Lucky's Lady (14 page)

Desire roared inside Lucky like an inferno, licking at his sanity, pulsing in his groin. He'd never wanted a woman like this. Never. He wanted her with every fiber of his being and she was hot and ready for him, her body begging him to take her. His nostrils flared like a stallion's scenting a mare, his head filling with a mix of expensive perfume and the subtle musk of arousal.

He pulled back from her and tore at the fastening of his jeans, fumbling with the button and struggling to get the zipper down over his erection. She closed her fingers around him, measuring the length and thickness of his shaft. She stroked downward, opening her hand to cup him gently, then drew her hand slowly back up, tightening her fingers until he was throbbing. He pulled in a breath as her thumb brushed across his velvety tip.

She pressed her lips to his chest and flicked the tip of her tongue across one nipple, and Lucky lost what was left of his control. It tore away from him on a wild animal groan that started in his chest and worked its way up the back of his throat. He had to have her now. Sooner than now.

He lowered Serena onto her back and mounted her, attempting to enter her fully with a single thrust, the need to claim her as his overwhelming. She cried out and dug her fingernails into his back, her body tensing against his intrusion.

“Oh, sweet heaven,” Lucky groaned, bracing himself on his elbows above her, fighting his natural urge to bury himself in the tight wet glove of her body. “Take it all, baby,” he pleaded. “Please,
please
, Serena! All of me. All of me.”

“Oh, Lucky,” she gasped. “I can't. You're too—”

“Shh . . .” he whispered, brushing his lips tenderly against her temple. “Just relax for me,
chère
,” he went on seductively, schooling his own body to sink down against her. “Relax. It's gonna be all right. It's gonna be so good. Just relax for me, sugar. That's it. That's right.”

She moved hesitantly beneath him, taking another inch, then tightening around him, taking him to another level of ecstasy. Lucky checked his passion ruthlessly, reining in the urge to drive himself into her, to bury himself to his hilt. He brushed her hair back from her cheek and kissed her slowly, deeply, sinking into her a little at a time as her body relaxed beneath his.

“You're tighter than a fist,” he whispered breathlessly, his lips brushing hers. He struggled to hold himself still against the gentle rippling of her body as it adjusted to accommodate him. “
Mon Dieu
, don't those men up in Charleston know what to do with a beautiful woman?”

Serena didn't answer him. She couldn't. She was beyond speaking, beyond telling him she couldn't even remember the name of the last man she'd gone to bed with because it had just been permanently erased from her mind. All she could think of was Lucky. All she could feel was Lucky, filling her, stretching her, kissing her. She stroked her hands over the sweat-slick muscles of his back, stroked a finger down the valley of his spine. Her hands cupped his taut buttocks and pulled him deeper into her as she tilted her hips to accept him fully.

His big body pressed down against her and he began moving slowly, easing in and out of her, gaining speed and strength with each thrust, until he was lifting her hips off the floor each time he drove into her. Serena arched against him, straining to meet him, straining toward something she had only guessed at before now. It was unlike anything else she had experienced, this feeling of intense excitement that grew like a bubble inside her, pushing away sanity, pushing aside her need for control. It was at once frightening and exhilarating, sweeping her away on a wave of sensation.

She clung to Lucky as if he could anchor her to the real world. She wrapped her arms around him, wrapped her legs around his lean hips. And still the wild sensation grew, hotter and brighter and more intense, swelling until it burst into a million brilliant shards.

“Lucky!”

Lucky felt her climax, heard her cry his name, then his own consciousness dimmed as he exploded inside her. He arched into her with a hoarse cry, unable to think, unable to comprehend anything except the exquisite pulsing of her body around his. The moment was so sweet, so perfect, so golden that for an instant all the darkness was banished from his soul and he felt clean and whole and at peace for the first time in a long while. He clung to the feeling, clung to Serena, holding her to him as if he might be able to absorb some of the goodness he'd found in her.

Reality returned by slow degrees, coming to him as if out of a mist. The paint-stained dropcloth. The feet of his easel. The stripes of filtered daylight falling through the blinds. The woman beneath him.

He looked down at Serena and felt something squeeze painfully in his chest. She was crying silently, her head turned to the side, the teardrops leaking out through the barrier of spiky lashes. He'd hurt her. He'd felt how tight she was and still he'd let his own need overwhelm him and banged the living daylights out of her.
Dieu
, what kind of an animal had he become?

As many times as he'd told himself he didn't care about anyone or anything. Lucky couldn't stomach this. He'd been raised to treat women gently and with respect. Despite the cynicism that had taken root inside him over the years, the idea of a man physically abusing a woman, overpowering her with his strength, was abhorrent to him. The idea of hurting Serena, brave, proud Serena, whose regal mask hid secret fears, cut deeper than he wanted to admit.

His hand was trembling slightly as he brushed her hair back from her temple. “Serena? Serena, I'm sorry—”

“Don't be,” she whispered. “I'm all right.”

“I hurt you. I was too rough. I—”

“No. That's never happened for me before,” she said, breaking in on his apology with her confession.

Lucky went still above her as comprehension dawned. “Never?”

She turned her head and gave him a tremulous smile. “Not like that. I didn't have any idea it could be like that. I've never been very good at sex.”

Nothing could have aroused Lucky more strongly or more immediately save having her tell him she was a virgin. Knowing he had taken her somewhere no other man ever had was the next best thing. Possessiveness surged inside him and for once he didn't try to fight it or deny it. She was his. He felt it on a fundamental, instinctive level. She was his.

Still snug in the silken pocket of Serena's womanhood, his body stirred strongly and her body tightened around him in automatic response. He stared down at her, feeling caught in the grip of a powerful emotion he couldn't name. She looked up at him, her eyes dark and liquid, her lips parting softly as her breath caught.

“Oh,
ma jolie fille
,” Lucky said, lowering his head to gently nuzzle her throat. “That might have been your first trip to heaven, but it sure as hell won't be your last.”

CHAPTER
                        

10

HE
'
D HAD THE DREAM A HUNDRED TIMES. HE WAS
crawling through a sewer tunnel under the private prison of self-styled general and drug kingpin Juan Rafael Ramos, the fumes choking him, the screams of prisoners in the interrogation rooms coming to him through the stone walls like the eerie cries of tortured souls from another dimension.

He had planned this escape since the day he had regained consciousness after his first “questioning” by Ramos's men. He had concentrated on the plan every time they tortured him, focusing his mind on freedom instead of the excruciating pain, had visualized it in his mind over and over through the endless hours in a dark, dank cell. Now the end of the tunnel was literally in sight. His fingers threaded through the rusted grate and pushed it out. On the other side, standing in a ball of bright light were Ramos, Amalinda Roca, and Lieutenant Colonel R. J. Lambert.

He lunged for Lambert first and killed him with a rough metal shank. Blood gushed from the body like water from a fire hydrant and pooled around him, thick and warm and shoulder-deep. He could hear a woman's laughter, and he turned toward it slowly, his movements hindered by the fluid rushing around him. Amalinda hovered above him, her long hair flowing around her like streamers in the wind.

The instant he recognized her her face contorted grotesquely into a monster's snarling countenance with fangs dripping venom. Her fingers transformed into snakes that wrapped around his throat and pulled his head under the swirling current of blood, drowning him. He could feel the pressure, the pain in his lungs, the panic rising in the back of his throat—

Lucky jerked awake, gasping for air and looking wildly for the source of the pressure on his chest. A woman lay with her cheek pressed over his heart, her hair spilling like a curtain of silvery silk over his dark skin. Shelby. No, no, he told himself, working to keep another rush of ugly memories at bay. Not Shelby. Serena.

It took him a long moment to sort reality from the nightmare, to realize who Serena was and where they were. Fragments of thought and emotions swirled like dust at the edges of his mind, and he painstakingly selected the appropriate pieces and frantically attempted to push the rest aside.

Serena. Safety. Home.

She lifted her head and blinked sleepily, looking up at him in silent question. Lucky said nothing. He eased out from under her and left the bed, padding naked to the front window.

A cold sweat filmed his skin. His hair was damp as he ran his fingers through it, slicking it back from his face. He was shaking—perhaps not visibly, but inside he was shaking violently and his heart beat like thunder. He braced his hands against the frame of the open window, trying to get a breath of fresh air, trying to hang on as fear tore at the edges of his sanity. It crawled up the back of his throat to choke him, and he coughed and gripped the window frame harder as he fought the sensation back down.

They were old companions, the nightmares and their aftermath, the shaking, the blinding fear that maybe this time he wouldn't be able to push the darkness back from the edges of his mind, the weariness, the regret. The thing he wanted most was to lie down and escape from it all with sleep, but he knew he wouldn't sleep again this night. The dreams were too terrible, too vivid, too seductive in their attempts to pull him over the edge.

He wouldn't sleep again this night because he was afraid, and because he was afraid he was ashamed. A stronger man could have slept. A better man wouldn't have been plagued by demons the like of these. Knowing Serena was there to witness it all made the shame a hundred times worse and he called on his deep reservoirs of anger and self-protection to deflect it.

Serena watched him from the bed. She couldn't see his face, but the pale moonlight spilling in through the window washed silver over his shoulders and back as he stood with his head lowered. Every muscle was tense, taut, perfectly delineated from its neighbor. His back rose and fell as he struggled for breath. She had no idea what kind of nightmare had driven him from sleep to this mental ledge he was clinging to now. All she knew was that she wanted to help. She wanted to reach out and offer him her strength as he had offered his the night before.

She found Lucky's T-shirt among the tangle of clothes on the floor beside the bed and pulled it on. It fell to the middle of her thighs as she slipped from the bed and went to him.

“What's wrong?” she asked quietly. For a long moment the only sounds that answered her came from outside—the chirrup of frogs and insects, the distant whinny of a raccoon.

“
Rien,
” he said at length, then shook his head impatiently as he realized he hadn't answered her in English. “Nothing.”

She reached out to lay a hand on his arm. “Lucky—”

“Nothing!” He roared, turning on her. It was a tactical error. Serena didn't back away. Instead, she looked up into his face and read it as plainly as a college professor might have read a grade-school primer. Lucky turned away to stare out the window again, schooling his voice to a calmer tone. “It's nothing to do with you. Just some leftover stuff from my stint in Central America.”

“What were you doing in Central America?”

A sardonic smile twisted his mouth. “Well, I wasn't down there with the Maryknoll Fathers, that's for sure.”

“The army?”

“Yeah. Doin' a little job for Uncle Sam. It was nothing.”

“We don't get nightmares from nothing.”

“
Pas de bétises
,” he muttered.

“If you want to talk about it, I might be able to help,” Serena said softly, her eyes warm with concern.

Lucky forced a laugh. “You can't even help yourself,” he said, almost wincing at the deliberate cruelty of his words.

Serena ignored his verbal strike. He was scared and hurting; lashing out was a natural response. “It's easier to solve other people's problems.”

“Yeah, well, forget it,” he growled.

She shrugged and crossed her arms in front of her. She looked all of nineteen standing there swallowed up in his T-shirt, her hair down, her skin smooth and flawless in the moonlight. Lucky felt a fresh stirring of desire and a dangerous tenderness. They added to the burden of all the other emotions he was shouldering at the moment, and he wondered if he would be able to shrug them off before he buckled beneath the load.

“All right,” Serena said, nodding. “I just thought—”

“What?” Lucky snapped. “You thought what? That just because I've spent half the night inside you that gives you the right to open up my head to see what kind of snakes are in it? Think again, angel.”

Serena wanted to argue with him. She wanted the right to ask him what haunted his dreams. She wanted to know everything about him. She wanted him to share that information with her willingly, but she knew he wouldn't any more than he would have shared his paintings with her. He would have been happier if she had gone on believing he was a criminal.

Maybe she would have been happier too. She would have stayed her distance from the man she had first believed him to be.

She turned and looked back at the bed they had shared the last few hours. Day had faded into night. Between bouts of lovemaking they had found their way down from the
grenier
, trading the hard floor of Lucky's studio for the comfort of an old-fashioned mattress stuffed with Spanish moss and fragrant dried flowers and herbs. Lucky had made love to her again slowly, tenderly, drawing out the anticipation and the climax, taking her to yet another height she had never before scaled. Her body was still alive with the sensations, her every nerve ending humming in awareness of the man standing beside her.

“Don't read anything into it,” he muttered, following her gaze. “It's just sex.”

Serena's mouth twisted in a wry, rueful smile. “Gee, thanks for making me feel like a cheap one-night stand.”

“It's nothing personal.”

“Oh. I see,” she said dryly. “I'm just one in a long line of cheap one-night stands. That makes me feel a lot better. You sure know how to flatter a girl, Lucky.”

“If you wanted pretty words, you came to the wrong man. There's nothing pretty inside me.”

Serena thought of the haunting beauty of his paintings but said nothing. He hadn't appreciated her seeing them, and he wouldn't appreciate her seeing anything else that was buried beneath his tarnished armor either.

“I'm just being honest with you,
chère
. Isn't that what you shrinks always want? Honesty? The straight line?”

Serena said nothing. The awful fact of the matter was that deep down she would rather have had him lie to her tonight. She felt so raw emotionally; so much had happened in the last two days, she would have been glad to have a man hold her and tell her she meant the world to him even if it wasn't true. But she would have been a fool to think this man would do it. Lucky wouldn't let anyone that close to him, not even in a lie.

She walked away from him, moving gingerly. Unaccustomed to sex, her body ached in muscles she'd forgotten she had. She went to the screen door and looked out at the bayou. The fear that had assaulted her the night before was conspicuously absent tonight. Other things had taken precedence over it—thoughts of Gifford, Shelby, the very real and physical presence of Lucky. Lucky, her hero, her antihero, her lover.

She'd never taken a lover before. She'd never even known a man like Lucky before—hard, haunted, dark, and complex. It all seemed so unreal, being in this place with this man. She felt as if she didn't know herself anymore. She had a wild urge to look into a mirror to see if she even resembled the person she had been two days before.

“Are you all right?” Lucky asked.

He had moved to stand behind her. She could feel the heat of his body and didn't resist the urge to lean back into him. His arms folded around her automatically, offering comfort he would never voice.

Serena sniffed, a wry, weary smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. “Sure. I have my whole life turned upside down on a regular basis. Doesn't everyone?”

“You could leave. Go back to Charleston. Make Gifford deal with this on his own.”

“No. Unlike you, I
am
obligated to other people. I may live my life apart from them, but that doesn't mean I can just shut them out. I can't walk away from this until it's over.”

Lucky listened to the mix of resignation and conviction in her voice and wondered how he could have ever confused her with her sister. The only thing they had in common was a pretty shell. Serena's hid a core of integrity and a deep well of strength she was having to draw on again and again, thanks to Shelby and Gifford. She was at once tough and fragile, a combination that touched him in a way he didn't want to admit. And it hurt him to think she was going to lose what was left of her innocence before everything was done here—hurt him in a place he hadn't believed he could be touched.

Out of a strong sense of self-preservation he denied the feelings. What he felt for Serena was desire and nothing more, he told himself. A desire that seemed insatiable. It stirred in his gut again like the glowing coals of a fire that could be banked but not extinguished.

He bent his head and brushed his mouth against her cheek and her temple. “Can I have you until it's over?” he murmured, his hands moving restlessly upward, over her ribs and stomach to her breasts.

Serena shivered from the heat of his touch and the coldness of his words. No pretense of love or affection. Just the bald, blunt truth. She tried not to let it bruise her heart. Lucky was no man for a long-term commitment. If she wanted him at all, she would do well to take a page from his book and see it as an opportunity for great sex and nothing more. An adventure, an odyssey she could look back on later when she returned to Charleston and sanity, and marvel at the recklessness of it.

At any rate, she didn't think she had a choice. She wanted him whatever way she could get him. Her body was responding to his now as if they had been lovers for weeks instead of hours. Heat rose inside her, inflaming the tips of her breasts as his fingers rubbed them through the soft cotton of the T-shirt. It seared her core as she felt his erection press into her back and throb relentlessly in the tender flesh between her legs. He turned her in his arms, pulling the T-shirt up so she would fit against him skin to skin.

“I can't get enough of you,
chère
,” he whispered, tasting her lips with soft, ardent kisses. “I want you again.”

Serena ducked her head against his chest. “I don't think I can.”

Lucky hooked a finger under her chin and tipped her head back. What he saw in her face wasn't rejection but embarrassment, and he smiled softly in understanding.

“Me, I've got just the thing for that, sugar,” he said seductively, leaning down to nuzzle her cheek. “Come on back to bed and let ol' Lucky kiss it and make it better.”

They left for Chanson du Terre while the mist still hovered over the bayou like thin wisps of cotton batting, giving the swamp its most primitive air. It looked like the dawn of time, when the earth was still cooling beneath the waters. Dinosaurs would not have appeared out of place.

It was easy for Serena to imagine they had slipped through a hole in the fabric of time and had fallen into earth's prehistory, that she and Lucky were the only woman and man on earth. It was an uncharacteristically romantic notion, but she didn't try to chase it away.

She took in the scenery silently as Lucky poled the boat. She still wasn't comfortable with the swamp—she doubted she ever would be—but her perceptions had changed subtly after having seen Lucky's paintings of this place. She glimpsed it now a bit through his eyes, and she tried to understand both the swamp and the man better.

Both were filled with secrets. Both were cloaked with an air of mystery and shrouded in isolation and loneliness. It was no wonder Lucky had taken refuge here; the swamp understood him. Serena wondered if she would ever be able to comprehend him fully, if she would ever be able to unlock his secrets or if he would remain as much a puzzle to her as the swamp.