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undertone. “What the hell have you done to me? That love potion you invented is driving me up the wall.”
    “Shhh.” She put a hand of caution on his arm. Even though they were several feet away from Matt and Blanche, she worried that they might be overheard. “What are you doing here? You promised to stay away.”
    He shrugged her hand off angrily. “I went deep into the bayou, just like I promised, and the only thing I could think about was you.”
    “Did Luc say that Sylvie has invented a love potion?” she heard Matt ask Blanche. “I wonder if she got her ideas from that voodoo journal?”
    Oh, Lord! The man must have a reporter’s sixth sense, or else he could read lips.
    Luc noticed and deliberately turned his back on them. He whispered raspily, “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t even fish. All I do is daydream about a woman I loathe.”
    Loathe? Sylvie cringed.
    “ Dieu , you have me picturing you in some hokey Acadian house on stilts, along a stream, with a white picket fence and a horde of grimy-faced kids with blue eyes and heart-shaped asses. But that’s not all. I—”
    “I am not flattered by that heart-shaped business, you know.”
    “I picture you in my boat, in a thong bikini. Red. Made of some lacy material. And you know what the best thing is about lace, don’t you, chère? All the holes.”
    Sylvie inhaled sharply. “I have never worn a thong bikini in my life. In fact, I don’t even own a bikini.”
    “Worst of all, I picture you in my bed…oh, Lord, do I picture you in my bed! Hot damn, I didn’t even know they could do that with licorice whips.”
    Licorice whips?
    “Then there were those black fishnet stockings. Man, I about had a heart attack.”
    Oh, my God! Sylvie thought her face would burst aflame. Even if she weren’t chronically shy, that last remark would be embarrassing. Lucien LeDeux made a habit of not only crossing the linebetween good taste and crudity, but pole-vaulting over it with great glee…at least, he did when around her. “You are making this all up,” she accused him huffily, and punched him in the chest.
    “Am not,” he asserted, making a cross over his heart with a forefinger. “Really, can a man die of a perpetual hard-on? And mushy emotions are banging against the walls of my brain like ping-pong balls, and each of them has your picture on it, sweet cakes.” He took a glass of Scotch off the tray of a passing waiter and belted it down in one long swallow, then let out a whoosh of exasperation.
    Forget about Luc dying of…that thing he’d said; Sylvie was the one who felt like dying…of mortification. It wasn’t that Luc was speaking loudly. Far from it. His words came out in more of a low growl.
    “Give me an antidote. Right now,” Luc demanded.
    “There is no antidote.”
    He appeared taken aback by that news. “Well, then, you’d better be prepared to spend the next week or so on your back, sweetheart.”
    He couldn’t mean what she thought he meant.
    “And another thing…did you start on the pollution tests I asked you to do? Shrimp are dying as I speak. Am I going through this torture for nothing?”
    “Shhh,” Sylvie warned once again. Matt had taken out a small notebook and was engaged in some serious scribbling, the whole time inclining his head toward Blanche, who was babbling away. “I did some of the preliminary tests, you jerk,” shegritted out. “And the results were just as you expected. Worse, even. Wait till you see the components in that sample. You may be able to make a direct connection with Cypress Oil. I’ll mail them to you in the morning.”
    “Mail? Mail?” he sputtered.
    “Hold the bloody presses!” Matt came up and hooted at Luc, as if suddenly enlightened. “I just made the connection between you and Sylvie…a lawyer and a chemist. Don’t tell me you’re representing that bunch of ragtag fishermen that are trying to fight Cypress Oil? ‘The Swamp Solicitor’ and the shrimpies? Man, you