“We can talk about it when we get home,” Serena said softly.
There were a hundred questions to be asked. Why hadn't Shelby called her when Gifford had left? Why had she denied knowing the reason Gifford had left? Why would Gifford ever have mentioned selling the plantation and why would Shelby agree to it, much less find a buyer?
Feeling a little like Alice waking up in Wonderland, Serena pushed herself to her feet and wiped the remaining tears from her eyes. The questions would have to wait. She wouldn't quiz Gifford now and run the risk of giving him another attack. It could all be sorted out once they were back home. And the sooner the better.
She turned around to look back at the dock. Gifford's bass boat was tied up on the side opposite Lucky's pirogue. “Pepper, would you please get the boat ready?”
Pepper shook his head, smiling at her much the way Lawrence Gauthier had earlier. “Oh, no,
chère
. Me, I kinda like bein' alive. You ax Giff 'bout it, he don' wanna go nowhere.”
Serena turned back to her grandfather. He refused to look at her. “Gifford, please. You can't stay out here.”
“I sure as hell can.”
She turned to Lucky.
He shrugged and physically backed away from the conversation. “It's a free country.”
“I don't believe this,” Serena said angrily, raking her hair back from her face with trembling hands. “Dammit, Gifford, you nearly had a heart attack right before my eyes. You can't stay out here!”
“I can do whatever I damn well please, young lady,” he said, forcing himself to his feet. He swayed a bit, but gripped the rail with a white-knuckled fist and locked his knees. “I won't have you or your sister or anybody else trying to run my life.”
Serena cast one last glance at Pepper and Lucky, looking for help but finding none. Pepper shuffled his feet and dodged her gaze, staring down at the bag of crawfish. Lucky merely stared back at her, saying nothing, offering nothing. She shook her head. “I think you've all gone mad.”
“Well then, why don't you just go on back to Charleston, where you won't have to worry about all your crazy relatives,” Gifford said coldly. “Outta sight, outta mind. You don't care what all goes on down here.”
Serena held up a hand to cut him off, pressing her lips together and blinking hard to ward off more tears of frustration. “I won't discuss this with you now, Gifford. I won't.”
“Fine. Then go on and get out of here. Leave me in peace.”
“I'm not going anywhere,” she announced. “I'm staying right here until I convince you to come home.”
“The hell you are. I won't have you,” Gifford barked. “Lucky, you take her on back to Chanson du Terre.”
Lucky backed away another step, brows drawing together ominously low over his eyes. “Forget it. I ain't running no goddamn ferry service. I'm not takin' her all the way back to Chanson du Terre. It's gettin' dark. I've got things to do.”
“Then she can stay with you at your place, 'cause she sure as hell ain't staying here,” Gifford declared. “I came out here to get
away
from ungrateful women.”
“Stay with
him!
” Serena said with horror.
“Stay with
me!
” The idea nearly made Lucky choke.
They regarded each other with a kind of terror that didn't go unnoticed by Gifford. The old man raised an eyebrow.
“She's not stayin' with me,” Lucky said emphatically. “It's out of the question. Absolutely out of the question.”
His house was his sanctuary. It was the space he had created for himself to heal in, to have some measure of peace. It was his private refuge, the last stronghold of his sanity. The last person he wanted breaching those walls was this woman, a woman he wanted beyond all reason, a woman whose face haunted his mind with memories of the pain and betrayal of another.
“
Non. Non
,” he muttered, shaking his head. “
Sa c'est de la couyonade
.”
Gifford snorted. “So you think I'm foolish too? By God, the two of you deserve each other. You can sit around over coffee tonight and compare notes on ways to avoid your responsibilities.”
Lucky wheeled around, stomping up three steps to thrust a warning finger in Gifford's face. “You're skatin' on thin ice, old man,” he said through his teeth. “I don' owe you. I don' owe Chanson du Terre.”
“Oh, that's right,” Gifford drawled sarcastically. Lucky's ferocious look didn't impress him; he was too old to be frightened by the idea of his own mortality. “You don't owe anybody anything. You're your own man. Good for you, Lucky. You can pat yourself on the back after the swamp silts up and everything dies.”
“Don' you talk to me about responsibilities, Gifford,” Lucky snapped. “You've got your own. And where are you? Out here fishin' and takin' potshots at Tristar reps. How the hell is that gonna solve anything?”
“I've got my own way of dealing with the situation.”
“
Mais, yeah
,” Lucky said with a harsh laugh. “By
not
dealing with it.”
Serena stepped between them. “Excuse me. Do I get a say in this matter?”
Both men scowled at her simultaneously and answered in thunderous unison. “No!”
She fell back a step in utter disbelief.
Lucky jumped off the stairs and started pacing again. He knew Gifford—mules had nothing on him when it came to stubbornness. If he said he wasn't letting Serena stay with him, he meant it. He'd leave her on the doorstep all night if it came to that. The idea went against Lucky's grain on a fundamental level where he'd long ago thought he'd given up all feeling.
He glanced at Serena out of the corner of his eye and mentally swore a blue streak. She was just as proud and stubborn as her grandfather. She'd stood toe to toe with the old man. She'd been on the brink of tears with worry over him. She obviously loved him. And old Giff had given her an emotional buffeting for her trouble. She looked like a hothouse flower that had been thrust outdoors during a thunderstorm—bedraggled, dirty, exhausted.
And Gifford was bent on turning her away.
Damn.
It wasn't that he
cared
about her, Lucky assured himself. It wasn't that he
wanted
to get involved. It was none of his business how Gifford treated his granddaughter. For all he knew, she deserved to be left out on the porch all night. The extenuating circumstances were what concerned him—another example of the way other people's affairs kept drifting into the path of his life. This swamp was his world. He couldn't bear the idea of seeing it destroyed.
He heaved a sigh and raked his hands through his hair. What were his options? He wanted Gifford to deal with the Tristar problem before something catastrophic happened, like Gifford shooting Len Burke or Shelby succeeding in selling the place to a company with a record as environmental rapists. That meant getting Gifford to go back to face the situation. Serena had resolved to get him to return, and heaven knew she had the determination to convince him, given enough opportunity. That meant keeping her near the old man and away from her sister's poisonous influence. And that meant . . .
Hell and damnation.
He examined the dilemma from another angle. How long could it take Serena to talk Gifford into going home? A day or two. Three at the outside. How much harping could a man take, after all? Lucky decided he wouldn't actually have to stay with her if she was in his house. He could easily spend that much time out in the swamp. He had plenty of other things to keep him occupied. Still, he didn't like the idea of being cornered into doing something.
He stopped his pacing, turning his head to glare up at Gifford. “All right,” he said, his voice low. “I'll keep her.”
Gifford successfully fought off a smile.
Serena's jaw dropped.
For a long second no one said anything. The tension building in the air was enough to make the coon hounds whine and trot away in search of a safe haven.
“Keep me?” Serena questioned softly, glaring at Lucky. “
Keep me!
” Her voice rose several decibels. She planted her hands on her hips and leaned over him, enjoying the height advantage for once. “You most certainly will not keep me!” She whirled toward Gifford, her face livid. “I will not stay with this man! I hardly know him and what I do know about him is hardly flattering. For heaven's sake, Gifford, you can't really expect me to stay with him!”
“Who knows what I might expect,” Gifford said, putting on a wounded air. “I'm just a crazy old man waiting to die.”
“Stop it!” Serena spat out. She stared up at him in the fading afternoon light and felt a big ball of fear swell up in her chest like a balloon. He had that same look he'd had on his face when she'd been seventeen and the sheriff had brought her home after catching her and two other honor students splitting a jug of cheap wine under the bleachers at the football stadium.
Her voice softened to a whisper. “Gifford?”
He shook his head. “Don't you even ask me, Serena. I'm so mad right now I could spit brass tacks. You think you can just come breezing in here and fix everything up with a sentence or two because you've got a sheepskin from Duke and a fancy practice up in Charleston. You don't know what's going on here and you don't care. You just want to put all the parts back in their places and get on with your vacation.” He shook his head once more and blew out a breath. His color was heightening again, a flush creeping up from his throat into his face like mercury rising in a thermometer. “Go on, get out of here. You'll be all right with Lucky.”
He turned and trudged up the rest of the steps, letting himself into the cabin without looking back. Serena felt stunned, as if someone had hit her between the eyes with a rock. Well, she'd gotten what she deserved, hadn't she? In his usual no-nonsense style Gifford had cut through to the heart of the matter. She
had
thought she'd come out here and simply set things straight, put her world back on track, rearrange things to her satisfaction. She had inherited that take-charge manner from Gifford. She used it to great success in her everyday life back in Charleston. But they weren't in Charleston.
Damn this place. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hands over her face, erasing what was left of her makeup.
“I'm sorry, Miz 'Rena,” Pepper said, climbing the stairs to stand beside her, his wriggling, clicking crawfish sack hanging down from his fists. “You know old Giff. He gets in a temper, him, there's no tellin' what he say. He don' mean half.”
Serena tried without much luck to muster a smile. “Does that mean you'll run me home after all?”
He frowned, something that looked completely foreign to his face, as if his mouth didn't quite know how to turn that way. “Can't. Dat old boat, she's not runnin'. Lucky, he bring the part, but dat don' make her run. Take me a coupl'a days to fix.”
Serena hadn't thought it possible for her spirits to sink any lower. She'd been wrong. They seemed to fall now from their last toehold into a bottomless black pit. It must have been a painful thing to watch, because Pepper made another attempt to frown. He shuffled his feet on the worn tread of the step, working up to making a run for it.
Why, oh, why had she let her temper goad her into coming out here without thinking it through, without first finding out exactly what was going on? Now she was stuck in this god-awful place. Turned out by her own grandfather. Turned over to the care of a man who wouldn't know a scruple if it bit his handsome butt.
She turned her bleak gaze to Lucky. He stood absently scratching the head of one of the coon hounds as he watched her, his expression inscrutable. In the long, sinister shadows seeping across the ground as the sun slid away, he looked more dangerous than ever.
“Get in the boat,
chère
,” he said softly. “Looks like we're stuck with each other for a little while longer.”
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 water's 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. “What'sa matter,
chère?
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.