He was nothing but a means to an end, a tool for Shelby to get what she really wanted-John Mason Talbot IV. Talbot was balking at the idea of marriage. Shelby took up with Lucky to provoke jealousy. A simple, time-honored plan. The fact that she had gotten pregnant with his baby had been an inconvenience easily dealt with just as soon as Talbot put his ring on her finger.
Lucky could still taste the bitterness. He hadn't loved Shelby as much as he had loved the idea of her. When she dropped him, the blow to his youthful ego was terrible. When he found out about the aborted pregnancy, the cut went to his very core. Shelby had shattered his pride with careless ease and gone on with her life as if nothing had happened at all, while pain and humiliation drove him to abandon school and all his grand plans.
With youthful drama he dropped everything and joined the army, sending his life down a path that led to a gray place of shadowed existence, where there was no good or evil, only missions and objectives, a place where his soul was stripped away from him a little bit at a time.
Thirteen years passed and he could still feel the shame of having been played for a fool by a pretty dark-eyed blond belle.
And now he was being tempted by another.
He swore in French and flung the butt of his cigarette away. As if he didn't have enough trouble already, he had to go stirring up old nests of resentment. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was revenge he wanted when he looked at Serena. Or maybe he was complicating matters unnecessarily. Maybe it was just sex.
Hell, he could handle sex. It would be fabulous between them. He already knew that. The instant he'd touched his mouth to hers he'd been wild to get inside her. And she'd lost that cool control of hers and responded to him with all the fire she had previously reserved for sarcasm. Yeah, he could handle sex with Serena Sheridan. The idea of having all that cool beauty and inner heat beneath him and around him damn near made him burn up from the inside out.
It was an emotional entanglement he wanted to avoid. He was smart enough to keep that from happening. He wouldn't let Serena get that close to him. He wouldn't let anyone get that close, not even his family. He didn't have anything left to give anyone. He guarded what was left of his soul like a miser.
The distant buzz of an outboard motor broke in on his thoughts. Lucky came to attention, following the sound carefully. It wasn't too far off-over on the next bayou and nearing the fork that branched into the little no-name stream he was on. He was exactly where he needed to be. A nasty smile unfurled across his dark face. He pulled a pair of infrared goggles from his gear bag, put them on, then took up his baire and draped it over himself, pulled his gun, and waited.
Serena couldn't sleep. She hadn't tried. Her exhaustion went bone deep, but the fear went deeper. She was alone. It didn't seem to matter very much that she was in a house with a roof over her head. She was still in the swamp, alone. In the ordinary course of things she thought of herself as a strong, competent, self-reliant individual able to handle most anything that might come her way. This she couldn't quite handle. Even after all these years the memories were too strong. Every sight, every sound, every smell only brought them into sharper focus. She would have given her left arm for a Valium. Just one. Anything to dull the little knives that were splitting her nerve endings.
«Pull yourself together, Serena,» she muttered aloud, tightening her arms across her chest in a symbolic gesture as she paced the width of the dining room. «If your patients could see you now, they'd pack up their neuroses and go shrink shopping.»
A skittering sound rattled across die gallery just as she passed the screen door. She shrieked and bolted sideways, banging her knee and stubbing her toe on a table leg. She swore a litany of curses under her breath and limped around the table.
In the time since Lucky had left she had done little else but pace. She had washed up in the tiny spotless bathroom, found a comb and restored some order to her hair. She'd made a sandwich with a spongy slice of Evangeline Maid white bread and peanut butter and eaten on the move, too keyed up to sit. Really, she'd been too keyed up to eat, but she knew from experience that not eating properly only magnified her paranoia. So she had walked and chewed, hiking over every inch of the first floor of Lucky's house.
There was nothing much to distract her from her fear. There was no television, no radio, no stereo. She spotted a CB radio on a shelf in the kitchen, but she had no idea how to work it. She couldn't even amuse herself by unpacking and repacking her suitcase because it was still outside.
She assumed Lucky had taken her luggage out of his pirogue. It probably wouldn't do for a poacher to be caught toting silk lingerie and a supply of makeup. Other swamp boys might get the wrong idea. But even if he had left her bags on the dock, they weren't going to do her any good because there was no way in hell she was walking out to get them. The ground was literally crawling out here at night. In her imagination she could picture herself trying to tiptoe across yards of writhing reptilian bodies.
«Stop it!» she snapped as a spasm of fear ran down her back and a wave of it rose up in her throat as thick and sour as grease.
From somewhere in the far distance beyond the front door came the crack! crack! of what sounded like gunfire.
Lucky.
«Oh my God,» Serena whispered. Her eyes teared up and she lifted a trembling hand to her lips. What if he were shot? What if he were killed? What if whoever did him in came looking for God knew what?
Her heart thudding like a paddle ball behind her ribs, she crept toward the door, straining her eyes to see something in the stygian blackness beyond. For a moment all she could hear was the blood roaring in her ears, then the raspy screech of frogs. Something screamed, a terrible bloodchilling sound that might have been an animal in its death throes or a woman on the brink of hysteria. The sound tore across the night like a knife ripping through silk and then it was gone, leaving an eerie stillness in its wake. Serena sucked back a sob and moved quickly away from the door and into the next room.
She resumed her pacing, picking up speed as she walked a path from the front window past the old horsehide sofa to the bed and back. The sore on the bottom of her foot had gone past the point of pain to numbness. She wished for the pain back; it would have been something else to think about besides this awful choking fear.
She tried to think about the situation at Chanson du Terre, but there were still too many pieces missing for her to make any sense of it. Thoughts of her last few moments with Lucky drifted through her head, but she shooed them away. She didn't yet want to consider the ramifications of getting that close to man who claimed to be crazy and carried a gun.
Her toe connected with something solid hidden under his bed as she turned the corner to pace back toward the front window. Hesitantly, she turned to face the bed. It was a mahogany half-tester with delicately carved details. A thick curtain of mosquito netting was draped back from the headpiece. The coverlet was an exquisite example of Cajun weaving in soft brown cotton with narrow indigo stripes.
The idea of Lucky, pagan and barbaric, stretched out naked on this elegant bed stirred the embers of desire deep inside her. Serena shook her head in amazement. How could she want a man who was so contrary to her idea of what a modern man should be?
She knew there were women who wanted to be dominated, women who would have melted into puddles at the feet of a man like Lucky Doucet. She was not among them. She had always held to the idea of equality between the sexes. Lucky was a throwback to the heyday of male chauvinism. She didn't trust him, didn't like him, didn't respect him. How could she want him?