“LUC. TO WHAT DO I OWE this dubious pleasure?” Luc’s grandmother, Celeste Robichaux, was a grande dame in every respect. She had agreed to “receive him” in the parlor of her huge Garden District home in New Orleans as if she still lived in a different era. She’d even had her maid bring them tea and French pastries.

Celeste herself was exquisitely outfitted in a linen dress, complete with stockings, pumps and a full complement of jewelry. He’d never seen her anything but fashionably dressed and perfectly pressed, whether she was attending a party or staying home to tat doilies, or whatever it was she did with her leisure time.

He’d heard horror stories about Celeste from his father. Supposedly Celeste banished him from home and cheated him out of his cut of the family fortune.

Luc had since learned there was another side to the story, and Celeste, while stern and a little bit scary, wasn’t the devil incarnate. In fact, out of all his extended family, Celeste was the one who’d offered him a way to make restitution for the damage he’d done by sending him off to Indigo to renovate the summer house and start the B and B, keeping him out of jail by doing so.