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shrugged. “It’s a Louisiana thing. You’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”
    “Yeah?” he challenged. “Or is it a ‘he’s-my-customer’ thing. Did he watch you strip tonight?”
    She swallowed. “I asked all the local enforcement to come, including the sheriff. Keeps down the possibility of rowdies getting out of control and trashing the club.”
    Luc gripped the wheel tighter as he peeled out of the parking lot. “So that’s a yes.”
    Fighting the urge to hit something in an unusual show of temper, he took a deep breath. The night he’d spent with her, it had been easy to pretend she had no other lover. They’d been alone, her house quiet. No phone ringing, no customers nearby, no psychos leaving menacing “gifts” in her car. Just the two of them, and hours upon hours of pleasure. God, he’d been so damn gullible.
    She nodded. “Why does it matter if Remy and the boys were there?”
    The short answer was that it shouldn’t.
    “If you should be worried about anything,” she went on, “it’s your hotel room. At nearly four in the morning, Homer has likely given your room away to one of those tourists come around for the arts festival that starts tomorrow.”
    He frowned. After everything that had happened tonight, she was worried about him? “I guaranteed that room with a credit card.”
    A Mona Lisa smile played at the corner of her mouth. That quickly, she made his dick hard again. Damn, how did the woman do it?
    “Doesn’t mean a damn thing to him. I’m sure when you didn’t show up after the club closed, he figured your room was fair game. But if you don’t believe me, call him.” She punched a few buttons on the phone and handed it to him.
    “You have the motel owner on speed dial?” He could think of only one reason why, and it horrified him. Did she turn tricks?
    Hell, he was going to throw up.
    “Out-of-town customers often need to sleep off their alcohol. Homer usually helps me out.”
    Luc liked her explanation much better. But still, he wondered. Didn’t a lot of strippers earn extra cash on the side?
    As the phone rang in his ear, Luc turned to Alyssa. Her face was golden under the streetlights shining through the windows as he raced down the quaint redbrick street, toward a neighborhood of older, still elegant homes. Odd that he remembered exactly how to find her house, despite the fact he’d been here just once. The image of the little craftsman with the Zen interior was burned into his brain.
    Homer answered a moment later, muttering his words. Clearly, he’d been asleep and sounded none too happy about being awakened.
    “This is Luc Traverson calling to advise that I’ll arrive in a few minutes to check in. You still have my room?”
    The man on the other end cleared his throat. “Well, when you didn’t show, I thought . . .”
    Luc waited, his temper rising again, for the motel’s owner to finish that thought. “Thought what? You’d give my room away?”
    “I waited until two thirty. You said you’d be here before midnight. Some road-weary folks came in with little ones and—”
    “Do you have another room?” He closed his eyes and pressed the phone to his ear.
    “Booked up. First time in a while, but this festival always brings ’em in. Some great zydeco bands playin’ this year.”
    Luc resisted the urge to count to ten. “And tomorrow night?”
    “Don’t have a free room until Tuesday. Got a couple of those lousy chain hotels a few miles down the road . . .” Homer said with obvious distaste. “Bet they’re booked up, too. ’Sides, I wouldn’t let my dog sleep there. They don’t clean nothin’. ”
    His head was going to explode. Luc was accustomed to traveling to cosmopolitan cities. He stayed at Hotel de Crillon when he traveled to Paris, the Dorchester in London, the Peninsula in Tokyo, the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles. The fact he’d been stiffed on a room at Homer’s Cajun Haven at four in the morning crawled on his last