Free The Convent Rose (The Roses) by Lynn Shurr Page A

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 noted 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