Avoiding that minefield, I quickly steered the conversation into safer, and more important, waters. “So what did Doc Halloran say?”

Mama turned back to the stove. There was a brief, almost-unnoticeable pause before she answered. “Just what I told you he’d say, baby. I’m right as rain.”

I frowned. “But you’ve had that cough for months now, Mama.”

Smiling brightly, she turned around again and faced me. I was struck by how beautiful she still was, her face unlined in the bright morning light spilling through the kitchen windows. I got my complexion from her—“toasted chestnuts” my milk-pale father called it—and hoped I’d age as well as she was.

Though if the bags under my eyes were any indication, I was out of luck.

“It’s nothing to worry about.” She placed the plate of food on the table in front of me. “Just a side effect of getting old.”

I laughed out loud. “Am I hearing things, or did the fabulous Miss Davina Hardwick just say the word old ? I didn’t think it was even in your vocabulary!”

“Hush, you!” My mother gave me a light, loving slap on my shoulder. “Or the whole neighborhood will hear!”

“Hear what?” said a booming baritone behind me.

I turned to find the Colonel in the doorway, grinning and pulling his suspenders over his shoulders. Trimly built and of below average height, he nonetheless had a big presence, fashioned in part from that booming voice, but mostly from twenty-five years leading soldiers in the army. As always, he was dressed in impeccable white, right down to his patent leather shoes. His eyes were an unusual, gunmetal gray, pale and arresting against the dark canvas of his skin.

My mother laughed and waved her hand at the table. “Nothing for you to be worrying about, just girl talk. Sit yourself down and eat.”

Grinning wider, he propped his hands on his hips. “I’ve already got a belly full of sweetness from spending the night with you, woman.”

My eye roll was so loud it could probably be heard from space.

Coy as a debutante, my mother pursed her lips and batted her lashes at him. “Why you silver-tongued devil. Whatever will I do with you?”

Faster than you’d think a seventy-year-old man could move, the Colonel had crossed the room and embraced my mother. He swung her around, lifting her so her feet cleared the floor, laughing in delight when she girlishly squealed.

“I can think of one or two things!” he boomed, rattling the windows. Then he set her on her feet and gave her such a passionate kiss my cheeks went red.

“Only one or two?” she said breathlessly when the kiss was over. “I thought you had more imagination than that, tahyo!”

Tahyo is Cajun French for a big, hungry dog.

I dropped my face into my hands and groaned. “Someone please kill me. Just kill me now.”

“I told you not to talk to yourself, child, you sound like one of the hobos over on the boulevard!” Mama scolded.

Into my head popped a vivid image of Jackson Boudreaux’s shocked expression after I’d told him he looked like one of the homeless panhandlers on the boulevard. It made me feel much better.

“You look a little tired this mornin’, sugar.” Finished slobbering all over Mama, the Colonel sat down beside me at the table and eyed me with concern. “Everything all right?”

Mama said, “Says it’s a man that gave her that face, but she isn’t saying who.”

With a wink, she made another plate of food and set it in front of the Colonel. She gave us forks, and we dug in.

“I just had a late night is all,” I said around a mouthful of succulent eggs.

The Colonel drawled, “This wouldn’t have anything to do with your visit from a certain Mr. Jackson Boudreaux, would it?”

“Jackson Boudreaux!” Eyes wide, my mother whirled around and stared at me. “Good Lord in heaven, what were you doing with him? I hear that boy’s meaner than a wet panther!”

I shot a sour glance at the Colonel, who lifted a shoulder unapologetically.

He said, “Word gets around this town fast, sugar, ’specially when it has to do with the most eligible bachelor in the state gettin’ a tongue-lashin’ in public from the owner of the hottest new restaurant in the French Quarter.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Rumor has it you nearly snapped that boy’s head clean off.”

I winced at the memory. “Not my best moment, for sure. But he deserved it. I’ve never met a more asinine, self-important, son of a—”

“Keep it up and I’ll cancel your birth certificate!” my mother warned.

“—rabid crawdad in my life,” I finished, smiling.

Even at thirty-one, I wasn’t allowed to curse in her presence. Some things never changed.

The Colonel chuckled. “You didn’t think the boy got the nickname ‘the Beast’ by bein’ all rainbows and butterflies, did you?”

A beast he is, but a boy he most certainly is not. I remembered the breadth of Jackson’s shoulders, the deep rumble of his voice, that hard, burning stare. The thought of it made me squirm in my seat.

Because I hated him, not because I found him attractive. Obviously.

My cheeks burning again, I stuffed another forkful of eggs into my mouth.

“Snapped his head off?” Mama pushed her glasses up her nose, took a seat opposite me, and leaned over the table, all ears.

I told a shortened version of the events at the restaurant last night. When I was finished, she took her glasses off, tsked, and patted my hand.

“Just goes to show that money is no substitute for class, chère. The true measure of a man is how he treats those less fortunate than him, make no mistake.”

That was a reference to my late father, a Harvard-educated attorney who disappointed his wealthy parents when he decided to dedicate his life to helping minorities in the poorest communities of Louisiana instead of following in his father’s footsteps and pursuing corporate law, and then a spot on the judicial bench. His parents’ disappointment turned to outrage when he married my mother. Marrying “down” simply wasn’t done by a Hardwick, especially when “down” included brown.

My mother was the first woman of color to marry into the Hardwick family tree.

Soon after I was born, my father was cut from his parents’ wills. I’d never met my paternal grandparents, and God help them if I ever did. The tongue-lashing I gave Jackson Boudreaux would sound like a love song in comparison.

“Anyway it doesn’t matter because I’ll never see him again,” I said, finishing my food. “Now I really need to get a move on or I’ll be late for the produce shipment—”

Mama started to cough. Violent, dry, hacking coughs that racked her body and made her eyes water and her face turn scarlet.

“Mama!” I jumped to my feet and went to her. Gripping her shoulder, I was surprised by how frail the bones felt under my hand.

“I’m fine,” she rasped, waving me away. “I’m just a little dry, chère, I need a glass of—”

A second round of coughing stole her words and bent her in half at the waist.

As I started to panic, the Colonel went to her other side and gently rubbed her back. “Easy, now, Davina, just take it easy, girl,” he said softly. He glanced up and met my gaze.

I knew from his look that this coughing fit wasn’t the first she’d had today. My body went cold. What was she hiding from me?