Page 4 of The Cajun Doctor

“I prayed . . . that . . . that you . . . would come,” Deke finally got out. Talking was difficult at this stage.

“That’s me . . . the answer to a little boy’s prayer,” Jamie Lee muttered.

“Am I dead yet?” His little hand clung to his father’s. “Are you an angel?”

Jamie Lee started to weep then. Hell, they all had tears in their eyes.

“No, I’m hardly an angel, son. Just your daddy.”

“I’m afraid. Will you stay with me?”

“As long as you want, slugger.”

And he did stay with him for the next five hours, never moving from the seat the nurse had pushed behind him, never releasing his son’s grip on his hand, until Deke slipped away. The death was almost an anticlimax.

Daniel had gone back to his office for several hours and returned just in time. As he left for the last time, he wondered how many more of these cancer deaths he could handle without going insane.

A dog is a dog, no matter the breed . . .

Samantha Starr walked down the corridor of the French Quarter courthouse with her new lawyer, Lucien LeDeux, at her side. They were headed toward a conference room where they would meet with her horndog ex-husband Dr. Nicholas Coltrane (aka Nick the Prick), his shark lawyer Jessie John Daltry, and an associate judge for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, District of New Orleans.

“Don’t say anything,” Luc warned her. “You know the good doc will try ta rile you into a hissy fit, which won’t sit well with the judge. Just let me do all the talking.”

“I’ll try.”

“Not good enough. I’ve studied the records, chère. You’re paying Coltrane as much alimony as you do because of your outburst last time.”

She stiffened and raised her chin haughtily. “Or because the judge was a female influenced by my ex’s dubious charms. Nick commented on my lack of sex appeal as an excuse for his adultery, and the judge didn’t even reprimand him.”

“Huh? No way! You are as hot as a goat’s behind in a pepper patch.”

“Charming.”

“Oops. That’s my Tante Lulu’s favorite Cajun saying. Hang around her long enough and she wears off on you.”

Samantha knew and even worked on occasion with Louise Rivard, better known as Tante Lulu to everyone, and she was outrageous in appearance, actions, and general reputation. Not the role model Samantha would set for herself.

Luc grinned. “Anyhow, don’t let the asshole put you down.”

“Oh, please! I am what I am.” Samantha was five-foot-ten in her bare feet. When she wore heels, she was taller than Nick’s five-eleven frame, which had annoyed him to no end. If that wasn’t bad enough, her body was covered with freckles from forehead to toes, and not the attractive kind. Once, in a drunken rage, Nick had likened her freckles to tobacco juice spit on her by a redneck farmer. Orange spittle. As for her bright red hair . . . no more! She paid a fortune to her hairstylist to keep it a more subdued auburn.

Samantha hated that she’d taken so much care with her appearance today . . . white, long-sleeved, Chanel pantsuit with a fitted peplum jacket, matching stiletto pumps, and tailored, jade-green, collarless, silk blouse . . . to match her green eyes, her only feature that she really liked. Her auburn hair was swept off her face in a neat chignon. Emerald drop earrings in a platinum setting and her great-grandmother’s emerald-and-diamond filigree ring were her only jewelry. Unfortunately, there was no way to cover the freckles on her hands, face and neck. She hadn’t dressed to impress Nick, but for her own self-esteem which always tanked in his presence. “I don’t need phony compliments.”

“The dickhead has done a job on you, darlin’. Talk about!” Luc just shook his head. “We can discuss that later. Maybe you should have stayed home and let me handle this.”

“No. I am not going to let him continue to bleed me. Did I tell you that a friend of mine saw him in the South of France? He was on the freakin’ French Riviera for a month. A month!”

Luc sighed. “Yes, you told me. His lawyer says it was a medical conference.”

“For a month? What kind of medical conference lasts a month? SDU? Slimy Doctors United?”

Samantha had been married to Nick for five years and divorced for another five, but she was still paying for that mistake. And not just with the continuing humiliation of his serial adultery, or the very public, acrimonious divorce. Nope, the jerk had demanded alimony, that on top of her having paid his way through medical school. And he kept wanting more and more.

It wasn’t just that Nick knew the salary and benefits she drew from her family business, not to mention stock she owned in the company and a sizeable savings account. But he was aware of the gold coins and bullion, worth anywhere from a million and a half to two million dollars, depending on the market, stored in her bank safety deposit box. It started out as a million dollars in gold, a gift her grandfather gave on the birth of each of his grandchildren. In her case, it had almost doubled in value. Being of conservative Scottish stock, her grandfather preferred hard, cold metal, over stocks and bonds. Portable wealth. Since that gold wasn’t “earned” during their marriage, the courts had denied Nick access to it, over and over. But he kept trying.

During the course of her relationship with Nick, she’d met many of his physician friends, and they all seemed to be focused on their net worth and what expensive toy they could buy next. Very few were in the profession for the good they could do. And most had been divorced at least once, or were blatant adulterers. And talk about the conversations when Nick and his gynecologist buddies got together! If she heard the joke “I’ve seen more pussy than Hugh Hefner,” one time, she’d heard it a hundred.

Thus, her bias against doctors. It was an unreasonable bias, to lump all male doctors into one assumption. She realized that, but perhaps it was understandable.