by Lynn Shurr
Red held out his beefy hand, then dropped it. He tipped his business Stetson back on his head, rocked in his lizard-skin boots, and said, “Why damn, you’re Bodey Landrum, five times World Champion Bull Rider and four times All-around Cowboy. Pleasure to meet you!”
Bodey had to release Eve to meet Red’s firm and enthusiastic shake. “You follow rodeo, Mr. Courville?”
“I do. Love it almost as much as the LSU Tigers. When a rodeo comes to town, there is always a Courville Construction Company banner hanging on the railings.”
“The Rodeo Association appreciates that, sir.”
“Evan and I were just about to get some coffee or a drink. You and Eve come join us.”
Hardy Courville swept them on a giant wave of hospitality toward an unoccupied table with Ja’nae Plato being drawn along behind bearing menus. Making it clear he was paying for everyone, Hardy ordered a scotch on the rocks and a large order of onion rings. Bodey settled on a beer. Eve requested herbal tea. The sculptor of Progress asked if espresso was available and sighed when one of the Rainbow’s older waitresses brought two pots of Community Coffee and asked if he wanted “Leaded or unleaded.”
Evan did accept one of the giant onion rings fried in a batter so light and flaky it tasted heavenly to anyone not on cholesterol-lowering drugs, but only because Hardy urged it on him. Bodey thought the artist ate the appetizer as if it were a giant slug, but then he had Evan figured as a snail eater. Eve passed entirely on the onions, letting Red and Bodey finish them off.
While Red monopolized his attention with rodeo and home renovation talk, Bodey tried to keep an ear out for Evan and Eve’s low-toned conversation. The good news was that Evan had come in Red’s car and stayed at the Courville house in Lafayette. They had to leave together. When that moment came, Bodey shook the artist’s soft hand a little harder than necessary and insincerely told the man what a pleasure it had been to meet him. He had no choice but to watch as Evan clasped Eve’s hand with both of his and promised they would “get together soon.”
No way in hell would Bodey let that happen.
Chapter Three
Sunday afternoon, Eve turned down an invitation to go riding with Bodey. She said she had to work on a large landscape for the lobby of Red Courville’s new building. Bodey guessed he believed her. He drove past her place both Sunday and Monday nights late and saw only Eve’s old white Toyota parked out front. The rest of his time, he spent getting some of the ranch’s furniture out of storage and setting up a new computer on Big Ben’s mahogany desk. He researched the bloodlines of some cows he wanted to purchase and breed to the meanest fuckers that ever threw him.
Monday afternoon, he made a special trip to Hobby Lobby to get his art supplies. Looking as out of place as a cowboy in a luxury spa, he wandered among the stretched canvases and a hundred of varieties of paints and brushes, clutching his list and completely lost. Two cute college girls a little too young for him and a grandmother, who said he had the most beautiful blue eyes, helped him with the search. All three gave him phone numbers in case he needed more advice.
Tuesday morning, Bodey got up early, shaved, and put on old jeans and a T-shirt with holes in it because he imagined painting as a messy business, and he would decline to wear a smock and a beret. On the way to Eve’s studio, he stopped at the café for a dozen hot biscuits, then walked over to Unc Knobby’s store for a quart of fresh honey sealed in a mason jar.
Unc Knobby, thin, stooped, his yellow skin spotted with age, bent Bodey’s ear about the hideous art his grandnephew Altimus Plato had shown in his shop—pictures of pimps and prostitutes and people shooting up.
The proprietor of the small grocery ran a hand over his bald pate and shook his head. “I says to him, dis is a holy town. What you showin’ dat trash fo’, and he says to me white folk like to buy from po’ boys who grew up in da projects. I says, ‘Altimus, you grew up here on Main Street,’ and he says back, ‘Whatever sells, Unc Knobby.’ Disgustin’. You want to take a pound of butter wit’ dat honey?”
“Sure.” Bodey managed to escape Rainbow Liquor and Food while his biscuits were still warm.
With his art supplies in their big Hobby Lobby bag along with the sales receipt on one arm and the box of biscuits and grocery sack of honey and butter on the other, Bodey arrived at Eve’s place and elbowed himself into the studio. Eve looked up from her position on the floor where she executed stretches on an exercise mat. His heart beat a little harder as she arched over long legs clad in slim yoga pants and her cropped top rode up showing a bare midriff. She posed in front of a huge canvas showing an enormous live oak thrusting up from the soil. Between its branches, a landscape full of small figures faded away toward infinity.
“Right on time,” she told him. “I’ve been up since dawn working on the commission. After a few hours, I get knotted up and take a break to stretch.”
“Another thing we have in common. I used to do stretches before I rode. Saved me from a lot of pulls and sprains, I think. Didn’t do diddly for broken bones though. You have breakfast? We can eat these while they’re hot, then stretch out on the floor together if you want.”
“I’m all finished stretching for the morning. I think I had a glass of orange juice around seven. Yummm, Rainbow Café biscuits and fresh honey. This isn’t going to keep the over-thirty flab away.” She took two. “There’s coffee in the carafe on the counter by the sink.”
Bodey filled a mug and watched Eve neatly break her biscuits and slather them with butter and honey using a clean, plastic palette knife. She bit in with her eyes closed and licked a dribble of honey off her chin as if she wanted to savor every lard-laden crumb. Ethereal, my ass, thought Bodey. He figured Eve had wells of untapped sensuality. As part owner in an oil enterprise, he knew where he wanted to drill.
He left his coffee and crossed the room to place his hands on the naked flesh between the cropped top and the drawstring pants. Bodey licked the crumbs off her lips and tasted the honey in her mouth. He ran his hands under a soft sports bra and felt her nipples harden. Though her hands came up, she didn’t push him away. This was going so well, they could be doing it on that exercise mat in the next few minutes. He’d release her hair from that tight braid, part it with his fingers, and…”
“Eve, you in there? I need to take my lesson early today. I have an appointment with my hairdresser at ten.” Renee Niles, or whatever she called herself now, pushed into the studio. Bodey didn’t recall her hair being quite so red, or her eyes that strong bright green, or her boobs swelling that large, but she looked even better than old memories recollected.
“Sorry I interrupted,” Renee said with a smile showing all her teeth between bronzed lips.
Eve burrowed into an oversized T-shirt splotched with paint. The back of her neck turned red. “No problem. Bodey is here to paint, too,” Eve mumbled as her head emerged.
“I can see that. Remember me, Bodey?”
“You are unforgettable, Renee.”
“I’d like to think so. Where can I set up, Eve?”
“Ah, over there. Bodey, do you have your canvas board? Set it over here.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I’ve also got a hard-on stiff as a board, Bodey thought as he rummaged in the Hobby Lobby bag and laid out his paints and brushes.
“Good. Did you bring a picture you want to paint? Let’s clip it up here in the corner. Why don’t you sketch it on your board while I check Renee’s project.”
Renee’s project, Bodey could see, was an anatomical study of a well-built black man’s back and buttocks. Lots of deep purple lines denoting hollows in the muscles dominated the dark brown study done on a real canvas, not this board thing he figured beginners used. She worked with oils like the Old Masters. That defined Renee—experienced at everything.
Eve suggested Renee pop out the purple with some cad yellow contrasts. Bodey watched almost embarrassed as the women ogled the black dude’s picture, though Eve’s interest appeared solely professional. He scratched hi
s pencil across the canvas board in an attempt to draw a bucking bull with the rider on its back using perfect form. He used one of his championship photos and hoped Eve would notice.
“Okay, Bodey. Put a good-sized dab of each color on your palette arranged like this color wheel and a big gob of white. Now try to rough in the background. If you go over your sketch a little, it doesn’t matter. Acrylics dry fast. You can paint it in again. I’m going to work on my painting while you do that. Holler if you need help.”
“Aren’t you going to show me how to hold the brush?”
“Whatever works for you, Bodey.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” he mumbled and began slapping paint.
“My therapist said I should take up my old hobby to help me get over men. Think it’s working? I don’t,” said Renee squinting at her subject’s firm ass.
“You paint pretty good, Renee.”
“If Eve is busy, you can call me for pointers any time. I expected to hear from you before now.”
Bodey didn’t answer. He continued to slop away until Eve returned. “Hmmm, don’t try for so much detail yet. Just try to capture the energy of that bull,” said Eve bending close.
“Eve, I’ve finished mine. Check it over for me.” Renee drew Eve back to her side of the room. “I don’t know what to paint next—unless Bodey would pose for me.”
“Clothes on or off, darlin’?” Bodey said automatically. “Eve owes me a portrait.”
“From the waist up only!” Eve protested as Bodey started to strip off his shirt. “Leave the shirt on.”
“Whatever you want, honey.” Bodey took a seat on a stool.
“Wait, do you have a hat. You need a hat.”
“Got my lucky hat in the truck.”
Bodey retrieved it. The hat was black and battered and had a dented silver concha band around the crown. “Always won when I wore this hat,” he reminisced. “Damn good hat.”
“I think I remember that hat,” Eve said.
“Like I said, my lucky hat. I always wore it when I had something hard to do.”
“That old, holey T-shirt isn’t working for me, Eve. Please, can’t he take it off?” Renee whined.
“Fine. Take off the shirt, Bodey, if it doesn’t bother you.”
Well aware that he was trim and hard-muscled, Bodey took off the T-shirt so slowly his act would have done credit to a Bourbon Street stripper. He tossed it in a corner like a rag and slouched on the stool. He turned his pretty side toward Eve, but she motioned for him to turn the other way where a long, pink scar slashed through his tan across the ribs and around his back. A bull named Yellow Thunder had gored him during the dismount after he rode out the clock. Stitched up and bandaged tight, he’d completed the competition, come in first, too. He told the women that story as they worked. It wasn’t bragging because it was God’s own truth. About the time Bodey’s back started to bother him, Eve said they had to clean up so she could make her class at the Academy.
Bodey shrugged into his T-shirt and casually strolled around to take a look at the canvases. Renee had nearly completed her version. Bodey barely recognized himself. He knew he was well-muscled through the shoulders and chest, but she’d drawn a cowboy on steroids with bulging biceps and six-pack abs. Renee had taken the artistic liberty of portraying his jeans as unzipped nearly down to his crotch—as if he were some Abercrombie and Fitch model. All his scars had vanished. Bodey guessed she flattered him. He’d had more than his fair share of women and had no problem strutting around naked in front of them, but to show him like that in paint somehow made this cowboy uncomfortable.
Bodey moved on to view Eve’s canvas. She had scrubbed in his figure but given most of her time to the face. His stance, his scars, his eyes, though very blue, seemed to say here sat a man sore and weary, looking for a light in the window and a warm bed where he could rest. Did Eve see him like that?—a worn-out man with no one waiting at home. Who would want to marry a man like that? Who would even have sex with this guy?
Renee came up beside him. “Well, Eve doesn’t do portraits very often. I think mine is better. Help me get my things to the car, will you, Bodey?”
Bodey picked up her picture of the buttocks gingerly by the edge and hefted her rather heavy wooden box of art supplies while Renee carried her still very wet cowboy canvas carefully out to a black Lexus.
“Maybe we could do a private session at your place or mine to finish this up,” Renee invited with her hand on Bodey’s arm.
This close, he could tell the green eyes came from colored contacts. The darker roots of her hair showed around the crown of her head, hence that trip to the hairdresser she’d mentioned. As she pressed against him, her breasts felt harder than he remembered. Was there anything real left of Renee Niles?
Eve watched the old friends and lovers standing so close together. What a fool she had been doing that stretching routine for Bodey Landrum’s benefit. Leave it to her to come up with such a feeble attempt at being seductive. For a short while, she’d begun to believe he was very attracted to her. The kiss at the fireworks, the arm he had kept around her waist, the lip-locking this morning that might have led to sex, all of it was probably engraved in Bodey’s genes like the startling blue of his eyes. She carried her own art gear to the trunk of her old, white Toyota, placed it inside and gave the lid a slam that made both Renee and Bodey jump apart. Eve got into her car and turned the ignition. She’d be early for her class, but didn’t care.
“Hey! My stuff is still inside,” Bodey called as she pulled out.
“I’ll keep it safe for you. I’m late. See you next Tuesday.”
“I haven’t paid you!” Bodey waved two twenties at her.
She stopped and rolled down the window long enough to take one of the bills. “Since this wasn’t a private lesson after all.”
“Renee took the other bill from Bodey’s fingers and handed it to Eve. “My share. I’ll pay you back next week, cowboy, or maybe before. That’s eight on Tuesdays, right Eve?”
Eve shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or the other to her. Then, she peeled out spraying bits of broken oyster shells from the driveway on her students.
Chapter Four
Renee Niles Bouchard Hayes finished Googling Bodey Landrum on her home computer. He began to take shape in her mind as more than a passing amusement, perhaps husband number three. From her comfortable home atop one of the small hills in her daddy’s subdivision, she could just see the roof of the Three B’s mansion, a house twice the size of the one she lived in at the moment.
Marriage, Renee felt, should be a well thought out business decision, not some silly Romeo and Juliet affair like her stupid cousin’s involvement with Noreen Courville. Everyone knew the Courvilles didn’t mix with the Niles family because of some ancient grudge and pushing Noreen and Rusty together in that barn had been a hoot.
As Noreen, a student of history and lover of genealogy, told Renee—ad nauseam—the previous attempt to end that feud through marriage had been around 1843 when the youngest son of Maxime and Marguerite Courville went on a sudden two year grand tour of Europe. The eldest daughter of Aaron and Ramona Niles had broken off her engagement to Rufe Courville and married a local doctor while the young man travelled and so caused more bitterness between the clans.
None of Noreen’s family, except for her brother, the priest, had come to her and Rusty’s tiny and rushed wedding in the nun’s chapel at the Academy. If Renee hadn’t volunteered to be maid of honor and taken charge, the whole affair would have been a shabby disaster. True, the feud died down upon the arrival of the first grandchild, but Renee didn’t feel family grudges faded that easily. She knew she’d never forgive her own weak-willed mother.
Bodey would want children, probably. Renee guessed she could endure one or two if he insisted. After all, women these days had epidurals and tummy tucks and nannies. Hardly anyone died giving birth. She’d had the same thought about her carefully chosen first husband, Elias Bouchard, a n
oted and wealthy heart surgeon, who thought he had picked Renee as his trophy wife after ditching the sagging Liz, mother of his five children. Fortunately, Elias had no desire to ruin another woman’s body with childbearing.
But in the end, she had grown bored with her husband’s long hospital hours and devotion to golf and deep-sea fishing. How had Liz endured the man for so many years without indulging in an affair? Renee had taken four lovers over the span of her marriage—her tennis instructor, her personal trainer, the yard boy, and the pool man. When that afternoon storm blew up, she should have realized Elias would come home early from a day at the links and find her straddled across her trainer on a weight bench, but she had been too preoccupied with the man’s marvelous stamina to hear the thunder, the same thunder masking the arrival of her husband’s car. She despised Louisiana weather.
Fortunately, Elias was an intellectual man and not given to violence. Rather soft, the doctor could never have taken on her hard-bodied trainer anyhow. He satisfied himself with stripping his roving wife legally of everything but the furnished house her daddy had given them as a wedding gift and a few pieces of nice jewelry. If she hadn’t delayed having children, she would have gotten a much better settlement. Make a mental note—when she married Bodey start a family immediately and get it over with.
Renee reviewed the Landrum assets again, a few million dollars made on the rodeo circuit invested in oil and a Texas ranch, a line of western clothing, endorsements for saddles and blue jeans and who knew what else, and of course, the newly inherited Three B’s Ranch and its contents. His body was great, his face handsome, his temper easy-going unless riled, and he’d had staying power in the sack when they’d gone together in high school—but he wouldn’t be indulgent like her second husband, Gerald Hayes.
