Dedication Letter to Reader Title Page PROLOGUE CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN EPILOGUE Copyright

To: The Lyon Family

Scott glanced at the envelope addressed to the family. It should have gone to the executive offices, he thought as he walked away. Then the return address registered.

Judge Nicolette Bechet

He went back and picked up the letter. Nicki—with an address out of the city, in one of the rural parishes.

He fingered the envelope. Curious. A little excited, even.

He had as much right to open it as anyone. So without examining his logic too closely or too scrupulously, he slid a finger beneath the flap of the envelope.

Her signature was full of sweeps and flourishes—not what he would have expected at all.

Scott read the letter six times. She wanted to help the family find Margaret Hollander Lyon. Also, not what he would have expected.

Scott thought of all the dead-end leads that had been followed in the search for his aunt. Maybe he shouldn’t burden the family until he knew more. He could talk to Nicki himself.

After all, he’d waited two years for the chance.

Dear Reader,

How important is family? And how profound are the effects when there are rifts in the family? This final book in THE LYON LEGACY, Family Reunion, explores the way two people are affected by the difficulties in their families and how their struggle to love one another leads to healing.

As I wrote about Scott Lyon and Nicki Bechet, I thought of my own family and how easy it sometimes is to take for granted the ties that bind us—ties of history, of shared memories, of love. I also thought about the “families”

I’ve been blessed to find over the years—women friends, neighbors, my sister writers in the romance community. All of them are valuable, and I made a commitment, as I wrote, to do more to nurture all those connections.

I hope as you read Family Reunion, you’ll also think of your family and be reminded how precious family is.

Happy reading.

Peg Sutherland

Family Reunion
Peg Sutherland

www.millsandboon.co.uk

PROLOGUE

March 31, 1997

THE PACK OF about fifty reporters and cameracrew members outside the New Orleans courthouse were hungry. That was how Scott Lyon would have described it. Hungry and circling for the kill.

Scott shifted the Minicam on his left shoulder. He glanced around, uncomfortable with the atmosphere. This felt personal and he knew why—Judge Nicolette Bechet.

Judge Bechet had handed down a controversial decision today in a child abuse case. The unsubstantiated allegations against a popular local politician had gripped the city’s attention. Following as it did so closely on the judge’s personal problems, which had also raised eyebrows and set tongues wagging, Judge Bechet’s handling of the case—and the subsequent jail sentence she’d imposed—had drawn considerable scrutiny.

Now, the judge would be grilled, then roasted on tonight’s late news and on the pages of the morning paper. Standard operating procedure. Nothing to get in an uproar over. Scott knew the drill.

But today, he had some qualms. Today, he kept remembering the haunted look in Judge Nicolette Bechet’s eyes the last time he’d turned his camera on her.

Scott looked up at a second-story window in the sturdy old courthouse. The judge’s office. He remembered its location from the first ambush interview, when he and WDIX-TV’s ace, R. Bailey Ripken, had stormed the judge’s chambers—just two days after her father had died of a drug overdose—and demanded answers to questions they’d had no business asking. The judge had been under siege ever since WDIX broke that story.

Scott regretted his part in exposing her family’s secrets.

The horde of reporters was growing. Growing noisier and restless and more convinced of its right to know with every minute that passed.

Scott eased the camera off his shoulder. It was heavier than usual.

“What?”

That was R. Bailey Ripken. First name Ramona, a closely-guarded secret in journalistic circles; she’d confessed it to him her first week on the job. Scott inspired that kind of trust, especially from women.

“I need a pit stop,” he said. It wasn’t true. He didn’t need to use a washroom. But something was driving him to get out of this mob, something he couldn’t explain to himself, much less to the Crescent City’s exposé queen.

“Now? You’ve got to be kidding? She’s bound to come out any minute!”

“I won’t be long.”

“Scott!”

He was already elbowing his way through the crowd, and was tempted to ditch the pricey camera. He’d heard the disbelief in Bailey’s voice. But what could she do? Have him fired? He smiled grimly to himself. Okay, so sometimes family connections gave a guy the edge.

He’d been around long enough to know better than to march right up to the front door. He’d have the entire gang of reporters right behind him. He went to a side door. He was familiar with the building layout. As he mounted the broad stairs to the second floor, his sneakers squeaking on the well-worn marble, his heart was thumping a little harder than usual. He knew the rules and what he had in mind broke most of them.

Maybe even having the name Lyon on his media credentials wouldn’t save his rear end if this got out.

To hell with it.

He made his way through the little maze of hallways to the judges’ offices. Room 201. A dark oak door, seven-feet high and imposing. Scott realized his fingers were cramping around his camera, he was gripping it that tightly.

What was going on with him, that he was reacting this way, sabotaging his own work? Was this the first sign of burnout? Boredom? Just plain disgust? Or was it, after all, as simple as one man’s instinctive urge to come to the rescue of a woman he wanted to impress?

He opened the door without knocking, slipped in and closed it behind him.

Judge Nicolette Bechet didn’t even seem startled. From her desk, her keen blue eyes zeroed in on his camera and froze. “Leave. Now.”

She was known for her clipped, no-frills style in court. She intimidated a lot of people that way. Scott wasn’t intimidated—he knew the technique. His Aunt Margaret used it well.

“Look out your window.”

She took a breath, her nostrils flaring almost imperceptibly. “You’ve overstepped your bounds, Mr. Lyon.”

She knew his name. He doubted if his family connections bought him much with her.

“I know. Now look out the window, Judge Bechet.”

She remained rigid, her gaze unflinching. A distinctive cleft marked her pointed chin, adding an aura of strength to her face. Her hair was the color of honey, streaked by the sun and pulled back loosely from her narrow face.

Nicolette Bechet wasn’t beautiful, but Scott hadn’t been able to get her off his mind since he’d videotaped her interview with Bailey. Despite her cool, she hadn’t been able to completely hide the haunted look in her wide blue eyes. It wasn’t just the look of a grieving daughter, he’d decided. It went deeper than that.

The probing questions she’d refused to answer during the interview—or in the ten days since, when every reporter in New Orleans had quizzed her over and over—had confirmed Scott’s guess. Judge Bechet had unfinished business in her family. Old business.

“I could very easily have you removed,” she said now with steely control. She spoke precisely, with no hint of her Cajun roots.

“But who’ll remove them?” he asked.

For the first time she seemed to see him as a human being and not merely a video camera on two legs. Her eyes met his, first challenging, then showing just a little uncertainty. Scott again registered the thud of his heartbeat and knew better than to attribute it solely to the fact that he was betraying his colleagues by warning Nicolette Bechet about the media attack awaiting her. No, it was more than that. The judge got under his skin.

“Them?”

He nodded at the window.

She stood slowly. She still wore her robe, open over a dove-gray silk blouse buttoned securely to a little stand-up collar. Gray cuffs showed. Her skirt was black and as she moved from behind her desk in the direction of the window, he saw that it fell a very proper two inches below her knees. Her calves were shapely, even in her nononsense flat-heeled shoes. Trim ankles.

But it was her eyes that made his mouth go dry.

A startling shade of blue and completely unrelenting, they weren’t the windows to any soul he could see, except in those brief moments when she was caught unaware.

She looked out the window, then stiffened. “I see.” She looked back at him. “And you’re here because...?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to be ambushed.”

She made a cynical smile. “And in return...”

He didn’t blame her. He was a television-news cameraman, after all.

“The back exit is clear,” he said. “You can make it to your car that way without running into trouble.”

She studied him. Then very carefully she took off her robe, folded it and draped it over the back of her leather chair. She replaced it with a suit jacket, picked up a briefcase and started for the door. He stood to one side.

“This doesn’t get you anything,” she said. “Not the inside scoop. Not an exclusive. Nothing.”

Her upper lip was delicate and perfectly formed. Her lower lip was full and soft. She didn’t have the look of a woman who wasted time being kissed.

“I don’t expect anything,” he said gruffly.

She didn’t challenge his claim, but her eyes remained filled with skepticism.

She marched down the hall. He wanted to follow her, but couldn’t justify doing so. She didn’t want his protection, and he had no business offering it.

He returned to the pack of reporters and waited with them until someone got word that Judge Nicolette Bechet had given them all the slip. Scott tried not to smile as R. Bailey Ripken contributed to the rash of frustrated profanities that rippled through the throng of reporters. There would be no story tonight.

The next day, however, was a different matter. At a late-afternoon press conference, it was announced that Judge Nicolette Bechet had resigned her post. She wasn’t available for questioning.

Her apartment had been vacated.

CHAPTER ONE

Bayou Sans Fin, November 1999

“SILENCE! Now!”

The cranky cockatiel’s command merely added to the usual morning chaos around the breakfast table at Cachette en Bayou Farm.

Tony and his cousin Toni were perfecting a riff in the song the two were writing for their zydeco band. Beau’s baby girl was demanding attention using the best technique known to six-montholds. Milo the mutt whined for a biscuit; Michel’s current live-in girlfriend whined about her hair. And twelve-year-old Jimmy was practicing his forward pass over everyone’s head, using the six unsuspecting cats as target.

Nicki sighed.

“Quiet!” That was Perdu the cockatiel again, more frantic this time. He made an impatient little skip on Maman Riva’s shoulder. The histrionics, Nicki knew, would serve no good purpose. The Bechet family was a freight train with no brakes.

“We start electrical work this week,” Nicki announced quietly, spooning up a slice of pink grapefruit.

“This one’s a bullet!” Jimmy shrieked. “Watch your noggins.”

Jimmy had not been raised to throw footballs at the breakfast table. This Nicki knew. His side of the family was normal, sane, well behaved. But as soon as they reached Cachette en Bayou, some sort of insanity gene kicked in and they were off and running.

Nicki swallowed the bite of grapefruit. “That means we’ll be without lights. Without refrigerator. Without hot water. Without air-conditioning.” Nobody took any notice of her. She thought wryly of her days on the bench. People had sat up and taken notice when Judge Nicolette Bechet spoke. Those days were gone forever. “It could go on for a week or more.”

Still no reaction. Yet Nicki knew that each and every one of them would look at her after several hours without power and demand to know how she could have sprung this on them without warning.

“This I cannot believe!” Maman Riva said, shaking her head and brushing Perdu’s beak with the fluff of snow-white curls peeking from beneath her purple paisley turban. “Months she is missing and not a word. Outrageous! Scandalous!”

“Shut up!” Perdu demanded, his tone even more strident.

Riva Reynard Bechet waved her cotton napkin in the cockatiel’s face. “Where you learn to talk to your elders that way, you so-and-so? You shut up, you hear?” She surreptitiously dropped a warm biscuit in the vicinity of Milo’s tan-and-gray nose. “You get old, nobody pays you no mind. This is the problem. My problem. Her problem. I try to keep my family in line, nobody pays me mind. She disappears, nobody pays her no mind.”

Riva was still obsessing over the disappearance of Margaret Lyon, the revered matriarch of the Lyons of New Orleans. Every morning since the story had broken in the Times-Picayune a month ago, Riva couldn’t wait to read the latest details. The Lyons seemed to hold some kind of special fascination for her, as if they were royalty.

The Lyons themselves certainly seemed to think so, Nicki thought. But it annoyed her that her own grandmother should have such skewed thinking. Didn’t she remember it was the Lyons and their TV station that had smeared the Bechet name, ruined her career?

Riva may have forgotten, but Nicki definitely had not.

“Perhaps you should stay in town with James and Cheryl while we do the electrical work, Maman,” Nicki said, instead of what she was thinking.

“You’re wanting, I think, to run me off my farm.” Riva didn’t look up from the newspaper. “See here, now, those Lyon scoundrels file junk in the court. They try to steal her TV station. Lord-a-mercy, is a great lot of peril in growing old.”

Junk in the court. Nicki supposed her grandmother meant an injunction of some kind. When it suited her, Riva could be so Cajun she was almost unintelligible to the rest of the world. Riva was sharp, had always run the Bechet family like a benign dictator. Papa Linc Bechet had been no match for her. Even Riva’s two surviving children, Nicki’s aunt Simone and uncle James, couldn’t get her to budge once she’d made up her mind. They kept trying to persuade her to move into town, sell the old farm or, better yet, let them run it.

That was usually when Riva lapsed into dialect and stared at them as if she’d never heard a word of proper English in her life.

The same way she’d been acting for the past six months whenever Nicki tried to have a reasonable conversation with her grandmother about Cachette en Bayou Farm. Riva didn’t want to fix up the farmhouse, which was crumbling around the edges. She didn’t want to sell. She just wanted things to be the way they’d always been. At least that was what Nicki concluded. Maman would not discuss it, so it was virtually impossible to know with any certainty what the eighty-four-year-old woman’s motives were.

“We need to talk about the house, Maman. It’s not going to be habitable for the next week. You should—”

A football landed in the huge pottery bowl of cheese grits. Gasps and giggles and groans broke out, along with howls of outrage aimed at the skinny twelve-year-old future pro quarterback, who should have been in school in the city.

“Why you not in school?” Beau demanded.

“They probably don’t want him around, either,” Tony said.

“Now you leave my Jimmy boy alone.” Riva waved off the comments. “Come here, Jimbo. Give an old lady a thrill.”

The sheepish adolescent gave her a hug. Nicki supposed her youngest cousin was currently in residence at the farm because his mother was having another of her famous migraines. Nicki suspected what incapacitated her uncle James’s society wife had more to do with bourbon than migraines, but she certainly wasn’t about to say so. Nor would anyone else in the family.

Then again, the Bechet family was enough to produce a headache, that much she could vouch for.

“Maman—” Nicki made another attempt “—if you stay with James for the next week, you can help out until Cheryl gets back on her feet, Jimmy wouldn’t miss any school and—”

“You must find Mrs. Lyon.”

Nicki tried not to grind her molars. “Maman, the Lyons do not need my help finding anyone.”

“Oh, but yes. I am thinking they do.”

“Besides which, I am not remotely interested in helping the Lyon family.” The volunteer work Nicki did was dear to her heart. She did searches for people, usually on behalf of adopted children looking for their birth parents. She did it because she knew from personal experience what it felt like to be abandoned.

She did not do it for millionaire families whose toughest decisions centered around whose life to ruin next.

Riva folded the newspaper neatly and clasped her hands on top of it. “Good. This is decided.”

“No, it’s not decided!”

Nicki realized from the silence following her words that she must have raised her voice. Raising one’s voice to Maman Riva was not recommended. Nicki strove to sound reasonable.

“Maman, I have work to do. Renovation work here at the farm—”

Riva shook her head. “Not necessary.”

“It is unless you want the place to fall in on top of you.”

Riva looked around, seemed to consider that possibility. “The boys have their cabin. Simone, she and John are settled. James and Cheryl, they have a big fancy house.” Riva shrugged. “You, you might find a nice man yourself if you had noplace to go. Me, I am old. If it falls on my head, I go on to heaven. Better than this mean old world, where old women disappear and not a body cares.” She reached over, patted Nicki’s hand and smiled the smile no one could resist. “You help find Margaret Lyon, that’s a good girl.”

“They haven’t asked for my help.”

“So you go to them.”

Nicki stared at her grandmother. Riva seemed to have forgotten just who had caused all the upheaval in the Bechet family two years earlier. Nicki would be just as happy if this morning’s headline reported that the entire Lyon family had been sentenced straight to hell with no chance for parole. But she couldn’t say that to her grandmother.

“I have too many search projects already. I—”

“You do good jobs for people,” Riva interrupted, still smiling. “You will do a good job for the Lyons.”

Nicki heard the rattle and chug of the pickup truck belonging to the couple helping with renovations. She stood. “This discussion is over. I have work to do.”

Riva stood and began collecting empty plates. “You call the Lyons. Make your grandmother happy.”

Nicki was accustomed to the fact her grandmother never played fair. Well, let her think she’d won. Nicki had real work to do.

SCOTT LYON LEANED against the wall closest to the conference-room door, one foot propped on an empty chair, his arms crossed tightly over his chest.

He ought to resign from the station.

Hell, he ought to resign from the family.

The morning editorial meetings at WDIX-TV were wearing him down. These days the time was rarely spent assigning stories and scheduling tapings, as it should be. Instead, the meetings disintegrated into bickering as everyone jockeyed for control. He should be used to it by now; it had been this way in the Lyon family all his life. He’d been weaned on his father’s bellyaching that he’d been robbed of his inheritance, a victim of greed and unfairness. Now, thanks to Aunt Margaret’s disappearance and the injunction filed by Scott’s three older brothers—Jason, Raymond and Alain—the ugliness simmering beneath the surface for as long as Scott could remember had exploded to the surface.

Jason, the sales manager at the station, had obviously made it to the conference room first this morning. He occupied the chair at the head of the table, a seat usually reserved for the news director. But the news director wasn’t family. To hear Jason and Alain tell it, even family wasn’t family these days.

“We don’t need to be covering that,” Jason said now about a press conference for a beleaguered city official whose career was drowning in scandal.

The city official was a buddy of Alain, the oldest of the four brothers. Scott pursed his lips to keep from opening his mouth. He didn’t get involved in decisions made by his brothers. He preferred the role of neutral bystander. He pretended not to register the news director’s rolling eyes.

“It’s news,” Bailey Ripken said with illdisguised contempt. “That’s what we do, Jason. Cover news.”

“Are we a tabloid scandal sheet now?” Jason Lyon looked around the table at the assignment editors and reporters who had managed to get the news on the air for years without his assistance or input. “Is that what we’re stooping to? Airing people’s dirty linen? I don’t think so. Lyon Broadcasting stands for more than that. Next story.”

Scott slipped out the door and closed it behind him as the words “journalistic integrity” and “muckraking” filled the air in the tense little conference room.

He stood in the corridor for a minute, working his jaw muscles and battling the urge to walk straight out the front door. He could dig ditches, for God’s sake. Drive a cab. He didn’t have to put up with this.

When he was calm enough to face the world without spitting out some kind of venom he would later regret, Scott made his way to the break room. He inserted quarters into the vending machine and treated himself to a breakfast of hot sweet coffee and two somewhat stale sweet rolls. He wolfed them down, barely noticing the taste.

His coffee had just gotten cool enough to drink when his cousin André walked into the break room. The hum of conversation quieted with the presence of the station’s embattled general manager.

André Lyon looked embattled, all right. At fifty-eight, he had always been tall and square-shouldered. But Scott thought his cousin’s shoulders had begun to sag with the weight of all that had happened since the station’s fiftieth anniversary this past summer. First, André’s father and co-founder of WDIX-TV, Paul Lyon, had died. Then, the day of the funeral, André’s mother had vanished. Most everyone had assumed that Margaret Lyon simply needed to get away from the glare of publicity, find a quiet spot to grieve and let go of the man with whom she’d shared her life and founded a broadcasting dynasty.

Then signs began to point to the possibility of foul play.

And in the midst of absorbing that emotional blow, the family had received another: Jason, Raymond and Alain were challenging Paul Lyon’s will in court. André wasn’t the rightful heir, they claimed. He wasn’t a Lyon and they swore they had the documentation to prove it.

Scott was incredulous, and ashamed that his own brothers would pull such a disgusting stunt. The rest of the family was equally stunned. And Andre, it appeared to Scott, had been nearly broken by the series of events.

Breathing out a heavy sigh, Scott took his litter to the trash bin beside the machines. André looked up as he passed. His once decisive and calm face looked distracted.

“Oh, Scott. How goes it? News conference already over?”

Rising to the occasion, trying to sound normal. Scott had to respect that in his cousin. It was one of the things he’d always admired in Aunt Margaret, too. His own side of the Lyon family should take a lesson.

“I slipped out,” he said, hoping André wouldn’t ask why.

André nodded, reached out and punched a button on the coffee machine. A cup dropped into the slot, and coffee began to trickle.

“Any word?” Scott asked, knowing no further explanation was necessary.

André shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Unless...” Retrieving the cup from the machine, he shook his head again.

They walked out of the break room together.

“Unless what?”

André took a deep swallow of his coffee and grimaced. “Unless you count the crackpots. A lot of crackpots. Gaby and I have waded through more crank calls and useless leads since the story broke.” He paused and gave his cousin a poor imitation of an encouraging smile. “We’re tired, that’s all.”

“If I can help...” Scott almost hated to make the perfunctory offer. He doubted that help from his branch of the family tree would be welcome.

André put a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate that, Scott. I know you’re in an awkward position here.”

“No. I stay out of it. And I mean what I say. If I can help, I want to. Aunt Margaret...” His throat grew unexpectedly tight at the mention of her name. He could almost see the grande dame of the Lyon family marching purposefully down a corridor at Lyon Broadcasting in one of her severe navy dresses, head high, shoulders back. Being seventy-seven hadn’t slowed her down a bit. “I think a lot of her.”

That was an understatement. Scott wondered if André knew that. The truth was, he loved Margaret Hollander Lyon; she’d been more of a mother to him than his own mother, and more of a role model for him than his own weak-willed father. As the youngest child in the family, almost a tagalong, born as his parents’ marriage was disintegrating into cold silence and emotional withdrawal, if not divorce, Scott had found little stability or warmth in his life. Until he got to know Aunt Margaret.

“I appreciate that, Scott. But the truth is, I don’t know that there’s much any of us can do. Except wait and pray.”

“I’m not much good at either of those,” Scott admitted.

“Me, neither. And I hate like the devil having to learn it under these circumstances.”

As André went his way, Scott turned in the direction of the newsroom—in time to see Raymond and Jason lurking in the door outside Raymond’s office in the accounting department. The morning news conference obviously over, they apparently had been watching Scott’s conversation with André. Feeling the building closing in around him, Scott wheeled into the newsroom without acknowledging his brothers.

In the newsroom a handful of reporters and camera technicians were beginning to gather. Early mornings were the slowest time of the day at WDIX-TV. Reporters and crew members straggled in and milled around waiting for their coffee to kick in. Sometime before noon, the activity cranked up. Phones rang, voices called out across the room, and chaos ruled. By late afternoon the chaos was organized and transformed into the evening news.

Scott could remember a time when he’d been excited by the process. When the desire to be the first to crack a story had been in his blood. But it didn’t seem to be there now.

All he felt these days, after years of watching competition and greed consume his family, was the desire to be someplace else.

He wondered, sometimes, if that was what had happened to Aunt Margaret.

“Hey, Scott,” said the sweet, beguiling voice of the newsroom clerk behind him, “what’s shaken’?”

He turned to give her a smile. Tiffany Marie Dalcour was young, just out of college, and ambitious. She seemed to think that cultivating the only single male Lyon in the building might somehow further her goal of making it on-camera herself.

“Not much, Tiffany.”

She was sorting mail for the newsroom. Piles and piles of mail. She didn’t miss a beat even as she intensified her smile at Scott. “So there’ll be no broadcast tonight, then?”

He laughed, and she looked pleased. At thirty-four, he had no interest whatsoever in the twenty-four-year-old, but he returned her teasing, anyway. “We’ll make it up if we have to.”

“Oops,” she said, tossing an envelope aside. “That one should have gone to the executive offices, I guess.”

Scott glanced down at the envelope. It was addressed to “The Lyon Family.” He started to walk away when the name on the return address registered.

Nicolette Bechet.

He went back and picked up the envelope. Nicolette Bechet, with an address out of the city, in one of the rural districts.

He fingered the envelope. He was curious. A little excited, even.

The Lyon Family.

He had as much right to open it as anyone.

Without examining his logic too scrupulously, he slid a finger beneath the flap of the envelope.

Her signature was full of sweeps and flourishes, not what he would have expected at all.

And she wanted to help the family find Margaret Lyon. Also not what he would have expected.

He read the letter six times. Finding people was a hobby of hers, the letter said. The letter recounted some of her successes. Scott was impressed. Intrigued. He thought about the weary tone of André’s voice when he’d spoken of all the dead-end leads he and his wife had followed up on. No need to add to the burden, Scott told himself.

He could talk to the former judge himself.

After all, he’d been wanting to for two years.

CHAPTER TWO

SCOTT WAS A CITY. BOY. He knew very little about Louisiana’s fabled bayou country. Recreation in Scott’s mind was a late night in the French Quarter following his nose to exotic new cuisine or his ears to the hottest new jazz or blues musicians.

He’d heard of Bayou Sans Fin. Some kind of family connection, although he couldn’t think what.

Bayou Sans Fin—bayou without end. The idea sent a little shiver along the back of his neck as he steered his low-slung two-seater along the snaking blacktop. Live oaks met overhead, blocking out the sky and the sun, dripping gray Spanish moss to within inches of his New Orleans Saints ball cap. Dense thickets of cypress, hackberry and willow trees fronted the marshes and swamps, which were neither land nor water, but some mysterious in-between territory that exuded an aura of danger.

The only sign of human habitation was the occasional mailbox. Narrow dirt driveways were overgrown with vines and weeds and other plant life alien to someone who’d grown up around the Garden District’s immaculately sculptured flower beds. The driveways, he supposed, signaled the possibility of homes. Of people. The kind of people who wanted to live far beyond the reach of prying eyes and friendly voices, perhaps.

Mostly, however, Scott imagined other life forms. Gators and muskrats and mink lurked in the dense overgrowth, maybe keeping a wary eye on the sleek red monster Scott drove. He imagined he could feel their wild unfathomable eyes on him and shivered again.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t gator eyes he imagined at all. Maybe the eyes he conjured up in his imagination were equally unfathomable, but as blue as the bits and pieces of sky visible through the canopy of trees.

He was going to see her. After two years, the memory of her had never quite vanished, and now he was going to talk to her. Get to know her maybe. Find out about the finely drawn upper lip that didn’t quite match the lush lower lip.

His mind was out of control.

He was supposed to be at work, lugging a video camera all over the Crescent City. Point, pan, zoom. Hours of taping for minutes of on-air time, measuring yours against theirs, holding your breath to see which reporter nailed the lead story that day, strutting if you won, clamping your jaw and saying wait till tomorrow if you ended up on the cutting-room floor.

He crossed a rickety plank bridge, holding his breath all the way, then spotted an enormous mailbox on the left a few yards ahead. It bore the name Bechet, hand-lettered in yellow on red. His tires squealed a protest as he wheeled into the turn and hit dirt and rock. A tree limb brushed the shiny paint on the passenger door; vines hung low above his open car. He wondered what he’d do if a snake dropped out of the trees overhead.

About two hundred yards off the highway, the driveway cleared and widened marginally, revealing a cypress archway with a sign—Welcome to Cachette en Bayou Farm. Hideaway on the Bayou. The sign might give lip service to the idea of welcome, but Scott wouldn’t have called the entrance inviting by any stretch of the imagination. He braked almost to a halt.

Unbidden came the image of the massive iron fence encircling Lyoncrest, the impressive family mansion in the Garden District. With its sleek bronze lions posing at the front gate, Lyoncrest had sometimes struck him as uninviting—as this dark entrance seemed to him now.

He glanced up at the letter from Nicolette Bechet clipped to the visor. He had, after all, been invited. Well, not him specifically. But a representative of the Lyon family. Which he was. So he wasn’t intruding. He drove on.

The house came into view. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but this wasn’t it. The building wandered in every direction, turning here, rising there, making another twist just when you expected it to finally come to a stop. Obviously it had been added to over the years—perhaps every time a new generation of Bechets was born.

What appeared to be the original core of the house was a square three-story structure made of unevenly formed bricks the color of just-boiled shrimp. The house rose on stilts above the unkempt yard, the ground level ringed with small windows, letting scant light into what was likely an above-ground cellar. Wide, steep steps rose to the second-floor gallery and main entrance, which was unimposing and standing wide open. Shuttered windows were as high as any door. Wings went off in both directions, one of natural cypress, one painted a dreary dun color. The roof was tin, the shutters hung crookedly, and the chimney was a listing steeple of bricks that appeared ready to topple and inflict serious bodily harm.

The ungainly house was surrounded by pickup trucks—Scott counted six—in varying states of repair, and one finned Cadillac circa 1960. The house leaked noise from every open door and window—sawing and hammering and drilling and conflicting music, zydeco from the cypress wing and country from the other.

This surely could not be the home of Nicolette Bechet.

He pulled his sports car in beside a polished blue pickup with fancy stripes, farthest from the disaster-waiting-to-happen chimney, and questioned his presence here one last time before he killed the engine.

Then he saw her.

She was hanging out a third-story window, precariously braced with one boot-clad foot inside the window, the other on the tin roof. She was tugging on one of the dilapidated shutters. A claw hammer hung from a loop on the overalls she wore. A white painter’s cap with its brim yanked to one side covered her head, but didn’t come close to covering her hair, which had been sleek and gold the last time he’d seen her. Now, it was long and wild and spilling to her shoulder blades.

If Scott’s heart hadn’t lurched in his chest and his breath come out in a whoosh when he saw her, he’d never have believed that figure was the carefully buttoned-up judge he remembered.

He took the keys out of the ignition, removed the letter from the visor clip, opened the car door and got out, never taking his eyes off her.

She almost lost her balance when the shutter pulled free. With a fierce grunt, she turned and shoved it off the edge of the steep roof, calling after it as it rattled and fell and splintered on the ground, “Now you’re trash. Irritating trash at that.”

He looked up at her, his reaction not diminishing. Her eyes landed on him. “Who are you?”

She’d certainly lost her judicial manner in two years. He grinned.

“Scott Lyon.” He fluttered the letter in the air by way of explanation.

She hoisted her other foot out of the window and stood on the roof, hands on hips, feet apart. “Get the hell off my farm.”

She must’ve misunderstood. His grin deepened. “I got your letter.”

“And I’ve got a shotgun I can put my hands on in forty-five seconds flat if I don’t see your rear end headed in that direction by the time I get back inside.”

She gave that a second to sink in, her expression granite, then turned and crawled back in the window, more graceful than anything he’d ever before seen in overalls and cowboy boots.

“Best leave,” came a voice from the zydeco side of the house. Scott looked into the amused eyes of a dark bearded man with a big smile and an industrial-strength drill dangling lightly from one beefy hand. “She don’t be a half-bad hand with a shotgun.”

Scott was still grinning. “She sent for me.”

The workman shook his head. “She’ll send you to hell in a quick minute, that’s what.”

A shot rang out. Scott flinched. He glanced up at the window. She stood there with the shotgun pointed skyward, glaring.

“Warning shot,” the workman explained. “Me, I don’t mess with her.”

“She’s worth the effort, seems to me.”

“We fancy our hides.”

“Maybe I fancy hers.”

The slash of white teeth against black beard grew wider. “I understand that, you bet. Still, I’d duck under the gallery if I was you.”

Scott looked up. She seemed to be taking aim. “Good idea.”

He bounded up the steep steps, all new boards, raw and unfinished but sturdy, a match for the new planks on the porch. A mutt dozed in a circle of dappled sunlight and raised two sleepy eyes to take him in. The animal was less wary of visitors, apparently, than the lady of the house. Scott peered through the open front door. The rooms were dark. The foyer was broad, rising two stories. He stepped in.

“I heard the shooting. I’m guessing you’ve already seen my granddaughter.”

He turned to the left, where an old woman sat in a straight-backed rocker beside a fireplace in a rustic parlor. No arches and fancy work here, just a square serviceable room with scarred hardwood floors and plaster walls that were gutted at intervals to reveal electrical wiring.

“I’m Scott Lyon,” he said, taking off his ball cap. “I think she’s forgotten. She wrote me. The family, actually.”

A cat was curled up in the old woman’s lap and an imposing white bird with brilliant orange markings sat on her narrow shoulder. “Scott. I don’t know a Scott.”

“Prescott Lyon, ma’am. Charles Lyon’s youngest son.” Scott was used to people not knowing him but recognizing his family name.

“You may call me Riva, Prescott.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“You may not call me ma’am. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She gave him a hard look, a look he’d already seen once today from the woman on the roof.

“Yes, Riva.”

She nodded slightly. “Better. So, you the son of Charles Lyon. The ne’er-do-well, yes?”

Her outspokenness reminded him of Aunt Margaret and made him instantly at ease with her, even though she couldn’t have been more different from his aunt on the surface. Riva looked much older, what with her face so lined and weathered and the slumped way she sat in her rocker. Yes, far less vigorous than Margaret Lyon. Also, Margaret wore impeccable navy suits and dresses, decorating herself with nothing more elaborate than a single strand of pearls. In contrast, Riva wore a garish purple wrap of some kind, a red-and-yellow scarf, gaudy jewelry dripping from her ears and her neck and her wrists, and ballet slippers on her tiny feet.

“Yes,” he said, liking the woman well enough not to take offense at her assessment of his father. “There are those who might describe my father as a ne’er-do-well.”

She cackled. “Never mind. They called me worse.”

“Uh-oh,” said the bird.

Riva glanced over Scott’s shoulder and her face broke into a smile. “Ah, Nicki. Your guest has arrived.”

Scott turned slightly to take her in. With her this close, he could almost feel the animosity rising off her in waves. It made his heartbeat accelerate.

She had left the shotgun upstairs.

He extended a hand, gave her a warm smile. “Thanks for not shooting me.”

She ignored his hand. “I asked you to leave.”

“Actually you told me to leave.”

“Nicki, m’enfant, how rude. This young man, he will think the bayou makes us inhospitable.”

Nicki glared at the old woman. “You stay out of this.”

The bird joined in with a shrill “Shut up!”

“You taught him to speak, I take it,” Scott said to Nicki.

Riva cackled. He thought he heard approval.

“I’m only here to take you up on your offer,” he said, tapping the folded letter against his palm. “I suppose I should’ve called first, but—”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Her blue eyes flashed and her wavy hair almost quivered with emotion.

He gave her the letter. She opened it and read it as if she’d never seen it before. Then she balled it up and threw it into the open fireplace.

“Maman, you go too far,” she said, her voice lapsing into a Cajun cadence he hadn’t heard her use before. She looked at Scott. “I’m sorry you wasted your time. My grandmother is toying with us, and I apologize for her, since I doubt she’ll apologize for herself. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

“But...”

She was leaving. Walking away. He took a step in her direction, but didn’t know what to say to change her mind or to pull her into the emotional whirlwind she always created in him.

Maybe if he simply followed and kissed her.

“Wouldn’t do that,” Riva said.

He spun around. “Wouldn’t do what?”

Riva laughed and didn’t answer. “Sit,” she said, and gestured at a matching rocker, occupied at the moment by a ball of yellow-and-gray fur, which proved to be two sleeping cats. When he approached, one hissed while leaping off the chair, the other stood on the armrest and waited patiently for him to sit. Then the feline dropped into his lap and circled four times before settling.

“She likes you, my cat.”

“Your granddaughter does not.”

“My cat is a better judge of people.”

“I’d like to think so.” He waited.

“It is true, what the letter says. Nicki finds people. She uses computers.”

“She doesn’t seem inclined to help.”

Riva shrugged. “She hates the Lyons.”

He didn’t have to ask why. “Then why am I here?”

“Because you want to find Margaret.”

He ran his hand over the cat’s fur and studied Riva Bechet. He had the most compelling sense that he was also here because Riva Bechet wanted to find Margaret, as well.

NICKI TOOK HER FURY to the pier, the only structure on the entire 106 acres that wasn’t falling apart. She looked at the film of green duckweed covering the still water and fumed.

How dare she!

Her grandmother was an unrepentant busybody. Among her many flaws, that was one nobody disputed. Riva Reynard Bechet believed she knew how everyone’s life should be managed, and she never hesitated to jump in and try.

But this! Inviting the Lyons to Cachette en Bayou and using Nicki’s name to do it.

When she turned back toward the house, a gasp of outrage escaped her lips. Riva had brought him onto the brick patio. He was holding a chair for her. Riva placed a hand on his arm as she lowered herself into the chair. She was smiling up at him. He was smiling back.

Nicki wheeled around to face the water again. She couldn’t stand this.

“Hey, Quick-Nick, what’s she done now?”

Nicki squeezed her eyes shut at the sound of her eighteen-year-old cousin Toni’s voice. Not now, she pleaded with whoever had the power to intervene in her life. She felt the slight give of the boards as the girl dropped onto the pier.

“I was out at the cabin and heard the gunshot. Who is he?”

Nicki drew a deep breath and opened her eyes. The water was still smooth and green. Elephant ears still swayed in the barest of breezes, and clumps of bulrush still provided nesting areas for black-crowned night heron and red-tailed hawks. A smattering of low-lying fog clung to the opposite shore. You could count on the bayou, from moment to moment, from year to year. The only change from seconds earlier was a snowy egret that had dropped silently onto a cypress log lodged against the opposite bank. The bird was graceful and still, unlike anything in Nicki’s life.

“I’m coming back as an egret in my next life,” she said.

Toni chuckled. “Not me. I’m going to be a gator. Snap at anything that makes me see red. Course, I guess you’ve got that covered this go round.”

A wry grin touched Nicki’s lips. “Smart mouth.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got my bad points, too.”

The egret took to the air, again without a sound.

“He’s a Lyon,” Nicki said. “Scott Lyon.”

“A Lyon? Oh, the big shots in the news. Some old lady ran off with the family fortune or something. Right?”

Nicki had a moment of envy for the obliviousness that could still be one’s companion at eighteen. The world remained narrowed to one’s immediate concerns—a boy who looked good in his jeans, a weekend gig for the band you believed was your heart and soul, the certainty that you’d always be a size six no matter how many cheeseburgers you ate.

“Something like that.”

“You gonna find her?”

“No.”

“His brains you were blowing out, then?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? He looks cute enough from here.”

Nicki restrained herself from looking. She didn’t have to. She could will Scott Lyon into her mind’s eye with a minimum of effort. He had changed since that day two years ago. His hair was short now, clipped so close to his head you couldn’t grab a handful. And it was mostly silver, even though he had to be about her age, which was thirty-four. He wore a tiny gold hoop in his left ear, the perfect size to hug his earlobe and no more. Strong bones formed his face, giving him a chiseled jaw and a square chin, high cheekbones and the nose from a statue by Michelangelo. His taut face was tanned to perfect gold, his eyes a smoky gray.

Those eyes had haunted her for two years.

She had been inclined to trust them two years ago when he’d burst into her chambers. Nicki usually trusted her instincts about people, and her instincts had told her Scott Lyon had no hidden agenda. He said he’d come to help her and he meant just that.

Silly her.

“I don’t like the Lyons,” she said.

“Because they run the TV station that started all that stuff after Uncle David died of a drug overdose?”

So maybe teenagers weren’t completely oblivious. Nicki felt the strongest urge to stalk away. But she did that a lot. So this time she stayed put.

“That’s right.”

“Dad said it was all true.”

Nicki opened her mouth to say that Toni’s father was a straitlaced coldhearted son of a you-know-what, but she caught herself. Uncle James might indeed be a little chilly where emotions were concerned, but he was still Toni’s father. Besides, Nicki was well aware that some of her younger cousins considered her to be a straitlaced coldhearted you-know-what herself. They didn’t understand.

Maybe she didn’t understand Uncle James.

“True or not,” she said, “I wasn’t crazy about having it pointed out to everybody in the city that my father was a drug addict who raised his daughter as a street performer.”

She flinched just saying it out loud. Giving voice to the words was her way of declaring that the truth had no power over her. Maybe someday, if she said it enough, it might be true.

“It’s not like anybody was going to blame you because Uncle David was, you know, sick. And a lousy father.”

Nicki glanced at Toni. Her young cousin was a Reynard, from the top of her mane of wild red hair to the tips of the toes she had shoved into a pair of size-ten snakeskin boots dyed red and purple. She also had the kind of husky throbbing singing voice that could give a saint a hard-on, a body the far side of Marilyn Monroe and an outspokenness saved from insensitivity only because she was always on target.

Nicki would have given the dimple in her chin to be more like Toni. But she knew full well that wasn’t going to happen. She was what she was.

“You’re a singer,” she said to Toni. “Dysfunctional’s trendy in the entertainment world right now. It doesn’t play as well for family-court judges.”

“Not good for people to get the idea their family-court judges are human, huh?”

Nicki felt her anger rising all over again. What was she thinking, trying to have a conversation about the darkest demons of her life with an eighteen-year-old? “Go to hell.”

Toni chuckled. She didn’t have a temper, either. Some women had it all, Nicki thought. The rest of them got the leftovers. “Yeah, probably. But not right away, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I’ll buy your ticket myself if you leave today and get off my back.”

Then they were both laughing. Nicki could almost forget that her Maman Riva, the closest thing she’d ever had to a responsible parent in her entire life, was consorting with Scott Lyon. The same Scott Lyon who had pointed a television camera at her face while one of his colleagues asked questions about the secrets she hid in the darkest corner of her soul. She could almost forget that he had found her hideaway, the place she’d gone to lick her wounds when the world found out that Judge Nicolette Bechet was not perfect.

She could almost forget that traitorous moment today when she’d felt a thrill at the sight of him.

“Come on,” Toni said when their laughter subsided. “I’ve got to take Mom to her shrink today. If you come with me, I won’t be tempted to draw mustaches on all the photographs on the covers of Psychology Today in the waiting room.”

“I’ve got work to do,” Nicki protested. “If I don’t—”

Toni stood. “Looks like he’s going to be here awhile.”

Nicki glanced toward the house. The lemonade pitcher was out. His chair was edged close to Riva’s, their foreheads almost touching as they talked. He did, indeed, look as if he was settling in.

“She’s probably convinced him to wait you out.”

Nicki didn’t relish a battle of wills with her grandmother.

“My truck’s at the cabin,” Toni said. “We won’t even have to go up to the house.”

“Deal. I’ll help you with the mustaches.”

THEY WERE GONE all day. The look of shock on Aunt Cheryl’s face when she saw Nicki’s overalls and ball cap made the decision worthwhile. And at dusk, when Toni pulled into Cachette en Bayou’s back driveway and parked near the cabin, Nicki took satisfaction in knowing she’d managed to outmaneuver the Lyon family once again.

Dinner had already begun on the back terrace. Nicki heard the talk and saw the flicker of candlelight when she tramped through the overgrown path from the cabin, along the swamp’s edge, toward the house. Thank goodness that at Cachette en Bayou there was no need to dress for dinner. As she approached the shadowy terrace, she pulled off her ball cap and ran her fingers through her hair. She could smell the étouffée and her mouth began to water. Her cousin T-John must have rolled in this afternoon. T-John, who ran a modest little café in New Iberia, made the best étouffée in the county.

Nicki walked onto the terrace with a smile on her face. The cacophony of voices didn’t change when she approached; she heard snatches of at least three conversations—one about the next season’s rice crop, one about the latest crooked politician sweet-talking the voters, one about T-John’s weight gain since his last visit. She made her way to her usual spot at the table.

Directly across from her empty chair sat Scott Lyon. He rose as she approached, a gentlemanly gesture never seen at the Bechet dinner table.

The candlelight flickered across his face, highlighting all the crisp angles. She couldn’t tell that his eyes were gray in this light. But she remembered.

“You—”

“Hey, Nicki!” T-John’s deep baritone cut through the rest of the noise at the table. “You near ‘bout let these sorry cousins o’ yours clean up the last of the étouffée. Beau, you pass that girl some food. And don’t be taking more yourself. Nicki, Maman says you’re going to help the big-shot Lyon family. How ’bout that? You gonna be on the news some?”

Nicki opened her mouth to deny it. But Riva’s hand covered hers. Scott’s eyes would not release her. And Perdu, from his place of honor on Riva’s shoulder, said, “Shut up.”

Good advice. She took it.

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 stood and reached for his hand. “Come on. Maman Riva has a sure cure for hangovers.

Oyster juice, tomato juice, pepper sauce and raw egg.”

Scott 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 one chair in my office and it’s mine.” She was crisp and automatic. The impassioned woman who didn’t mind wrangling with a carpenter had vanished. Scott found the transformation intriguing.

He dropped to the floor and sat at her feet. “No problem. I always think it’s wise for a man to look up to a woman.”

He smiled. She frowned.

“The power’s off for the electrical work and I can’t fire up Sam. So—”

“Sam?”

Her frown deepened. She tipped her head in the direction of the computer. “So what I suggest is—”

“I never knew a computer with a name before.”

She tapped the ballpoint against the notebook. She gave him a look like those the nuns had given him in school when he’d disrupted the class.

“Well, now you do. Here’s what—”

“Sam what?”

She was biting the inside of her lip. To keep from losing her temper, he supposed.

“Spade.”

“I get it. Sam Spade, private detective. The two of you find people.”

“You’re quick, Mr. Lyon. I’m impressed. Now can we get on with this?”

“Oh, sure.” He smiled again. He supposed, actually, he’d been smiling all along. His hangover must be gone. “She should patent it.”

“What?”

“Maman Riva’s Hangover Potion.”

Judging by the grip she had on the pen, it should snap any moment. That wasn’t going to help her mood at all. He reached up and touched her fingers. “You’re tense, Nicki. Do I make you nervous?”

She flinched away. “Yes. People who prey on others make me nervous.”

“And I prey on others?”

“You’re a Lyon, aren’t you?”

He met the challenge in her eyes, but refused to match her bristling attitude. He’d been catching it one way or another all his life for being a Lyon. He was too rich for those who had less. He was too stingy for those who wanted a handout. He was too privileged, too powerful, too driven. He was none of those things, of course. He’d made a point not to be, in fact. And he’d also made a point of never defending himself against assumptions.

“I was glad you got away that night,” he said, instead.

That stopped her for a moment. He saw the speculation behind those ice-blue eyes, but he knew before she spoke that she wouldn’t give voice to her curiosity. “I can’t imagine why it mattered to you.”

The edge in her voice was intended to veil the unspoken question. Scott believed he’d keep the judge guessing.

“Margaret Lyon doesn’t prey on people,” he said, turning the conversation back to the reason he was here.

The other reason.

“I’m sure.”

“Trust me.”

“Absolutely. Now about your aunt—I’ll need some details so that when Sam is back in commission I can do a little nosing around.”

He gave her what details he could and promised to get back to her with the information he didn’t have. Margaret’s social security number and her parents’ dates of birth. He supposed he could get it all from his cousin Gaby or her daughter Leslie. He wasn’t sure how any of it would help Nicki find a woman no one else could find. But he was here and he wanted to come back, so he would simply do what she asked.

She slapped the notebook shut and tossed it onto the desktop together with the pen. She was poised to stand. He was being dismissed, free to return to the city, to WDIX-TV, to his squabbling family.

“Why do you do this?”

“How is that relevant?” she countered.

He reminded himself of what he knew of her, of the scandal that had first placed her in his path. A father dead of a drug overdose, a less-than-stable childhood. Street performers, if he remembered correctly. That was what made her so brittle. Her past and his role in exposing it.

“Interesting, not relevant.”

“If it isn’t relevant, I don’t have time for it. You may have noticed I have a lot of work to do.”

She stood and stepped over him, then waited at the door for him. He decided not to be any more trying to her than he’d already been. “I’ll bring the rest of the information tomorrow.”

He paused at the door. The expression in her eyes should have cooled everything in the vicinity—including him—but somehow it didn’t. The aloofness was at odds with the unruly dance of her curls, which made his fingers ache with need. He wanted to bury his hands in her hair. To lose himself in the heat he felt despite the chill she projected.

“Call, Mr. Lyon. A phone call will be fine.”

A call would be preferable was what she meant, he knew.

“I don’t mind the drive,” he said.

“Don’t push me, Lyon. You aren’t welcome on my land or in my life. I don’t know how to be any clearer than that.”

Scott wasn’t one to push. But pushing back, that was different. A man had an obligation to push back, didn’t he?

“Can I kiss you goodbye?”

Color rushed into her cheeks, anger more than embarrassment, he speculated. She clenched a fist and he thought for a moment he was going to find out what kind of right hook she had.

“On second thought, maybe I won’t help you at all.”

Obviously getting past this woman’s defenses was going to take some doing, and he knew he wasn’t advancing his cause one bit.

“Is that a no to the kiss, too?” he asked, matching her determination with a cocksureness of his own.

“My shotgun’s still loaded.”

“I guess that’s a definite no.”

“This isn’t a game, Lyon.”

“No. It isn’t.”

He saw the shudder of anxiety tighten her face when she realized what he meant. It wasn’t a game, a flirtation, a seduction. She knew now what he’d known for two years. He wanted her. And she didn’t appear pleased at the news.

CHAPTER FOUR

RAYMOND LYON suppressed a belch.

The food at Chez Charles always gave him heartburn, but he didn’t complain about it much. Maybe there was no such thing as a free lunch for the rest of the world, but the rules were a little different when your father owned the joint.

“We oughtta fix this place up, hire somebody who can actually cook, when the old man croaks,” Ray said.

He watched his older brother wipe his fingers on a white linen napkin and screw up his face as if he smelled something bad. Alain was like the old man in that way, always acting as if he was above the rest of them. Ray supposed it ran in the family; most of the Lyons seemed to behave that way.

“Have a modicum of class, why don’t you, Raymond.”

Alain’s hoity-toity attitude ticked Ray off. He decided to bring up the one topic that would upset his brother. “I moved the old lady again.”

Alain glanced around. He had a full head of hair, touched with silver at the temples, the perfect hint of dignity for a man pushing fifty, whereas Raymond, who wasn’t even forty yet, already had a hole in his haircut, right at the crown of his head. Life wasn’t fair.

“Not here,” Alain said.

Ray ignored him. “To Arkansas. Close enough to keep an eye on her.”

“How is she?”

Ray shrugged. “Old. How good can she be? You know, she could kick any time. And that might not be a bad—”

“She’d better not,” Alain said with the authoritarian tone that always made Ray want to do just the opposite.

“Might simplify things.”

“And it might blow up in somebody’s face.”

Ray knew what that meant. Somebody’s face, as in not Alain’s. Alain was in this up to his prissy red suspenders, but Ray knew that the smoking gun would lead right back to him, and only him, if their little scheme was ever uncovered. Damn. Alain was wily. Slick. And Ray was just the stupid kid brother, the way it had always been.

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