Free Marisa Carroll - Hotel Marchand 09 by Her Summer Lover Page A

when she was excited about something that it made his throat ache. It hadn’t been all bad times between them, and when he saw Dana like this, he remembered the good stuff, at least for a little while. “Can I go, Daddy, please?”
    He hated always being the bad guy, but that’s what happened when you had children with a woman who never wanted to grow up. While she ran off to follow her own selfish dreams, he got stuck with all the tough jobs. “We’ll see,” he said, not able to dash all her hopes. “But—”
    “I know,” she said, sounding suddenly much older than her seven years. “But Momma might change her mind.”
    “Yes, she might.” He got himself back in hand and played the heavy. “And I don’t like the idea of you missing school. You only have a two-day vacation. It’s a long way to Florida.”
    “Maybe we can go when school’s out,” she said hopefully, but without much conviction. Even at seven she’d learned not to count on anything her mother planned.
    She was tired and he didn’t want a bout of tears at bedtime. “We’ll talk about it some more after I get a chance to discuss it with your mom, okay?” He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She locked her arms around his neck and kissed him back.
    “Okay. I love you, Daddy,” she whispered in French, then turned over on her side and curled into a ball under the covers.
    “I love you, too, petite .” He amended his earlier bitter reflection as he inhaled the scent of strawberry shampoo and warm, sweet, little-girl skin. You might get all the tough jobs being a single parent, but you also get all the hugs and baby kisses and I love yous, too. He stood up and walked to the window, looking out over the village he’d called home for nearly all his life. The place he’d chosen to raise his children.
    Indigo was a pretty little town, not much crime, not much of a tax base, either. But enough to keep up the infrastructure and lure a few yuppies, tired of city life, to buy, build and rehab the old shotgun houses around the town square, and even a couple of the big Victorian white elephants on either side of his mother’s twenties-era, Craftsman-style two-story. Still, he’d be lying if he said it was the center of the universe. That is, anyone else’s universe other than his own.
    He liked being Chief of Police. He liked looking after his neighbors and friends, their parents and grandparents, kith and kin. He liked being able to drive his kids to school and pick them up at night, even if he did never really go off duty. More often than not he’d have to head out for traffic accidents and domestic disputes at all hours of the day and night. That was a cop’s job, after all, and he was a cop, through to his bones. Had been ever since the army had made him an MP and he’d found his calling in life.
    It hadn’t always been that way. Once, a long time ago, he’d had other dreams—getting out of Indigo, heading to the big city, making a name for himself as a bass guitarist in Memphis or even L.A. But such grandiose plans hadn’t lasted long after his dad died.
    He’d grown up fast that summer he was nineteen, figured out that he wasn’t going anywhere as long as his mom and two younger sisters needed him. But he’d been wrong there, too. Cecily was as determined as he was that he make something of himself. What they differed on was what that something would be. Alain smiled and turned from the window to gaze at his daughter once more.
    Dana was sound asleep. He tucked the covers under her chin and tiptoed out of the room, shutting the door behind him. He went next door to his own room, smaller but with a view out over the backyard where he could glimpse the bayou on clear days. He hadn’t been the greatest student in the world. Hell, you didn’t have to be when you were going to take the music world by storm, so there weren’t any scholarships for him the summer he graduated from high school. But Cecily was determined he