He was also her only hope of reaching Giff. And she had to reach him. Someone had to find out what was going on. Shelby claimed she hadn't a clue as to why Gifford had suddenly deserted the plantation in favor of living out in the swamp. It might have been nothing more than a matter of Giff getting fed up with having Shelby and her family underfoot while their new house was under construction, but it might have been something more. It wasn't like him to leave during a busy time of year, simply turning the reins of the sugarcane plantation over to his manager.
Shelby had peevishly suggested Gifford was getting senile. Serena couldn't imagine her grandfather as anything other than sharp as a tack, but then, she hadn't actually seen him in a while. Her practice in Charleston kept her too busy for many visits home. She had been looking forward to this one, looking forward to simply enjoying her ancestral home in all its springtime glory. Then Shelby had greeted her at the door with news of Gifford's defection to the swamp.
He'd been out there two weeks. Two weeks with no word, and Shelby had done nothing about it except complain.
“What did you expect me to do?” she had asked. “Go out there after him? I have two children to raise and a real estate business to manage and a husband, and I'm the chairperson of the Junior League drive for canned goods for the starving peasants of Guatemala. I have responsibilities, Serena! I can't just jump in a boat and go out there! Not that he would ever listen to a word I have to say anyway. And you can't expect Mason to go out there. You know how beastly Gifford is to him. I'm just at my wit's end trying to deal with him. You're the psychologist. You go out there and talk some sense into that hard head of his.”
Go out there. Into the swamp. Serena's blood had run cold at the suggestion. It ran cold now at the thought. But she was just angry enough and stubborn enough to get past her fear for the moment. She had stormed from the house to go in search of a guide without even bothering to change her clothes. She wouldn't allow herself to dwell on her fear. She had to see her grandfather and there was only one way to do that. She had to go out into the one place she thought of as hell on earth, and the only man available to take her had just walked away.
Serena rushed after Lucky Doucet, struggling to hurry in her narrow skirt and shoes that had not been intended for walking on rough planking. The midday sun was blinding as she stepped out onto the dock. The stench of dirty water and gasoline hung in the thick, still air. Lucky stood at the open door to the workshop.
“We haven't discussed your fee,” Serena said, ignoring the possibility that he had changed his mind about taking her. She struggled for an even breath as she faced his chest.
He looked down his nose at her with an expression that suggested she had just insulted his mother. “I have no need of your money,” he said contemptuously.
Serena rolled her eyes and lifted her hands in a gesture of exasperated surrender. “Pardon me for thinking you might like an honest wage for an honest job. How bourgeois of me.”
He ignored her, bending to pick up a heavy cardboard box full of oily black motor parts. He lifted it as though it weighed no more than a kitten and set it on a workbench to sort through it. His attitude was one of dismissal and irritating in the extreme.
“Why are you making this so difficult?” Serena asked.
He turned his head and gave her a nasty, sardonic smile. “Because I'm a difficult kind of guy. I thought you might have figured that out by now. You're an intelligent woman.”
“Frankly, I'm amazed you would credit a woman with having a brain. You strike me as the sort of man who sees women as being useful for only one purpose.”
“I said you were intelligent, not useful. I won't know how useful you are until I have you naked beneath me.”
Heat flared through Serena like a flash fire. She attributed it to anger. Certainly it had nothing to do with the sudden image of lying tangled in the sheets with this barbarian. She crossed her arms in front of her defensively and made a show of looking all around them before returning her belligerent gaze to Lucky. “Pardon me, I was just checking to see if I had somehow been transported back into the Stone Age. Are you proposing to hit me over the head with a dinosaur bone and drag me back to your cave, Conan?”
He raised a warning finger, his brows drawing together ominously over glittering eyes. “You got a mouth on you,
chère
.”
He shuffled toward her, backing her up against the door frame. He braced his forearms on the wood above her head and leaned down close. His breath was warm against her cheek and scented with the smoky taint of tobacco and whiskey.
“I have
never
forced a woman,” Lucky said, his voice low and soft, the molten gold of his eyes burning into Serena's. “I never have to.”
She was a spoiled society bitch and he wanted nothing to do with her. He'd been burned badly enough to know better.
Dieu
, he'd learned his first lesson at the hands of her twin! To get that close again was to give in entirely to the demons of insanity.
Still, desire ribboned through him. The subtle, expensive scent of her perfume lured him closer. He dropped his head down near the curve of her shoulder and battled the urge to nuzzle the tender spot just below her ear and above the prim stand-up collar of her dark pink blouse.
“I'm hiring you as a guide,” she said through her teeth, her voice trembling with rage or desire or both. “Not for stud service.”
Lucky mentally thanked her for breaking the spell. He stepped back, cocking one hip and hooking a thumb in the waistband of his pants. He gave her a devilish grin. “Why not, angel? I'd give you the ride of your life.”
She glared at him in utter disgust and walked away to stand at the edge of the dock, her slender back rigid. He had no doubt irreparably offended her ladylike sensibilities, he thought. Fine. That was exactly what he wanted. The more emotional distance he put between himself and a woman like Serena Sheridan, the better. His mother would have peeled the hide off him for talking that way to a woman, but this was more than just a matter of manners, it was a matter of survival.
He scooped up the box of motor parts and started down the pier with it, calling over his shoulder as he went. “So, you comin',
chère
, or what? I don't have all day.”
Serena turned and stared in disbelief as he headed down the worn dock. She noticed for the first time that his hair was nearly as long as hers, tied in a short queue at the back of his thick neck with a length of leather boot lace. A pirate. That was what he reminded her of—in looks
and
attitude.
“You're leaving
now?
” she said, once again rushing to catch up with him.
He didn't answer her. It was perfectly obvious he meant to leave. Serena cursed Lucky Doucet and spike heels in the same breath as she picked up her pace. Talk about your grade-A bastards, this guy took the prize. And she wanted to be the one to personally pin the medal on him. If they were in Charleston, never in a million years would she have put up with being treated the way he was treating her. She had too much sense and self-respect to fall for that tame-the-rogue-male syndrome. But they weren't in Charleston. They were in South Louisiana, at the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp, some of the wildest, most remote swampland in the United States. And Lucky Doucet wasn't some button-down executive or construction worker she could bring to heel with a cool look. He was a breed unto himself and only marginally more civilized than the bayou country around them.
Abruptly, the heel of one of her pumps caught between planks in the dock and gave way, nearly pitching Serena headfirst off the pier and into the oily water. She swore aloud as she stumbled awkwardly, hampered by the narrow skirt around her knees, just managing to catch her balance before it was too late.
Lucky stopped and turned toward her with a look of mock affront. “Why, Miz Serena, such language! What will the ladies at the Junior League think?”
She narrowed her eyes and snarled at him as she hopped on her ruined shoe and pulled the other one off. The instant she put her foot down, she ran a sliver into it, but she refused to cry out or even acknowledge the pain. She limped up to Lucky, struggling to maintain some semblance of dignity.
“I'm not prepared to leave just now, Mr. Doucet,” she said primly. “I was thinking more along the lines of tomorrow morning.”
He shrugged without the least show of concern. A brilliant white grin split his features. “Well, that's too bad, sugar, 'cause if you're leavin' with me, you're leavin' now.”
CHAPTER
2
IT WAS A NO-WIN SITUATION. IF SHE STOOD HER
ground, she lost her ride. If she gave in, it was another blow to her pride and another peg up for Mr. Macho's overinflated ego. Serena took a slow, deep breath of air that was as dense as steam and tasted metallic and bitter. Maintaining as much of her dignity as she could, she lifted her slim nose and gave Lucky a long, cool look.
One corner of his lush mouth curled like the end of a cat's tail. “What'sa matter,
chère?
You'd rather give orders than take them? Well, I'm not your hired boy. You want a ride, then you climb in the boat. You wanna boss somebody around, you can take a hike.”
Serena was certain she could actually feel her temper start to boil the blood in her veins. She clenched her jaw and fought a valiant battle to keep the lid on when all she wanted to do was tell Lucky Doucet to take a long walk off a short pier. Despite her name, her apparent serenity was little more than a shield, a defense mechanism, protective camouflage. All her life she'd had to struggle with strong doses of Sheridan temper and stubbornness. Now she wrestled one into submission with the other. The man was doing his best to make her angry, so she stubbornly refused to lose her temper.
“You are a remarkably obnoxious man, Mr. Doucet,” she observed in the calmest of voices, as if she were commenting on nothing more interesting than the weather.
“I always try to excel.”
“How admirable.”
“So are you comin'?” He set his box down on the dock and sat beside it, dangling his long legs off the pier.
“I'll need to stop by Chanson du Terre for a few things. You wouldn't have any objection to that, would you?”
He gave her a flat look.
Serena motioned impatiently to the suit she was wearing. “You don't really expect me to travel out into the swamp dressed this way, do you?”
He scowled and grumbled as he lowered himself into his boat. “
Non
. Come on, then. I been here too long already. Just look at the trouble I got myself into, havin' to haul you around.”
Serena moved to the edge of the dock and looked down. It was then that the full folly of what she was about to do hit her. Lucky's boat was no more than twelve feet in length, slender as a pea pod, and it looked about as stable as a floating leaf. Sitting in it would put her no more than an arm's length from the black water of the bayou.
Fear rose up in her throat and wedged there like a tennis ball. What was the matter with her? Had she completely lost her mind? She was about to put her life in the hands of a man she wouldn't sit next to on a bus and trust him to take her into the deep swamp in a boat that looked about as seaworthy as her broken shoe.
The swamp. Where anything could happen. Where people could get lost and never be found.
A chill raced over her flesh, settling into her arms and legs in trembling pools. She clenched her jaw and held her breath, forgetting every relaxation technique she taught her own patients. It had been too long since she'd been assaulted by this fear. The strength of it took her by surprise. It swelled and shook her, crowding at the back of her throat like a scream demanding release.
Lucky stood in the pirogue, watching her, annoyed by her dawdling. Then the color drained out of her face and his annoyance was replaced by something he refused to name. Serena Sheridan had come across as a lady who could handle herself in most situations. She had stood up to him better than most men did. Now she looked like a piece of porcelain about to crack from some fierce internal pressure. Something deep inside him responded to that, commiserated with it.
He ground his teeth, resenting the feeling and giving in to it at the same time. As hardened as he liked to think he was, he couldn't just stand there and watch her fall apart. He told himself it was because he didn't want to have to deal with a woman in hysterics. Besides, he had already decided the safest thing for him was to keep her half mad at him all the time. A man stayed wary of a snake poised to strike; it was the ones that appeared to be docile and dozing in the sun that were dangerous.
“You don' like my boat,
chère?
” he drawled, an unmistakable note of challenge in his voice.
“A—um—” Serena pulled herself out of her trance with difficulty, trying to focus not on her memory but on the boat and the man standing in it leaning indolently against a long push-pole. “It's not exactly what I had in mind. Don't you have something a little . . . bigger?”
“Like a yacht?” he asked sarcastically. “This ain't Saks Fifth Avenue, sugar. I don't have a selection for you to try on for size. Now, are you gonna get on down here or do I get to spend the rest of the day lookin' up your skirt?”
A welcome surge of reckless anger warmed the chill that had shaken Serena from within. She narrowed her eyes as she pressed her knees together demurely and pulled her slim skirt tightly around them. Clutching her purse and shoe in one hand, she lowered herself awkwardly to the rough planks of the dock, dropping her legs over the edge and grimacing as she felt her pantyhose run all the way down the back of one leg.
She looked down at the pirogue bobbing gently on the oily water and a second wave of apprehension rose up to her tonsils. She hadn't gone out on the bayou in a boat of any kind in fifteen years. She doubted she would have felt safe on the
Queen Elizabeth II
, let alone this simple shell of cypress planking. Still, why couldn't he at least have had a nice big bass boat with a motor on it? Nobody used pirogues anymore . . . except Lucky Doucet.
“My pirogue is all the boat I need,” Lucky said as he reached up for her. “What'd you think—that I'd go around in a cabin cruiser on the off chance I might have to give some belle a ride somewhere she hadn't oughta be going in the first place?”
Serena flashed him a glare. “No. I was just hoping against hope that you weren't as uncivilized as you appear to be.”
He laughed as his big hands closed around her slender waist. She gave a little squeal of protest as he lifted her down into the boat. The pirogue rocked beneath his spread feet and she sacrificed pride for panic, dropping her shoe and purse and grabbing on to Lucky's biceps for support.
For an instant she clung to him as if he were the only thing keeping her from falling into the gaping jaws of hell. Her breasts pressed against his upper rib cage, her belly arched into his groin as his big hands splayed across the small of her back, holding her close. His thighs were as solid as oak trees against hers. A shiver of primitive awareness shimmied down her back as she looked up at him.
He flashed her a smile that would have given the devil goose bumps. “Oh, I'm every bit as uncivilized as I look.” His voice dropped to that throaty purr that set all her nerve endings humming like tuning forks. “You gonna try to do somethin' 'bout that,
chère?
You gonna try to domesticate me?”
The suggestion elicited an involuntary trill of excitement inside her. It was like a starburst of sensation deep in her belly, and Serena cursed it for the foolishness she knew it was. Any woman who took on the task of domesticating Lucky Doucet was just asking for trouble. Still, she couldn't seem to quell the feeling as she looked up at him, at his hard, beard-shadowed jaw and that decadent mouth. She steeled herself against it, pushing herself back from him. He let her put an inch of space between them, but only after letting her know he could have held her there all day if he'd been of a mind to.
“Domesticate you?” Serena said derisively, arching a delicate brow. “Couldn't I just have you neutered?”
“No need.” He gave her a little push that landed her on the plank seat of the pirogue with an unceremonious thump, and turned to get his box of motor parts. “I wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole,
lady
.”
“That's the first good news I've had today,” Serena grumbled, ignoring the twinge of disappointment that nipped her feminine ego. Ignoring, too, the obvious comparison to be made between Lucky Doucet and a ten-foot pole.
She fanned herself with her hand, feeling suddenly flushed, and watched as Lucky lifted his box off the dock, back muscles bunching and sliding beneath his taut, dark skin. He settled the box in the bow of the boat, then moved gracefully toward the stern, stepping over the jig and over the seat, carelessly rocking the tippy pirogue.
Serena's fingers wrapped around the edge of the seat like C clamps, and her gaze drifted longingly down the pier to a shiny aluminum boat. It seemed huge and luxurious compared to the homemade pirogue. A fat man wearing a black New Orleans Saints cap and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off sat at the back of it, jerking the rope on the outboard motor.
“You might think about joining the twentieth century sometime soon,” Serena said, shooting Lucky a sweet smile. “People use motors nowadays.”
Lucky stared at the gas and oil bleeding into the water from the outboard as the fat man yanked on the rope. He frowned, brows pulling low over his eyes as he took up his push-pole. “Not me.”
He poled the pirogue away from the dock and let the nose turn south.
Serena jerked around, looking up at him over her shoulder with alarm. “This isn't the way to Chanson du Terre or Gifford's fish camp. Just where do you think you're taking me, Mr. Doucet?”
Lucky scowled at her. “I got other things to do besides haul your pretty face up and down the bayou.”
It was apparently all the answer he was going to give her. He had set his face in an expression that declared the subject closed, and Serena decided not to push her luck. After all, he wasn't running a taxi service. She had no claim on his time. Considering his attitude, it was a wonder he had agreed to take her at all.
She faced forward and tried to concentrate on the scenery instead of the sinuous feel of the boat sliding through the dark water. They were at the south edge of town, and the only buildings along the banks of the bayou were the occasional bait shop and a couple of dilapidated tar-paper shacks on stilts with boathouses made of rusting corrugated metal.
A spindly legged blue heron stood among the cattails near the bank, watching them pass. Serena focused on it as if it were the subject of a painting, its graceful form set against a backdrop of orange-blossomed trumpet creeper and clusters of dark green ferns. Rising in the background, hackberry trees reached their arms up to a china-blue sky and live oak dripped their tattered banners of dusty gray Spanish moss.
Their destination eventually became clear as Lucky poled toward the bank and a wharf hung with barnacle-encrusted tires to buffer its edge. The structure that rose up on stilts some distance behind it was as big as a barn, an unremarkable clapboard building with peeling white paint and a sign hanging above the gallery that spelled out
MOSQUITO MOUTON
'
S
in two-foot-high red letters. Rusted tin signs advertising various brands of beer were nailed all along the side of the building above a long row of screened windows. Even though it was only the middle of the day, cars were parked on the crushed-shell lot and Zydeco music drifted out through the double screen doors in swells of sound accented by occasional shouts and laughter.
“A
bar?
” Serena questioned imperiously. She looked up at Lucky, incredulous, as he brought the boat alongside the dock. “This is where you had stop to delay us? A
bar?
”
“I've got some business here,” he said. “It won't take long. You wait in the boat.”
“Wait in the—?” She broke off, watching in disbelief as he hauled himself onto the dock and headed for the bar without looking back. “Swell.”
God only knew what his business was or how long it would take. In the meantime she could sit and rot in his stupid boat. The sun beat down on her, its heat magnified by the humidity. She could feel her linen suit wilting over her frame like an abused orchid. Not that it was going to be salvageable after today anyway, she thought, grimacing at the greasy handprint on the sleeve of her jacket.
She cursed her temper for getting her into this. If she hadn't let Shelby goad her into rushing right out to find a guide . . . If she hadn't let old feelings of inadequacy push her . . . If she had taken the time to think the situation through in a calm and rational manner, as she would have back in Charleston . . .
This was what coming home could do to a person. She had an established persona back in Charleston, an image she had fashioned for herself among acquaintances she had chosen. But this was home, and the minute she came back here, she became Gifford Sheridan's granddaughter, Shelby Sheridan's twin, the former captain of the high school debate team; old feelings and old patterns of behavior resurrected themselves like ghosts, peeling away the veneer of adulthood like a pecan husk.
It was part of the reason she stayed away. She liked who she was in Charleston—a professional woman in control of her life. Here she never felt in control. The very atmosphere wrested control away from her and left her feeling unsettled and uncertain.
This place, Mosquito Mouton's, was a perfect example. It was the most notorious place in the parish. She had been raised to believe it was frequented by hooligans and white trash, and no decent girl would come within shouting distance of it. Sitting in Lucky Doucet's pirogue, she had to quell the urge to look around for anyone who might recognize her. She felt as if she were a teenager cutting class for the first time.
Crossing her arms in front of her, she heaved a sigh, closed her eyes, and thought of her cool, pretty apartment back in Charleston. It was done in soft colors and feminine patterns and had a view of the water. There was a garden in the courtyard, and it was a long, long way from the swamp and Lucky Doucet.
The instant the screen door banged shut behind him, heads turned in Lucky's direction.
The place was about half full and would be bursting at the seams by sundown. Mouton's was the hub of trouble. There was gambling in the back and girls who might do anything for a few bucks or just for the hell of it. From here a man could find his way to a dogfight or a fistfight or a whorehouse or any number of dens of iniquity that were no longer supposed to exist in the civilized South.