Free Honest illusions(BookZZ.org) by Nora [Roberts Nora] Roberts Page A

into the opening as easily as a hand into a glove. As the truck backed in behind it, Mouse glanced over at Luke. And winked.
    It was a fine thing. For some reason the parking of the truck and trailer struck Luke as an event as fine as Christmas, or the opening day of a new baseball season. His own laughter rocked him back on his heels while he stood blinded by the headlights.
    “Man, you are number one,” Luke shouted as Mouse climbed out of the truck. Then he whirled like a boxer at the ready when a light flashed on in the house beside them. “Who’s that?” he demanded of Mouse as he spotted a figure in the doorway.
    “LeClerc.” Jiggling the keys in his pocket, Mouse moved forward to shut the iron gates to the courtyard.
    “So, you’ve returned.” LeClerc stepped down, and in the backwash of light Luke saw a small man with gray hair and a full beard. He wore a snowy white athletic T-shirt and baggy gray trousers held up with a hunk of rope. His voice was touched with a slight accent, not the fluid drawl of Max’s, but something sharper that seemed to add syllables to words. “And you’re hungry, yes?”
    “Didn’t stop to eat,” Mouse called out.
    “Good you didn’t.” LeClerc came forward, his gait stiff and uneven. Luke saw that he was old, older
    than Max by a decade or more. The boy’s impression was of an ancient face, a tattered leather map scored with hundreds of deeply traveled roads. The brown eyes were wide-set and shrewd under wiry brows.
    LeClerc saw a slim young boy with a beautiful face dominated by wary eyes. A boy who was poised on the balls of his feet as if to run, or to fight.
    “And who would this be?”
    “This is Luke,” Max said as he stepped out of the trailer with a dozing Roxanne in his arms. “He’s with us now.”
    Something passed between the two men that seemed all the more intimate with being left unsaid.
    “Another one, eh?” LeClerc’s lips curved briefly around the stem of the pipe he kept clenched permanently between his teeth. “We’ll see. And how is my bébé?”
    Heavy-eyed, Roxanne held out her arms and was gathered up to LeClerc. She settled against the bone and sinew as though he were a feather pillow. “Can I have a beignet?”
    “I make just for you, don’t I?” LeClerc pulled the pipe out of his mouth to kiss her cheek. “You are better, oui?”
    “I had the chicken pox forever. I’m never, never getting sick again.”
    “I make you a gris-gris for good health.” He settled her comfortably on his hip as Lily stepped out. She carried a heavy makeup bag over one arm of her flowing negligee. “Ah, Mademoiselle Lily.” LeClerc managed to bow despite the child on his hip. “More beautiful than ever.”
    She giggled and held out a hand for him to kiss, which he did with smooth aplomb. “It’s good to be home, Jean.”
    “Come in, come in. Enjoy the midnight supper I make for you.”
    At the mention of dinner, Max stepped over from the trailer and greeted LeClerc as he led the way across the courtyard, where roses and lilies and begonias bloomed in profusion, up a short flight of steps and through a door that opened into the kitchen. There a light was burning to shine on the polished surfaces of white tile and dark wood.
    There was a small hearth of bricks that had been smoked from red to a comfortable rose gray. Atop it stood a plastic glow-in-the-dark statue of the Blessed Virgin, and what looked like an Indian rattle dressed with beads and feathers.
    Though it was too miraculously cool inside for Luke to believe the bricked oven had been used, he would have sworn he caught the tantalizing odor of bread just baked.
    Dried bouquets of spices and herbs hung from the ceiling, along with dangling ropes of onion and garlic.
    Gleaming copper pots were suspended from iron hooks above the stove. Another pot, with steam puffing out, sat on the back burner. Whatever was simmering inside smelled like paradise.
    A long butcher-block table had already