Lucky's Lady (9 page)

She pressed her back against the wall beside the window and strained to hear. Nothing . . . a faint thump . . . or was that just her heartbeat? She inched her way toward the door, breath aching in her lungs, candlestick raised in a white-knuckled fist.

A hand grabbed her arm from behind.

She didn't have time to draw breath to scream before she'd been spun around and pinned to the wall. A large hand clamped over her mouth and a heavy male body pressed into hers, his weight holding her with ridiculous ease. The candlestick dropped from her grasp and clattered to the floor.

“You lookin' to put a few dents in my head, sugar?”

Serena went limp against the wall. The tension ran out of her, leaving the trembling afterglow of fear. Lucky. He dropped his hand from her mouth and eased back from her, an amused smile twitching his lips. The smile died the instant Serena launched herself at him.

“You bastard! Of all the rotten things to do!”

He caught her by the wrists and held her off. “Hey, cool out!”

“I will not cool out!” She aimed a kick at his shin, but he dodged it easily, which only made her angrier. “If you had any idea how frightened I was to begin with— Damn you!” she raged, tears of terror swelling over the dam of her lashes. She kicked again and won the satisfaction of hearing him grunt as her toe made contact. “If you had any idea . . .”

It all caught up with her then. The fear, the memories, the episode with Gifford, her exhaustion, the futility of trying to hurt Lucky all rushed up on her and hit with the strength and finesse of a freight train. She stopped struggling against him. His grip relaxed and she jerked her arms back, pulling free. She turned toward the door and pressed her hands over her face as the last brick in her wall of resolve crumbled.

She didn't want to be there. She didn't want to be frightened. She didn't want to have to deal with any family problems. She didn't want to have to deal with a man like Lucky.

Tears came very much against her will, but she didn't have the strength to stop them. They rolled like pearls down her cheeks.

Lucky watched with something akin to horror. The sound of a woman crying flipped a panic switch inside him. He could deal with her smart mouth and her cool reserve and the temper she had just unleashed on him, but tears . . .
Dieu!
And these were the real thing, not some phony whimpering designed to win her something. These were real tears, and it was plain she didn't like having him see them. She kept her back to him, her shoulders rigid as she tried in vain to fight them off. He stood there helpless, his hands jammed at his waist. The image of her standing on the pier at Gauthier's came back to him—the way the color had suddenly washed from her face as she'd looked down at his pirogue, the impression he'd had of inner fragility. It was there again, that sense that something inside her had cracked.

He couldn't help but feel empathy. He knew what it was to feel strength give way inside, to feel darkness creeping in like cold black ink. It didn't matter how many times he told himself he wouldn't get involved with her beyond the physical sense. It didn't matter how detached he told himself he was. He couldn't ignore this kind of pain.

“Hey,” he said, coming to stand directly behind her. He rested a hand on her shoulder and held on, gentle but firm, as she tried to shrug him off. “What'sa matter,
chère?
Did I scare you that bad? I didn't mean to. I don' like comin' in the front door. It's an old habit that's saved my miserable hide more than once. Saved me from gettin' a goose egg this time,” he said, pushing at the candlestick with the toe of his boot.

“It's not that,” Serena whispered miserably. She shook her head and tried to sniff back the tears, but they still squeezed out to dribble down her face. She felt too defeated to cling to her pride. It served no purpose anyway. Why not tell him and get it over with? He probably thought the worst of her as it was, and what did it matter if he did? She didn't have to answer to him.

“It's this place. The swamp,” she said. She brushed her hair back from her face and stared out the door at the shades of darkness beyond. “It terrifies me.”

“Is that why you never went out to get your bags?”

Serena nodded. “I'm sure it seems completely stupid to you, but going out there in the dark is one of my worst nightmares.”

“Why is that?” Lucky asked, backing a step away from her and letting his hand drop from her shoulder. “Why do you hate this place so? Is it too dirty for you? Too primal? It offends your sophisticated sensibilities that much?”

The bitterness in his voice touched Serena's raw nerves like acid. She jerked around to face him, glaring up at him through her tears. “Stop it. I'm sick of your reverse snobbery. Stop putting me down because I prefer to live in a city and hold a regular job and wear a complete set of clothes. You don't know anything about me. You don't have any idea why I hate this place.”

“Then tell me.” He spoke it like a challenge, told himself he didn't care what the answer was, and waited to hear it just the same.

Serena blew a long sigh of resignation between her lips. Wrapping her arms around herself, she turned once again to face the door. “When I was seventeen I got lost out here,” she began, relating the tale in a voice carefully devoid of emotion. “My sister and I and some friends came out for the day in Giff's bass boat. We were just fooling around, having fun. We had packed a picnic lunch and we stopped off at a little clearing to eat. I wasn't sure where we were, but the boy driving the boat said he was, so I didn't worry about it.

“Shelby and I started getting on each other about something. I don't even remember what it was. We were always like that—bickering over little things, always taking opposite sides of an issue no matter how trivial. Anyway, when we got ready to leave, I realized I had forgotten my jacket in the clearing and went back alone to get it. Shelby talked the boy who was driving the boat into leaving me there.”

“She left you there. Alone.” Anger simmered in Lucky's gut, hot and furious.
Shelby
. “The bitch.”

Serena made a dismissive gesture with one hand, then tucked it back against her. “It was just a spiteful joke. She didn't mean for anything bad to happen.”

“Didn't she?” Lucky said flatly.

“No. Of course not. She was just mad at me and wanted to give me a scare. They went off in the boat, intending to come back and get me in an hour or so, but a storm blew up.

“It was one of those days. The sky was blue one minute and black the next.” She could still see it clearly in her mind's eye—the clouds rolling in across the swamp, gray and black with a strange yellow tinge, like noxious smoke boiling up out of a hundred factory chimneys. She could still taste the air, could still feel the weight of it pressing on her the moment before the storm broke. She could still hear the deafening thunder, the vicious cracks of the lightning as it ripped across the sky.

“It rained so hard it looked like ice coming down in sheets. It stormed for hours, and when the thunder and lightning finally quit, it just kept on pouring. I got scared. I knew no one would be able to come and get me with a boat the way it was raining. I thought if I got pointed in the right direction, I might be able to find my way back. I was wrong.”

She stopped there, unable to talk about what it had been like to walk on and on, following swelling streams that ran one direction and then another, turning so many times she'd had no idea whether she had been going toward home or hell. She couldn't talk about the terror of spending the night with no shelter, no supplies, no food. She couldn't put into words what it had felt like to crouch on a tree stump as that dark water swirled up toward her, driving a trio of cottonmouths up to share her perch.

The pressure building inside her as she relived the memories forced the false sense of calm from her voice. “I don't remember a lot of what happened,” she said in a tremulous whisper. “I blocked a lot of it out. I remember being cold and wet . . . and so afraid, I thought I'd choke
on it . . . shaking so hard with fear that I almost couldn't walk. I remember the look on Gifford's face when they found me.”

“How long did it take?”

“Two days.”

Lucky swore under his breath. He had grown up on the bayous, fishing and hunting with his father and brothers, exploring just for the sheer joy of it. It was nothing for him to spend days in this wilderness. He knew every plant, every animal, every insect, every inch of mud and water. But he could imagine the kind of girl Serena had been—a soft, pretty debutante, member of the country club and cheerleading squad—and he could imagine her terror. The swamp was an unforgiving place, a place of natural beauty and natural violence. It didn't suffer fools gladly. Serena had been thrown into it completely unprepared. Considering the circumstances, that she had survived was a miracle.

And it had all been Shelby's fault.

It was Shelby's fault Serena was standing before him now, her fierce pride in tatters, trembling as if she were being given jolts of electricity at regular intervals. She had had this fear inflicted on her by her own sister, her twin. That was unthinkable to Lucky. Whatever else he might have done in his life, he had never intentionally hurt one of his own family members. But Shelby had. Shelby, who didn't care whom she hurt as long as she got what she wanted.

Anger surged through him now as he stared down at Serena. Anger and an emotion he refused to recognize as protectiveness. She stood with her back to him, but he had shifted to one side so he could see a little of her face over her shoulder. She looked impossibly young and sad standing there with her hair down around her shoulders and no makeup on her face.

“I was in the hospital for a week,” she said. “Suffering from exposure and snakebite. As you can see, I never did quite get over it.” She gave a little laugh, but it held no humor, only pain and frustration and a sense of shame. She sniffed and shrugged. “Now you know my disgraceful little secret: The calm, cool psychologist has a phobia she can't overcome.”

Lucky closed his eyes and folded his arms around her, holding her because he knew how badly she needed comforting. He could hear it in her voice and he couldn't keep from responding. He pulled her back against his big, solid body and marveled absently at how perfectly she fit.

Serena didn't fight his embrace. She wasn't sure what it meant, this show of caring from such a hard man, but she accepted it. She let herself lean back against him and soaked in the feeling of safety his arms inspired. In that moment it didn't matter how they'd fought or how different they were from each other. He was just a man offering her compassion when she needed it badly. She turned her head and pressed her cheek to his chest, listening to the solid thud of his heartbeat.

“This is why you didn't want to come out here in the pirogue,
oui?
” he asked softly, resting his cheek against the top of her head without even realizing it, certainly without recognizing the tenderness of the gesture.

“I didn't want to come out here, period.”

“Why did you?”

“Because I had to. Somebody had to.”

“That you're so afraid of the swamp—why didn't you tell me this sooner?”

“And give you another reason to sneer at me? No thank you. Frankly, I didn't think my fears would be of any interest to a man like you.”

“We've all of us got fears,
chère
,” he murmured almost to himself.

She looked up at him over her shoulder, arching a brow. “Even big, bad Lucky Doucet?”

Lucky said nothing. It was one thing to have Serena confess to him. It would be quite something else to turn the tables. He wouldn't, couldn't, let her get that close to him. He had worked too hard to pull himself together to let some lady shrink dissect him.

“What are you afraid of, Lucky?” she whispered, her dark eyes glowing with intelligence and curiosity. There were tear tracks on her cheeks and her mouth looked soft and vulnerable.

“Nothing,” he murmured, turning her in his arms, “nothing.” He lowered his mouth to hers.

He kissed her deeply, parting her lips expertly and sliding his tongue into her mouth in a gesture of possession. She tasted salty and sweet and so damn good his mind nearly went numb from it. He stroked his hands over the unbound silk of her hair and down her back to the subtle curves of her hips.

He hadn't stopped wanting her in the time he'd been gone. The fire had merely been banked, not put out. The flames leapt to life as her mouth moved beneath his, as her body moved against his. He had pulled away the first time, but he had no intention of pulling away now. He wanted her. It was desire, nothing deeper, nothing more complex than the basic story of a man wanting a woman, of a male needing a female.

With one hand splayed across the small of her back, he pulled her hips tighter against his. With his other hand he found the hem of her top and slipped beneath it to stroke the smooth satin of her skin. With deft fingers he unsnapped the front catch of her bra and cupped a breast. The fullness of it surprised him. The feel of her nipple hardening at the brush of his fingertips excited him.

He dragged his mouth from Serena's lips to her jaw to her ear. She shivered as he traced the delicate shell with the tip of his tongue and trembled when he whispered to her, his voice as dark and hot as the night.

“I want your breast in my mouth,
chère
. I wanna taste you. I wanna feel your nipple between my lips.”

A whimper caught in her throat.

“I wanna be inside you. I wanna feel you around me, tight and hot and wet.”

Serena's mind reeled with the seductive images he was conjuring. She could feel her temperature rising, sexual desire like a fever in her blood. It was exhilarating, intoxicating, frightening. Her body pressed against his, making its own desires known even as her mind grappled for control.

He kissed her throat, letting his teeth graze the skin. Serena caught her breath against the moan that threatened, but she couldn't stop herself from arching her neck to give him better access. He whispered a more explicit request in her ear, then sucked gently at the soft petal of her earlobe.