Lucky’s Lady

CHAPTER 9

LUCKY DROPPED HER OFF AT HIS HOUSE, TELLING her he would be back in an hour to pick her up and return her to Chanson du Terre. Serena watched him pole away, then let herself inside. It was silent and cool. One of the baby raccoons peered in the back door at her, its long front paws pressed to the screen. When Serena moved toward it, the coon whinnied and scampered away, its claws clattering on the wooden floor of the gallery, making the exact sound that had scared her witless the night before.

She set her suitcases by the front door, then raided Lucky's small refrigerator and made herself a ham sandwich, taking great care to make certain the kitchen was as spotless when she was finished as it had been to begin with. When that small task was accomplished, she still had forty minutes to wait.

Her mind turned to the question of what she would find awaiting her at Chanson du Terre. It all seemed so unlikely. Mason running for office. Shelby plotting against Giff. The plantation's existence threatened.

Bulldozers, Lucky had said. Tristar would raze the place to make room for labs, offices, manufacturing facilities, warehouses. The possibility, as remote as it was, hit Serena in a tender spot. That old house had borne silent witness to a lot of history. It had seen the last days of French rule in Louisiana, the golden era before the war. Yankees had camped on the lawn, and the staircase still bore the marks where a drunken officer had ridden his horse up it. It had survived the Reconstruction and the Great Depression. Had it survived all that only to fall victim to greed?

No. Of course not. The current situation would be cleared up and life would go on at Chanson du Terre with Gifford ruling the roost as he had for nearly sixty years.

And when Gifford was gone and Shelby was off in Baton Rouge and Serena was back in Charleston… what then?

«Oh, no, you don't,» Serena muttered, pushing herself up from her place at the table. This was exactly what Gifford wanted-to rouse her sentimental streak.

Instead, she turned her mind to another puzzle- Lucky. She wandered the two rooms of his cottage, trying to discern as much as she could about him from the things she found. It was an exercise in perception and reasoning, she told herself, not simple curiosity about the man.

What she found in examining Lucky s lair was almost nothing. Utilitarian furnishings that happened to be antique. Nothing frivolous, nothing personal, nothing more revealing than a respect for his heritage and a need for order. He kept no books in sight, no magazines, no photographs, no art on the walls. But that in itself was a revelation. He was a man in hiding. His house was hidden. In his house, everything personal was hidden. He let nothing of his inner self show if he could help it at all.

Why was that? It didn't seem like a wholly natural reticence. It seemed more as if he had carefully constructed a maze of walls around himself for protection. What would a man like Lucky need protection from? He seemed so tough, so self-reliant. And yet there were the contradictions. He gave food to orphaned raccoons. He had defended her to Gifford. He had held her when she had felt miserable and afraid.

She opened the tall door of the armoire in the dining room. The shelves of the cupboard were stocked with only the kind of things one would expect to find in a dining room. Serena groaned a little in disappointment and hesitated a moment before crossing into the other room, which was, with the exception of the quality of the furnishings, barren as a monk's cell.

«Jackpot,» she whispered as she swung open the door of the large armoire that stood opposite the foot of the bed.

The closet had a column of cubbyholes along the left side, with an area for hanging clothes on the right. A set of three deep drawers created the base. She glanced over his wardrobe, which consisted of jeans, fatigue pants, T-shirts, and an army dress uniform with a chest full of decorations. The uniform interested her, but the smaller shelves on the left drew Serena's immediate attention.

They held framed photographs. The Doucet family captured at all different times of their lives. There was a sepiatoned wedding picture of his parents-a handsome, smiling couple gazing at each other with love. There was a battered black and white snapshot of his father standing with his hand on the shoulder of a gangly boy who was proudly displaying a trophy-size fish and a gap-toothed grin. Lucky, she assumed, looking much younger and lighter of heart. There were more recent photos of other members of the clan, unmistakable by their resemblance to one another, children of various ages, chubby babies in frilly baptism gowns, and grade-schoolers taking first communion in their Sunday best with their faces shining and their cowlicks slicked into submission.

Serena felt her heart melt a little as she looked at the photographs. Lucky had a family and he loved them. He wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of framing the pictures if he hadn't cared deeply. Why did he isolate himself from them? Shelby had said his parents were nice people, respectable people. Did Lucky feel unworthy of them because of the life he led? Or was there something else that made him feel separate?

She reached out to touch the photograph of Lucky and his father, brushing her fingertips over the smiling face of the boy he had been. What had happened to that boy to put shadows in his eyes? What events had turned him into the dangerous, brooding man he was today?

A yearning to know that was deeper than professional curiosity ached inside Serena. She wanted to know Lucky's secrets, wanted to reach past them to offer him something-solace, comfort. This longing wasn't wise, and it brought her no joy, but she didn't try to deny it. She just stood there, hurting for him, hurting for herself, wishing to God she had never left Charleston.

«Mom sent over a chocolate cake and some cookies and two loaves of French bread she baked today. I just set 'em on the counter.»

Serena shrieked and jumped back from the armoire as if it had suddenly come alive. She swung around with a hand over her heart to keep it from leaping out of her chest. Standing at the entrance to the room was a boy of about thirteen, beanpole-thin in jeans that were too short and a T-shirt that proclaimed Breaux Bridge to be the crawfish capital of the world. His eyes were dark and round with excitement.

«You ain't Lucky,» he blurted out. «But Lucky sure is.»

The instant the remark registered in his brain he flushed a shade of red that rivaled the color of the baseball cap he wore backward on his head.

Serena laughed, more out of relief than anything. «You startled me,» she said, pushing the door of the armoire closed. «Lucky's not here right now. He should be back in about half an hour. I'm Serena Sheridan.»

«Will Guidry.» He came forward hesitantly, started to offer her his hand but stopped midway to check it for dirt. Finding it relatively clean, he stuck it out in front of him again, looking as if he fully expected contact with her to give him a painful shock.

«It's nice to meet you, Will.» Serena gave his hand a firm shake and released it. «Would you care to wait for Lucky to come back?»

«Um-well-no-that's okay,» the youth stammered. He jammed his hands into his pants pockets and shuffled his oversize feet, staring down at them as if they were the most amazing sight he'd come across recently. «I was just leavin' off some stuff. Mom says she knows he won't take nothing-«He grimaced and corrected himself. «Won't take anything for runnin' them poachers off our crawfish nets, but she said the least she could do was bake him somethin' nice seein' as how he lives out here all alone-«He broke off and winced again, as if some unseen etiquette monitor was smacking him with a switch every time he goofed up. «I mean, he did live alone until you- But then, maybe you aren't-I mean, this could just be- Aw, hell-I mean, heck-«

Serena stared at him, everything inside her going still. «What did you say?» she asked softly, ignoring the boy's red-faced embarrassment. «Did you say 'running poachers off?»

Will shuffled his sneakers and shrugged, giving her a look that told her he suspected she might be a little odd. «Well, yeah. That's sorta what he does.»

«But I thought-«Serena cut herself off, snapping her mouth shut with an audible click.

She had thought what Lucky had wanted her to think. She had taken one look at him and assumed he was an outlaw, and he had let her believe it, had reinforced that image every chance he'd gotten. This was certainly her day to feel like a fool.

«We been havin' some trouble, you know,» Will said somberly, scratching his bony elbow. «My dad's gone down to the Gulf to look for work, so it's just Mom and us kids to home. Poachers figured our nets would be easy pickin'. Lucky showed 'em different.»

«Lucky,» Serena murmured. Big bad Lucky Doucet. Savior of orphaned animals. Defender of the defenseless. Not poaching, but chasing poachers away from the nets of women and children.

«He's some kind of man,» Will said happily. «But I guess you already know that.» His gaze dropped abruptly and he turned red again. He was at the age where nearly everything struck him as a sexual innuendo, and every social blunder seemed catastrophic. He looked at Serena with horror. «I didn't mean that you'd know. I meant, you know…»

«I know,» she said absently, still too stunned to take much pity on the poor kid.

If Lucky wasn't a poacher, then why had he let her believe he was? And why the antipathy between him and the game warden? Maybe they simply didn't like each other. Maybe Lucky didn't think Perry Davis was doing a good enough job. There could have been any number of reasons, not all of them good. Just because he wasn't a poacher didn't mean «he wasn't guilty of something. There was still the matter of the illegal liquor and the room upstairs he didn't want her to see.

«Anyhow,» Will said, gulping down his embarrassment. «I oughta be goin'.» He shuffled backward toward the door, swinging a long, bony arm in the direction of the kitchen. «I just left the stuff on the counter.»

«Yes, thank you. I'm sure Lucky will appreciate it,» Serena said, resurrecting her manners and her smile. «It was nice meeting you, Will.»

He blushed and shrugged, ducking his head and grinning shyly. «Yeah, you too. See ya 'round.»

He bolted out the front door and loped across the yard to a canoe beached on the bank of the bayou. Serena wandered out onto the gallery and waved to him as he paddled away. Even from a distance she could see him blush. Adolescence. What hell. She shook her head in a combination of amusement and sympathy, and wondered what Lucky might have been like at that age.

As if she didn't have enough to figure out about the grown man. If he wasn't a poacher, then what was he? A bootlegger? A gun runner with a heart of gold?

Her gaze drifted across the porch to the stairs that led up to the overhanging grenier, the forbidden room.

Never you mind what I keep up here… It's nothing for a pretty shrink to go sniffing through… You're a helluva lot better off not knowing.

She was better off not knowing, or he was safer if she didn't know?

She was on the steps before she could tell herself not to go on. Whether it was a need to understand the man that compelled her, or a need to justify her attraction to him, she didn't try to discern. In fact, she tried not to think at all. Almost as if they belonged to someone else's body, she watched her feet ascend one step at a time, watched her hand reach for the doorknob and turn it, watched the door swing back.

Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. Not in her wildest imagination had she suspected this. She thought she had been prepared for anything-crates of guns, bales of drugs, boxes of stolen goods-but she hadn't been at all prepared for beauty, for art.

The room was ringed with paintings. Canvases, stacked three deep, leaned back against the walls. An easel took center stage in the open, airy room. On it was propped a work in progress.

Serena wandered into the room, gazing all around her in a daze. Unlike the first floor, the attic was not divided, but was one large room with windows at either gable end and skylights punctuating the ceiling on the north side. The light that filtered in through the blinds was soft and dusty-looking, spilling onto the floor in oblong bars of gold. There was a long workbench against one wall, loaded with jars of brushes and tubes of paint, sketch pads, pencils, paint-spotted rags. A heavy sheet of canvas served as rug and drop-cloth, covering a large area of the wooden floor surrounding the easel. The smell of oil paint and mineral spirits hung heavy in the air like cheap perfume.

So this was Lucky's deep dark secret. He was an artist.

Serena walked around the edge of the dropcloth, trying to take in the paintings propped against the wall. They depicted the swamp as a solitary place of trees and mist, capturing the stillness, the sense of waiting. They were beautiful, hauntingly, powerfully beautiful, filled with a dark tension and an aching sense of loneliness. They were magnificent and terrifying.

She stood before one that featured a single white egret, the great bird looking small and insignificant among the columns of gray cypress trunks and tattered banners of gray moss and smoke-gray morning mist. She stood there in the hot, stuffy room and felt as if the painting were drawing her in and swallowing her whole. She could feel the chill of the mist, could smell the swamp, could hear the distant cries of birds.

All the paintings shared that ability to draw the viewer into the center of the swamp and the center of the artist's anguish. They were extraordinary.

«Oh, Lucky,» she whispered as understanding dawned painfully inside her. She closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her face.

This was what he hadn't wanted, for her to see beyond the facade of macho bravado, not because he was ashamed of what she would find, but because it was too personal, too private. He wasn't a man who would easily share his inner self; she'd known that all along. But she had never suspected his inner self would be so tender, so full of pain and longing.

Hugging herself, she looked at a painting of a storm building over the swamp. An angry sky churned in a turmoil of gray, green, and yellow above the stillness of the bayou. Tears rose in her eyes.

He had told her more than once he didn't want her prying into his life. He was nothing more than her unwilling guide and unwilling host. But she had pushed and prodded, excusing her behavior as professional curiosity, telling herself she had a right to know just how dangerous he really was, and in doing so she had violated the most basic human right-the right to inner privacy.

She turned to leave and jumped back, sucking in a startled breath as her heart vaulted into her throat. Lucky stood at the open door, staring at her. He was perfectly still, but there was a terrible sense of raw tension vibrating in the air around him. His eyes flashed like lightning warning of a coming storm.

«I'm sorry,» Serena whispered. She realized dimly that she was trembling. «I shouldn't have come in here.»

«No, you shouldn't have,» he said, his voice low and thrumming with fury.

He stared at her, struggling to hold himself from flying into a rage. What he did in this room he did for himself. This had been his solace, his salvation when he came back from Central America. He spent hours in this room, healing, focusing on his canvases to keep his mind together and to vent what was trying to tear him apart. These paintings were his most private feelings, the pain he couldn't escape, the fear he wouldn't acknowledge. Having someone see them was like stripping his soul bare and putting it on public display. It was unthinkable. And now it was inescapable.

«I didn't mean to pry,» Serena said stupidly.

«Of course you did,» Lucky snapped. He strode into the room and began throwing cloths over the paintings, his movements jerky with anger. «That's what shrinks do best, isn't it? Dig into people's heads, dig out their secrets.»

«I was only trying to see if you were doing something illegal. I have a right to know who I'm staying with,» she said, the words sounding self-righteous and foolish even to her.

He wheeled around suddenly and grabbed her by the arms, jerking her up against him, bending over her so that she had to arch her back to look up at him. «You don't have any rights out here,» he growled. «You don't belong here. This isn't polite society, Shelby. There are no rules except my rules.»

«Serena.» Her name trembled on her lips. She stared up at him, at the wild look in his eyes, genuinely afraid of him for the first time. I'm over the edge…Folks say he's half-crazy…»I'm Serena, Lucky,» she said softly, her heart pounding as she watched him struggle to pull himself back from that edge.

Lucky blinked at her, his mind sliding back from the darkness and chilling as he realized what she had said. He straightened and let go of her abruptly. She stumbled against the easel, setting the canvas on it rocking.

«I know who you are,» he said bitterly. Plowing his hands through his hair, he began to pace the width of the room like a caged tiger, his head down, eyes burning bright with fury and pain and fear.

«Damn you. Damn you,» he muttered as the breath soughed in and out of his lungs in gusts. So much had been taken from him-his youth, his innocence. It seemed all he had left was his pride and his privacy, and the woman standing there staring at him with doe eyes full of fear was stripping him of both. He didn't want her interference. He didn't want the reminder of his past she brought him. He didn't want the fire she set in his blood. Damn her, damn her!

Serena reached out to steady the easel, steadying herself at the same time. She watched Lucky pace, watched the storm of emotions raging inside him and witnessed the awesome battle to contain those emotions within him. As she watched, her fear receded and was replaced by something stronger-the need to reach out to him.

«Lucky, I didn't mean any harm,» she said softly. «I'm very sorry. Really, I am.»

He stopped abruptly and looked at her sideways, his eyes as bright and hot as molten gold. A savage smile cut across his dark face. «You're sorry. You invade my life, invade my privacy, drag me into your battles, and all you have to say is that you're sorry. Use me to your own end and excuse it all with an apology. Very civilized. Very proper. Dieu, isn't that just like the Sheridan girls?»

The words rang in his ears like the clashing din of cymbals. If he could have reached out and grabbed them back, he would have, but they hung there. Serena met his gaze, her face filled with dawning awareness and questions.

«How well do you know Shelby?» she asked carefully, not wanting to hear the answer.

«Well enough to know better than to let her twin take me for the same ride.»

Serena was unprepared for the stab of jealousy that pierced her at the thought of Shelby and Lucky together. It didn't seem possible. She didn't want to believe it, but she didn't have much choice.

«I'm not Shelby,» she said, drawing her armor of cool poise around herself. «I'm nothing like Shelby. I'm sorry if she hurt you, but I won't pay for her sins, Lucky.»

«Forget it,» he muttered. «It was a lifetime ago.»

He could see she had more questions, but before she could voice them, he jerked his head around and resumed his pacing, dismissing the subject as if it hadn't been the one pivotal event that had changed his life's course.

«What did you think you would find up here, ma petite? Contraband? Guns? Drugs?»

«You let me think you were a poacher,» Serena said evenly. «Why, Lucky? Why let me think you're something bad when you're not?»

To keep you away. To keep from getting hurt. He pressed the heels of his hands to his temples as if to hold the thoughts in as they swelled and throbbed behind his eyes. When he started toward her, he roared, an animal cry of impotent rage and guilt and fury. Serena jumped, but held her ground, waiting for an answer. Lucky lunged at her, pulling himself up just a hairbreath in front of her.

«You look at me and see something bad. That's because I am,» he insisted.

«I've seen what you wanted me to see, not who you really are.»

«Mais non, chere,» he said bitterly. «You've seen all there is.»

«That's a lie. What about this?» Serena raised a hand toward the half-finished canvas on the easel. «You wouldn't have let me see this. There's nothing bad here. Your paintings are beautiful and touching, Lucky. Why wouldn't you let me see them? Do they show too much?»

Snarling an oath, he pushed past her, grabbed the canvas off the easel, and hurled it across the room like a giant Frisbee. It hit the leg of the workbench with a loud crack, the stretcher snapping in two along one side of the canvas, ruining it.

«Cloth and pigment,» Lucky spat out. «That's all it is. I do it to pass the time. Don't read anything into it, Dr. Sheridan,» he warned, leaning over her again. «Don't look for symbolism or metaphors. Rest assured, the only way I want to touch you is with my hands,» he said, pulling her against him with barely leashed violence.

«This is how I want to touch you, chere,» he whispered savagely, sweeping his hands over her hair, down her back to her hips. His fingers pressed into her flesh, stroking roughly, caressing without tenderness. «This is the only way I want to touch you.» He brought one hand up to cup her breast through the sheer fabric of her blouse. «This is all I have to give you, all I'll let you take.»

He lowered his mouth the rest of the way and kissed her hard.

She should have pushed him away. Common sense told Serena to push him away. Common sense told her that poacher or artist, Lucky Doucet was a man with problems, a man who wouldn't share himself. He'd given her fair warning on that score. All he wanted was this, the physical, the sexual. He wanted desire and nothing more. Even that need he gave in to grudgingly, angrily. He wanted her, but he didn't like it. She wanted him and it confounded her. She was too smart a woman to fall into the trap of wanting a man who would never give of himself. She was too slick and polished to want a barbarian, too in need of control to surrender it utterly.

She should have pushed him away. But she didn't. Couldn't. She wanted his touch, his kiss. He had awakened an instinct in her that had lain dormant even through marriage. Now it roared with life, with hunger. It frightened her and thrilled her, and she surrendered without a fight because no matter how wrong her common sense told her it was, the woman in her said it was right.

The woman in her, who had never known true passion, yearned for it now, with this man, this warrior with the soul of an artist. She had held herself in check with the idea he was a criminal, but he wasn't a criminal. He was a man with hidden fears. He was a man who covered his tenderness, his inner loneliness, his goodness with a mask of toughness and danger, a man who needed love but would never reach out to take it.

Serena didn't push him away. She melted against him.

Lucky groaned helplessly as her mouth softened beneath his. He hadn't meant this to happen. He had meant to push her away, to frighten her, to repel her, to chase her so far away she wouldn't want to come within an emotional mile of him. But the instant her resistance melted, so did his anger. Need swept over him like a tidal wave. He needed to touch her, to taste her, to hold her. He wanted to lose himself in her. It was madness, he knew, but such sweet madness he couldn't resist.

He raised his head a scant inch and looked into her eyes. What he saw was a mirror of his own bewilderment, need, and wariness of that need.

«I want you,» he murmured, untangling the overwhelming knot of emotions to the root of the problem. «I want you, Serena.»

«I know.»

Her words were little more than shadows of sound passing between her lips, lips that were swollen from his kiss. Her braid had come loose and her hair fell around her shoulders in disarray, a shaft of light from the window above turning it the color of spun gold. She was temptation personified, a temptation Lucky had no intention of resisting.

«I stopped last night,» he reminded her. «I'm not stopping this time, chere.»

Serena could feel him, hard and urgent against her belly, and she knew he meant what he said. A primitive thrill shot through her at the thought that he meant to claim her as males had claimed their mates from the dawn of time. He lowered his mouth to hers again, sipping, tasting, testing her. Serena framed his face with her hands and pressed her lips more solidly against his, letting him know she had no intention of stopping him.

She met the thrust of his tongue eagerly as reason and logic shut down and instinct took control. He filled her mouth with the taste of him, surrounded her body with his heat and raw power. She slid her arms around his neck and gasped as her breasts flattened against the wall of his chest.

Lucky pulled her lower body tight against his with one hand and slid his other hand between them, seeking and finding the open throat of her blouse. He needed to touch her skin, needed to see her. The top button gave way as he curled his fingers into the fabric and pulled downward. One by one the buttons surrendered, falling to the floor.

He trailed his kiss down her jaw to her throat, stripping the blouse from her shoulders and discarding it. His thumbs hooked under the straps of her bra and he drew them down off her shoulders, peeled the cups away to reveal her breasts to his touch, his gaze, the hunger of his kiss.

Serena cried out as he took one turgid peak into his mouth and sucked strongly. She tangled her fingers in the black silk of his hair and pressed him closer as heat swept through her.

Together they sank to their knees on the rumpled canvas dropcloth. Serena leaned back, arching into the heat of Lucky's mouth. It was exquisite-the pull of his lips, the rasp of his tongue, the feel of his hand kneading her other breast. Her own hands moved restlessly over his broad shoulders, gathering the fabric of his T-shirt into her fists.

He pulled away and tore the garment off, flinging it aside, never taking his eyes from hers. His gaze was searing, hot, wild with desire. It took her breath away to look at him, at the intensity of his face and the perfection of his body. His body was a living sculpture of muscle. He looked to Serena like the consummate male animal, hungry and untamed, intent on one purpose.

She made a sound of surprise when he snatched her into his arms again, then moaned at the contact. They met flesh to flesh, soft white skin to hard, tanned muscle, woman to man. She trembled at the power of just touching him, and excitement swirled through her at the thought of being possessed by him.

He kissed her roughly, wildly, his arms banding her to him, his hands sweeping down her back, pressing her hard against his arousal, then finding their way around to the button of her shorts. The baggy khaki shorts fell to pool around her knees. She gasped into his mouth as he caught his fingertips in the waistband of her panties and jerked the scrap of silk and lace from her hips, tearing it free.

He whispered to her as he smoothed one hand over her bare hip and the delicious roundness of her buttock, kneading, squeezing, lifting her. While the fingers of his other hand slid into the nest of dark blond curls at the juncture of her thighs, seeking the heat and silken softness that lay beyond, he murmured against the shell of her ear-words of sex, words of praise, words in a language she didn't understand.

Serena tried to catch her breath to whisper his name, but couldn't. He stroked her intimately, knowingly, wringing another gasp from her as he slid a finger into her heat to test her readiness. Her hips moved against the pressure of his hand, inviting him, begging him silently.

Lucky raised his head and looked down at her. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted. Her back arched as she moved against him, thrusting her full breasts upward. With her hair tumbling around her shoulders she looked like a wanton angel. There was no sign of her infuriatingly cool control. There was no hint of polished sophistication. She was a woman who wanted a man, wanted him, and her body was making no secret of the fact. She moved against his hand, caught up in sensation, the soft petals of her feminine cleft dewy and warm.

Desire roared inside Lucky like an inferno, licking at his sanity, pulsing in his groin. He'd never wanted a woman like this. Never. He wanted her with every fiber of his being and she was hot and ready for him, her body begging him to take her. His nostrils flared like a stallions scenting a mare, his head filling with a mix of expensive perfume and the subtle musk of arousal.

He pulled back from her and tore at the fastening of his jeans, fumbling with the button and struggling to get the zipper down over his erection. She closed her fingers around him, measuring the length and thickness of his shaft. She stroked downward, opening her hand to cup him gently, then drew her hand slowly back up, tightening her fingers until he was throbbing. He pulled in a breath as her thumb brushed across his velvety tip.

She pressed her lips to his chest and flicked the tip of her tongue across one nipple, and Lucky lost what was left of his control. It tore away from him on a wild animal groan that started in his chest and worked its way up the back of his throat. He had to have her now. Sooner than now.

He lowered Serena onto her back and mounted her, attempting to enter her fully with a single thrust, the need to claim her as his overwhelming. She cried out and dug her fingernails into his back, her body tensing against his intrusion.

«Oh, sweet heaven,» Lucky groaned, bracing himself on his elbows above her, fighting his natural urge to bury himself in the tight wet glove of her body. «Take it all, baby,» he pleaded. «Please, please, Serena! All of me. All of me.»

«Oh, Lucky,» she gasped. «I can't. You're too-«

«Shh…»he whispered, brushing his lips tenderly against her temple. «Just relax for me, chere,» he went on seductively, schooling his own body to sink down against her. «Relax. It's gonna be all right. It's gonna be so good. Just relax for me, sugar. That's it. That's right.»

She moved hesitantly beneath him, taking another inch, then tightening around him, taking him to another level of ecstasy. Lucky checked his passion ruthlessly, reining in the urge to drive himself into her, to bury himself to his hilt. He brushed her hair back from her cheek and kissed her slowly, deeply, sinking into her a little at a time as her body relaxed beneath his.

«You're tighter than a fist,» he whispered breathlessly, his lips brushing hers. He struggled to hold himself still against the gentle rippling of her body as it adjusted to accommodate him. «Mon Dieu, don't those men up in Charleston know what to do with a beautiful woman?»

Serena didn't answer him. She couldn't. She was beyond speaking, beyond telling him she couldn't even remember the name of the last man she'd gone to bed with because it had just been permanently erased from her mind. All she could think of was Lucky. All she could feel was Lucky, filling her, stretching her, kissing her. She stroked her hands over the sweat-slick muscles of his back, stroked a finger down the valley of his spine. Her hands cupped his taut buttocks and pulled him deeper into her as she tilted her hips to accept him fully.

His big body pressed down against her and he began moving slowly, easing in and out of her, gaining speed and strength with each thrust, until he was lifting her hips off the floor each time he drove into her. Serena arched against him, straining to meet him, straining toward something she had only guessed at before now. It was unlike anything else she had experienced, this feeling of intense excitement that grew like a bubble inside her, pushing away sanity, pushing aside her need for control. It was at once frightening and exhilarating, sweeping her away on a wave of sensation.

She clung to Lucky as if he could anchor her to the real world. She wrapped her arms around him, wrapped her legs around his lean hips. And still the wild sensation grew, hotter and brighter and more intense, swelling until it burst into a million brilliant shards.

«Lucky!»

Lucky felt her climax, heard her cry his name, then his own consciousness dimmed as he exploded inside her. He arched into her with a hoarse cry, unable to think, unable to comprehend anything except the exquisite pulsing of her body around his. The moment was so sweet, so perfect, so golden that for an instant all the darkness was banished from his soul and he felt clean and whole and at peace for the first time in a long while. He clung to the feeling, clung to Serena, holding her to him as if he might be able to absorb some of the goodness he'd found in her.

Reality returned by slow degrees, coming to him as if out of a mist. The paint-stained dropcloth. The feet of his easel. The stripes of filtered daylight falling through the blinds. The woman beneath him.

He looked down at Serena and felt something squeeze painfully in his chest. She was crying silently, her head turned to the side, the teardrops leaking out through the barrier of spiky lashes. He'd hurt her. He'd felt how tight she was and still he'd let his own need overwhelm him and banged the living daylights out of her. Dieu, what land of an animal had he become?

As many times as he'd told himself he didn't care about anyone or anything. Lucky couldn't stomach this. He'd been raised to treat women gently and with respect. Despite the cynicism that had taken root inside him over the years, the idea of a man physically abusing a woman, overpowering her with his strength, was abhorrent to him. The idea of hurting Serena, brave, proud Serena, whose regal mask hid secret fears, cut deeper than he wanted to admit.

His hand was trembling slightly as he brushed her hair back from her temple. «Serena? Serena, I'm sorry-«

«Don't be,» she whispered. «I'm all right.»

«I hurt you. I was too rough. I-«

«No. That's never happened for me before,» she said, breaking in on his apology with her confession.

Lucky went still above her as comprehension dawned. «Never?»

She turned her head and gave him a tremulous smile. «Not like that. I didn't have any idea it could be like that. I've never been very good at sex.»

Nothing could have aroused Lucky more strongly or more immediately save having her tell him she was a virgin. Knowing he had taken her somewhere no other man ever had was the next best thing. Possessiveness surged inside him and for once he didn't try to fight it or deny it. She was his. He felt it on a fundamental, instinctive level. She was his.

Still snug in the silken pocket of Serena's womanhood, his body stirred strongly and her body tightened around him in automatic response. He stared down at her, feeling caught in the grip of a powerful emotion he couldn't name. She looked up at him, her eyes dark and liquid, her lips parting softly as her breath caught.

«Oh, ma jolie fille,» Lucky said, lowering his head to gently nuzzle her throat. «That might have been your first trip to heaven, but it sure as hell won't be your last.»