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 waters 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.