Lucky's Lady (10 page)

“No,” she barely managed to say between gasps. It sounded more like a question than an answer. “No,” she said more forcefully.

Lucky rolled her nipple between thumb and forefinger, tugging subtly at the turgid peak. He raised his head a fraction and stared down at her, his eyes heavy-lidded and dark with passion, the thin band of amber ringing the pupils as warm as the light from the lamp on the table.

“Yes,
chère
,” he whispered.

Serena's gaze drifted to his mouth, that incredible, sensuous mouth, gleaming wet and red from their kiss. She stared at it, imagining it at her breast, tugging, sucking, his tongue laving her nipple while his fingers stroked her most sensitive flesh.

“No,” she murmured, the word barely a breath moving from her lips. “I hardly know you.”

“You know I'm a man. I know you're a woman. What more do we need to know?”

“We don't even like each other.”

Lucky growled low in his throat as his mouth moved toward hers. “I'm likin' you just fine right now, sugar.” He kissed a corner of her mouth, probing gently at the cleft of her lips with the tip of his tongue.

“
J'aime te faire l'amour avec toi
,” he breathed the words against her lips. “
Bien, ma chère, casse pas mon coeur
.”

He might have been saying anything. He might have been telling her she was uglier than a mule, but the words, spoken in his smoky voice and flavored with their rich French accent, had their desired effect just the same. Serena felt her common sense further diluted by desire. A languid weakness floated through her arms and legs. She leaned heavily against Lucky and his scent filled her head—musky and warm and indisputably male.

He kissed her again, filling her mouth with his taste. His fingers left her breast to encircle the wrist of her right hand. He drew it down from where it rested flat against his chest. He moved against her hand, nuzzled her cheek, nipped her ear. “That's all for you, angel. Let me give it to you,
chère
.”

Serena let her fingers flex hesitantly. Another wave of heat flashed through her. Oh, God, she wanted him. She wanted a man she'd only just met, a man who was a mystery to her, a man whose overwhelming masculinity frightened her on a fundamental level.

She turned her head away to draw in a deep breath, and her gaze hit the butt of the semi-automatic pistol that nestled against his ribs. Her heart skipped a beat, then rushed into double time as she looked beyond the gun to his biceps. An ugly two-inch-long gash was carved in the flesh and a line of dried blood trailed from it.

He was a dangerous man. A criminal. A man without scruples.

Shaking from the conflict that raged inside her, Serena pushed herself back from him. “You're bleeding.”

“What?”

“Your arm. The one next to the gun,” she said pointedly. “It's bleeding.”

“It's nothing.” Lucky reached for her.

Serena stepped back, crossing her arms in front of her, still avoiding his gaze. “Not to me it's not.”

He reached out slowly to touch her hair, lifting a golden lock to rub it between his fingers. “If I put a Band-Aid on it, will you go to bed with me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't indulge in meaningless sexual flings with men I barely know,” she said, struggling to resurrect her façade of calm.

Lucky watched her lift her chin and straighten her shoulders and resented like hell the ease with which she seemed to throw off the need that still pounded through him. “You mean you'll fuck a man only if you think he'll put a ring on your finger,” he said brutally.

“That's not what I said.”

“
Mais non,
but that's what you meant.”

“That isn't what I meant,” Serena argued. “I don't believe in casual sex. I don't go to bed with men who have no intention of investing emotionally in a relationship just because they happen to be well hung.
That
's what I meant,” she said bitingly. “Are you going to try to tell me you're in love with me?”

Lucky forced a laugh. “Not a chance.”

Serena clenched her jaw against the unexpected stab of hurt his words inflicted. Of course he wasn't going to say it—not now, not ever. Nor did she want him to. “That settles it, then, doesn't it?”

“Only for tonight, sugar,” he said, hooking a finger beneath her chin and tilting her head back. He bent his head and brushed a mocking gentleman's kiss against her lips. “
Bonsoir, chérie
. Sweet dreams.”

Serena watched him saunter out the front door. She had no idea where he was going. She told herself she didn't want to know. At any rate, she was too exhausted to care. She'd been put through an emotional wringer, and every muscle and bone ached with it.

Avoiding even a glance at the bed, she curled herself into one corner of the sofa and tried not to think about Lucky, his heat, his passion . . . the way he had held her when she'd told him she was afraid. . . .

CHAPTER
                        

8

SERENA SAT IN THE PIROGUE, SHADING HER EYES
from the fierce morning sun that had come up like a ball of fire to burn off the low-lying fog. It was not yet noon and already the heat was as oppressive as a fur coat in July. She had dressed in a sleeveless white cotton blouse and khaki walking shorts, but even these summerweight garments wilted and clung to her and made her think longingly of a swim suit and a quiet day at the beach.

Adding to her discomfort was the knowledge that Lucky was standing behind her. She could feel him glowering down at her, and she straightened her back to show she wouldn't be intimidated by his evil mood.

She had gone searching for him at seven-thirty, eager to get to Gifford's—partly because she didn't quite trust herself to be alone with him. She had slept all of two hours after they had parted company the night before. And those two hours had been full of erotic dreams starring Guess Who. Just the memory was enough to make her blush. She didn't want to begin to decipher its meaning.

Lucky Doucet was trouble; he was an outlaw. The fact that he had a body to rival Adonis's couldn't enter into the argument. She couldn't get involved with him. She kept repeating that to herself like a mantra, but every time she thought she had herself convinced, her mind would sneak in the memory of the way he had held her after she'd told him about getting lost in the swamp. For that moment he had been gentle and tender and compassionate. . . .

He had been none of those things when she found him that morning. After searching the galleries back and front and finding only a trio of baby raccoons playing on the steps, she made her way up the exterior staircase to the attic.

Lucky stepped out and slammed the door shut behind him as she neared the landing, glaring at her with bleary, bloodshot eyes. His jaw was shadowed with morning beard. His hair was loose and disheveled, falling to his shoulders in unruly blue-black waves.

“What the hell are you doin' up here?” he demanded, his voice low and as rough as gravel. “I don' want you comin' up here. You got that?”

“Why?” Serena questioned, arching a brow. “Is this where you keep the bodies?”

“
C'est pas de ton affaire
,” he muttered. “Never you mind what I keep up here. It's nothin' for a pretty shrink to go sniffin' through. You're a helluva lot better off not knowing.”

The mere suggestion made Serena curious. What was he hiding? Stolen goods? Illegal liquor? Drugs? Guns? It could have been any of those things, all of them, or something even worse.

“I'm sure I don't care what you keep in there, Mr. Doucet,” she said with as much cool as she could muster. “I only came up here looking for you.”

He moved down to the step below hers, putting them nearly at eye level. Giving her a look that was at once calculatedly cruel and seductive, he lifted a hand to cup her cheek and brought his mouth down close to hers.

“Change your mind, sugar?”

“Certainly not.” Making a disgusted face and leaning back to escape his breath, she fanned the aroma away with her hand. “You've been drinking.”

“Heavily,” Lucky said, straightening away from her. “You oughta try it sometime. Loosen you up. From what I've seen, you could stand it.”

On that infuriating note, he turned and descended the stairs, his heavy boots barely making a sound on the wooden treads. Serena followed at a discreet distance, her mind wrestling with the conflicting facets of the man and with the conflicting emotions he aroused inside her. Her overriding thought was that the sooner she got to Gifford's, the sooner she would be free of Lucky Doucet and the strange spell he seemed to have cast over her.

While she sat at the table waiting impatiently, Lucky went through his morning ablutions without haste, shaving, showering, emerging from the bathroom barechested, wearing a pair of jeans that were nearly white with age. His wet hair was slicked back into its queue and bound with a length of leather boot lace. A scrap of red bandanna was tied around his right biceps, hiding the ugly wound he had acquired the night before.

Serena's gaze fastened on the makeshift bandage, and she felt something twist in her stomach. She told herself it was revulsion at the reminder of how this man made his living, but she knew that wasn't the whole truth. A part of that knot could be directly attributed to fear of what might have happened to him if the bullet had gone high and inside. He would have been dead and there would have been no chance left for anyone to reform him.

She shied away from the direction her thoughts were taking. That path was a dead end, a fast track to heartache.

“I suppose you'll tell me the other guy looks worse,” she said, still staring at the bandage and the massive arm it was bound to. Looking at it at least kept her eyes off his chest and the taut, hard muscles of his stomach.

Lucky looked down at the bandanna as if getting grazed with a bullet had slipped his mind. He flicked a speculative glance at Serena. “
Mais yeah
, but then, he was an ugly son of a bitch to start with.”

“Shouldn't you have a doctor look at that?”

“You're a doctor,” he said, his voice low and rough, his eyes capturing hers. He braced his hands on the arms of her chair and leaned down until his mouth hovered a breath away from hers. “You wanna look at it?”

“No,” Serena murmured, tensing against the waves of heat rippling through her. He was much too close. His body gave off an electrical charge that shorted out her common sense and stimulated the primitive instincts buried beneath her sophisticated façade. His clean male scent filled her nostrils, and she caught herself wondering what it would be like to kiss him when he tasted like toothpaste instead of tobacco.

“No?” he questioned softly, arching one black brow. “Is there some other part of me you'd care to examine, Dr. Sheridan?”

Her memory leapt at the opportunity to remind her of the way he had molded her hand to his erection. Serena bit back a curse, but she couldn't stop the heat from rising in her cheeks.

“Just say the word, sugar,” Lucky announced. “Your wish is my command.”

Serena broke away from the beam of his gaze and spoke through her teeth. “I wish you would stop wasting time on crude seduction routines and take me to Gifford's.”

He backed away from her, his expression cold and closed. “You'll get there.”

“When?”

“When I'm damn good and ready to take you.”

He proceeded out onto the back porch, where he set down a dish of dry cat food for the baby raccoons, shooting Serena a look that dared her to comment. She stood at the back door, watching quietly as the little bandits gamboled around his big feet, vying for his attention, playing with his shoelaces. Lucky grumbled at them in French, but made no move to kick them away. He looked annoyed and embarrassed and Serena felt a most disastrous weakening in the heart she was trying to steel against him.

“It's just easier to feed them than have them in my garbage all the time, that's all,” he said defensively. “It's not like they're pets.”

The words had barely left his mouth when one of the coons sat up on its hind legs and snickered at him, reaching up with its front paws to bat at his pant leg.

“Why not just shoot them?” Serena asked sweetly. “You could save up all their little hides and make yourself a shirt.”

Lucky narrowed his eyes and growled at her, but the effect was ruined when another raccoon reached from its perch on the gallery railing for the shiny button on Lucky's jeans. He arched away from it, scolding it in rapid French. The little coon sat back and whinnied at him, and he reached out grudgingly to scratch it behind one triangular ear.

Serena felt her heart give a traitorous thump. The big bad poacher had a soft spot for little animals. She reminded herself that even Hitler had had a pet, and she forced herself to go back to the table to wait.

Only after a breakfast of fried catfish and a bottle of beer did Lucky give any indication of being ready to take her to Gifford's.

“I've got better things to do than play chauffeur,” he grumbled as he poled the pirogue away from the shore.

Serena shot him a look over her shoulder. “You know, I'm sick of hearing you complain. If you didn't want to get involved in this, you could have left me at Gifford's yesterday. Why bring me here if you're too busy to take me back?”

He arched a brow above the rim of his mirrored sunglasses with insulting lasciviousness. “Do you really have to ask, sugar?”

She narrowed her eyes speculatively. “You know, I think you do that on purpose.”

“What?”

“Make obnoxious sexist remarks. I think you do it to make me angry, to throw me off the topic. Why is that, Lucky? Are you afraid to have a real conversation with a woman?”

“I'm not afraid of anything,” he said too vehemently, giving the push-pole a mighty shove. “I'm sure as hell not afraid of you.”

They traveled on in a silence that was as thick as the muggy air.

No shotgun blast greeted them this time as they rounded the bend to Gifford's cabin. Gifford sat on the steps tying fishing flies. Pepper Fontenot sat in a ratty old green and white lawn chair in the yard with a gutted outboard motor on a tarp at his feet. The clamorous sounds of a Cajun band blasted out of a portable radio on the gallery.

“Hey, Giff, what'sa matter with you? You run outta shells or somethin'?” Lucky hollered as he piloted the boat alongside the rickety dock.

Gifford pushed himself to his feet and jammed his big hands at his waist. “Hell, I ain't wasting good buckshot on you, Doucet.”

“What about me?” Serena called. She waited for Lucky to pull the nose of the pirogue up on shore and exited from the bow, preferring to step on land rather than risk her neck on the rotted pier again.

Gifford gave her a long, hard stare as she came to stand at the foot of the steps. “I figured you'd be on your way back to Charleston by now.”

Serena swallowed down the hurt and met his gaze head-on. “I told you, I won't leave this swamp until you do. I want you to come back to Chanson du Terre with me.”

“And I told you, I'm not going. You're not bossing me around, little girl. I don't give a toot how many degrees you have. You can't hightail it out of Lou'siana first chance you get, then come on back and try to run things on the weekend.”

She didn't back down. Lucky watched her take it on the chin. He cursed Gifford for being so hard on her, then told himself he didn't care. He leaned a hip against the newel post and lit his fourth cigarette of the morning, sucking smoke down a throat that was already raw.

He felt like holy hell. Even in the best of circumstances he never slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch because of nightmares, but the previous night had been worse than usual. What little sleep he'd gotten had been plagued with memories of pain and betrayal. As if his conscious mind hadn't been doing the job well enough, his subconscious had seen fit to remind him that beautiful women were the cause of most of his problems. First Shelby, then Amalinda Roca, the lovely little viper whose duplicity had helped to land him in a Central American prison.

He had finally given up on the idea of sleep and had proceeded to attempt to drown his foul mood and sexual frustration with whiskey, succeeding only in giving himself a colossal hangover. Now his head banged in syncopated rhythm with the gash in his arm where Mean Gene Willis had managed to nick him.

“You look like hell,” Gifford said, his hard gaze still on Serena. His voice had lost some of its edge, betraying his true concern as he took in the dark crescents beneath her eyes. He glanced at Lucky to distract himself from his guilt. “You both look like hell.”

“Mebbe they both been
raisin
' hell,” Pepper suggested, chuckling merrily at the dark looks his comment received from both Lucky and Serena. Gifford only raised a bushy white brow in speculation as he studied them.

Serena felt a blush rise to her cheeks at the memory of the near miss of the night before. There but for the grace of God and Smith & Wesson . . . If the sight of Lucky's gun hadn't brought her back to reality in a cold rush, she may well have had something to blush about now. Dropping her head, she made her way up the steps, past her grandfather and onto the gallery.

“I could use a cup of coffee. Pepper, do you still make it strong?”

“Black as dat bayou and strong 'nough to curl your purty blond hair,
pichouette
,” Pepper said, flashing his teeth.

“Sounds like heaven,” Serena mumbled, letting herself in the front door.

Gifford remained on the steps, staring down at Lucky. “What have you got to say for yourself? You been fooling 'round with my little girl?”

Lucky slid his sunglasses on top of his head and gave Gifford a belligerent look. “What would you care, old man? All you wanna do is give her the sharp side of your tongue. You're the one left her with no place to stay last night.”

“I got my reasons.”

“Like you got your reasons for holin' up out here?” Lucky shook his head and muttered an expletive. “Cut her some slack, Giff. She came, didn't she?”

“Yeah, she came, and she'll leave again too,” Gifford drawled, nodding. “First chance she gets. She don't give a damn about what happens here. The girl oughta have some respect for family, for tradition.”

Lucky snorted. “You got a funny way of teachin' respect. Dump her out in the swamp to spend the night. She'd probably cut your heart out if you had one.”

The idea that Gifford had known about Serena's fear and played on it infuriated Lucky. And the rise of his protective instincts made him even angrier. He swore again, tossed his cigarette butt to the dirt, and snuffed it out viciously with the toe of his boot. “I oughta just wash my hands of the lot of you. It's nothin' but trouble, this business.”

“Me, I hear you got 'nough trouble wit' dat Perret boy and dat big ugly son Willis,” Pepper said, rocking back on the hind legs of his lawn chair. His light eyes sparkled like aquamarines in his dark face.

Lucky scowled at him. “Where'd you hear that?”

“Me, I heard dat wit' my ears, I did.” The old man chuckled at his little joke, not heeding Lucky's ferocious glare in the least.