LITMIR.BIZ

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on Willa, watch over her while she’s here.”

      “I would gladly do that,” he responded, reaching into Rosie Lee’s spinach salad to snare a fat slice of green pepper. “But Willa said she was tired and she was going back to her room to rest and make a few phone calls. So I left her to it.”

      And wondered why she’d looked so sad as she’d walked away.

      Lorna frowned, then nodded. “Okay, then. I know she didn’t let anyone know where she’d be, not even her agent. And I think she’s turned off her cell phone. I hope she did get some rest today.” Glancing at the clock, she added, “Oh, I’ve got to get to the restaurant before Mick gets home. Just as soon as I gauge the crowd and make sure my assistant and Em can handle things, I’ll be back for dinner.”

      “We’ll be honored by your presence,” Lucas teased.

      Lorna gave him a mock-nasty glare, then reached to kiss him on the cheek. “I’m sorry I jumped on you, brother.”

      “What else is new?”

      “You’re still my favorite brother, you know.”

      “Maybe because I’m your only brother.”

      She smiled at him, all trace of doubt gone. “I want you to be happy, Lucas.”

      “But just not with your fair friend Willa.”

      “I didn’t say that. Actually, it would be nice if—”

      Willa came into the room then, her crystal-blue eyes bright and red-rimmed, her expression bordering on frantic. In spite of that, she looked glorious in a long, straight blue cotton sundress etched with embroidered daisies on its wide crisscrossed straps.

      Lucas started to question her but glanced at his sister and saw the warning look in Lorna’s worried eyes.

      He turned to Willa, hoping to lighten her mood. “I hear you’re joining us for dinner. Most of the guests eat in the restaurant, so we’re glad to have you at our table.”

      “Thank you,” she said, her words just above a whisper. “I hope I won’t be intruding on a family gathering.”

      “Not at all,” Aunt Hilda told Willa, her sharp gaze taking in everything. “As Lucas said, we don’t provide dinner for our guests—just breakfast. But Lorna figured out a way around that with her booming restaurant.”

      Lucas grinned, then took his aunt by one arm as he extended the other to Willa. “But we never turn down a beautiful face at the dinner table, either, when the occasion presents itself.”

      He waited, saw Willa hesitate, wondering. He wanted to pull his hands through her haphazardly upswept hair.

      Then she put her arm around his, lifted her head and gave him a brilliant smile that would probably sell lots of lipstick in a magazine shot. “How can I refuse, then?”

      How, indeed, Lucas wondered. She seemed anything but eager to have dinner with his family. She seemed sad and forlorn, just like his lost, forgotten garden in the bayou.

      Lucas wanted to wipe away her tears, make her smile again, from the heart. But first he had to find out what had brought her here and why she seemed so fragile.

      As he walked with his aunt and Willa up the central hallway of Bayou le Jardin, Lucas knew one thing for sure.

      God had brought Willa to him. And Lucas had been right to take her to his private garden.

      It was the place where he kept his fears and sadness intact, nurturing them as if they were cherished blossoms lost deep inside the swamp.

      He looked at Willa and knew that beneath her pain, the beauty was still there, just as with his garden. He felt an acute need to clear away the bramble and entanglements surrounding Willa’s smile and bring that beauty into the light.

      Chapter Four

      Lucas flipped on the light by his favorite armchair in the little den off the kitchen. “Well, well. Would you look at that?”

      “I knew you’d want to see it,” Rosie Lee told him, shaking her head. “Dem fellows might be back, Lucas.”

      “Yeap, they just might. And I just might be waiting for them.”

      Lucas focused on the supermarket tabloid Rosie Lee had handed him. The supermarket tabloid that had a picture of Willa O’Connor, standing on the bayou, plastered across its front cover, complete with the headline “Supermodel flees New York for bed-and-breakfast retreat in Louisiana.” Then, in a subhead, “Why did Willa O’Connor cancel her appearance in benefit fashion show? Details inside.”

      Lucas wanted the details. But not this way. He wanted Willa to tell him what was going on. If she saw this, she’d probably pack up and head for parts unknown.

      Because she was obviously running from something.

      Lucas knew this because, hey, it took one to know one. He’d certainly run away a few times in his life. To the swamp. To New Orleans. To his garden pagoda. He could see all the signs.

      But why had Willa come here?

      Maybe because she needed to be here; God wanted her to be here right now. Last night at dinner, she’d been polite—her manners were impeccable. She’d also been aloof and withdrawn, traits expected of a haughty model, but they didn’t fit the Willa he’d seen when they’d been alone in the garden. There she’d been more open, more down to earth. Lucas wished he could figure out the real Willa O’Connor, not the glossy image she’d managed to project both on paper and in the flesh.

      He put down the tabloid, telling himself he wouldn’t read the disgusting and obviously untrue article inside. Then he pulled out the worn picture he’d found of Willa in the fashion magazine the other morning, comparing it to the blurry headshot from the tabloid.

      There was no comparison.

      In the glossy magazine shot, Willa looked picture-perfect as she stood smiling on a bridge in Venice, wearing a shimmering baby blue satin evening gown and dazzling jewels. It was an ad for a very expensive designer perfume. It worked for him.

      In the tabloid picture, Willa looked lovely, but she had that same lost, worried look on her face Lucas had noticed so many times in the past two days. She was staring at the water as if hoping to find answers there. The intrusive photographers had captured her in a very private moment. And they’d obviously had more than one roll of film, since Lucas had destroyed the rolls in their cameras.

      That didn’t work for Lucas.

      He wanted to find those two clowns and grind them both to pulp. But Aunt Hilda would tell him that wasn’t the way a Dorsette resolved conflict.

      So did he pray for their rotten, misguided souls instead?

      Better to pray for Willa. To pray that he could find a way to get closer to her, help her through whatever problem she’d come here to solve.

      Rosie Lee stuck her head in the doorway. “Want more coffee, Lucas?”

      “Non.” He got up, threw the trashy tabloid on the worn coffee table. “I’m going out to find the rest of the breakfast crowd. Then I’ve got a busy day—got to check the dip nets and trotlines so Lorna will have fresh seafood for dinner tonight. Then I’m supposed to get with Mick and Justin to go over the renovation plans for later this fall. But first I need to see—”

      “Willa O’Connor is out on the gallery,” Rosie Lee told him with a grin.

      It was uncanny the way Rosie Lee could read his mind, Lucas thought as he grabbed his cup of now cold coffee and headed through the kitchen to the back gardens. Glancing over the clusters of people eating their morning meal, Lucas saw a couple of new faces.

      And the one face he’d been searching for.

      They were booked solid for the summer, in spite of the damage from the storms earlier in the spring. Of course,

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