Page 24 of Must Love Alligators

He sat up straighter.“Oh.That’s not pathetic at all.”That would be so easy to get.“I have no idea what Cajuns eat for Christmas, but I can tell you that if Ellie Landry and Cora Allain are making it, then it’s gonna be some of the best stuff you ever tasted and if youdidn’twant a chance at it, you’d be crazy.”The Landrys loved only one thing more than food.Feeding people.Lots of people.Any people.But he narrowed his eyes.“Are you using my attraction to you to get Christmas dinner?”he teased.

“I didn’t know you were attracted to me.”

“Bullshit,” he chided.

Finally, she gave him a half-smile.“Okay, maybe I thought you were a little.But I think I thought that I was just the first girl who hadn’t fallen at your feet and you were determined to figure out what that was about.”

He nodded slowly.Interesting that she’d realized that about him.“That was part of it.At first.”

“I knew it.”

“But just at first,” he said.He thought about his next words and decided that this confession was important.“I haven’t been with anyone since that crazy night when I made a total ass of myself with you and we had the most awkward non-kiss ever.”

She blushed, but still looked intrigued.“You haven’t?”she asked softly.“Really?”

“Really.And, trust me, that’s unusual.”

She arched an eyebrow.“Oh, I trust you on that.”

He chuckled.“You’re not my type.I didn’t even kiss you.But I can’t stop thinking about you.So I’m pretty glad you’re here and pretty glad you were hoping to see me.Even if Christmas dinner was part of that.”

“You’re not my type either,” she said.But she sounded just puzzled by that.“But maybe that’s why I wanted to come and see if that feeling was still here.”

“What feeling?”His voice was a little gruff without him even trying.

“The feeling of I-want-more-of-that in spite of knowing that didn’t make any sense,” she said.“I’m a scientist.I like things to make sense.But I also like studying anomalies.”

Hell, he was a scientist too.He just studied humans instead of swamp creatures.“Sometimes anomalies are what make things survive, what helps them evolve from what was there before.”

She just blew out a little breath at that.

Yeah, maybe she was the anomaly that was going to make his love life evolve.That thought wasn’t as strange or disturbing as he would have expected.

“So, what kind of food is there at Cajun Christmas?”he asked, to lighten the suddenly serious, let’s-just-get-married tone.

“Um… well, tons of seafood, of course,” she said.“And lots of desserts.And lots of drinking.I’m not sure about families on the bayou.I know in New Orleans they do Reveillon dinners.”

He wanted to take her to a Reveillon dinner.He didn’t even know what that was.But she looked so excited about it.“Tell me about the Revillon dinners.”

“Oh, it’s an old tradition.Because New Orleans was originally almost entirely Catholic, everyone would go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve and then go home and have these huge feasts that lasted until dawn.They were kind of like breakfast with pastries and egg dishes, but there were also meats, and seafood, and wine.Slowly, the tradition went out of style, but then in the nineties the city brought it back, serving the dinners in some of the restaurants in the French Quarter.”

“Have you been?”

Bailey shook her head.“I wasn’t here last year, remember?”

“We’ll go next year.”

She paused.For a second Chase thought she was going to say that was silly or there was no way they could make a date like that.But then she nodded.“Okay.”

Chase felt a strange surge of satisfaction at that.

She dug into the box beside her again.“Oh my gosh!”She pulled out a book.“I’ve heard about this too!”

The book wasThe Cajun Night Before Christmas.

“Really?”he reached for it.

“Another tradition down here,” she said with a grin.“I can totally see Leo doing an annual reading of this story.”

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