Читать книгу Family Reunion - Peg Sutherland - Страница 9

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.