CHAPTER
13
SHE LOOKED LIKE AN ANGEL. HER HAIR SPILLED
golden and silky across the pillow. Her lashes lay like tawny lace fans against her cheeks. Her mouth was soft and rosy, relaxed in sleep. Lucky looked down at her, something twisting painfully in his chest as he reached out to touch her but stopped himself, his fingers a scant inch above her face.
She was giving and caring, strong and brave, everything he'd ever given up on finding in a woman, and he couldn't allow himself to indulge in anything other than her body. That, of course, was heaven itself. What he felt when he was inside Serena was incredible. She took away the coldness, chased back the darkness, made him feel alive instead of caught in some bleak plane of existence. He could take her five times a day and never get enough of her. He'd never felt such an insatiable yearning for a woman, had never had his needs met with such sweet absolute surrender.
He wouldn't have believed it possible of the woman he'd first encountered in Gauthier's, but that cool, controlled woman wasn't who Serena really was. Too bad for him, he thought, his mouth twisting in a wry parody of a smile.
Serena wasn't cold and hard. She was a warm, golden temptation. Heaven was losing himself in her, hell was knowing he couldn't stay. She would want too much from him. She would want things he couldn't give. He couldn't let her get that close.
In the first place, he was terrified of what she would see—the things he'd done, the things he'd seen, the cold blackness that surrounded his soul and crept in on his mind. In the second place, he was terrified of what would happen. He had spent the past year putting himself back together, painstakingly reconstructing himself from the fragments Ramos's hell had left him in. Now those fragments balanced one against the other like a house of cards. One wrong move and it would all come crashing down.
He needed his peace, his solitude, his art. That was all. He had stripped his life down to those bare essentials because he couldn't tolerate anything more. He couldn't be around people because their presence irritated him, like air blowing across an exposed nerve. By necessity his focus had to remain inward, concentrating on holding himself together. He couldn't need a woman whose job was to poke around inside people's minds, ferreting out their secrets, taking them all apart to see what made them tick.
He slid from the bed without disturbing Serena, stepped into his jeans and zipped up, leaving the button undone. He dug a cigarette from the pocket of his T-shirt, hung it from his lip, and wandered across the room to the French doors that still stood open. Thunder rumbled in the distance, an appropriate accompaniment to everything that was going on inside him and around him; a portent of a coming storm within and without.
He had a bad feeling about this business with Chanson du Terre. He had from the beginning and it was only getting worse. Opposing forces were pushing against each other, building pressure. Something was going to have to give. Digging a match out of his pocket, he lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply, wondering which side would give in first.
Gifford Sheridan was an old man. Ferocious and hardheaded, to be sure, but an old man nevertheless. If he had a son to inherit or a granddaughter who wanted to stay, things might have looked better. As it was, the deck was stacked against him, against Chanson du Terre, against the swamp.
On the other side stood Tristar and Len Burke. Burke, who reminded Lucky too much of his old nemesis, Colonel Lambert, a man who had known no boundaries when it came to getting what he wanted. Where would Burke draw the line? And what of Shelby? Lucky knew all too well how far she was willing to go to get what she wanted.
Mason Talbot struck him as little more than a pawn to be used by Tristar and Shelby. He was too laid-back to instigate anything. Too dimwitted in Gifford's opinion. But he would have his uses. He would make a perfect figurehead to rally the town around in favor of economic growth. And once Tristar was in place and Mason was ensconced in the legislature in Baton Rouge, he would make a very attractive spokesman for the chemical industry.
Lucky's gaze drifted back to the bed and Serena, who was frowning and mumbling in her sleep, her hand sweeping against the mattress where he had lain. The load had been dropped squarely on her slender shoulders, and while she seemed determined to uphold her grandfather's wishes, would she only be delaying the inevitable? She had said Gifford's ploy wouldn't hold her here. What would happen when she left?
“Lucky?” she whispered, rousing herself like a sleepy kitten. Blinking against the soft light, she sat up and combed back a handful of honey-gold hair from her eyes. Lucky watched and said nothing, savoring the sight of her as she drew the ivory cotton sheet up demurely over her breasts, a gesture that struck him as sweetly incongruous considering everything they'd done together in bed.
She tilted her head and blinked at him. “What are you doing?”
“Havin' a cigarette,” he said. He took a deep drag and exhaled a plume of smoke in demonstration.
Serena frowned as she slid from the bed, wrapping the sheet around her like a Grecian gown. “You smoke too much,” she chided him softly as she padded across the faded carpet. She cuddled against him, not waiting for an invitation, but sliding her arms around his lean waist and nuzzling her cheek against his bare chest. She tilted her head back to look up at him. “You shouldn't smoke at all. It's bad for you.”
Lucky couldn't hold back a soft, incredulous laugh. He stared down into her earnest face, something like wonder rising inside him. He couldn't remember the last time he'd given a moment's thought to his health. Not because he doubted his own mortality, but because he didn't care. For a long, long time he'd felt as if he had nothing left to lose, including his own life. When he first returned from Central America, he spent night after night staring at a 9mm Beretta, his death awaiting him in a sleek black casing filled with hollow-point ammunition. The only thing that kept him from sticking the thing in his mouth and pulling the trigger was the knowledge of what it would have done to his parents, who were staunchly Catholic.
He had lived with death as a constant companion and now Serena stood looking up at him, warning him of the dangers of smoking.
“Why is that funny?” she asked, looking annoyed with him.
Lucky sobered. “It's not.”
He turned without leaving her embrace and crushed his cigarette in a decorative china cup sitting on a stand. “Happy?”
“Hardly.” Serena sniffed. “That was my great-grandmother's teacup.”
“This old house is full of stuff like that, isn't it?” he asked, looping his arms loosely around her. “Antiques, heirlooms, family treasures passed down and down.”
“Yes,” Serena answered, her own gaze wandering over a dozen things in this room alone that had seen generations of Sheridans come and go. “It's like a microcosm of history. It ought to be renovated and opened to the public as a museum.”
“Instead, it could be razed and lost forever.”
She looked up at him, her brows pulling together over troubled dark eyes. “Could we not talk about it for a while? I'm so tired.”
Lucky ran a hand over her hair, an unexpected wave of sympathy sweeping over him. He would have liked to have taken her away from all the problems, protected her, kept her all to himself for a little while, but that wasn't an option. He knew he should have steeled himself against the tenderness stirring inside him as he looked down at her, but he gave in to it for an instant, leaned down, and kissed her. She looked tired. She looked confused and battered. What could it hurt to offer her a little comfort?
Her lips were soft and warm beneath his. Eager, yearning. She clung to his kiss as if it might intoxicate her past thinking. She pressed herself against him as if she wished to be absorbed directly into his body. The desire to protect her rose up even stronger inside him and he tried to push it back. He couldn't be anyone's savior; he had all he could do just to hold himself together.
When he lifted his head he touched her cheek and murmured regretfully, “I'm sorry,
chère
. I know you didn't ask for this fight.”
“It's mine by birthright, I suppose,” Serena said, drawing away from him. She wandered in the little pool of lamplight, absently touching objects on the table and dresser with one hand and clutching the sheet to her breasts with the other.
“It's ironic, you know,” she added, trying unsuccessfully to smile. “I left here because I thought my life was somewhere else, because I didn't think I'd ever become my own person if I stayed. And here I am . . .” She gestured to the room, to the house in general, looking around her with a vague sense of bewilderment. “Here I am. They say you can't go home again. I can't seem to get away.”
“You'll be able to get away permanently if your sister has her way,” Lucky said, watching her with a hawkish gaze. “Is that what you want—to be out from under the burden of your heritage forever?”
Serena looked around at the room, feeling the personality of the great house bearing down upon her. She was too tired to fight it. Resignation flowed through her and her shoulders sagged. She would be forever tied to this house in a way time and distance couldn't alter even if she wanted them to. This was her home. It would always be her home. Chanson du Terre was where her roots were and they went two hundred years deep.
“No,” she said softly.
She didn't want to see the old house destroyed. She didn't want to see strangers living here. She didn't want Tristar Chemical building a processing plant where the old slave quarters stood in silent testimony to past lives. She didn't want to see high wire fences surrounding what once had been cane fields. She wanted Chanson du Terre to be owned by a Sheridan; she just didn't want it to be her.
“Then you'd better be ready for a fight, sugar,” Lucky said. “Len Burke means to have this land. He'll fight dirty to get it and your sister will be there right beside him.”
“It's not Shelby I'm worried about.”
He gave her a guarded look. “Don't underestimate her, Serena. I don't think you realize what she might be capable of.”
Serena shrugged off his warning and the niggling doubts that had taken seed in her own mind over the past few days. Shelby was flighty and selfish, but she wasn't ruthless. “She's my sister. I think I probably have a better idea of what she's capable of than you.”
“Did you think she was capable of abandoning you in the swamp?”
The jab found its target, hitting the nerve with stinging accuracy, but Serena stubbornly shook it off. “We've been over that ground before. She didn't intend anything bad to happen. Shelby doesn't think things all the way through. She doesn't consider all the consequences of her actions, just the immediate effect.”
Don't count on it, sugar
, Lucky thought, but he kept the idea to himself. He supposed it was only natural for Serena to have a blind spot where her twin was concerned. What kind of person could look at their own flesh and blood and see evil? He only hoped that blind spot didn't keep her from seeing something truly dangerous before it was too late.
The explosion came just before dawn. It rattled the windows and shook the foundation of the old house. Serena was able to smell smoke before she was fully conscious. She shot up and out of bed, the instinct to flee danger pumping adrenaline through her bloodstream.
It took several seconds for her brain to catch up, sorting through the questions of where she was and what was the source of the danger. Her room was dark and in the aftermath of the blast the only sound was the rumbling of thunder. For a moment she thought that might have been all that had awakened her, but then the scent of smoke came again. It drifted in through the open French door, carried on a strong cold breeze that heralded the coming storm.
Grabbing her robe and throwing it on hastily, she rushed to the open door and looked out across the gallery and across the yard. A ball of orange glowed in the distance, and flames licked up the side of the machine shed. Shouts cut through the silence and men arrived at the scene, their shapes silhouetted against the brightness of the fire.
Serena whirled toward the bed, suddenly thinking of Lucky, but he was gone. His absence struck her like a physical blow, but there was no time to contemplate where he had disappeared to, or when or why.
She grabbed clothes out of the wardrobe without looking and jerked them on, not bothering with underwear. She stepped into her tattered espadrilles and ran out onto the gallery, down the steps, and across the garden, flying as fast as her legs would take her toward the building that was already engulfed in flames.
Workers were directing hoses at the conflagration by the time she got there, but to no avail. Fire was devouring the building. James Arnaud rushed back and forth between the workers, shouting to be heard above the roar, telling them to concentrate on wetting down the part of the enormous old wooden shed that wasn't already ablaze.
“What happened?” Serena yelled, grabbing his arm and his attention as he paced past her.
“Hell if I know,” he snapped, his thick dark brows set in a V over furious eyes. “I heard the blast and came running. It was probably lightning. All I know is we've got most of our equipment in there and we're gonna lose it all if we don't get this fire put out!”
“Has anyone called the fire department?”
“They're on the way and they'd better get here fast. We might as well piss on this building for all the good we're doing.”
He shrugged her off then and went to help with the seemingly futile business of dousing the shed. Serena stood back helplessly, watching, squinting into the brilliance of the flames, the heat searing her cheeks even from a distance.
Above them the sky lit up with a network of white lines, and thunder boomed like cannon fire. Thick, rolling storm clouds were illuminated in the fluorescent glow of the lightning, black and swollen like enormous sponges.
“Come on, rain,” she shouted.