Lucky's Lady (8 page)

“Stubborn as that grandpapa of yours, walkin' around half the day with this in your foot,” he grumbled, playing the tweezers. “
Espèsces de tête 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,
chère
.”

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,
chère?
”

“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 kind, 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?”

CHAPTER
                        

7

THE PIROGUE CUT ACROSS THE INKY SURFACE OF
the bayou as softly as a whisper on the wind. Mist drifted like smoke among the smooth dark trunks of the trees. The air was heavy with scents, like a courtesan's perfume, sweet, almost palpable—honeysuckle and jasmine, verbena and wisteria, all mingling with the darker metallic scent of the water and the decaying growth that lay beneath it. Intertwined with scent was sound—the chirp and trill of insects, the song of frogs, the call of an owl and the whoosh of its wings as it left its perch. In the distance an alligator roared, a nutria screamed. Night feeders had come out to hunt and be hunted.

Lucky let his boat drift toward the shelter of a massive live oak that overhung the water's edge. The bank had been eaten away to the gnarled roots of the tree and formed a tiny cove that was deep enough to keep the boat afloat. It provided natural cover with the canopy of the tree spreading out wide and low, its ragged beards of moss hanging down like a moth-eaten curtain. It was the perfect place to wait.

He dug a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it, taking a deep, soothing drag. The tip flared red in the gloom of the night. The match hissed as it hit the surface of the water. Tension hummed inside him like an overloaded power line. Tension for the job he was here to do, but a greater part of it was sexual frustration. He'd never wanted a woman so badly in his life. Never. Not even in his youth when his hormones had roared in perpetual high gear. Not even after he'd spent a year in a Central American prison. He had never wanted a woman more than he had wanted Serena Sheridan in that blinding flash of heat. He was still shaking with the intensity of it. He was still half hard.

Damn her.
Why
her? Of all the women on the planet, why her? How could it be possible for him to look at Serena and remember Shelby's duplicity and still want her?

She wasn't Shelby. He knew that. Shelby would never have come after Gifford. She would never have stood nose to nose with the old man and matched him temper for temper. Shelby's methods of getting what she wanted fell more into the eyelash-batting and pouting categories. No, in terms of personality, the sisters were nothing alike. Shelby was all calculated flirtation and coy charm. Serena was all business and sass. Still, he didn't want to want her. She was dangerous to his sanity, reminding him of the past and the affair that had set his life on a near-disastrous course.

He had surrendered to Shelby's charms, succumbed to her, and lost himself. He was a junior at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, young and hot and full of himself, caught up in the idea of taking the world by storm, determined to show everybody what he could do. The big brooding kid everyone watched with a wary eye was going to be the first Doucet to get a college education. He was going to be a biologist. Having Shelby Sheridan on his arm—and in his bed—was another feather in his cap. He had the world by the tail that spring. Then it turned around and knocked him senseless.

He was nothing but a means to an end, a tool for Shelby to get what she really wanted—John Mason Talbot IV. Talbot was balking at the idea of marriage. Shelby took up with Lucky to provoke jealousy. A simple, time-honored plan. The fact that she had gotten pregnant with his baby had been an inconvenience easily dealt with just as soon as Talbot put his ring on her finger.

Lucky could still taste the bitterness. He hadn't loved Shelby as much as he had loved the idea of her. When she dropped him, the blow to his youthful ego was terrible. When he found out about the aborted pregnancy, the cut went to his very core. Shelby had shattered his pride with careless ease and gone on with her life as if nothing had happened at all, while pain and humiliation drove him to abandon school and all his grand plans.

With youthful drama he dropped everything and joined the army, sending his life down a path that led to a gray place of shadowed existence, where there was no good or evil, only missions and objectives, a place where his soul was stripped away from him a little bit at a time.

Thirteen years passed and he could still feel the shame of having been played for a fool by a pretty dark-eyed blond belle.

And now he was being tempted by another.

He swore in French and flung the butt of his cigarette away. As if he didn't have enough trouble already, he had to go stirring up old nests of resentment. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was revenge he wanted when he looked at Serena. Or maybe he was complicating matters unnecessarily. Maybe it was just sex.

Hell, he could handle sex. It would be fabulous between them. He already knew that. The instant he'd touched his mouth to hers he'd been wild to get inside her. And she'd lost that cool control of hers and responded to him with all the fire she had previously reserved for sarcasm. Yeah, he could handle sex with Serena Sheridan. The idea of having all that cool beauty and inner heat beneath him and around him damn near made him burn up from the inside out.

It was an emotional entanglement he wanted to avoid. He was smart enough to keep that from happening. He wouldn't let Serena get that close to him. He wouldn't let anyone get that close, not even his family. He didn't have anything left to give anyone. He guarded what was left of his soul like a miser.

The distant buzz of an outboard motor broke in on his thoughts. Lucky came to attention, following the sound carefully. It wasn't too far off—over on the next bayou and nearing the fork that branched into the little no-name stream he was on. He was exactly where he needed to be. A nasty smile unfurled across his dark face. He pulled a pair of infrared goggles from his gear bag, put them on, then took up his
baire
and draped it over himself, pulled his gun, and waited.

Serena couldn't sleep. She hadn't tried. Her exhaustion went bone deep, but the fear went deeper. She was alone. It didn't seem to matter very much that she was in a house with a roof over her head. She was still in the swamp, alone. In the ordinary course of things she thought of herself as a strong, competent, self-reliant individual able to handle most anything that might come her way. This she couldn't quite handle. Even after all these years the memories were too strong. Every sight, every sound, every smell only brought them into sharper focus. She would have given her left arm for a Valium. Just one. Anything to dull the little knives that were splitting her nerve endings.

“Pull yourself together, Serena,” she muttered aloud, tightening her arms across her chest in a symbolic gesture as she paced the width of the dining room. “If your patients could see you now, they'd pack up their neuroses and go shrink shopping.”

A skittering sound rattled across the gallery just as she passed the screen door. She shrieked and bolted sideways, banging her knee and stubbing her toe on a table leg. She swore a litany of curses under her breath and limped around the table.

In the time since Lucky had left she had done little else but pace. She had washed up in the tiny spotless bathroom, found a comb and restored some order to her hair. She'd made a sandwich with a spongy slice of Evangeline Maid white bread and peanut butter and eaten on the move, too keyed up to sit. Really, she'd been too keyed up to eat, but she knew from experience that not eating properly only magnified her paranoia. So she had walked and chewed, hiking over every inch of the first floor of Lucky's house.

There was nothing much to distract her from her fear. There was no television, no radio, no stereo. She spotted a CB radio on a shelf in the kitchen, but she had no idea how to work it. She couldn't even amuse herself by unpacking and repacking her suitcase because it was still outside.

She assumed Lucky had taken her luggage out of his pirogue. It probably wouldn't do for a poacher to be caught toting silk lingerie and a supply of makeup. Other swamp boys might get the wrong idea. But even if he had left her bags on the dock, they weren't going to do her any good because there was no way in hell she was walking out to get them. The ground was literally crawling out here at night. In her imagination she could picture herself trying to tiptoe across yards of writhing reptilian bodies.

“Stop it!” she snapped as a spasm of fear ran down her back and a wave of it rose up in her throat as thick and sour as grease.

From somewhere in the far distance beyond the front door came the
crack! crack!
of what sounded like gunfire.

Lucky.

“Oh my God,” Serena whispered. Her eyes teared up and she lifted a trembling hand to her lips. What if he were shot? What if he were killed? What if whoever did him in came looking for God knew what?

Her heart thudding like a paddle ball behind her ribs, she crept toward the door, straining her eyes to see something in the stygian blackness beyond. For a moment all she could hear was the blood roaring in her ears, then the raspy screech of frogs. Something screamed, a terrible bloodchilling sound that might have been an animal in its death throes or a woman on the brink of hysteria. The sound tore across the night like a knife ripping through silk and then it was gone, leaving an eerie stillness in its wake. Serena sucked back a sob and moved quickly away from the door and into the next room.

She resumed her pacing, picking up speed as she walked a path from the front window past the old horsehide sofa to the bed and back. The sore on the bottom of her foot had gone past the point of pain to numbness. She wished for the pain back; it would have been something else to think about besides this awful choking fear.

She tried to think about the situation at Chanson du Terre, but there were still too many pieces missing for her to make any sense of it. Thoughts of her last few moments with Lucky drifted through her head, but she shooed them away. She didn't yet want to consider the ramifications of getting that close to man who claimed to be crazy and carried a gun.

Her toe connected with something solid hidden under his bed as she turned the corner to pace back toward the front window. Hesitantly, she turned to face the bed. It was a mahogany half-tester with delicately carved details. A thick curtain of mosquito netting was draped back from the headpiece. The coverlet was an exquisite example of Cajun weaving in soft brown cotton with narrow indigo stripes.

The idea of Lucky, pagan and barbaric, stretched out naked on this elegant bed stirred the embers of desire deep inside her. Serena shook her head in amazement. How could she want a man who was so contrary to her idea of what a modern man should be? She knew there were women who wanted to be dominated, women who would have melted into puddles at the feet of a man like Lucky Doucet. She was not among them. She had always held to the idea of equality between the sexes. Lucky was a throwback to the heyday of male chauvinism. She didn't trust him, didn't like him, didn't respect him. How could she want him?

Her gaze roamed over the bed again, and heat unfurled like a dozen ribbons in her belly, tickling, tantalizing.

Tearing her thoughts away from sex, she dropped to her knees on the woven rug beside the bed and lifted the edge of the coverlet. There were several large cardboard boxes stashed away and she reached for one, stopping herself just as her fingertips grazed the edge. She could find something she would be better off not knowing about. Or she could find something that would give her a clue to who Lucky Doucet really was. She nibbled her lip in indecision but jerked the box toward her as another strange scratching sound drifted in through the window.

The carton was packed with books.

“God, who would have guessed he even knew how to read,” she muttered to herself.

Her fingers drifted lightly over the spines of the hardbound volumes that had been so carefully packed. They were largely college-level text books on biology. There was a collection of Shakespeare, several tomes on art history, and a set of small, very old-looking volumes with French titles in faded gold print. Serena carefully lifted out one of the science books and turned back the cover. It smelled musty and sweet and the pages stuck together as she turned to the title page and read the handwritten note in the upper right-hand corner:

Etienne Doucet. USL. 1979.

College. She tried to imagine Lucky walking the hallowed halls of USL, going to class with books in his arms, but could picture him only in army fatigue pants and no shirt, climbing up into a tower with an assault rifle. But he'd been a student, and a serious one, if these books were anything to go by. Why then was he making his living by nefarious means?

“I'm over the edge. I might do anything.”

“He's been living like an animal out in the swamp ever since he got out of the army. Folks say he's half crazy.”

How did a student of science and the arts make the jump to the military and from the military to here? What had happened? What events had shaped him into the tough, sullen man he was today?

Her mind working on the question, Serena replaced the book and shoved the box back under the bed. She perched herself on the edge of the bed and sat there for a long moment, thinking, her gaze drifting around the room as she tried to make sense of the enigma that was Lucky.

The stillness crept in on her by degrees. By the time she was fully aware of it, it seemed absolute. The night that had seemed almost raucous with sound was suddenly silent. The eeriness of it felt like fingers tracing down her back.

She felt totally vulnerable. If someone outside the house were bent on coming in, the only thing to stop an intruder was a screen door. She thought she heard the scrape of a boot on the gallery floor, but the sound was gone so quickly she might have imagined it. The fear that had temporarily abated rushed back like a flood tide. There was more than snakes and alligators to be wary of in the swamp at night. The faces of the men Lucky had confronted at Mosquito Mouton's came to mind with nauseating clarity, and the big man's threat came back loud and clear—
I'll get you
. . .

Serena blew out the kerosene lamp on the nightstand, dousing the room in blackness. Grabbing a heavy brass candlestick, she crept on tiptoe toward the front wall. Lucky could fight his own fights, she was sure, but if his enemies came looking for him, she was not interested in being made a secondary target for their violence.