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accordion for emphasis. It produced a short, squawking, somewhat indecent noise. “Get back where you belong.”
    “I’ll go when you put that damned accordion down.”
    Smiling politely, Paul stepped into the light not more than five feet from her. He watched her eyes skim down his body. He watched them widen when she realized that he was wearing only the accordion, which he held at a crucial spot in front of him.
    “Still want me to put it down,
chère
?” He pressed the accordion together slowly. It made a sound like a luscious sigh and revealed a good deal of his outer thighs and hips.
    She lifted her chin and looked down her nose at him. She held her ground, he had to give her that.
    “Oh, I see,” she noted sardonically. “This is a sexual fetish peculiar to Cajuns. Pardon me.”
    He played several scales on the accordion, pressing and releasing it languidly between his large, sinewy hands while he gave her a lecherous smile. “Heh, heh, heh,” he chortled. “Us Cajuns call this a squeeze box. You have anything as good?”
    “Not with pleats in it.” Looking unsettled, she grasped the front of her pajama top as if she were afraid he might burn it off with his gaze, then pivoted and stomped back downstairs.
    Paul listened carefully until he heard her bedroom door slam shut. Then his rugged face contorted in discomfort. Reaching carefully between himself and the accordion, he began to disengage a thatch of curly black hair caught in the instrument’s brass trim. He’d nearly crushed a hard part of his anatomy that desperately wanted to like Caroline Fitzsimmons, even when she was meddling and giving orders.
    This woman was going to cause him pain in more ways than one.
    Frank and the movie’s director cranked up the cast and crew that day to shoot an outdoor scene that didn’t require Wolf’s presence.
    Free to roam, Caroline investigated the plantation, meeting the staff and petting the animals. Ed invited her to play with the black-footed ferrets, a species that conservationists had barely rescued from extinction and were now trying to return safely to the wild.
    She sat down in the middle of a large outdoor pen with a screened top, and immediately a dozen half-grown ferrets scampered over to her. Caroline laughed delightedly and spread her hands.
Come
,
babies. I won’t hurt you
.
    The ferrets climbed up her arms and stretched out on her legs. One hung from the back of her oversize tangerine-color blouse, and another draped himself over the crown of her voluminous yellow sunhat.
    Laughing, the sunhat mashed around her face like a collapsed buttercup, she didn’t notice when Paul walked up and gazed at her with astonishment.
    This couldn’t be the same glitzy babe who’d showed up in a limo yesterday, he thought. But yes—even covered in ferrets she looked chic, clean, and cool, untouched by human hands. Her blouse was orange; her flared shorts were yellow, like her sandals and the sillyhat she wore and the scarf she’d twisted around her throat as a necklace. He could almost drink her; she was a tequila sunrise, sweet with a punch.
    Paul rubbed a grimy hand across his sore jaw. What a punch. He listened to her soft, carefree laugh and wondered what kind of magic the animals wrought on her. He couldn’t imagine her laughing like that around people.
    She spotted him watching her, and her laughter faded. She lifted the brim of her hat, ferret and all, and squinted at him.
    “You’re filthy,” she noted cheerfully, sweeping a jaunty gaze over his dusty jeans and T-shirt. His face and arms were streaked with dirt and sweat, and his hair was plastered to his head. She clucked her tongue in reproach. “Have you been wrestling with your conscience again?”
    He was too tired to fight the she-cat, and the sound of her laughter had softened him in some way he didn’t understand. He shrugged and smiled at her. “Been wrestling with an injured antelope.”
    “What happened to it?”
    “Got its leg