LITMIR.BIZ

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took her hand and groaned. “Not if I see it coming first.”

      Toni laughed. “Nobody ever sees Riva coming in time.”

      Amazingly the massive cypress dining table on the brick terrace was already crowded when he and Toni arrived. Apparently the members of the Bechet clan were better trained than he was for the night’s festivities. There didn’t appear to be a queasy belly or a pounding head in the bunch.

      “Ah, Scotty the Lion rises to greet the day!” T-John’s friendly greeting almost took the top off Scott’s head. “Maman, he is in need of elixir.”

      Riva took Scott’s hand and looked up into eyes he feared were bloodshot. “Ah, you bad ones, what have you done to our visitor? Keep him up all night and pour liquor down his neck, I doubt not. Never mind, Riva will fix.”

      “Please, Mrs. Bechet, that’s not—” she was already out of her chair and headed for the house “—necessary.”

      They all laughed. But the laughter was goodnatured and it included him, drawing him once again into the circle of warmth that surrounded the Bechet cousins.

      Except for one.

      Nicki hadn’t joined the partying the night before—Toni had explained that she seldom did—so Scott tried to believe her absence had nothing to do with him. And she wasn’t here this morning. Riva answered his unspoken question when she returned, setting a glass before him.

      “That one, she is already harassing the workmen. Drink up.”

      Scott glanced into the glass. His nose wrinkled involuntarily.

      “If you have to eat a bullfrog,” Riva said, “it is best not to stare at it too long.”

      Scott sipped.

      Riva shook her head. “No sips. Gulp.”

      Beau added his encouragement. “The way you downed that first beer last night.”

      “Leave him be, you,” Riva admonished.

      “This one, he’s not a drunken lout like the bunch of you. Now, Scott, do like I say. Big swallow.”

      Riva was right. This bullfrog was gaining warts by the second. Scott held his breath, took a long gulp and downed three-fourths of the tomato-juice concoction. He didn’t upchuck. He took that as a good sign.

      The table broke out in applause when he set the empty glass back on the table.

      “Now there’s a real man,” Tony declared. “Welcome to the bayou, city boy. You’re all right.”

      Now that he’d downed the evil potion, Scott began both to relax and to feel better. He enjoyed three biscuits, scalding black coffee and the same kind of loving sharp-edged banter he had enjoyed the night before at the cabin. This, he thought, was family. Close. Warm. Loving. They enjoyed each other’s company and there wasn’t a phony in the bunch. Nothing formal or distant here, nothing reeking of the resentment that was always front-and-center at any Lyon family gathering.

      Unless you counted Nicki, of course. He finished eating, insisted on helping Riva clear the table and wash up, then went in search of her.

      She wasn’t hard to find. He followed the sounds of a very vocal disagreement, and sure enough, there she was, knee-deep in workmen and leading with her chin.

      “I’ll not have any second-rate carpentry on this house, Em. It gets done right or it gets done by someone else.”

      The workman who had spoken to Scott when he’d first arrived the day before stood almost nose to nose with Nicki, massive paws on his hips. He should have dwarfed her, but somehow didn’t. She stood tall and straight in a pair of white canvas painter’s pants and a blue-and-white striped T-shirt.

      “I never do nothing second-rate. Emile Lafitte is the best, and I tell you, two-by-fours will do the job. Any man will know this.”

      “Don’t patronize me, you big ugly Cajun. It’s my house and I want four-by-fours.” Her voice remained calm and firm, despite the growing rage in Emile’s voice.

      The man rolled his eyes. “This is waste. This is damn fool woman talk.”

      “Four-by-fours,” Nicki repeated, still calm, still firm.

      “Twice the money,” Em countered.

      “I can get it done for half.”

      Em gasped as if he’d been slapped. “Do that and you see what second-rate really looks like, you. No, third rate!”

      “I’ll take my chances.”

      Nicki turned and walked away.

      Em groaned, raised his hands toward heaven, muttered a prayer that might actually have been a curse if Scott had been able to understand his Cajun French. “Four-by-fours, you mule-headed woman. You get four-by-fours. I lose money, but you get your way. Now, happy?”

      Nicki didn’t slow down. “I’ll let you know when I see the work done.”

      Em muttered some more; the knot of workmen began to drift back to their jobs. Em spotted Scott, shook his head and jabbed a finger in the direction of Scott’s chest. “I tell you this, that woman...that woman...a gentleman can’t say about that woman. You ever see a woman like that?”

      She was pausing along the way now, encouraging the other workers, passing out kudos and smiles. She seemed completely unaffected by the argument with Emile, showed no sign she was gloating over her victory.

      “Can’t say that I have,” Scott replied. But as soon as he’d said it, he realized it wasn’t true.

      Nicolette Bechet was a younger, earthier version of Aunt Margaret. One tough broad. That was what Aunt Margaret sometimes called herself. He thought she might say the same of Nicki if she ever met her. If he ever saw his aunt again.

      A wave of melancholy swept over him. Big ifs.

      But the tough woman disappearing into the house might be the key to turning those ifs into whens. Shoving away the melancholy and grabbing onto the slim hope that rested with Nicki Bechet, he followed her into the house. She was in conversation with one of the electricians, and this confrontation was quite subdued. Scott suspected that only an old friend like Emile Lafitte would dare to do battle with Nicki. Watching the electrician agree to whatever Nicki was requesting, Scott had no doubt that the Bechet clan would continue to be a matriarchy, long after Riva Reynard Bechet went on to her reward.

      Nicki seemed to notice Scott for the first time after the electrician went back to his work. For a moment her confident air appeared to evaporate. But the fleeting vulnerability vanished so quickly Scott wondered if he’d imagined it. Imagined that she reacted to him as strongly, and as inexplicably, as he reacted to her.

      “I suppose you want me to help you now,” she said.

      He’d watched a lot of men back down in the face of Aunt Margaret’s toughness. One who hadn’t, he recalled, was her husband, Uncle Paul. “That’s right.”

      “Might as well get this over with.”

      She led him to a room farther down the hall. It was small, and made even smaller by the mountains of stuff—an old wooden door set atop sawhorses for a makeshift desk, an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair, a wall of gray metal shelves stacked with books and files and newspapers, with more of the same spilled onto the floor beneath the only window. Two marble-based brass floor lamps curved like vultures over the desk. A padlocked steamer trunk was shoved behind the door and almost obscured by more books and papers. A blown-glass wind chime tinkled beside the open window. The only thing in the room that fit his image of Nicolette Bechet was the state-of-the-art computer, printer and fax machine on the door/desk.

      She sat in the chair, picked up one of about five hundred spiral-bound notebooks in the room, unerringly located a ballpoint pen in the chaos and looked at him.

      “Sorry. Only

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