have to be more careful. Though he and Holly had become friends over the past few months, he’d begun pulling back. Trying to protect himself. Holly wastoo intuitive. Too adept at reading people. And he couldn’t afford to have her read him.
He and Holly had a lot in common. They’d both overcome unfavorable odds to make something of themselves. Of course, Holly’s situation had been worse. At least he’d had his mother’s love and support.
What would his life have been like if his father had stayed around instead of leaving when Luc was just a little boy? Maybe Pierre would have come back here to New Orleans and claimed what was rightfully his—a part of his family’s fortune.
Luc glanced wistfully around the elegant lobby, but found he could no longer feel the resentment and burning desire for revenge that had gotten him into this mess. After working with the Marchands—his father’s sister Anne, and his four cousins—he was finding it hard to believe they were the villains he’d expected them to be. And that made what he had to do so much harder.
“Good afternoon,” he said, handing a guest his messages from the cubbyhole of an antique armoire behind him. When the man walked away again, Luc was left to his own thoughts once more.
And he wasn’t enjoying them.
It had all seemed so simple a few months ago, when Richard and Daniel Corbin approached himabout their scheme to force Anne Marchand to sell the hotel. Luc had leaped at the chance to get back at his father’s family for kicking Pierre out when he was eighteen. Though it shamed him some to admit it to himself, he’d believed that Anne Marchand had deliberately cut her brother, Pierre, out of her life, even though his father had told him otherwise—that Anne had in fact supported Pierre. It was their mother, Celeste Robichaux, who had destroyed her son’s sense of self, his confidence, practically forcing him into a life of drifting and gambling.
Even as Luc thought it through, a voice in the back of his mind argued that Pierre had made his own choices. He’d disappeared from Luc’s life when he could have stayed. He could have tried to make a good life for his wife and son.
Damn it, he shouldn’t be having these doubts or regret becoming involved with Richard and Dan, two less-than-sterling hoteliers he’d worked for in Thailand. He was supposed to be enjoying the thrill of getting even with his father’s family, but the only villain in the family was his grandmother, and she had nothing to do with the hotel.
It had been built with the hard work and dreams of Anne and her late husband, Remy.
But Luc was trapped now. Which put him squarely behind the eight ball. He was trapped. He’d made a bargain with the devil and didn’t have a clue how to get out of it—or even if he should try.
If he confessed to his aunt Anne that he’d been behind recent mishaps at the hotel, everything from a damaged generator to botched deliveries—mishaps that threatened to affect bookings and place the hotel in grave financial danger—she’d fire him and maybe even have him arrested. And if he backed out of his deal with Daniel and Richard, he knew they would do even worse.
The telephone on his desk rang and jolted him out of his thoughts. He was grateful for the reprieve, however brief it might turn out to be. Snatching up the receiver, he schooled his voice and said, “Concierge, how may I assist you?”
I SHOULDN’T HAVE come back, Parker told himself. He had plenty of things he should be doing instead.
But that afternoon, as he walked into the bar and took a seat at the table he’d claimed the day before, Parker couldn’t think of anywhere he’d rather be. Holly’s voice reached out to him, sliding inside him, easing away the rough edges, pushing everything else from his mind.
She swayed on stage, her long, auburn hair swinging in a soft arc behind her head. Her voice caressed each note, heartbreaking in its clarity, its ability to