Ah, youth. He was getting old, and late nights showed on his face. He wanted to be just waking up, warm and happy with Lila cuddled up beside him. He would have kissed her and made love to her again, and then they would have gotten dressed and walked to Café Du Monde hand in hand. He would have driven her back, talking to her the whole time.

Damn, but he was falling in love with that woman, and that could be dangerous because she might want more than he was willing to give.

“We have to bring in an arson investigator from New Orleans. He’ll be here tomorrow afternoon, but right now the fire department boys are saying they think it was faulty wiring,” Roxie said as soon as she closed the door. “They think it started in the laundry room, and the place went up fast. Something about old newspapers.”

Lila had been planning to recycle the massive stack of papers Bill had collected but hadn’t gotten around to it. And there was no doubt the place had bad wiring. He’d seen it himself. Still, it was awfully coincidental. “I want to know where Donny Petrie was, and while we’re on it, I want to make sure Momma Petrie was out on her island last night. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“I’ll get right on it. You don’t buy what the fire chief is saying?”

“I don’t know. He’s a good man, but he’s not an arson inspector. I’ll wait until we get that report in. Until then, I want us to keep an eye on Lila.” She’d lost everything. She didn’t have clothes. He was certain her sister was already working on that problem. Lisa had shown up at the site a few minutes after they’d gotten there, throwing her arms around her sister and crying freely.

Lila wouldn’t cry. Not in public. She would wait until they were alone, and even then he would have to make love to her. When he’d stripped down all her walls, she would give in and let the tension out.

Was she planning on moving out to Guidry’s? There was an apartment over the bar. Or she could stay at Lisa and Remy’s home close to town.

He didn’t want that. Was he being a bastard by thinking about using the situation to get her to move in with him? If she did move in, would she get comfortable, maybe so comfortable she forgot the problems they had? Could he convince her to forgo the possibility of having children of her own?

Did he want to do that? The idea of Lila with a baby in her arms was a pleasant one.

The idea of loving that child, of worrying about that child, of potentially losing that child was the thing that made him hesitate.