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you like a warm blanket on a chilly night. “To me, that’s sad. What kind of life is that?”
    “Depends on who’s living it. I happen to think my life is perfect the way it is.” He went back to his soup.
    She glanced at his left hand. No wedding ring. She shouldn’t be surprised, given what he’d just told her, but she was. Paul was tanned, fit and seemed to be a happy, successful man, the kind any woman inher right mind would want. Yet when Marjo looked in his blue eyes, she got a feeling—those same feelings her granny Lulu used to get about storms on the way—that Paul Clermont’s life was not as perfect as he painted it. “Why don’t you come out and take pictures of the opera house?”
    “I already took a couple, in case I need them for the Realtor or maybe a piece down the road. I don’t see the need for any more photos.”
    “If you see the inside, the amazing construction of those nineteenth-century craftsmen, I’m sure you’d think differently. I don’t know anything about photography, but I know something about you, about your work. It’s damned good.” She clasped her hands together once again, before she went overboard. “I saw that series you did on the tribe in New Zealand. The Maori tribe who’d never seen an outsider before? Their culture was dying, because the very seclusion they sought had become a double-edged sword. You captured their story, but not in the captions. It was the pictures of their faces, their homes. And I have to admit, you did it really well.”
    He sat back, surprised. “You looked up my work?”
    “Even out here in the sticks, we get Internet access. And some of us actually know how to use Google.”
    He grinned. “I’m flattered you looked my work up, and even more flattered that you liked it.”
    “Then please do this one thing,” she said, slidingher bowl to the side and reaching briefly for his hand. When she touched him, once again the contact ignited something inside her. She’d meant only to emphasize her point, but clearly something more than that had happened here.
    “What?” he prompted.
    She pulled her hand back. “Look at the Indigo Opera House as an assignment. As a way to capture someone’s story. Maybe you could even get that magazine of yours to run a piece on it. That way, we all win.”
    “How do you see that?”
    “I get the publicity I need to fund the rest of the restoration, as well as spread the message about the importance of preserving our Cajun heritage. And you’ll undoubtedly end up with dozens of offers from rich philanthropists in New York or Hollywood who will invest in the property as a conversation piece.” She had to choke out those last few words, but surely anyone who saw the opera house would love it as much as she did.
    “I’ll think about it,” he conceded. “You’ve whet my appetite with the story of the bed-and-breakfast. Not enough to make me want to own a piece of Indigo, but enough that I want to see the rest of the opera house through my lens.” Paul considered her words, his body still. “But only if you tell me one thing.”
    “What?”
    “What’s in it for you?” He leaned forward, andhis piercing blue eyes seemed to zero in on her, slipping past her defenses. “Because there’s more to this for you than just fixing up some old building and making people remember a way of Cajun living that is disappearing faster than fog on a sunny day.”
    “I don’t want anything more than that.”
    “As you say down here, that’s a load of toad crap.”
    She laughed. “We say it a little less pretty than that.”
    “I’m with a lady,” Paul said, tossing her one of those grins that he seemed to have in abundance. “A lady who has a secret. And until I find out what your story is, Marjolaine Savoy—”
    The sound of her name slipping from his lips in that deep, intent tone made her heart skip a beat.
    “—I’m not making any promises.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    T HE NEXT MORNING Paul stood by the