"You want a Popsicle, 'tite chatte?"

"You're messing with the wrong man, Boudreaux," Baldwin said, his voice trembling with rage and humiliation. "You don't want to tangle with me."

Jack flicked a glance at him, looking supremely bored with the whole scene. "That's right, preacher. I don' want to tangle with you. I got better things to do with my time than scrape you off the bottom of my shoe, so mebbe you oughta just stay the hell outta my sight."

Jimmy Lee shook his head, a strange look of amazement dawning on his face. "You don't know who you're dealing with," he muttered, then turned on the heel of his wingtip and stalked off toward his car.

Laurel watched him walk away, then turned toward Jack, stepping up onto the gallery. He stared down into the freezer as cold billowed up out of it in a cloud.

"For someone who claims not to be anybody's hero, you seem to spend an awful lot of time coming to my rescue," she said.

"Mais non," Jack mumbled, reaching in for a Fudgsicle. "Me, I was just having a little fun with Jimmy Lee while my carburetor gets looked at."

He didn't want her reading anything into his actions, he told himself. But the truth was that he didn't want to look at those actions too closely himself. He didn't want to dig too deep for the reason behind the rush of anger he'd felt when Baldwin had put his hand on her. He didn't own her, would never have any claim on her, and therefore had no business feeling jealous or overprotective.

Conditioned response. That was what it was. How many times had he rushed at Blackie when the old man reached out and put a hand on Maman or Marie? Countless times. They had called him their hero, too. But he hadn't been anything but a kid full of rage and hate. Small and weak and worthless, and Blackie had shaken him off more times than not. He wasn't small or weak anymore. The feeling of slamming Baldwin up against the building had sent a rush of adrenaline and power through him that was still buzzing in his veins.

He glanced at Laurel as he unwrapped his treat, trying to defuse her concentration with a teasing smile. "Besides, I didn't want you to pull your gun out and shoot him. Day's too hot to have a corpse laying around out in the sun." She made a disgusted face, and he chuckled to himself. "Popsicle or Fudgsicle, angel? What do you think?"

Laurel narrowed her eyes as he blatantly dismissed her line of questioning. "I think you ought to make up your mind, Jack," she said. "Are you a good guy or a bad guy?"

"That all depends on what you want me for, darlin'," he murmured, his voice rough and smooth at once, beckoning a woman to reach out and touch him.

Laurel 's heart beat a little harder; nerve endings he had awakened and tantalized the night before stirred restlessly. She frowned at him. "I don't want you for anything."

Jack leaned across the open freezer. "It's a good thing you're not under oath, counselor," he whispered.

"Close the freezer, Boudreaux," she said sarcastically, "before your hot air melts all the Popsicles."

She went into the station and paid for her gas, spending a few moments chatting with Mrs. Meyette, who asked after Aunt Caroline and Mama Pearl, told her she was too thin, and made her take half a dozen sticks of boudin with her. When she came out, Jack was nowhere in sight.

She staunchly refused to acknowledge the disappointment that slid down through her. She had better things to do with her time than spar with him, and she had to assume he had better things to do, as well. He was supposed to be some hot-shot best-selling author, but he never seemed to work. It seemed to her he was always at Frenchie's or giving her a hard time. And it took no imagination at all to picture him spending the rest of his time sprawled in a hammock asleep with that awful hound sacked out right beneath him.

Trying like a demon not to picture him at all, she drove home and changed out of her slacks into a cool gauzy blue skirt and a loose-fitting pale blue cotton tank. The house was silent, the shades drawn. Mama Pearl had left a note on the hall table: Gone to card club. Red beans and rice in the pot. Eat, you! Monday. Wash day. Red beans and rice for supper. Laurel smiled at the comfort of tradition.

There was no sign of Savannah. Laurel wasn't sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. She didn't like the memories from their morning's argument lingering in her mind like acrid smoke, but she didn't know how they would clear the air, either. They had both said things that would have been better left unsaid. They couldn't go back and change their childhoods. Laurel wanted to leave it all in the past, to start fresh, but Savannah dragged her past around with her like an enormous, overloaded suitcase.

And so do you, Baby. She could almost hear her sister's voice, angry, accusatory.

"What the hell have you been doing with your whole damn life?"

Looking for justice.

There was a difference, she insisted. She was an attorney; that was her job. She wasn't trying to change the past. She wasn't trying to atone for anything.

The word "liar" drifted through her mind, and she slammed down on it before it had the chance to do more than rattle her nerves. She had to go out and take care of some business. No doubt by the time she got home, Savannah would be here, begging forgiveness for the nasty things she'd said, promising she hadn't meant any of them. That was the way their fights usually ran. That was the way Savannah 's temper ran-hot and cold, from emotional conflagration to contrition in a flash. She was probably off somewhere right now thinking about coming home to red beans and rice and a side order of apologies.

Savannah stared out at the heat. It seemed so thick, so oppressive, she thought she could see it hanging in the air above the bayou, pressing down on everything. It permeated the cabin, seeping in through the screens, soaking into everything, bringing with it the wild, feral scent of the swamp.

She brushed at the stray tendrils of hair that had escaped her topknot and shifted restlessly from one bare foot to the other. Sweat coated her skin like a fine mist, despite the fact that she wore nothing but a pair of ragged cutoff jeans and a black bandeau bikini top with a sheer white blouse hanging open over it.

The quiet was getting to her. She had promised Coop she wouldn't disturb him, but the day had come to a complete standstill. Even the birds had fallen silent beneath the blanket of heat. The sense of expectation that was so much a part of the swamp had thickened until everything waited, breath held, for something unknown, unseen.

The two-room cabin squatted on stilts above the murky green water. From Savannah's vantage point, no solid land was visible, only bald cypress, their thick hard trunks thrusting up from the water, scruffy, stubby branches sticking out like deformities, knobby knees jutting out at the bases. They looked like tortured creatures that had been cast under an enchantment and petrified so that they resembled death. Floating on the surface around their trunks were sheets of delicate green duckweed and rafts of water hyacinth, shimmering violet and looking deceptively fragile beneath the brutal sun. Lily pads lay scattered like an array of deep green Frisbees tossed randomly across the bayou.

She could see a partially submerged log lying at the edge of a thicket of cattails and knew it could well be an alligator. Not far to the south, the jagged stump of a dead cypress had become home to a nest of herons, and the pair posed there, motionless, looking like a woodcarver's exquisite craftings, their long necks arched and tucked, black beaks as straight and slender as fencing foils.

The birds' stillness irritated Savannah. She wanted them to squawk and fly away, huge wings beating the air. She wanted the gator to lunge for one of the fish that dimpled the surface of the water as they rose unseen to catch insects. She wanted the air to stir, wanted to see the reeds sway. Most of all she wanted Coop to move.

He sat at a rough plank table that was pushed up against one screened wall, staring out, making notes from time to time, nearly as motionless as the surroundings. He had bought the cabin as a fish camp, but he never fished when he met her here. He mostly stared. "Absorbing the profound intensity of life in the swamp," he'd explained once. He would sit there for hours, seemingly doing nothing, then he would come to her and they would make love on the old moss-stuffed mattress.

This was their secret hideaway; an idea that usually appealed to Savannah. She liked going out on the bayou in her old flat-bottomed aluminum boat, not saying anything to anybody, winding her way into the dense, lush wilderness to meet her lover. But today something about the arrangement grated on her. She blamed it on the fight she'd had with Laurel.

"Why do you have to do that? Why do you have to degrade yourself that way?"

She jerked around and burned a hole in Cooper's broad back with her glare. "Haven't you stared out that screen long enough?"

Coop sat back, wincing a little at the stiffness that had settled in his joints. He scratched a hand back through his blond hair like a man just waking from a long, deep sleep, and looked at Savannah over his shoulder. He was struck as always by her raw sexuality and by the soft, stunning natural beauty she had seen fit to make slightly grotesque with collagen and silicone. She was so alluring, so flawed, she never failed to captivate him utterly.

He longed to turn and jot those thoughts down in his notebook, but he refrained. Savannah 's mood seemed as volatile as the weather-a tense stillness that hid a building storm. Instead, he put down his pen, rose and stretched.

"I don't mean to ignore you, love," he mumbled in his low, smooth voice. "But I have to get my notes made. I'm doing an APR broadcast from N'Awlins next weekend."

Savannah 's eyes lit up like a child's. "You'll take me with you?"

It was more a statement than a question. Coop doubted she even heard him when he said, "We'll see." She was already racing ahead, making plans for them to meet in one of the cottages of the Maison de Ville, chattering about dinner in her favorite restaurants, the shopping she would do, the clubs they might visit.

Of course, he wouldn't take her. While he loved her, he knew that love must be contained within very definite boundaries. If he allowed it to escape the small pen of Bayou Breaux, it would run wild and in its delirium destroy itself and them. Like a fine wine, it was something to be sipped and savored. Savannah would drink it all in greedy, sloppy gulps, spilling it down her, splashing it all over, laughing madly.