«What about me?» Serena called. She waited for Lucky to pull the nose of the pirogue up on shore and exited from the bow, preferring to step on land rather than risk her neck on the rotted pier again.
Gifford gave her a long, hard stare as she came to stand at the foot of the steps. «I figured you'd be on your way back to Charleston by now.»
Serena swallowed down the hurt and met his gaze head-on. «I told you, I won't leave this swamp until you do. I want you to come back to Chanson du Terre with me.»
«And I told you, I'm not going. You're not bossing me around, little girl. I don't give a toot how many degrees you have. You can't hightail it out of Lou'siana first chance you get, then come on back and try to run things on the weekend.»
She didn't back down. Lucky watched her take it on the chin. He cursed Gifford for being so hard on her, then told himself he didn't care. He leaned a hip against the newel post and lit his fourth cigarette of the morning, sucking smoke down a throat that was already raw.
He felt like holy hell. Even in the best of circumstances he never slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch because of nightmares, but the previous night had been worse than usual. What little sleep he'd gotten had been plagued with memories of pain and betrayal. As if his conscious mind hadn't been doing the job well enough, his subconscious had seen fit to remind him that beautiful women were the cause of most of his problems. First Shelby, then Amalinda Roca, the lovely little viper whose duplicity had helped to land him in a Central American prison.
He had finally given up on the idea of sleep and had proceeded to attempt to drown his foul mood and sexual frustration with whiskey, succeeding only in giving himself a colossal hangover. Now his head banged in syncopated rhythm with the gash in his arm where Mean Gene Willis had managed to nick him.
«You look like hell,» Gifford said, his hard gaze still on Serena. His voice had lost some of its edge, betraying his true concern as he took in the dark crescents beneath her eyes. He glanced at Lucky to distract himself from his guilt. «You both look like hell.»
«Mebbe they both been raisin hell,» Pepper suggested, chuckling merrily at the dark looks his comment received from both Lucky and Serena. Gifford only raised a bushy white brow in speculation as he studied them.
Serena felt a blush rise to her cheeks at the memory of the near miss of the night before. There but for the grace of God and Smith amp; Wesson… If the sight of Lucky s gun hadn't brought her back to reality in a cold rush, she may well have had something to blush about now. Dropping her head, she made her way up the steps, past her grandfather and onto the gallery.
«I could use a cup of coffee. Pepper, do you still make it strong?»
«Black as dat bayou and strong 'nough to curl your purty blond hair, pichouette,» Pepper said, flashing his teeth.
«Sounds like heaven,» Serena mumbled, letting herself in the front door.
Gifford remained on the steps, staring down at Lucky. «What have you got to say for yourself? You been fooling 'round with my little girl?»
Lucky slid his sunglasses on top of his head and gave Gifford a belligerent look. «What would you care, old man? All you wanna do is give her the sharp side of your tongue. You're the one left her with no place to stay last night.»
«I got my reasons.»
«Like you got your reasons for holin' up out here?» Lucky shook his head and muttered an expletive. «Cut her some slack, Giff. She came, didn't she?»
«Yeah, she came, and she'll leave again too,» Gifford drawled, nodding. «First chance she gets. She don't give a damn about what happens here. The girl oughta have some respect for family, for tradition.»
Lucky snorted. «You got a funny way of teachin' respect. Dump her out in the swamp to spend the night. She'd probably cut your heart out if you had one.»
The idea that Gifford had known about Serena's fear and played on it infuriated Lucky. And the rise of his protective instincts made him even angrier. He swore again, tossed his cigarette butt to the dirt, and snuffed it out viciously with the toe of his boot. «I oughta just wash my hands of the lot of you. It's nothin' but trouble, this business.»
«Me, I hear you got 'nough trouble wit' dat Perret boy and dat big ugly son Willis,» Pepper said, rocking back on the hind legs of his lawn chair. His light eyes sparkled like aquamarines in his dark face.
Lucky scowled at him. «Where'd you hear that?»
«Me, I heard dat wit' my ears, I did.» The old man chuckled at his little joke, not heeding Lucky's ferocious glare in the least.
«Yeah, well, you keep your ears out of it or they might just get shot off.»
The end of his warning was punctuated by the sound of the screen door slapping shut, the soft «pop» sounding like a toy gun. Serena made her way across the small gallery, trying to concentrate on the steam rising from her coffee instead of the conversation she'd heard plainly through the screen while she'd been inside.
«Are you going to make this easier on all of us and explain to me what's going on, Gifford?» she said, lowering herself carefully to sit on the top step.
Gifford looked down at her and frowned. «Shouldn't have to be giving you an update like some kind of goddamned foreign correspondent.»
Serena sighed heavily, feeling too exhausted to even bring her cup to her lips so she could draw on the amazing elixir that was Pepper Fontenot's coffee. «Gifford, please. You've made your opinion of my life abundantly clear. Yes, I'm living miles away. People do that, you know. They grow up, they move on, they make their own lives.»
«You've got no sense of tradition.»
«I won't be a slave to it, if that's what you mean. I appreciate the history of Chanson du Terre, but I'm not going to become a planter to keep it going. Shelby is the one who always planned to carry on the tradition in one way or another. My career has taken me elsewhere. That doesn't mean I don't care about Chanson du Terre or you. I love you both,» she said, looking up at him with fierce earnestness in her wide dark eyes. «Is that the confession you were looking for? Are you happy now?»
«Hardly,» the old man grumbled. Still, he backed up a step and sat down beside her. «If you cared about the place, things would never have come to this.»
«And just what is 'this'? What's going on?»
He hesitated a long time, considering and discarding options. Serena didn't rush him, but sat patiently, sipping her coffee. Finally, he heaved a sigh and plowed a hand through his white hair, leaving short strands standing on end.
«Some hotshot political people have got it into their puddin' heads Mason Talbot is destined for political stardom. They want him to run for the legislature next year. He's just pretty enough and stupid enough to get elected too. He'll make a nice little puppet for the oil kingpins. His daddy may have lost his fortune in the bust, but he hasn't lost any of his connections. I'm sure old John Talbot would love to have a son in the governor's mansion one day.»
«Mason running for office,» Serena murmured, a troubled frown drawing her brows together. «I can't believe Shelby didn't mention it to me.»
«Seems to me there's quite a few things Shelby didn't mention to you, chere» Lucky commented darkly.
Serena shot him a look of annoyance and turned back to Gifford. «I don't see what this has to do with Chanson du Terre.»
«Think about it, Serena. Shelby has her heart set on Mason going to Baton Rouge. They won't need the plantation. The state the place is in right now, all it is is a liability. But if I were to sell it now and advance her her inheritance, that would give Mason enough money to buy his way into any office he wanted.
«Everybody knows it's advertising wins elections nowadays. Plaster Mason's pretty face on billboards, on television, on the sides of buses, nobody's gonna care that he's got cotton for brains.»