Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(58)

“Thanks, honey. The course has been real good to me this week.”

“Where's Skeet?” she asked.

Francesca gazed innocently at the chrome and glass sugar dispenser in the middle of the table.

“Something wasn't sitting right in his stomach, so he decided to stay back at the motel.” Dallie gave Francesca a stony look and then asked her if she wanted something to eat.

A litany of wonderful foods flicked through her head— lobster consommé, duckling paté with pistachios, glazed oysters—but she was a lot smarter than she had been five days before. “What do you recommend?” she asked him.

“The chili dog's good, but the crawfish are better.”

What in God's name were crawfish? “Crawfish would be fine,” she told him, praying they wouldn't be deep-fried. “And could you recommend something green to go along with it? I'm beginning to worry about scurvy.”

“Do you like key lime pie?”

She looked at him. “That's a joke, isn't it?”

He grinned at her and then turned to the waitress. “Get Francie here a big salad, will you, Mary Ann, and a side dish of beefsteak tomatoes all sliced up. I'll have the pan-fried catfish myself and some of those dill pickles like I had yesterday.”

As soon as the waitress had moved away, two well-groomed men in slacks and polo shirts came over to the table from the bar. It was quickly evident from their conversation that they were touring golf pros playing in the tournament with Dallie and that they had come over to meet Francesca. They positioned themselves on either side of her and before long were giving her lavish compliments and teaching her how to extract the sweet meat from the boiled crawfish that soon arrived on a heavy white platter. She laughed at all their stories, flattered them outrageously, and, in general, had them both eating out of her hand before either had finished his first beer. She felt wonderful.

Dallie, in the meantime, was occupied with a couple of female fans at the next table, both of whom said they worked as secretaries at one of Lake Charles's petrochemical plants. Francesca watched surreptitiously as he talked to them, his chair tilted back on two legs, navy blue cap tipped back on his blond head, beer bottle propped on his chest, and that lazy grin spreading over his face when one of them told him an off-color joke. Before long, they had launched into a series of nauseating double entendres about his “putter.”

Even though she and Dallie were involved in separate conversations, Francesca began to have the feeling that there was some connection between them, that he was as conscious of her as she was of him. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. Her encounter with him at the motel had left her shaken. When she curled into his arms, she had sent them flying across some invisible barrier, and now it was too late to turn back, even if she was absolutely certain she wanted to.

Three brawny rice farmers whom Dallie introduced as Louis, Pat, and Stoney pulled up their chairs to join them. Stoney couldn't tear himself away from Francesca and kept refilling her glass from a bottle of bad Chablis that one of the golfers had bought her. She flirted with him shamelessly, gazing into his eyes with an intensity that had brought far more sophisticated men to their knees. He shifted in his chair, tugging unconsciously at the collar of his plaid cotton shirt while he tried to act as if beautiful women flirted with him every day.

Eventually the individual pockets of conversation disappeared and the members of the group joined together and began telling funny stories. Francesca laughed at all their anecdotes and drank another glass of Chablis. A warm haze induced by alcohol and a general sense of well-being enveloped her. She felt as if the golfers, the petrochemical secretaries, and the rice farmers were the best friends she had ever had. The men's admiration warmed her, the women's envy renewed her sagging self-confidence, and Dallie's presence at her side energized her. He made them laugh with a story about an unexpected encounter he'd had with an alligator on a Florida golf course, and she suddenly wanted to give something back to all of them, some small part of herself.

“I have an animal story,” she said, beaming at her new friends. They all looked at her expectantly.

“Oh, boy,” Dallie murmured at her side.

She paid no attention. She folded one arm on the edge of the table and gave them her dazzling wait-until-you-hear-this smile. “A friend of my mother's opened this lovely new lodge near Nairobi,” she began. When she saw a vague blahkness on several faces, she amended, “Nairobi... in Kenya. Africa. A group of us flew down to spend a week or so there. It was a super place. A lovely long veranda looked out on this beautiful swimming pool, and they served the best rum punches you can imagine.” She sketched out a pool and a platter of rum punches with a graceful gesture of her hand.

“The second day there, some of us piled into one of the Land-Rovers with our cameras and drove outside the city to take photographs. We'd been gone for about an hour when the driver rounded a bend—not going all that fast, actually —and this ridiculous warthog leaped out in front of us.” She paused for effect. “Well, there was this awful thump as the Land-Rover hit the poor creature and it dropped to the road. We all jumped out, of course, and one of the men, a really odious French cellist named Raoul”—she rolled her eyes so they would all understand exactly the sort of person Raoul had been—“brought his camera with him and took a photograph of that poor, ugly warthog lying in the road. Then, I don't know what made her do it, but my mother said to Raoul, ‘Wouldn't it be funny if we took a picture of the warthog wearing your Gucci jacket!’” Francesca laughed at the memory. “Naturally, everyone thought this was amusing, and since there was no blood on the warthog to ruin the jacket, Raoul agreed. Anyway, he and two of the other men put the jacket on the animal. It was dreadfully insensitive, of course, but everyone laughed at the sight of this poor dead warthog in this marvelous jacket.”