Bayou Hero by Marilyn Pappano

All he needed now was to imagine her with her hair down, tumbling loose around her shoulders, and he’d have to put his jacket back on. It was too damn hot for that.
    “What does your father do?”
    She blinked, apparently needing a moment to remember that she’d mentioned her father’s job. “He’s retired now.”
    “What did he do before he retired?”
    She did a cute little thing with her mouth, kind of pursing it, before looking away, then finally back. “He was in the navy. He was a rear admiral.”
    Landry couldn’t say why that surprised him, maybe because people tended to remark on things they shared in common with someone else. And there had to be restrictions on how many admirals the navy had at any given time. A person didn’t run into those admirals’ grown children every day.
    But he hadn’t
run into
Alia. She was trying to find out who killed Jeremiah, whether Landry was the guilty party. Hardly the situation to say,
Hey, your father’s an admiral? Guess what? So is mine.
    “The same as Jeremiah?” he asked.
    “Not entirely. My father retired a rear admiral, lower half—a one-star admiral. Your father was upper half with two stars.”
    He smiled thinly. What were the odds that an admiral’s daughter would be considering another admiral’s son a possible murderer? “So you went through the whole navy brat experience.”
    She shrugged. “Like you, my father didn’t tolerate brattiness, but I did get to do all the moving around. The upside is I can adapt to anything. The downside is I don’t have that roots-heart-and-home attachment anywhere.”
    For years Landry had thought that kind of detachment sounded pretty damn appealing, but he never could have abandoned Mary Ellen completely or cut off contact with Miss Viola. He had to admit, he would miss New Orleans, too—the people, the music, the food, the life, the history, the strength, even the weather. And, yeah, that roots-heart-and-home thing.
    “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” Louis Armstrong had sung. Landry didn’t know personally because every time he’d gone away, he’d always come back a week or two later. More than that, he didn’t want to know. He didn’t have a whole lot in his life, thanks to Jeremiah.
    And he wasn’t about to give up anything he did have.
    She gestured to his throat. “Have I missed the new trend in neckwear?”
    He looked down, from his perspective, seeing only bits of the “scarf” Mariela had wrapped around him, and smiled. “Apparently, my seven-year-old niece is no more knowledgeable about tying ties than I am.”
    “May I?” After his nod, she caught the end of the tie, pulled it free and draped it around her own neck. “I only know how to do it when I’m wearing it. Mom has pretied Dad’s ties for him their whole marriage. I was her backup for emergencies when she was out of town.”
    He watched as her thin fingers pulled fabric here, slid it through there, tugged it back over here. The black-silver-and-red-striped pattern went with her clothes as well as his own, and there was something about a woman in a tie pulled loose, loose...
    “Here you go.” She tugged the tie over her head, stepped closer and lowered it over his head. It took her seconds to straighten, snug, slide, and then she stepped away again.
    But he still smelled her. No longer than the tie had been around her neck, no more than it had touched her bare skin, it had picked up traces of her perfume, rich and sexy and intimate.
    He hoped it stayed with him through the rest of the day.
    * * *
    By two thirty-seven that afternoon, Alia was officially pooped. First, it was about a hundred and ninety degrees outside, and the accompanying humidity hovered somewhere around “that’s impossible.” Second, even low heels that weren’t supposed to torture her feet did torture them after three hours constantly moving at the Davison home, the church and the cemetery. Third, dehydration had kicked in because she got