«Gifford!» Serena gasped, her cheeks blooming delicate pink.
The old man showed no signs of remorse. He didn't even have the grace to look guilty.
«You look as peaked and thin as a runt pup,» he complained, his gaze raking her head to toe. «I'll have Odille heat you a plate of food.»
Serena shook her head in amazement. «Don't bother her,» she said absently. «I ate on the plane.»
Gifford snorted his disapproval and moved off down the hall in the direction of the kitchen. «Wouldn't feed that trash to my hounds.»
Serena watched him go. One of the reasons she had decided to move back home was that she had figured Gifford would need her after everything that had happened. What a joke that was. It was quite clear he could take care of himself. She was going to have to stay on her toes just to keep up with him.
She dragged her suitcases into her bedroom, where she kicked off her shoes, stripped off her travel-wrinkled suit, slipped on her robe, and set about the business of unpacking before she collapsed under the weight of her fatigue.
She went about the task methodically, mechanically. It seemed most of her movements these days were mechanical. She was operating on automatic, taking care of day-to-day matters with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. In her logical, educated mind she knew this lethargy would pass eventually. In the meantime, she simply had to suffer through it, going through each day only to get to the next. It wasn't fun, but it was better than nothing. In her more philosophical moments she reflected it would give her added empathy for her patients in the future-as soon as she had some patients.
She had gone back to Charleston to tie up all the loose ends there, to resettle her patients with new therapists, to sell her condo and say good-bye to friends. All had been accomplished with minimal flap. Tomorrow she would drive up to Lafayette and start looking for office space. She should have been looking forward to the task, but she couldn't come up with any emotion to dent the numbness inside.
Too much had happened in too short a time. Her emotions had gone on overload and shorted out. It was a defense mechanism. It hurt to feel, therefore her mind had shut down the capacity to feel. The only time her emotions turned back on was late at night, when she was too tired and too lonely to keep them at bay. Then they rushed back in a high-voltage surge of pain that left her feeling even more drained and beaten.
A month had passed since the crisis at Chanson du Terre had come to a head. There would still be the trials to get through-Mason, Willis and Perret, Perry Davis, who had in fact been Mason's middleman in hiring the two thugs. Len Burke had gotten off scotfree. There had been no hard evidence connecting him to any crime other than greed. Shelby had already pleaded guilty to a minimal charge of conspiracy and been given a suspended sentence. She and her children had gone to stay with Masons parents in Lafayette. The Talbots had raised Mason's bail and were reportedly calling in long-due favors to get him the best defense attorneys money could buy. Rumors abounded about deals to avoid the scandal of a trial, but there had been no official word.
Serena found herself oddly incurious about it. She wasn't interested in punishment or restitution. The trust she had lost, the disillusionment she had suffered, couldn't be repaired or replaced. She wanted only to put it all behind her and get on with her life.
Gifford had reinstated himself in the house and was going on as if all that had happened was already little more than a dim memory. He was engrossed in planning the new machine shed as well as in ordinary plantation business. Pepper and James Arnaud had him thinking about crawfish as a new cash crop to rotate with the sugarcane.
As it always did, life gradually returned to normal, healing over the wound and leaving only hidden scars behind to remind those who had lived through the trouble.
Serena placed a final stack of lingerie in the dresser and closed the drawer. As she lifted her head her gaze caught on her reflection in the beveled mirror. It was amazing. She looked no different than she had before all this had begun. The cuts and scratches of her harrowing night in the swamp had long since healed, leaving her skin unmarred. It seemed as if there should have been some lasting sign of that whole momentous chapter in her life plain on her face for all the world to see, but the scars were on the inside, on her heart.
Lucky had gone away with the deputy that day and never returned. Serena had been angry, hurt, heartbroken. She had considered going out into the swamp to get him, but had decided against it in the end. It went against her grain to give up on him, but she knew she was right in not pushing him. It had to be Lucky's decision to come back to her. She couldn't force him to love her enough. She couldn't force him to want to have a future. He had to decide his life was empty without her. He had to see that hiding from the world wasn't the answer to his problems.
It had become painfully obvious he was not going to make those decisions.
Maybe she'd been wrong about him. Maybe he didn't love her after all. Maybe what they'd had together had been nothing more than desire magnified and intensified by the circumstances. Maybe she was the only one who had felt something that went beyond passion. Maybe she was the only one left feeling empty.
Even as she opened the dresser drawer and pulled out the faded blue workshirt, Serena chastised herself. This wasn't very healthy behavior. It was certainly no way to get over a broken heart. But her inner critic wasn't very stringent. Some deeper wisdom told her she needed time to heal. None of her practical therapy methods were going to change the fact that she still loved Lucky Doucet or that she missed him or that she hurt because of losing him. No amount of counseling could change the fact that she needed to feel close to him now at the end of a long day, when she was feeling tired and in need of a broad shoulder to lean on. So she didn't stop her hands from lifting the old blue work-shirt from the drawer, nor did she try to stop herself from bringing it up to brush the soft chambray against her cheek and breathe in the scent of it.
Hardly an hour went by that she didn't think of Lucky, wondering what he was doing, if he was all right, if he was still chasing poachers. She couldn't help thinking about him, picturing him standing at the back of his pirogue, poling silently through the swamp, or sitting in his studio staring moodily at a canvas. She couldn't help thinking about him, wondering what he was doing, if he ever missed her.
He had done what he thought was the right thing, the noble thing, in leaving her. Ironic, considering how determined he had been to convince her he was no good. Sometimes it made her angry when she thought of it-how high-handed he'd been in deciding what was best for her-and sometimes it made her ache with sadness that he'd seen himself as so unworthy of her love. Sometimes she told herself he might have known best and she should just give up on him and get on with her life. But she could never manage to tell herself that at night when she lay in her bed, staring into the darkness.
Hugging the shirt to her chest, she closed her eyes and sighed as the pain penetrated the protective wall she'd built around her heart. The scents and sounds of the summer night drifted in through the open French doors. And with them came the memory of the night she and Lucky had made love in this room.
No other man had ever made her feel the way Lucky did. No other man had ever gotten past her barrier of cool control and brought out the true woman in her. It didn't make sense. He was the last man she would have imagined falling in love with, dark, dangerous, rough-edged. And she would never have believed herself capable of falling so hard and so quickly. It defied logic. She could find no pat, analytical answer, but it was true nevertheless. No man had ever made her feel so alive, so filled with passion and yearning to be a part of another soul. She knew with a deep, sad certainty no man ever would.