A Second Chance

“I’ve left a couple of messages. But I wouldn’t expect her to return my call. I’ve contacted a dozen chefs, at least. Those who did get back to me aren’t able to help. The festival is only a few weeks away. They say there’s not enough time.”

Zara, he noticed, was watching him closely. Was he going to be her mother’s white knight, riding to the rescue, slaying dragons, producing fifty servings of gumbo, etouffee and jambalaya out of thin air?

“Let me think on it,” he said, mostly because he couldn’t bear to say no. “Maybe I can come up with something.”

“That’s all right,” Loretta said quickly. “It was just a thought. I can’t expect you to impose on your cousin. I’ll get it done somehow, even if I have to pay through the nose. Zara, we better go. We have lots of deliveries to make.” She grabbed her daughter’s hand and swept out of the breakfast room, still talking.

“Thanks for the coffee and juice. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Zara, say goodbye.”

“Goodbye…Mr. Carter,” she said in a solemn voice, and the significance of the formal mode of address wasn’t lost on him. The little minx was giving him the cold shoulder.

Mr. Carter indeed.

He’d show her. As he listened to the Volvo’s chugging fade away down the road, he vowed he would come up with some way to bail Loretta out of her jam.

“Mr. Carter?” It was Mrs. Bird-watcher, poking her head into the kitchen. “We’re ready for breakfast whenever you are.”

“Coming right up.”

He poured coffee and juice, and set out the yogurt and Loretta’s delectable baked goods. Then, with a flourish, he placed the frittata in the center of the table. It was a thing of beauty.

The bird-watchers, both disturbingly birdlike in appearance, stared at the casserole with twin looks of horror.

“Is that…eggs?” Mrs. Bird-watcher asked.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s a frittata.”

She clamped her eyes shut. “Take it away, please.”

“We don’t do eggs,” Mr. Bird-watcher added apologetically. “It would be like eating our little feathered friends, you see. Didn’t we tell you?”

Luc guessed that meant the fried-chicken boxed lunches wouldn’t go over big, either.

“MAMA, WHY DIDN’T LUC want to help us?” Zara asked as Loretta drove along the two-lane highway toward New Iberia, where she had half a dozen stops to make.

Loretta had been wondering that herself. He’d been very evasive about why he couldn’t ask his cousin Melanie to help out with the music festival. She had to believe it wasn’t because he didn’t want to help.

“Probably because he didn’t want to make a promise he couldn’t keep. For whatever reason, he doesn’t believe he can get his cousin to help us.” She tried to cast a positive light on Luc’s actions. Luc was one of the few people in this world Zara responded to besides her immediate family. She was unbelievably intelligent. Loretta sometimes had a hard time keeping up with her. Yet she was often shy with strangers and sometimes wouldn’t talk at all for hours at a time. She’d get an expression on her face as if she were pondering some great, eternal problem, trying to work out the meaning of life.

“So what are you going to do?” Zara asked, her forehead furrowed.

“I’ll figure something out. Don’t you worry. This is a grown-up problem, not a kid problem. At the very worst, I’ll hire one of the caterers I already talked to, and the dinner won’t raise as much money for the opera house as we’d hoped.” Or, more accurately, the dinner would lose money, and Loretta would feel obligated to fund the shortage with the money she’d been planning to use to expand her business. But that was what she got for pushing this idea in the first place before doing her research. She should have known better.

“Luc is handsome, isn’t he?” Zara asked.

“That he is.” Handsome, and exotically different from all the dark-haired, dark-eyed Cajuns who lived in Indigo. He had golden-blond hair and twinkling blue eyes and a smile that drove her absolutely wild. He talked differently from anyone she’d ever known, with no hint of a southern or Cajun accent. He’d obviously been raised somewhere else-out west, if Loretta’s ear was any good. But he’d lived all over the world, if his casual references to France and Thailand were any indication.

Why he’d chosen to settle in Indigo, Louisiana, was a mystery and the topic of endless speculation. For all his easy charm, Luc didn’t reveal much about his past except in very vague terms. The fact that he was Celeste Robichaux’s grandson ensured that he was accepted in the town. But that was about all anyone knew for sure.

Didn’t it just figure that after almost eight years without a man in her life, Loretta would get the hots for some exotic out-of-towner with a mysterious past? Just like Jim. He’d been an itinerant farmer, handsome as the devil and brimming with funny stories of his exploits. To Loretta he’d been a romantic vagabond, a gypsy, and she’d embraced the notion of wandering the country, living off the land. At eighteen, she’d found Indigo a dead bore, and what better way to escape than to marry a wandering adventurer?

Living on the road with Jim had been an eye-opener for her, especially when she’d discovered how her husband supplemented his income. He stole things-food, equipment, jewelry, even a car every so often. No appeal from Loretta could convince Jim to stop committing crimes.

Then Zara had come along, and the vagabond lifestyle had lost the little appeal it still held. Loretta had wanted and needed a home.

Roots weren’t for Jim. He’d been unable to hold a steady job, unable to stay at home for longer than a week at a time. Next thing Loretta knew, he’d been arrested somewhere in Texas for armed robbery. Shortly after his conviction, he’d become a crime victim himself, stabbed to death in a prison exercise yard.

Loretta had mourned him-or rather, the man she thought she’d married, the funny charmer who was never down, who was always dreaming up their next adventure. But she’d learned some valuable lessons. She no longer had a desire to see the world or be a gypsy. She’d come to appreciate the community she had here in Indigo, especially her wonderful parents, who’d never stopped loving and supporting her even when she’d made such bad decisions.

She also refused to throw in her lot with a man again, any man. Who knew what might lurk beneath the surface of even the most appealing guy? Even Luc Carter.

Especially Luc Carter.

He flirted relentlessly with her, but she suspected he flirted with every female. She didn’t take it seriously, but just in case, she took care to make it clear she wasn’t interested.

CHAPTER TWO

“LUC. TO WHAT DO I OWE this dubious pleasure?” Luc’s grandmother, Celeste Robichaux, was a grande dame in every respect. She had agreed to “receive him” in the parlor of her huge Garden District home in New Orleans as if she still lived in a different era. She’d even had her maid bring them tea and French pastries.

Celeste herself was exquisitely outfitted in a linen dress, complete with stockings, pumps and a full complement of jewelry. He’d never seen her anything but fashionably dressed and perfectly pressed, whether she was attending a party or staying home to tat doilies, or whatever it was she did with her leisure time.

He’d heard horror stories about Celeste from his father. Supposedly Celeste banished him from home and cheated him out of his cut of the family fortune.

Luc had since learned there was another side to the story, and Celeste, while stern and a little bit scary, wasn’t the devil incarnate. In fact, out of all his extended family, Celeste was the one who’d offered him a way to make restitution for the damage he’d done by sending him off to Indigo to renovate the summer house and start the B and B, keeping him out of jail by doing so.

“Thanks for seeing me on short notice, Grand-mere,” he said, adopting the French moniker his cousins used. “I have a problem and I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me out.”

“Is something wrong at La Petite Maison?” she asked, her nose twitching at the possibility that her now-