Lucky’s Lady

CHAPTER 6

«COME ON,» LUCKY SAID, NODDING TOWARD THE pirogue. «I'll bring you back tomorrow and you can have all day to hound him.»

Serena followed him reluctantly to the waters edge. She looked out across the bayou and at the black forest that seemed to be looming ever larger as the light faded. Fear started to claw its way past the last wall of her resistance.

«I'll pay you anything if you just take me home.» The words were out of her mouth before she was even aware of thinking them, but she didn't try to take them back. They were true. She could have managed staying at the cabin with Gifford and Pepper, but the idea of staying with a stranger-a dangerous stranger-and having him see her fear… she couldn't do it. At that moment she would have given him the keys to her Mercedes if he would have agreed to take her back to civilization. She wanted a long hot bath, a meal, some aspirin, and an explanation from her sister-not necessarily in that order.

«Anything?» Lucky arched a brow and gave her a slow, wicked smile as he considered. «That's tempting, sugar, but I just plain can't take you back tonight. I have a previous engagement.»

Serena ground her teeth and forced the word through them. «Please.»

Lucky bent and lifted the box of motor parts out of the bow of his boat, setting it aside on the bank. «Look, angel,» he said as he straightened, resting his hands just above the low-riding waist of his fatigue pants. «I'm sure you think I'm gonna take you back to my place, tie you to the bed, and ravish you all night long, but I've got more important things to do. You'll just have to content yourself with fantasizing.»

Serena gave him a look of complete disgust. He ignored her, wading out and pushing the pirogue away from the shore.

«Come on, sugar, allons. Get in the boat, or you can spend the night with Gifford's coon hounds out in the woodshed.»

What choice did she have? Serena knew her grandfather. He was fully capable of leaving her to spend the night outside. He seemed angry enough to do it. Not even the idea of sharing a house with Lucky Doucet seemed as terrible as the idea of being out alone all night.

Dragging her tattered cloak of pride around herself once again, she lifted her nose and walked out onto the dilapidated dock to get in the boat.

They headed away from Gifford's and deeper into the wilderness. The bayou narrowed to a corridor flanked on both sides by what looked to be impenetrable woods. Cypress and tupelo trees stood in dark, silent ranks in their path like a natural slalom course. Dusk had fallen, casting everything in one last dusty glow of surrealistic light.

Serena sat, trying to keep her back straight, trying to keep from crying. Now that the confrontation with Gifford was over and the anger had subsided, pain rushed in unabated. She had come for him. Couldn't he see that? How could he accuse her of being so callous as to be thinking only of her inheritance? She had never even thought about him dying, much less what he would leave her.

Gifford dying. In her mind she relived the horror of watching him turn purple and collapse. She couldn't bear the thought of losing him. She especially couldn't bear the thought of losing him now when he seemed so angry with her, so disappointed.

Tears welled in her eyes and she blinked them back furiously. She would not cry now. She would not cry in front of Lucky Doucet and give him yet another reason to sneer at her. She couldn't let go and cry now, anyway, because she was afraid that once she started, she wouldn't be able to stop and she had too much yet to face before this day was over.

That was hardly a cheerful prospect, she thought, fighting another wave of despair. She already felt as if she'd been dragged by the hair for eight hundred miles and brutally dismembered. The person she had been just yesterday was no longer recognizable; she had been dismantled by this place and its people and the memories and emotions they evoked. She was exhausted from the ordeal, but she clung to her one last shred of strength and dignity and fought back the tears.

Lucky stood behind Serena, watching the little tremors that shook her shoulders. He could hear her catch a breath and knew she was trying valiantly not to cry. Proud, stubborn little thing. He felt something twist in his chest and did his best to ignore it.

He was having a hard time maintaining his image of her as an ice bitch. The woman who had tried to hire his services had been a professional woman, prim and cool, consummately businesslike in her designer suit, not a hair out of place. That woman had been easy for him to dislike. But that guise was long gone now, and her efforts to appear calm and in control were no longer irritating but touching-or they would have been had he been susceptible.

She hiccuped and sniffled and swatted at the mosquitoes that were rising off the water in squadrons to swarm up around her head, and Lucky clenched his jaw against the very foreign urge to feel sympathy.

«I hate this place,» Serena announced, smacking at the mosquitoes with both hands. The swarm dispersed and regrouped to mount another sortie. She hiccuped and sniffed again, sounding perilously close to bawling. Her voice trembled with the effort to hold the tears back. «I have always hated this place.»

Great. Lucky frowned. The fate of the swamp was coming to rest on the shoulders of a woman who hated it.

He eased the pirogue to a halt and secured the pole. He stepped gingerly around Serena, narrowly avoiding having her hit him in the groin as she slapped at the mosquitoes. He snatched up the wad of baire he kept in the front of the boat and tossed the sheer netting over her like a dust cover over an old chair.

«Now you can stop your squirming before you capsize us and serve us up to the 'gators for dinner.»

Serena shuddered at the mention of alligators, but didn't look at the water for evidence of any. «Thank you for your concern,» she said dryly. «Why aren't the mosquitoes after you, enormous, half-naked target that you are.»

«They like your perfume. Very uptown tastes, these skeeters have. Mebbe you'd like to take some of them back to Charleston with you, oui?»

«Don't you start in on me,» she warned, her voice hoarse from the big knot of emotion lodged like a rock in her throat. «You don't know anything about it.»

«I know Giff needs you here,» he said, taking up his stance behind her once again. The pirogue slid forward. «That is, if you care anything about your heritage. Mebbe you don't. You say you hate this place. Mebbe you'd like to see it poisoned and ruined, yes?»

«Gifford would never allow such a thing to happen.»

«Gifford won't have any say in the matter if he doesn't take charge of the situation soon. He thinks it'll just go away if he stays out here and shoots at the Tristar rep every time he comes around.»

«You make it sound like he's running away from the problem. Gifford Sheridan never ran from a fight in his life.»

«Well, he's runnin' from this one.»

«It's ridiculous,» Serena insisted. «If he doesn't want to sell to Tristar, all he has to do is tell them no. I don't understand what the big problem is.»

«Me, I'd say there's a lotta things here you don' understand, sugar,» Lucky drawled.

Not the least of which was him, Serena thought, plucking at the edge of the mosquito netting. The man was a jumble of contradictions. Mean to her one minute and throwing mosquito netting over her the next; telling her in one breath he didn't involve himself in other people's affairs, then giving his commentary on the situation. She wouldn't have credited him with an abundance of compassion, but he was rescuing her from having to spend the night outside, and, barring nefarious reasons, compassion was the only motive she could see.

She wondered what kind of place he was taking her to. She didn't hold out much hope for luxurious accommodations. Her idea of a poacher s lair was just a notch above a cave with animal hides scattered over the floor. She pictured a tar-paper shack and a mud yard littered with dead electricity generators and discarded butane tanks. There would probably be a tumbledown shed full of poaching paraphernalia, racks of stolen pelts and buckets of rancid muskrat remains. Certainly it would be no better than Gifford's place. She couldn't imagine Lucky hanging curtains. He struck her as the sort of man who would pin up centerfolds from raunchy magazines on the walls and call it art.

They rounded a bend in the bayou, and a small, neat house came into view. It was set on a tiny hillock in an alcove that had been cleared of trees. Its weathered-cypress siding shimmered pale silver in the fading light. It was a house in the old Louisiana country style, an Acadian house built on masonry piers to keep it above the damp ground. Steps led onto a deep gallery that was punctuated by shuttered windows and a screen door. An exterior staircase led up from the gallery to the overhanging attic that formed the ceiling of the gallery-a classic characteristic of Cajun architecture. Slim wooden columns supporting the overhang gave the little house a gracious air.

Serena was delightfully surprised to see something so neat and civilized in the middle of such a wilderness, but nothing could have surprised her more than to hear Lucky tell her it was his.

He scowled at the look of utter shock she directed up at him through the mosquito netting. «Whatsa matter, chere? You were expecting some old white-trash shack with a yard full of pigs and chickens rootin' through the garbage?»

«Stop putting words in my mouth,» she grumbled, unwilling to admit her unflattering thoughts, no matter how obvious they might have been.

A corner of Lucky s mouth curled upward, and his heavy-lidded eyes focused on her lips with the intensity of lasers. «Is there something else you want me to put there?»

Serena s heart thudded traitorously at the involuntary images that flitted through her mind. It was all she could do to keep her gaze from straying to the part of his anatomy that was at her eye level.

«You've really cornered the market on arrogance, haven't you?» she said, as disgusted with herself as she was with him.

«Me?» he said innocently, tapping a fist to his chest. «Non. I just know what a woman really wants, that's all.»

«I'm sure you don't have the vaguest idea what a woman really wants,» Serena said as she untangled herself from the baire and tossed it aside. She offered Lucky her hand as if she were a queen, and allowed him to hand her up onto the dock, giving him a smug smile as her feet settled on the solid wood. «But if you want to go practice your theory on yourself, don't let me stop you.»

Lucky watched her walk away, perversely amused by her sass. She was limping slightly, but that didn't detract from the alluring sway of the backside that filled her snug white pants. He might not have known what Miss Sheridan really wanted, but he damn well knew what his body wanted.

It was going to be a long couple of days.

He pulled the pirogue up out of the water and left it with its cargo of suitcases and crawfish to join Serena on the gallery. He didn't like having her there. This place revealed things about him. Having her there allowed her to get too close when his defenses were demanding he keep her an emotional mile away. He might have wanted her physically, but that was as far as it went. He had learned the hard way not to let anyone inside the walls he had painstakingly built around himself. He would have been safer if she could have gone on believing he lived like an animal in some ancient rusted-out house trailer.

«It's very nice,» she said politely as he trudged up the steps onto the gallery.

«It's just a house,» he growled, jerking the screen door open. «Go in and sit down. I'm gonna take the sliver out of that foot of yours before gangrene sets in.»

Serena bared her teeth at him in a parody of a smile. «Such a gracious host,» she said, sauntering in ahead of him.

The interior of the house was as much of a surprise to her as the exterior had been. It consisted of two large rooms, both visible from the entrance-a kitchen and dining area, and a bedroom and living area. The place was immaculate. There was no pile of old hunting boots, no stacks of old porno magazines, no mountains of laundry, no litter of food-encrusted pots and pans. From what Serena could see on her initial reconnaissance, there wasn't as much as a dust bunny on the floor.

Lucky struck a match and lit a pair of kerosene lamps on the dining table, flooding the room with buttery-soft light, then left the room without a word. Serena pulled out a chair and sat down, still marveling. His decorating style was austere, as spare and plain as an Amish home, a style that made the house itself seem like a work of art. The walls had a wainscoting of varnished cypress paneling beneath soft white plaster. The furnishings appeared to be meticulously restored antiques-a wide-plank cypress dining table, a large French armoire that stood against the wall, oak and hickory chairs with rawhide seats. In the kitchen area mysterious bunches of plants had been hung by their stems from a wide beam to dry. Ropes of garlic and peppers adorned the window above the sink in lieu of a curtain.

Lucky appeared to approve of refrigeration and running water, but not electric lights. Another contradiction. It made Serena vaguely uncomfortable to think there was so much more to him than she had been prepared to believe. It would have been easy to dislike a man who lived in a hovel and poached for a living. This house and its contents put him in a whole other light-one he didn't particularly like to have her see him in, if the look on his face was any indication.

He emerged with first aid supplies cradled in one brawny arm from what she assumed was a bathroom. These he set on the table, then he pulled up a chair facing hers and jerked her foot up onto his lap, nearly pulling her off her seat. He tossed her shoe aside and gave her bare foot a ferocious look, lifting it to eye level and turning it to capture the best light. Serena clutched the arm of her chair with one hand and the edge of the table with the other, straining against tipping over backward. She winced as Lucky prodded at the sliver.

«Stubborn as that grandpapa of yours, walkin' around half the day with this in your foot,» he grumbled, playing the tweezers. «Espesces de tete dure.»

«What does that mean? Ouch!»

«You're a hardheaded thing.»

«Ouch!» She tried to jerk her foot back.

«Be still!»

«You sadist!»

«Quit squirming!»

«Ou-ou-ouch!»

«Got it.»

She felt an instant of blessed relief as soon as the splinter was out of her foot, but it was short-lived. Serena hissed through her teeth at the first sting of the alcohol, blinking furiously at the tears that automatically rose in her eyes.

«Your bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired,» she said harshly.

Lucky raised his eyes and stared at her over her toes. The corners of his mouth turned up. «Yeah, but my manner in bed won't leave anything to be desired. I can promise you that, chere.»

Serena met his hypnotic gaze, her heart beating a wild pulse in her throat as his long fingers gently traced the bones of her foot and ankle. All thoughts of pain vanished from her head. Desire coursed through her veins in a sudden hot stream that both excited and frightened her. She didn't react this way to men. She certainly shouldn't have been reacting this way to this man. What had become of her common sense? What had become of her control?

With an effort she found her voice, but it was soft and smoky and she barely recognized it when she spoke. «That's no promise, that's a threat.»

Lucky eased her foot down and rose slowly. His fingers curled around the arms of Serena's chair and he tilted it back on its hind legs, his eyes never leaving hers as he leaned down close.

«Is it?» he said in a silken whisper, his mouth inches from hers. «Are you afraid of me, chere?»

«No,» she said, the tremor in her voice making a mockery of her answer. She stared up at him, eyes wide, her breath escaping in a thin stream from between her parted lips.

«You're not afraid of me?» he said, arching a brow, the words barely audible. He leaned closer still. «Then mebbe this is what you're afraid of.»

He closed the distance between them, touching his lips to hers.

The heat was instantaneous. It burst around them and inside them, as bright and hot as the flare of the lamps on the table beside them. Serena sucked in a little gasp, drawing Lucky closer. He settled his mouth against hers, telling himself he wanted just a taste of her, nothing more, but fire swept through him, his blood scalding his veins. One taste. Just one taste… would never be enough.

Her mouth was like silk soaked in wine-soft, sweet, intoxicating. His tongue slipped between her parted lips to better savor the experience. He stroked and explored and Serena responded in land, reacting on instinct. Her tongue slid sinuously against Lucky's. His plunged deeper into her mouth. The flames leapt higher.

A moan drifted up from Serena's throat, and her arms slid up around Lucky's neck. She could feel herself growing dizzy, as if her body were floating up out of the chair. Dimly she realized Lucky was rising and pulling her up with him. His arms banded around her like steel, lifting her, pulling her close. His big hands slid down to the small of her back and pressed her into him.

He was fully aroused. His erection pressed into her belly, as hard as granite, as tempting as sin. She arched against it wantonly, reacting without thought. A growl rumbled deep in his chest, and he rolled his hips against her as he changed the angle of the kiss and plunged his tongue into her mouth again and again.

He stroked a hand down over the full swell of one hip. Cupping her buttock, he lifted her to bring her up against him. She made a small, frightened sound in her throat and need surged through him like a flood. He wanted her. He wanted her right here… right now, on the table, on the floor. It was madness.

Madness.

Sweet heaven, what was he doing? he wondered, finally hearing the alarm bells clanging in his head. What was she doing to him? He set her away from him with a violence that made her stumble back against the chair she'd been sitting in. She stared at him, her eyes wide and dark with a seductive mix of passion and fear. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders in golden disarray. Her mouth, swollen and red from the force of his kiss, trembled. She stared at him as if he were something wild and terrifying.

Wild was exactly what he was feeling-out of control, beyond the reach of reason. His chest was heaving like a bellows as he tried to draw in enough oxygen to think straight. He speared his hands into his hair and hung his head, closing his eyes. Control. He needed control.

Control. She'd lost control-of the situation, of herself. Serena swallowed hard and pressed a hand to her bruised lips. How could this have happened? She didn't even like the man. But the instant his mouth had touched hers she had experienced an explosion of desire that had melted everything else. She hadn't thought of anything but his mouth on hers, the taste of him, the strength of his arms, the feel of his body. Shivers rocked through her now like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Heaven help her, she didn't know herself anymore. What had become of her calm self-discipline, her training, her ability to distance herself from a situation and examine it analytically?

You wanted him, Serena. How's that for analysis?

She shook her head a little in stunned disbelief. «I think I would have been safer with the coon hounds,» she mumbled.

Something flashed in Lucky s eyes. His expression went cold. «Non. You're safe in this house, lady. I'm out of here.»

He turned and stormed into the next room. There was a banging of doors that made Serena wince. When he reappeared he was wearing a black T-shirt that hugged his chest like a coat of paint. He shrugged on a shoulder holster. The pistol it cradled looked big enough to bring down an elephant. Serena felt her eyes widen and her jaw drop.

«It's not hunting season.» She didn't realize she had spoken aloud, but Lucky turned and gave her a long, very disturbing look, his panther's eyes glowing beneath his heavy dark brows.

«It is for what I'm after,» he said in a silky voice.

He pulled the gun and checked the load. The clip slid back into place with a smooth, sinister hiss and click. Then he was gone. He slipped out the door like a shadow, without a sound.

Serena felt the hair rise up on the back of her neck. For a long moment she stood there, frozen with fear in the heat of the night. With an effort she finally forced her feet to move and went to the screen door to look out.

The night was as black as fresh tar with only a sliver of moon shining down on the bayou. The water gleamed like a sheet of glass. She thought she caught a glimpse of Lucky poling his pirogue out toward a stand of cypress, but in a blink he was gone, vanished, as if he were a creature from the darkest side of the night, able to appear and disappear at will.

«Heaven help me,» she whispered, brushing her fingertips across her bottom lip. «What have I gotten myself into now?»