A Second Chance

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

LORETTA HUNG UP the phone, relief coursing through her veins like a drug. “She’s okay. That was Alain. He’s bringing her home.”

Adele’s eyes filled with tears of relief, and Vincent crossed himself in thanks. “So what happened? Where’s she been?”

“Making mischief, apparently. We’ll get it all sorted out when she gets here.”

They didn’t have to wait long. Soon the lights of Alain’s patrol car shone through the bakery’s front windows. Loretta couldn’t wait-she ran out the door and to the car, and when the passenger door opened and her little girl scrambled out, Loretta scooped her up and held her tightly.

“Oh, baby, I was so scared. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m okay. Luc found me.”

Loretta looked to Alain for confirmation.

“It was Luc who found her,” Alain said. They went back inside, where Loretta got her subdued daughter something to eat as Alain explained the evening’s events.

“Luc saw the commotion and stopped to help. He found Zara hiding in some bushes down near the bayou.”

Luc. She was going to have to do something about him. But first things first. “Zara,” she said, trying not to sound too accusatory, “can you tell us why you went to all this trouble?”

“Because I’m a juvenile delinquent. I come from a broken home.”

Loretta definitely smelled something fishy here. Zara had an agenda. And Loretta had a pretty good idea what it was.

Alain sat down next to Zara at the oak table. “You know, Zara, what I’ve found is, it’s not so much the number of parents that makes for a good home to raise a child in, but the amount of love and care and concern and guidance the child gets. And everyone in town knows that your mama, and your grandparents, too, give you enough love for ten kids. So I’m not buying this ‘broken home’ nonsense.”

“Thank you, Alain,” Loretta said, “but I think I know what’s going on. Zara’s on a campaign to convince me she needs a father.”

“Ahhh. Well, Zara, honey, I’m sure your mama would like you to have a father, too. But you can’t just buy one at the store.”

“I know that,” Zara said. “But I know where she can get one.”

Alain quickly pushed his chair back. “I think this investigation is no longer in my area of expertise.”

“Do I have to go to jail?” Zara asked, sounding scared but a little intrigued by the possibility.

“No, but you’ll need to clean up that wall you painted.”

“It’s just tempera paint,” Zara said. “It’ll come off with water.”

Well, that was a relief, at least. “We’ll take care of it tomorrow,” Loretta told Alain. “And I’ll come up with an additional punishment, just so Zara’s clear on the consequences of breaking the law.”

“Mama-”

“Not a word out of you, missy.” Now that the surge of relief was wearing off, Loretta’s anger rose.

Alain nodded. “I’m sure you’ll do what’s best. And I’m just awful glad no harm came to you, Miss Zara.” He tipped his hat and went on his way.

Zara hadn’t eaten much of her dinner, but Loretta wasn’t in the mood to argue about it. “Are you finished here?”

She nodded.

“Then go take a bath and get all that paint off you. Afterward, it’s straight to bed.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She slipped out of her chair and headed forlornly toward the house.

“Wait. Zara…”

Zara stopped, and Loretta went to her and enveloped her in yet another bear hug. “No matter what happens, no matter what you do, I’ll always love you. I’m put out with you right now, but I still love you. Okay?”

She nodded. “I love you, too.”

“Mama,” Loretta said, “do you think you could supervise her bath for me? And shampoo her hair? She’s got paint in it.”

“Of course.”

“I have something important to do.”

Adele nodded, understanding perfectly. Vincent just looked pleased. “We’ll spend the night here, if you need us to,” he said. “Don’t worry about a thing. But you might, um…do something about your own hair.”

Well, that told her where her parents stood on the issue of Luc. They hadn’t pushed her one way or another when they’d learned of the breakup, but they’d obviously been hoping she would change her mind about Luc.

She checked herself in the car’s rearview mirror and realized her father had a point. She looked a fright, as if she’d been struck by lightning or something. She ran her fingers through her hair, then dug in her purse for some lipstick, but she gave up after a fruitless search. Luc would just have to take her as she was.

If he didn’t slam the door in her face on principle alone.

When she pulled up to the B and B, lights shone warmly through the windows. It was such a beautiful, inviting home, and Luc was the soul of it. A person who had created such a place from the ground up had to be good, deep-down good.

She was distressed that Luc’s car wasn’t there. She walked to the front door and rang the bell, and Celeste answered. The woman didn’t look quite as formidable as usual. Maybe she’d softened, too.

“Celeste, is Luc here?” Loretta asked.

“No, I’m sorry, dear. He left a while ago, didn’t say where he was going. But he seemed in a…melancholy mood. Would you like to come in and wait for him?”

“Yes, thank you.” Celeste opened the door wider and allowed Loretta to step into the warmth. As always, the B and B smelled wonderful-like home.

“Michel made us some mulled wine,” Celeste said. “We’re enjoying it with some of the guests in the parlor. You can join us if you like.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good company. I’ll just sit in the kitchen.”

“All right, dear.”

Celeste walked her to the kitchen, which was permeated with the heady scent of mulled wine simmering in a Crock-Pot. She refilled her cup, then got one for Loretta. Loretta blew on it, then took an appreciative sip. “This is delicious, thank you.”

Amiable conversation and laughter drifted in from the lounge, but surprisingly, Celeste didn’t rejoin the group. She pulled out the chair opposite Loretta and sat down.

“I apologize for my behavior yesterday,” Celeste said. “It was a knee-jerk reaction toward someone I perceived had hurt one of my cubs.”

Loretta smiled at the thought of Luc as a cub.

“I found out less than two years ago that I had a grandson,” Celeste continued. “And I’ll confess, the initial impression he made on me wasn’t favorable. But I’ve kept an eye on him. And I’ve come to realize what a good heart he has. At one time in his life, he was misguided-but that was partly my fault, too.”

“Luc has to be responsible for his own actions,” Loretta said.

“And believe me, he has taken responsibility. Not like his father, not at all.”

“Luc’s father got into trouble, too?”

“To put it mildly. Pierre, my son, was a rough-and-tumble little boy, always in trouble, and I simply refused to tolerate him. I expected him to be just like his older sister-demure, obedient, perfectly behaved. The harder I clamped down on him, the worse his behavior became. But I never made any attempt to understand him.

“By the time he was a teenager, it was open warfare. And he left home as soon as he was able-and I never saw him again.”

“That must have been terrible,” Loretta said, feeling a bond with Celeste as a mother. “I don’t know what I would do if Zara left me.”

“I pretended it didn’t bother me, but of course it did. For a short while he communicated with Anne, his sister, unbeknownst to me, and she tried to talk him back home. But his story was that I’d kicked him out and disowned him. And, looking back, I can see how he might have seen things that way. I was incredibly harsh, but I guess that’s what I thought the boy needed. I never dreamed he would disappear for good.”

“We all do the best we can,” Loretta said. “Being a parent is the hardest job on earth.”

“I’m telling you this not to get your sympathy, but to provide some background that you might find useful when you talk to Luc.”

“Thank you.”

Car lights coming up the driveway signaled Luc’s return, and Celeste quickly stood. But she didn’t leave right away. She poured yet another cup of the mulled wine and set it on the table. “Give Luc this. It loosens the tongue and mellows the mood, as I’ve just proved.”

By the time Luc walked through the kitchen door, Celeste had gone. “Loretta.” He had on an old, beat-up leather jacket and his most faded jeans, making him look the perfect rebel. The cautious, guarded expression on his face fit perfectly with the image.

“Luc.” Earlier, she’d been burning with things she wanted to tell him, but now that the moment had arrived, she was strangely bereft of words. Well, there was one easy thing she could start with. “Thank you for finding Zara.”

Luc shrugged. “Like I told Alain, she pretty much found me. She wanted me to be a hero.”

“You are a hero. Not everyone would drop whatever they were doing to look for a missing child-especially the missing child of a woman who’s been so horrible to you.”

“Whatever piece of bad road you and I have traveled, I wasn’t going to hold it against Zara.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” She extended the cup of wine toward him. “Celeste says you should drink some of this. It’ll loosen your tongue and mellow your mood.”

“Is there more to say?”

She nodded and swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. This was even harder than she’d thought it would be. “I’m sorry for the way I’ve acted.”

“It’s your business if you don’t want anything to do with a convicted felon. Especially given your history.”

“Maybe. But that’s not a decision I should make without knowing the whole story. You wanted to tell me, and I wouldn’t let you, and that was wrong.”

He accepted the wine and took a big gulp, then looked at it, surprised. “What is this stuff?”

“Mulled wine. Michel made it.”

“That explains the kick.” He pulled out a chair and sat down. “Loretta, if you want the whole story, I’ll tell you. Every sordid detail. I wanted to tell you before, but you were so stressed out about the music festival, I figured you had enough on your plate. But I planned to tell you right after the festival. Even though I knew it might end our relationship.”

“So tell me now.”

“I don’t know that it will make any difference. I did some terrible things.”

She knew she had to hear what those things were. A part of her wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, she would love him no matter what. But she’d been so stupidly trusting with Jim.

“I confess, I did panic when I discovered you had a record,” she said, “because all I could think about was Jim-sticking up a convenience store and shooting a man because he didn’t open the cash register fast enough. But you’re not Jim. And I can’t imagine you did anything like rob someone.”

He didn’t immediately reassure her he hadn’t, which gave her only a slight unease. This was Luc, sweet, kind Luc.

“I’ll tell you the whole story,” he said. “Do you mind if we get comfortable first? It’s kind of long.”

They moved to Luc’s quarters, where, for lack of any other place to settle, they sat on the bed. Luc stretched out, propped up with some pillows, and Loretta slipped off her shoes and sat cross-legged, still clutching her mug of mulled wine.

“I already told you about my father,” Luc began. “How he made peace with my mom and me before he died. But that wasn’t the whole story.” He paused, as if he were looking back in time. “On his deathbed, he made me promise that I would claim the family legacy he’d been denied. His mother and sister and her family were worth millions, he figured, and he thought I should get my share. Or maybe, what he really said, was that I should make peace with them. My memories might be less than accurate, because I was pretty angry with his family. They’d given my father a raw deal.”

“Celeste told me that part. It sounds like maybe he was treated unfairly.”

“He brought it on himself,” Luc insisted. “Pierre Robichaux was always the victim, always being wronged. But I didn’t understand that at the time. I was a walking cliché-the angry young man.

“Still, I didn’t do anything about it for a long time.” Luc explained that he’d left home after his father’s death and kicked around the world, talking his way into jobs at luxury hotels, leaving when he got bored.

Then he went to work for the Corbin brothers, who used their small hotels in Thailand to defraud people. When their crimes started to catch up to them, they decided to move back to the States and expand their business there.

Luc had found the perfect way to seek his revenge through the brothers’ scheme to acquire a property in New Orleans’ French Quarter. The Hotel Marchand, owned by his aunt, was ideal for their purposes, since it was already in financial trouble. Luc joined the staff as a concierge, and his job was to work from the inside to ruin the hotel’s reputation so the owners would be forced to sell-at a bargain-basement price.

“And that’s what you did?” Loretta found it nearly impossible to picture the Luc she knew doing something so hateful.

“I did,” he confirmed. “At first, it was fairly innocuous. I tampered with the generator and it failed during a power outage. I mixed up reservations for a society wedding party, and I leaked a story to the tabloids about a celebrity staying with us.”

“Oh, Luc.”

“But almost from the beginning, I had a problem. I liked the Marchands. They treated me like family, even though they had no idea who I was. So I tried to back out of my agreement with the Corbin brothers. But it wasn’t that easy. By then they were involved with some mobster types who didn’t care who got hurt-or killed-so long as they got their hotel.”

“And you didn’t go to the police?”

“I finally did. Unfortunately, I went to the wrong cop. He was on the crime boss’s payroll. I was shot by one of the Corbin brothers and left for dead.”

Loretta gasped. This was far more sordid and complex than she’d imagined. No wonder Charlotte and Melanie Marchand had been so guarded around Luc when he’d gone to the hotel to talk about the Cajun dinner. “Oh, Luc. Is that how you got the scar on your back?”

He nodded. “I’m tough, though. The bullet nicked my liver and I lost a lot of blood, but I recovered. The important thing was that I was able to tell the police everything. By that time Charlotte and Jackson, who’s now her husband, had been kidnapped. But the police were able to rescue them and arrests were made.”

“Including you.”

“Including me. But I turned state’s evidence, and the Marchands actually came out in favor of leniency. I was charged with everything from fraud to conspiracy to theft to malicious mischief, but only the theft charge stuck. I got a two-year probated sentence, and if I stay out of trouble for five years, I can have my record expunged.”

“Oh, Luc,” she said again, sighing. “Is that everything?”

“That’s everything. Except that it was Celeste’s brilliant idea to send me here to make restitution to the family. She thought she was being pretty clever, condemning me to some backwater town. At first, I think she was hoping I wouldn’t be able to hack it, and I’d mess up my probation and end up in jail, proving her theory that I was a bad seed, just like my father. Neither of us had any idea how much I would love it here.”

Loretta was silent for a while, taking it all in. Luc was right, he’d done some pretty bad things. But she could feel his regret. And she could hear the fondness in his voice for his cousins, his aunt-even his grandmother.

“So,” Luke said briskly. “You can run screaming into the night, now, if you want. I won’t hold it against you.”

She studied his face and saw the vulnerability there. Her heart squeezed painfully. “I have no intention of running. I feel exactly the same about you as I did before you told me. I don’t care what you did. I can see with my own eyes that you’re kind and generous and hardworking.”

“Maybe you’re seeing what you want to see,” he said cautiously.

“No. You’ve made mistakes, but who hasn’t? It doesn’t mean I can’t love you. Everyone deserves a second chance, a fresh start.” She looked down at her empty cup. “Celeste was right about this stuff.”

When she looked up, she felt dizzy from the intensity of Luc’s gaze.

“Somewhere in all that,” he said, “did you just say you loved me?”

“I did.”

“You know I love you too, don’t you?”

“N-not until right this moment.” Love. But what did that word mean to Luc?

“I think I was in love with you months ago,” he said, “but since I’ve never been in love before, I didn’t recognize it.”

“Love can be very sneaky.” She reached her hand toward him, only to find he’d done the same to her. They clasped hands, and then somehow they were in each other’s arms, lying in the middle of the bed, kissing as if they’d been lovers separated for years instead of a couple of days.

Pausing for breath, Luc pulled back and looked deeply into Loretta’s eyes, stroking her hair. “I love you,” he said again. “And I love Zara, too.”

“I want you to spend as much time with Zara as you please. I know you’ll be a good influence on her-for however long you choose to stay in Indigo.” She forced herself to say that last part. But she knew she had to accept Luc exactly as he was, not the ideal she wanted him to be.

“However long? How about the next hundred years or so?”

“Luc, don’t tease.”

“I’m dead serious. I’ve never stayed in one place long because I’ve never had a reason to before. But I love this town. I love the people, the way they care so much about each other. I probably won’t be in this house. I think Grand-mère intends to live here and run the place herself. But I’ll find something to do. Maybe I’ll run a swamp tour business.”

Loretta could hardly believe what she was hearing. Luc here in Indigo, forever? She couldn’t bear to think of La Petite Maison without Luc, but Celeste was the owner, and Loretta could understand the other woman’s desire to run it. And whatever business Luc decided to get into, he would make it something wonderful.

Luc jostled her. “You still with me?”

She realized she’d been staring off into space. “No. I’m just speechless.” She sat up and pulled away slightly, trying to gauge his sincerity. “You’ll really stay here?”

He nodded. “And something else. I want to marry you. Now, you don’t have to answer right away-”

“Yes.”

“-because I’ll keep asking. Maybe once a month or so.”

“I said yes.”

“You did?”

She leaned in and kissed him again. “Yes.”