Lucky stepped out and slammed the door shut behind him as she neared the landing, glaring at her with bleary, bloodshot eyes. His jaw was shadowed with morning beard. His hair was loose and disheveled, falling to his shoulders in unruly blue-black waves.
«What the hell are you doin' up here?» he demanded, his voice low and as rough as gravel. «I don' want you comin' up here. You got that?»
«Why?» Serena questioned, arching a brow. «Is this where you keep the bodies?»
«C'est pas de ton affaire,» he muttered. «Never you mind what I keep up here. It's nothin' for a pretty shrink to go sniffin' through. You're a helluva lot better off not knowing.»
The mere suggestion made Serena curious. What was he hiding? Stolen goods? Illegal liquor? Drugs? Guns? It could have been any of those things, all of them, or something even worse.
«I'm sure I don't care what you keep in there, Mr. Doucet,» she said with as much cool as she could muster. «I only came up here looking for you.»
He moved down to the step below hers, putting them nearly at eye level. Giving her a look that was at once calculatedly cruel and seductive, he lifted a hand to cup her cheek and brought his mouth down close to hers.
«Change your mind, sugar?»
«Certainly not.» Making a disgusted face and leaning back to escape his breath, she fanned the aroma away with her hand. «You've been drinking.»
«Heavily,» Lucky said, straightening away from her. «You oughta try it sometime. Loosen you up. From what I've seen, you could stand it.»
On that infuriating note, he turned and descended the stairs, his heavy boots barely making a sound on the wooden treads. Serena followed at a discreet distance, her mind wrestling with the conflicting facets of the man and with the conflicting emotions he aroused inside her. Her overriding thought was that the sooner she got to Gifford's, the sooner she would be free of Lucky Doucet and the strange spell he seemed to have cast over her.
While she sat at the table waiting impatiently, Lucky went through his morning ablutions without haste, shaving, showering, emerging from the bathroom barechested, wearing a pair of jeans that were nearly white with age. His wet hair was slicked back into its queue and bound with a length of leather boot lace. A scrap of red bandanna was tied around his right biceps, hiding the ugly wound he had acquired the night before.
Serena's gaze fastened on the makeshift bandage, and she felt something twist in her stomach. She told herself it was revulsion at the reminder of how this man made his living, but she knew that wasn't the whole truth. A part of that knot could be directly attributed to fear of what might have happened to him if the bullet had gone high and inside. He would have been dead and there would have been no chance left for anyone to reform him.
She shied away from the direction her thoughts were taking. That path was a dead end, a fast track to heartache.
«I suppose you'll tell me the other guy looks worse,» she said, still staring at the bandage and the massive arm it was bound to. Looking at it at least kept her eyes off his chest and the taut, hard muscles of his stomach.
Lucky looked down at the bandanna as if getting grazed with a bullet had slipped his mind. He flicked a speculative glance at Serena. «Mais yeah, but then, he was an ugly son of a bitch to start with.»
«Shouldn't you have a doctor look at that?»
«You're a doctor,» he said, his voice low and rough, his eyes capturing hers. He braced his hands on the arms of her chair and leaned down until his mouth hovered a breath away from hers. «You wanna look at it?»
«No,» Serena murmured, tensing against the waves of heat rippling through her. He was much too close. His body gave off an electrical charge that shorted out her common sense and stimulated the primitive instincts buried beneath her sophisticated facade. His clean male scent filled her nostrils, and she caught herself wondering what it would be like to kiss him when he tasted like toothpaste instead of tobacco.
«No?» he questioned softly, arching one black brow. «Is there some other part of me you'd care to examine, Dr. Sheridan?»
Her memory leapt at the opportunity to remind her of the way he had molded her hand to his erection. Serena bit back a curse, but she couldn't stop the heat from rising in her cheeks.
«Just say the word, sugar,» Lucky announced. «Your wish is my command.»
Serena broke away from the beam of his gaze and spoke through her teeth. «I wish you would stop wasting time on crude seduction routines and take me to Gifford's.»
He backed away from her, his expression cold and closed. «You'll get there.»
«When?»
«When I'm damn good and ready to take you.»
He proceeded out onto the back porch, where he set down a dish of dry cat food for the baby raccoons, shooting Serena a look that dared her to comment. She stood at the back door, watching quietly as the little bandits gamboled around his big feet, vying for his attention, playing with his shoelaces. Lucky grumbled at them in French, but made no move to lack them away. He looked annoyed and embarrassed and Serena felt a most disastrous weakening in the heart she was trying to steel against him.
«It's just easier to feed them than have them in my garbage all the time, that's all,» he said defensively. «It's not like they're pets.»
The words had barely left his mouth when one of the coons sat up on its hind legs and snickered at him, reaching up with its front paws to bat at his pant leg.
«Why not just shoot them?» Serena asked sweetly. «You could save up all their little hides and make yourself a shirt.»
Lucky narrowed his eyes and growled at her, but the effect was ruined when another raccoon reached from its perch on the gallery railing for the shiny button on Lucky s jeans. He arched away from it, scolding it in rapid French. The little coon sat back and whinnied at him, and he reached out grudgingly to scratch it behind one triangular ear.
Serena felt her heart give a traitorous thump. The big bad poacher had a soft spot for little animals. She reminded herself that even Hitler had had a pet, and she forced herself to go back to the table to wait.
Only after a breakfast of fried catfish and a bottle of beer did Lucky give any indication of being ready to take her to Gifford's.
«I've got better things to do than play chauffeur,» he grumbled as he poled the pirogue away from the shore.
Serena shot him a look over her shoulder. «You know, I'm sick of hearing you complain. If you didn't want to get involved in this, you could have left me at Gifford's yesterday. Why bring me here if you're too busy to take me back?»
He arched a brow above the rim of his mirrored sunglasses with insulting lasciviousness. «Do you really have to ask, sugar?»
She narrowed her eyes speculatively. «You know, I think you do that on purpose.»
«What?»
«Make obnoxious sexist remarks. I think you do it to make me angry, to throw me off the topic. Why is that, Lucky? Are you afraid to have a real conversation with a woman?»
«I'm not afraid of anything,» he said too vehemently, giving the push-pole a mighty shove. «I'm sure as hell not afraid of you.»
They traveled on in a silence that was as thick as the muggy air.
No shotgun blast greeted them this time as they rounded the bend to Gifford's cabin. Gifford sat on the steps tying fishing flies. Pepper Fontenot sat in a ratty old green and white lawn chair in the yard with a gutted outboard motor on a tarp at his feet. The clamorous sounds of a Cajun band blasted out of a portable radio on the gallery.
«Hey, Giff, what sa matter with you? You run outta shells or somethin'?» Lucky hollered as he piloted the boat alongside the rickety dock.
Gifford pushed himself to his feet and jammed his big hands at his waist. «Hell, I ain't wasting good buckshot on you, Doucet.»