Lucky's Lady (30 page)

Serena watched her with a strangely detached curiosity. The initial rush of confusing emotions had subsided, leaving her feeling blank and empty again, vaguely wary of her sister's motives.

“I suppose you're still angry with me,” Shelby said. Her tone of voice was almost annoyed, as if she didn't believe Serena had a right to be angry, but her movements and quick sideways glances said she was nervous about what the answer to her statement would be.

“No,” Serena said, turning to watch her in the mirror.

Shelby looked up and frowned at her. “Serena the Good,” she said bitterly. “I should have expected as much. Forgive all those who sin against you.”

“I didn't say I'd forgiven you. I said I wasn't angry. Anger isn't what I feel when I think about you.”

“What do you feel?”

Serena was silent for a long moment as she contemplated her answer. “I don't know if it has a name. It's like grief, I guess, but different, worse in a way.”

Their eyes met in the mirror and Shelby suddenly looked genuinely sad.

“We were never very good at being sisters, were we?” she said softly.

Serena shook her head. “No. I'm afraid we never were.”

Shelby moved several steps closer, until they stood side by side, close but not touching, alike but not the same. Her gaze riveted on their images in the looking glass. “How can we look so much alike and be so different inside?” she whispered as if she were asking the question of herself.

Serena said nothing. There were no easy answers. As a psychologist, she could have cited any number of theories on the subject, but as a sister none of them meant anything. As a sister all she knew was that she and her twin were standing on opposite sides of a chasm that was too wide and deep to be bridged. There might have been a point in their past when they could have found some common ground and reached across, but that time was gone and they both knew it.

“I wish things hadn't gone so wrong,” Shelby said, her dark eyes filling.

That was as much of an apology as she was going to get, Serena thought sadly. There would be no remorse, no expression of regret for what had happened, for what could have happened. Shelby was incapable of taking blame. She was like a thief who was sorry the police had caught her red-handed, but not sorry she'd committed the crime. She was only sorry things had gone wrong.

“Me too,” Serena said softly, knowing they had very different ideas about what had gone awry. The blank slate of her emotions filled suddenly with a complex mix of feelings, like a tide rushing in, and, as she had said in answer to Shelby's earlier question, the strongest was something like grief. They may both have been physically alive, but whatever had been between them was dead and she wanted to mourn it like a lost soul.

“My word, Serena,” Shelby murmured, still staring at their reflections in the mirror, “you look all done in.”

“I'll be all right.”

“Yes, I'm sure you will be.”

“Will you?”

“We'll manage,” Shelby said, lifting her chin a defiant notch.

She moved back a step. The distance between them widened. Her reflection in the mirror grew smaller. When she reached the door and turned the knob, Serena found her voice.

“Shelby?” Their eyes met again in the glass. “Take care.”

A single tear rolled down her sister's cheek and a faint smile touched her mouth. “You too.”

Serena watched her go, feeling as if she were losing a part of herself she'd never really known. Then, bone-weary and heartsick, she crawled onto the bed, curled up with Lucky's shirt, and did the one thing she did really well these days—she cried herself to sleep.

Gifford slipped into the room quietly. He set the plate he was carrying on the dresser and walked around the end of the bed to look down at his sleeping granddaughter. The tears were still damp on her cheeks, her breathing still shaky. She held an old blue workshirt wadded up in her hands, reminding him of when she'd been no more than a toddler, dragging a ragged yellow security blanket around the house with her everywhere she went.

He remembered the day they'd put her mother in the ground, how he had slipped in that night to check on the girls because Robert had been too lost in his grief to think of it. He had found Serena asleep on top of the covers, still wearing the little black velvet dress and white tights she'd worn to the funeral, one patent leather shoe on and one off. The tears had still been damp on her cheeks, and she had clutched in her hand that ragged old blanket.

He remembered it like it was yesterday even though tonight he felt every one of the years that had passed since then. The love he'd known for Serena that night hadn't lessened a whit. It didn't matter that Serena had grown into a woman or that life had complicated things between them. He still experienced her pain more sharply than if it had been his own. His grief over what Shelby had done was magnified by the grief he knew Serena was feeling. Her pain over Lucky's defection was more than enough to break his own heart.

He knew he had pushed her over the years and bullied and manipulated her, but he hadn't done anything without loving her, and he just about couldn't bear to see her suffering. He couldn't change what had happened between them, and he couldn't mend the rift between her and Shelby, but he could do his best to knock some sense into that big Cajun rogue. In fact, it was the least he could do, all things considered.

Careful not to wake Serena, he leaned across the bed and pulled the coverlet back over her. He looked at her again, turned slowly, and shuffled out of the room, taking the dinner plate with him and shutting the light off on his way out.

Lucky checked the rope attached to the nose of the half-submerged rowboat one last time, then slogged out of the bayou and onto the bank. The day was hotter than summer in Hades. The sun beat down on the bare skin of his back through a haze of humidity, burning him an even darker shade of brown. Sweat rolled off him. He pulled on a pair of worn leather work gloves and took up the end of the rope he had looped around the trunk of an oak tree, paying no attention to his discomfort. He focused his mind on his job.

He'd been hauling junk up out of the bayou for weeks now, working literally from sunup to sundown, cleaning up dozens of sites careless people had chosen for disposing of such things as old refrigerators, iron bedsteads, stoves, mattresses, bicycles, and tires. It was a job that needed doing and one that he could devote himself to and exhaust himself with in the hopes of gaining a few hours of sleep at the end of the day.

When the job called for it, he used a gas-powered winch, but he fell back on it only after he'd spent a good long while trying to pull the object out by himself—no matter what it happened to be. The exertion cleared his mind and made certain the overriding pain he felt was in his muscles.

He took up the rope now and tightened the slack gradually until he was leaning back hard against it, straining to inch the boat up out of the water. He heaved, his every muscle standing out, physical pain blocking all thought from his mind. Beads of sweat slipped past the bandanna he wore around his forehead, stinging his eyes. He leaned back, pulling until his blood was roaring in his ears. He didn't even hear the outboard motor till the bass boat was nearly to the bank.

From the corner of his eye he saw Gifford and groaned inwardly. Why couldn't the world just leave him alone? He adjusted his grip on the rope and heaved backward again, doubling his concentration on his task, dragging the boat up another six inches toward the bank. The sound of the outboard ceased abruptly, but Lucky worked on as if he were completely oblivious of Gifford Sheridan's presence.

“I had me a mule once could pull like that,” the old man drawled. “He was a damn sight smarter than you, though, I reckon.”

Lucky sucked in a lungful of humid air, adjusted his grip, and hauled back on the rope again, the corded muscles in his neck and shoulders standing out as he pulled. The nose of the old rowboat lunged forward as the back end pulled free of the mud. Within a couple of minutes he had the dilapidated craft halfway ashore. He dropped the rope then and went to tip the water out of the boat. Gifford sat patiently watching him from under the brim of a battered old green John Deere cap.

“What are you doin' here?” Lucky growled, not looking up from his task. He pulled a small anchor from inside the boat and heaved it onto the bank. “I thought you got everything you wanted, old man.”

“What would it matter to you if I did or didn't? Everybody knows you don't give a damn about anyone but yourself.”

Lucky said nothing as he drained the boat. He didn't need this. His life was miserable enough without having this cantankerous old man chewing his tail. He'd done what he had to do. That was the end of it.

“You broke her heart,” Gifford said succinctly.

Lucky flinched inwardly, the words like a whip across tender flesh. He focused on the junk in the boat as he stood there waist-deep in the bayou. “I didn't ask her to fall in love with me.”

“No, but she did anyway, didn't she? God knows what she sees in you. I look at you now and all I see is a stubborn, selfish man too caught up in his penance to see he doesn't have anything left to pay for.” Gifford shrugged and sighed, his shrewd dark eyes on Lucky the whole time, never wavering. “Hell, I don't know, maybe you like pain. Maybe you like thinking you could have had a decent life with a wonderful woman, but you passed it all up to suffer. Catholics do like their martyrs.”

He didn't so much as bat an eye at the murderous glare Lucky sent him. The old man sat leaning forward with his forearms on his thighs and his big hands dangling down between his knees, as calm as if he were sitting over a fishing pole waiting for a bite. Lucky turned abruptly and waded ashore, dragging the old rowboat with him. When the boat lay on its side like the carcass of a whale, he turned back toward Gifford.

“I did what was best.”

Gifford snorted. “You did what was easiest.”

“The hell I did!” Lucky snapped, taking an aggressive step toward the bow of the bass boat. “You think I wanted to walk away from her? No. But what kind of life could I give her? What kind of husband would I be?”

“Not much of one until you get yourself straightened out. I don't see any sign of that happening any time soon,” Gifford said sarcastically. “I guess I can just go on home and tell Serena she's crying herself to sleep at night for no good reason.”

The blow was on target, even more so than Gifford could have hoped. Lucky had heard Serena's tears. He had found himself on the gallery of Chanson du Terre late one night, just to catch a glimpse of her, just to ease that one longing a little. He'd seen her curled up on her bed, crying into the shirt he'd left behind. He'd told himself then he'd done the right thing; he didn't deserve her tears. But the sound of them, the idea of them, had been enough to tear his heart in two.

“I can't give her what she needs,” he said, staring down at his boots.

“What do you think she needs, Lucky? Money? An executive husband? Serena can make her own money. If she wanted an executive, she could have had one long before now. All she needs is for you to love her. If you can't manage that, then, by God, you are one sorry soul indeed.”

“She knows I love her,” Lucky admitted grudgingly.

“Then come back.”

“I can't.”

Gifford swore, his patience wearing thin in big patches. “Goddammit, boy, why not?”

Lucky gave him a long, level look. The corner of his mouth curled up in a faint sardonic smile. “I got my reasons.”

The old man's jaw worked and his face flushed, but he held his temper in check. “Well, Lucky,” he said at last on a long sigh, “you have a nice life out here all by yourself.” He reached around for the starter rope, his fingers closing over the handle. “Don't worry about Serena. She'll buck up. She's a Sheridan.”

The engine sputtered, then roared to life, and Gifford calmly rode away, leaving Lucky feeling as unsettled as the bayou in the churning wake of the outboard motor.

The feeling still hadn't subsided by sundown when he abandoned his job for the day and made his way home. It hadn't lessened any by midnight when he sat on the floor of his studio drinking and staring morosely at his paintings in the moonlight. He had managed to keep the worst of his feelings at bay these past few weeks, denying them, dodging them, burying them, but now they rose to the surface like oil on the bayou. They clung to him, refusing to be ignored even as he tried to study the painting on the easel before him.

He hadn't painted in weeks. He had expected to find the same peace in it as he had after returning from Central America, but when he'd taken up the brush and applied it to the canvas he'd felt nothing to compare with the peace he had found so briefly in Serena's arms. That kind of peace he never expected to find again.

That had been an unwelcome revelation. The solace he had once found in this place was lost to him. He had retreated from the love Serena had offered him and found not peace, but misery in the form of a terrible wrenching loneliness that felt as if a vital part of him had been torn out and taken away.

He couldn't go out into the swamp without thinking about the way she had given him her trust there in the place she had been so afraid of. His house was haunted by her memory. He hadn't slept a night in his bed because he couldn't lie there without remembering the feel of her body against his. Every time he turned he thought he caught the scent of her perfume in the air. He could feel her presence but he couldn't touch her, couldn't see her, couldn't take her in his arms and have her chase away the darkness in his soul.

“Damn you, Serena,” he muttered, pushing himself to his feet.

The emotions rose higher and hotter inside him, tormenting him. He paced back and forth before the easel with his head in his hands as he realized with a sense of panic there was no escape. He could work till he dropped and the feelings would still be there inside, waiting for a chance to torture him. He could drink himself unconscious and they would still come to him through the haze of oblivion.