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peace, and her husband’s torment was over. His friends expected him to grieve but at the same time feel relief that his wife wasn’t suffering any longer. He had loved the woman with all his heart, hadn’t he?
    Despite others urging him to take some time off, the widower went back to work the day after the funeral. He insisted he needed to keep busy in order to take his mind off his anguish.
    It was a bright, blue, cloudless day as he drove down St. Charles toward his office. The sun warmed his shoulders. The scent of honeysuckle hung heavily in the humid air. His favorite Mellencamp CD,
Hurts So Good,
blared through the speakers.
    He pulled into his usual spot in the parking garage and took the elevator up to his suite of offices. When he opened the door bearing his name, his secretary hurried forward to offer her heartfelt condolences. He remarked to her that his wife would have loved such a glorious summer day, and she later told the others in the office that there had been tears in his eyes when he’d said Catherine’s name.
    As the days passed, he appeared to be battling his depression. During most of his hours at work he seemed withdrawn and distant, going through his routine as if in a daze. Other times, he seemed shockingly cheerful. His erratic behavior was a concern to his staff, but they dismissed it as the understandable remnants of his grief. The best thing they could give him now was space. John was not one to discuss his feelings, and they all knew what a private person he was.
    What they didn’t know was that John was also quite the busy boy.
    Within a couple of weeks after “the event,” he had thrown out every painful reminder of his wife, including the Italian Renaissance furniture she had so loved. He dismissed her loyal servants and hired a housekeeper who hadn’t known Catherine. He had the two-story house painted from top to bottom in bright, bold colors, and he had the garden re-landscaped. He added the fountain he’d wanted, the one with the cherub spouting water out of its mouth. He’d wanted the fountain for months, but when he’d shown Catherine a picture of it in a catalog, she had decreed it too gaudy.
    Everything was finished to his satisfaction. He’d chosen contemporary furniture because of the sleek, uncluttered lines. When it was delivered from the warehouse where he’d been storing it, the placement of each piece was personally overseen by the interior designer.
    Then, when the last delivery truck had pulled away from the driveway, he and the oh-so-clever, beautiful young designer christened the new bed. They screwed the night away in the black-lacquered four-poster — just like he’d been promising her for over a year now.

CHAPTER TWO
    T heo Buchanan couldn’t seem to shake the virus. He knew he was running a fever because every bone in his body ached and he had chills. He refused to acknowledge that he was ill, though; he was just a little off-kilter, that was all. He could tough it out. Besides, he was sure he was over the worst of it. The godawful stitch in his side had subsided into a dull throbbing, and he was positive that meant he was on the mend. If it was the same bug that had infected most of the staff back in his Boston office, then it was one of those twenty-four-hour things, and he should be feeling as good as new by tomorrow morning. Except, the throbbing in his side had been going on for a couple of days now.
    He decided to blame his brother Dylan for that ache. He’d really nailed him when they’d played football at a family gathering in the front yard at Nathan’s Bay. Yeah, the pulled muscle was Dylan’s fault, but Theo figured that if he continued to ignore it, the pain would eventually go away.
    Damn, he was feeling like an old man these days, and he wasn’t even thirty-three yet.
    He didn’t think he was contagious, and he had too much to do to go to bed and sweat the fever out of his body. He’d flown from Boston to New Orleans to speak at a