LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER THREE

      NICKI CLOSED the window of her third-story bedroom to shut out the sounds of music and laughter coming from the cabin a few hundred yards away.

      The cabin hugging the water’s edge saw some partying almost every night, what with five cousins and a variety of long- and short-term significant others. Cold beer and hot music were routine at the place, but T-John’s presence always kicked things up a notch. T-John had stories to tell and a big booming voice for telling them. Tonight, the partying was louder and would go on longer than usual, Nicki knew. She saw a flicker through the trees, a signal someone had started a bonfire. They would play their music and sing in its light and its warmth.

      Nicki turned away from the window. Riva stood in the doorway, clutching the lapels of her plum-colored silk robe with one gnarled hand, a candleholder with the other. Perdu sat in his favorite spot and the dog flopped to the floor at her feet. In the flickering candlelight, her face was a dry riverbed of cracks and crevices.

      “Nothing to be afraid of in having a little fun, chère fille. Her voice was soft this time of night. Nicki usually assumed it was weariness overcoming her grandmother, but sometimes she liked to pretend it was simply a special voice the old woman saved for her firstborn grandchild when they were alone.

      “It isn’t fun to me,” Nicki replied, picking up the book she was reading.

      “You are too serious for one so young.”

      “Not so young, Maman.”

      Riva made a dismissive sound and tapped her forehead. “Up here, not so young. Always up here, not so young.”

      It was true, but having it pointed out made Nicki uncomfortable. Having someone, even her grandmother, read her so easily made her uneasy. As did the high spirits of her cousins. She’d been around such frivolity all her life, growing up on the streets of New Orleans’s French Quarter. Drunken laughter and boozy music were her heritage, courtesy of her father. But whenever she was around too much of it for too long, anxiety stirred in her, and then an urge to flee.

      At times like that she felt ten again, and on guard against some unseen predator lurking beneath the music and the laughter.

      She shrugged the feeling off. She understood her hang-ups. She could deal with them. “You should get your rest, Maman.”

      Riva smiled. “Me, I am lucky to sleep a few hours at my age. Too many young ones to worry about. And none of them settling down so I can rest easy.”

      Nicki thought about her cousins and returned her grandmother’s smile. “They’re a long way from settling down. Except Beau, I suppose.”

      “And you?”

      “Me? I’m settled down.”

      Riva frowned.

      “I am,” Nicki insisted. “I have work I enjoy, helping others. I’m fixing up the house. You should be glad of that. The house will be here for all of us. It will keep us together.”

      “Bah! This old house. It will keep you a prisoner. It should fall down around us. That I would be glad of.”

      Nicki had never understood her grandmother’s apparent aversion to the farm. “Why do you say that?”

      “I go now. I must sleep, an old woman like me.”

      “You never answer my questions. Do you know that?”

      Shuffling down the hall to her room, Riva cackled. The only reply came from Perdu, his usual “Shut up.”

      Nicki thought, not for the first time, that her grandmother seemed as restless and discontent sometimes as her father had always seemed. So much alike, yet they’d been constantly at odds. David Bechet had refused to be in the same room with his mother for most of Nicki’s childhood. Nicki always thought that was her father’s fault, or the fault of the drugs that had finally done him in.

      Having lived with Riva these past two years, she had decided there might be more to it than that.

      She plumped the pillows on her bed and lit the kerosene lamp she’d brought up for her bedside table. She stretched out her legs under the covers and opened the book, a techno-thriller that had proved to be a powerful sedative.

      Tonight she listened to the pulsing beat of the music from the cabin. Tonight, she thought of the stories she was missing and the camaraderie she was rejecting.

      Tonight, she thought of Scott Lyon. She thought of the way his pale eyes had searched her face across the dinner table, the way his smile flashed when T-John told one of his stories. His body looked lean and sculpted. And the tiny gold hoop in his ear signaled a certain rebelliousness that made Nicki wary. She remembered the way he closed his eyes and threw his head back, savoring the first bite of T-John’s bread pudding. A man who liked his pleasures.

      She thought of the way he’d rescued her two years ago and wondered why he’d done it.

      Well, she would never know because she had no intention of having that kind of conversation with him.

      She finished her book, but by the next morning couldn’t remember how it had ended.

      GOOD LORD, IT HAD BEEN a long time since he’d greeted the morning with a hangover. He wasn’t one to overindulge, but it wasn’t easy saying no to the Bechet family.

      He pressed fingertips against his grainy eyes and sat up on the edge of the lumpy cot that had felt like heaven at about four in the morning. Now it felt like a chiropractor’s conspiracy to increase business. The chilled cabin was still littered with signs of recent habitation—messy cots, pillows and blankets piled up on chairs, a sleeping bag sprawled in the corner.

      Apparently Scott and the person in the sleeping bag were the only ones who hadn’t already risen. She blinked at him, revealing bright green eyes.

      “Head hurt?”

      He recognized the husky voice. Toni of the wet-dream body and the wild red hair. If she’s such a hot number, he asked himself, why were you thinking about Nicki all night?

      Because he didn’t go after eighteen-year-old kids, his beer-befuddled brain replied.

      Maybe that was it. Or maybe it wasn’t.

      “Head?” he muttered.

      “That throbbing thing between your ears,” she said, struggling out of the sleeping bag. She still wore her jeans from the night before. She didn’t look any the worse for wear. That was the difference between eighteen and thirty-four, he reminded himself.

      “Oh, that.”

      She

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