The dining table’s length hindered conversation with anyone other than those immediately surrounding him. With Anne on his left, Forbes on his right, and Meredith, Jason, and Rafe across the table, George found Sunday dinner not much different than the Thursday night suppers he’d attended. And the food… He stopped at two servings of roast beef and mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans, corn, and what Anne said were collard greens. He did take a third yeast roll, however, and followed Forbes’s example of dipping the bread into the gravy that remained on his plate.

Forbes laughed and took the fork out of George’s hand, then put a piece of roll directly between his fingers. “You can’t sop like a Southerner if you’re using your fork and knife.”

George glanced around the table and did see he was the only one not using his hands. “This is called what again?”

On his left, Anne laughed. The sound sent tingles up his spine. “Soppin’. You’re soppin’ up the gravy with your roll.” Her eyes twinkled at him.

“And this is appropriate dinner-table behavior?”

“It is in this family.” Across the table, Meredith held up a piece of roll between her fingers. “You might not want to do it at the Ritz in New York, but you’ll find pert-near everyone in Bonneterre won’t fault you none for soppin’ up your vittles.”

“I’m flabbergasted as to what you just said, but”—he took the piece of roll and sopped up some of the gravy on his plate—“I’ll take your word for it.”

When everyone finished eating, the women, including Anne, rose and cleared the plates from the table. When George started to push his chair back and offer to help, Anne stopped him with the gentle pressure of her hand on his shoulder. “It’s family tradition,” she whispered in his ear. “The women clear the table and bring dessert. The men do the dishes afterward.”

As soon as the women were out of the room, Anne’s grandfather, Bonaventure Guidry, an imposing, tall man, spread his arms to rest his palms on the corners of the table. “Well now, Mr. Laurence, what are your intentions toward our Anne?”

George sputtered to keep from spitting out the water he’d just sipped. He swallowed and wiped his mouth with the blue fabric napkin. “Sir?” He glanced around the table. Without exception, Anne’s male relatives stared at him, awaiting an answer to the preposterous question. “My intentions…” He cleared his throat. “My intentions toward Miss Hawthorne are honorable, I assure you, Mr. Guidry.”

Beside him, Forbes burst into laughter, and the rest followed suit. “They’re just giving you a hard time. Means they like you.”

Not sure he understood, George nodded and smiled. He was saved from any further embarrassment by the reappearance of the women. He started to stand, but Forbes stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “They’re going to serve dessert, so you’ll just be in the way if you do that.”

“I see.” He edged his chair closer to the table.

Maggie directed the presentation of the desserts on the sideboard. A white cake with strawberries on top became the centerpiece, surrounded by pies, dishes of petits fours, and other confectionaries.

“Coffee?” Anne leaned over his right shoulder with a carafe and a cup.

“You know me.” He winked at her.

She set down the cup and poured. “This is the real thing—genuine Louisiana coffee with chicory. Dark roast.” Her voice held a hint of warning.

He sipped the dark, rich, bitter liquid. “My favorite. Although I haven’t had it quite this strong anywhere else.”

“That’s the way Aunt Maggie likes to make it.” She squeezed his shoulder and moved on to serve coffee down the table.

Meredith placed a square plate in front of him with a sampling of each of the desserts, arranged on the plate as he would expect to see in a fine restaurant. Maggie did this for a living. Anne had suggested her aunt to make Courtney’s wedding cake. If what he’d seen today was what she did for a regular family gathering, he’d love to see what she could do for a reception for seven hundred guests with no holds barred on the price.

He stood and held Anne’s chair for her. “Everything looks wonderful. I’m not even certain what all of it is.”

Anne picked up her dessert fork and used it as a pointer. “White amaretto cake with strawberries and raspberry filling. Banana pudding. Chocolate petits fours—some have a berry filling, some are vanilla crème, and some are mint—I’m not sure which kind you got. Lemonade icebox pie. We don’t usually have this many desserts. Aunt Maggie catered the Junior League tea yesterday afternoon and had all this left over.”

“Annie, did Madeline catch you at church this morning?” one of her aunts asked as she leaned between them to refresh their coffee.

“Yes. I figured you were one of the key people who put her up to asking me to speak.”

Forbes handed George the cream to give to Anne before she had to ask for it. She answered her relatives’ questions about the invitation to speak at the Bonneterre Women in Business luncheon but fidgeted as if uncomfortable with the focus of attention on herself. As soon as the discussion turned to something else, she stopped twisting her napkin in her lap, sipped her coffee, and nibbled at her desserts.

* * *

Anne smiled at George when he brought the carafe of coffee over to refill her cup before following the rest of the men into the kitchen to help clean up. As soon as the kitchen door stopped swinging, her aunts and cousins exclaimed over him—his sweetness, good looks, charm, impeccable manners, and especially his British accent.

“Is it serious?” Aunt Maggie’s question brought everyone else to attention.

Anne shrugged. “Not really. Less than a week ago, I thought he was marrying someone else.”

Meredith leaned forward. “But could it be serious?” Her expression told Anne what answer she wanted to hear.

“I’m really not sure. I haven’t even known him for a month. I know y’all want me to find someone and settle down, but give us some time, please.” She smiled at the women staring at her to soften her words. “I promise you’ll be the first to know if it turns serious.”

Each of the younger single women was then given the opportunity to be the center of the aunts’ appetite for romance. When the masculine voices and laughter in the kitchen grew louder than the clank of dishes being washed, the women’s conference ended. Anne took the opportunity to slip off to the powder room.

On her way back, one of her younger cousins waylaid her at the entrance to the sunroom and pulled her back into the now-empty kitchen.

“What’s up, Marci?” Anne reached over and pushed a lock of the twenty-four-year-old’s honey-streaked red hair back from her face. She knew the young woman was struggling to get her parents and even Jenn, Mere, and Forbes to recognize her as an adult. But there was a lack of maturity in the way she acted around her family, compounded by the fact that she still hadn’t chosen a college major after five years, that kept her a perpetual child in their eyes.

“Annie, you’re the only person in the family who’ll tell me the truth.”

“Of course I will. What do you want to know?”

“Earlier, when I asked about Cliff Ballantine, I know Forbes was lying to me about not knowing him. Did y’all know him in high school?”

Anne’s stomach twisted. She didn’t want to lie to her cousin, but she also didn’t want the story to get beyond the family. She crossed her arms and leaned against the edge of the island. “If I tell you, you have to promise me it goes no further. There’s a reason why he’s not discussed by anyone, and that’s because of me. I’ve asked everyone in the family to keep my secret, which has become harder as he’s gotten more famous.” She took a deep breath. “Yes, we knew Cliff in high school. I tutored him in English and helped him write several papers.”

“Even though you’re two years younger than him?”

Anne harrumphed. “He was only a year ahead of me in school, but I was in advanced placement classes. He wasn’t. When he started college, I kept helping him. You have to understand—I was very shy as a child and had very low self-esteem from all the teasing I got because I hit a growth spurt and was nearly six feet tall by the time I was thirteen. I never had a boy show the kind of attention to me that he did just for doing something I was good at. When I got to college, though, I wasn’t just helping him with English—it was all his classes: history, anthropology, even his drama classes. When I told him I didn’t have time to continue, he really turned on the charm. We started ‘dating.’ ” She made quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “I’ll spare you all the gory details. But when Cliff moved out to Hollywood my first year of graduate school, I sent him money every month to help him make ends meet. It got to the point where I was getting every credit card I could and maxing it out with cash advances just to have money to send to him. When the loan company threatened to repossess my car, I told him I couldn’t afford to send him any more money. That was when he suggested we get married. I was naive and wanted to be married, especially to someone as handsome and talented as he, so I agreed. I quit grad school and went to work full-time as the event planner for B-G.”

“The job Meredith has now?”

“Yes. I started planning my wedding. It was going to be small, just our families. We couldn’t afford much, and I didn’t want to ask Uncle Errol and Aunt Maggie for money because they’d already helped me out by giving me a loan to pay off all of my past-due bills and letting me move back in so that I could use my rent money to pay them back. Half of each paycheck went to them, half to Cliff in California. We set a date. I reserved the chapel, the reception hall, worked out the menu with Maggie, and had a gown on layaway at Drace’s.”