a cook who shooed you outta the kitchen."
Piper couldn't deny that, but being shooed from the kitchen was fine with her since hanging out in the stables trumped anything that might have been taking place in the house. But to let Ace know she wasn't a complete hopeless case in the kitchen, she said, "I can read, and I can follow a recipe, so cooking a fish wouldn't be a problem."
"Not if you don't mind eatin' scales. You do know how to gut and scale a fish, don't you?"
"Is this part of your getting to know Piper Harrison routine, or are you trying to make me feel like a complete idiot who can't do anything but ride a horse?" Piper asked.
Ace chuckled. "I'm just messin' with your head. What kind of pole do you want?"
Piper glanced at the line-up of poles, and not having a clue how to throw a lure into the water and reel it in, she said, "One of those cane poles will be fine."
Ace looked askance at her. "If you hook a Gaspergou you might want a pole with a reel. They can put up a pretty fierce fight, especially the big ones."
"I'll chance it. I find a cane pole with a line more relaxing." After observing fishermen on bayous over the years, Piper was familiar with rod and reel fishing, but having never done it she could imagine a big tangle of line, or a hook snagged in a tree, or a fish hitting her in the head while jerking the thing out of the water.
Ace handed her a cane pole. "I'm surprised you want to fish with this. Folks like yours usually come around with their fancy rods and reels and pricey lures that flash and swim on their own, and while they're catchin' nothing, the guy downstream using a cane pole with a worm pulls 'em up as fast as they bite."
Piper felt a little ripple of delight on learning what bait to use. "In case you haven't noticed I'm not exactly like my folks. In fact, I'm sure they consider me the black sheep in the family. And maybe we could dig up some worms for bait."
"No need. There's an old bathtub with earthworms behind the shack. Be back in a minute." Ace returned holding a rusty coffee can half filled with moist soil crawling with a few worms.
Piper tried not to grimace as she tugged a slimy, rubbery thing from the soil. After shoving the hook into the poor worm, she threw her line into the water and sat on the pier and waited for something to happen.
"You might want to put a bobber on that line so it doesn’t sink to the bottom," Ace suggested.
Piper looked up, blankly. She knew what a bobber was, but she had no idea where to put it on the line or how to attach it. "I didn't see any around so I'll just hold my pole up and fish without it."
"No need." Ace took a box from a shelf above the window and handed it to her. "Take your pick."
Piper looked into a box filled with half-red, half-white plastic balls with tiny red buttons on top. The balls were of varying sizes, so she chose a big one, figuring it would be easier to spot bobbing on the water. Her own curiosity had her pushing the red button, which exposed a tiny hook o
n the bottom. Maybe to clamp the bobber onto the line?
Ace looked at her skeptically. "You plannin' on catchin' a fifty-pound fish?"
Piper stared at him, puzzled.
"That big bobber. It'll make it harder to tell if a fish strikes."
"With all this murky water I figured it would be easier to spot," Piper explained, though she figured by now Ace was probably beginning to put two and two together. Rummaging through the box, she grabbed a small bobber, pressed the button on top and clamped it onto the line about halfway between the hook and pole and tossed the line back into the water.
"It's not very deep here," Ace said.
Again, Piper looked at him puzzled.
"You put your bobber a good distance from the hook. About two feet should do it here."
"Oh." Piper tugged in the line for the third time and repositioned the bobber.
Meanwhile, Ace took a cane pole from the lineup, and after attaching a small bobber to the line and shoving the hook into a worm, he lobbed the line into the water and sat beside Piper, close enough so his arm brushed hers. After a few minutes sitting silently, the two of them with their cane poles reminding her of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Ace said, while pulling at his line with short, quick jerks, "You ever moved cattle?"
Figuring jerking the line was needed to catch a fish, she did the same thing, while replying, "You mean go on a cattle drive?"
"More like movin' a small herd from the prairie to the marshes where the grass is better."
The Final Turn (Cajun Cowboys Book 2) Page 12
