“MAMA, WHY DIDN’T LUC want to help us?” Zara asked as Loretta drove along the two-lane highway toward New Iberia, where she had half a dozen stops to make.

Loretta had been wondering that herself. He’d been very evasive about why he couldn’t ask his cousin Melanie to help out with the music festival. She had to believe it wasn’t because he didn’t want to help.

“Probably because he didn’t want to make a promise he couldn’t keep. For whatever reason, he doesn’t believe he can get his cousin to help us.” She tried to cast a positive light on Luc’s actions. Luc was one of the few people in this world Zara responded to besides her immediate family. She was unbelievably intelligent. Loretta sometimes had a hard time keeping up with her. Yet she was often shy with strangers and sometimes wouldn’t talk at all for hours at a time. She’d get an expression on her face as if she were pondering some great, eternal problem, trying to work out the meaning of life.

“So what are you going to do?” Zara asked, her forehead furrowed.

“I’ll figure something out. Don’t you worry. This is a grown-up problem, not a kid problem. At the very worst, I’ll hire one of the caterers I already talked to, and the dinner won’t raise as much money for the opera house as we’d hoped.” Or, more accurately, the dinner would lose money, and Loretta would feel obligated to fund the shortage with the money she’d been planning to use to expand her business. But that was what she got for pushing this idea in the first place before doing her research. She should have known better.

“Luc is handsome, isn’t he?” Zara asked.

“That he is.” Handsome, and exotically different from all the dark-haired, dark-eyed Cajuns who lived in Indigo. He had golden-blond hair and twinkling blue eyes and a smile that drove her absolutely wild. He talked differently from anyone she’d ever known, with no hint of a southern or Cajun accent. He’d obviously been raised somewhere else-out west, if Loretta’s ear was any good. But he’d lived all over the world, if his casual references to France and Thailand were any indication.