Lucky's Lady (4 page)

Lord, what was the matter with her, thinking he was cute? Puppies were cute. Boy scouts were cute. Lucky Doucet was a grown tiger. He probably had boy scouts for lunch and ate puppies for dessert and picked his teeth with prim blond psychologists who saw redeeming qualities where there were none. She shouldn't be thinking any kind thoughts about him. She should be afraid of him . . . but she wasn't.

She was obviously losing her grip on sanity. It was this place, this wild, primal place. The air was ripe with scents that invaded the brain. What common sense she had left told her not to trust this man any farther than she could throw a horse, but she couldn't bring herself to walk away from him.

“I'm amazed,” she said at last.

“What?” He gave her a narrow look. “That I wouldn't sell you to white slavers?”

A corner of her mouth lifted in a wry smile as she started toward the dock. “That you have a friend.”

CHAPTER
                        

3

CHANSON DU TERRE. IF SHE LIVED TO BE A HUNDRED,
Serena knew she would never tire of seeing it. It gave her a feeling of security and tradition. Sheridans had lived there since winning it in a card game in 1789. She may not have chosen to live there herself, but it was her heritage.

The house stood at the end of an
allée
of moss-draped live oak, the broad crowns of which knitted together to form a high bower above the drive. The house was an old Creole chateau, a combination of French Provincial and West Indies in style, with a sloping roof and broad galleries surrounding it on both the upper and lower levels.

At first glance the house looked the same as it always had to Serena—graceful, welcoming, impressive without being ostentatious. Then she blinked away the golden glow of her memory and saw it exactly as it was, as if seeing it for the first time ever.

The roof was in a state of disrepair, due to heavy spring rains. Shingles were missing and a bright blue tarp had been thrown over a portion near the west dormer. The columns of the upper gallery needed paint and some of the balusters were missing from the handrail, giving the house the appearance of having a wide gap-toothed grin. The brick of the ground floor and the wooden siding of the upper story were still painted yellow, but the color had faded with age to the shade of old parchment instead of the butter-yellow of her memory.

Memory was flattering, Serena reflected; reality was like seeing a beloved relative who had passed from middle age to old age between visits.

She made her way across the broad lawn at a hurried, half-lame walk, her shoes and purse cradled against her. A screen door on the upper level of the house swung wide open and her niece and nephew burst out like racehorses from the starting gate. Six-year-old Lacey ran shrieking down the wide steps, a blur of blond ringlets and pink frills, with eight-year-old John Mason right behind her, a bullfrog clutched between his hands and a maniacal grin on his face.

“John Mason, leave your sister alone!” Shelby Sheridan-Talbot shouted, bustling out onto the gallery.

She was a fraction of an inch shorter than Serena with a softer, slightly rounder figure. Her brown eyes were a bit more exotic in shape, and her mouth seemed perpetually set in a petulant frown. Beyond those slight differences they appeared very much the same physically. Shelby looked ready to address the chamber of commerce in a bright yellow suit with a fitted jacket that flared out at the hips in the current style intended to denote femininity. The emerald silk blouse beneath the jacket sported a flamboyant candy-box bow at the throat. Serena felt like a bag lady in comparison.

“Oh, my Lord, Serena!” Shelby exclaimed dramatically. She pressed perfectly manicured hands to her cheeks, displaying a diamond ring big enough to choke a cat and a large square-cut topaz. “What on earth has happened to you? You look like you've been mugged or run over by a truck or both.”

“Gee, thanks.” Serena trudged up the steps, uncharitably wishing that she had been born an only child. Shelby's temperament was as capricious as the weather—sunny one second and stormy the next. She tended to be silly and frivolous. Her constant theatrics were tiring in the extreme, and she had a way of saying things that was at once innocent and cuttingly shrewd and that made it exhausting to endure a conversation with her.

Serena frowned at her as she limped onto the gallery and Shelby inched back, making a moue of distaste, careful not to brush up against her.

“I'm not having a great day here, Shelby, and I don't have time to go over the gory details with you,” Serena said. “I've got to change and get going. Can you please arrange to have someone pick up my car in town? I left it down by Gauthier's.”

Shelby's expression quickly clouded over from feigned concern to childish annoyance. “Of course, Serena. I have nothing better to do than run errands for you. My stars, you come home looking like something the cat dragged in, worrying me to a frazzle, and the first thing out of your mouth is an order. Isn't that just like you.”

Serena limped past her sister. She seriously doubted Shelby had given a single thought to her absence from the house. Shelby's most pressing concerns in life were her children, her wardrobe, and her prominence in community affairs—which she entered not with an eye to civic duty but social status. She was as pretty and shallow as a lily pond in a Japanese garden.

Serena stepped into the house and made her way down the hall, regretting the fact that she didn't have time to take in the ambience of the home she'd grown up in. Aside from one major renovation in the early 1800s and modifications since then to install plumbing and electricity, it had remained largely unchanged over its long history. It was a treasure trove filled with heirlooms and antiques that would make a museum curator's mouth water. But there was no time to appreciate the cypress-paneled walls painted a mellow gold or the faded Turkish rugs that spilled jewel-tone colors across the old wood floor. She went directly toward her old bedroom, where earlier in the day she had done nothing more than deposit her suitcases before storming off in a stubborn huff to find a guide.

“Going, did you say?” Shelby questioned suddenly, as if Serena's words had only just managed to penetrate through her sense of indignation. She rushed to catch up, plucking at the sleeve of Serena's rumpled jacket like a child trying to catch its mother's attention. “Going where?”

“To see Gifford.”

“You can't go now!” Shelby whined in dramatic alarm, following Serena into her room. She positioned herself well within her sister's range of vision and put on her most distressed expression, wringing her hands for added effect. “You simply can't go now! Why, you only just arrived! We haven't had a chance to chat or anything! I haven't had a chance to tell you a thing about our new house or about how well the children are doing in school or how I may very well be named Businesswoman of the Year by the chamber of commerce. You simply can't go now!”

Serena ignored the dictate and began undressing, tossing her ruined clothes into a pile on the floor. She frowned at the suitcase on the bed, knowing there was nothing in it suitable for a swamp. She might have grown up dogging Gifford's heels around the cane fields, but the woman she had become in Charleston had no call to wear jeans or rubber knee-boots.

“And Odille is making a leg of lamb for supper,” Shelby went on. She moved around the room in quick, nervous motions, flitting from place to place like a butterfly, lighting only long enough to straighten a lace doily or fuss with the arrangement of cut flowers in the china pitcher on the carved cherry dresser. “You can't know the battle I had to wage to get her to do it. Honestly, that woman is as churlish as the day is long. She has defied me at every turn since Mason and I moved in. And she frightens the children, you know. They think she's some kind of a witch. I don't doubt but what she told them she'd put a spell on them. She's just that way. I don't understand why Gifford keeps her on.”

“He enjoys fighting with her, I imagine,” Serena said, smiling as she thought of the cantankerous Odille facing off with the equally cantankerous Gifford.

Odille Fontenot was as homely and hardworking as a mule, a tall rack of bones with the hide of a much smaller person stretched tautly over them. Her skin was as black as pitch, her eyes a fierce shade of turquoise that burned as bright as gas jets with the force of her personality. She was dour and superstitious and full of sass. She had taken over as housekeeper after Serena and Shelby had gone and Mae, the woman who had helped raise them, had retired. Odille was probably well into her sixties by now, but no one could tell by looking at her and no one dared ask.

Serena opened her suitcase and pulled out a pair of white crop-legged cotton slacks and a knit top with wide red and white stripes. A quick glance in the beveled mirror above the dresser confirmed her suspicions that her hair was coming down, but there was no time to fuss with it.

“Besides,” she said, her voice muffled as she pulled her top on over her head, “Odille's brother is Gifford's best friend.”

Shelby abruptly stopped rearranging knickknacks on the dresser and looked sharply at her sister's reflection in the mirror. “Did you say you're going
after
Gifford? You're going out into the swamp?”

Serena zipped her slacks, meeting Shelby's gaze evenly. “Isn't that what you told me to do?” she said with deceptive calm.

Shelby's cheeks flushed beneath her perfect makeup, and she glanced away, suddenly uncomfortable. “I guess I didn't think you'd really do it. I mean, for heaven's sake, Serena,
you
going out into the swamp!”

“What did you think I'd do, Shelby? Nothing? Did you think I'd just ignore the problem?”

Shelby turned and faced her then, her mood changing yet again. “Ignore it the way I have, you mean?” She narrowed her eyes and pinched her mouth into a sour knot. “Well, I'm sorry, Serena, if I don't live up to your standards, but I have many other responsibilities. If Gifford wants to go live in the middle of some godforsaken, snake-infested swamp, I can't just drop everything and go after him.”

“Well, you won't have to,” Serena said tiredly. “Because I'm going.”

“Yes.” Shelby flitted to the French doors that opened onto the gallery. She drew a length of sheer drape through her fingers, then twirled away, tossing her head. “Won't Giff be tickled to see how you've overcome your fears.”

Serena gave her twin a long, level look brimming with anger and hurt, but she made no comment. She refused to. She had never once discussed with Shelby her fear of the swamp or how she had acquired it. The topic had tacitly been declared off-limits years earlier, a dangerous no-man's land that Shelby danced along the edge of when she was feeling spiteful.

Serena wasn't even certain her sister realized how potentially volatile the subject was. It wasn't that Shelby was stupid; it was just that she magnified the importance of things that pertained directly to herself and tended to minimize all else.

Stepping into a pair of red canvas espadrilles, Serena snapped her suitcase shut with a decisive click. She had no time to analyze her sister's psyche even if she had wanted to. She had a boat to catch.

“I'm leaving now,” she said softly, still struggling to control her temper. “I don't know when I'll be back. Knowing Gifford, this could take a day or two.”

She slung the strap of her carryall over her shoulder and hefted the suitcase off the bed. Without so much as glancing in Shelby's direction, she left the room and headed for the front door.

“Serena, wait!” Shelby called, her voice ringing with contrition as she hurried down the hall.

“I can't wait. Lucky gave me ten minutes and I have no doubt he'll leave without me just to prove his point if I'm not there on time.”

“Lucky?” Shelby's step faltered as she repeated the name. “Lucky who?”

“Lucky Doucet,” Serena said, bumping the screen door open with her hip. “He's taking me out to Giff's.”

Shelby's face fell and paled dramatically, but Serena wasn't looking.

“Good heavens, Serena,” she said breathlessly, scurrying out onto the gallery. “You can't go off with him. Do you have any idea what people say about him?”

“I can well imagine.”

“Mercy,” Shelby fretted, patting her bosom with one hand and fanning herself with the other, as if she might swoon like a belle of old. “I don't know how his poor mother can hold her head up in public. And she's just the dearest woman you'd ever care to meet. His younger siblings are perfectly nice with college degrees and I don't know what all, but that—that—Lucky . . . Good heavens, he's nothing but trouble. He's been living like an animal out in the swamp ever since he got out of the army. Folks say he's half crazy.”

“They may be right,” Serena conceded, remembering Lucky's own words to that effect. “But he was the only person I could find to take me.”

“Well, I don't think you should go with him. Who knows what he might do or say?”

Serena sighed heavily. “Shelby, one of us
has
to go talk to Gifford. You're not willing and Lucky Doucet is the only person able to take me.”

Shelby pouted, plumping her lower lip out and batting her lashes. “Well, I just don't think you should, that's all.”

“Your protest has been duly noted. Now, I'm off. Give my apologies to Odille.”

“Be careful.”

Serena paused on the last step at her sister's hesitant admonishment. It was one of the rare shows of concern from her twin that always made her do a double take. Shelby was for the most part completely self-absorbed. She could be silly and frivolous, petty and downright cruel on occasion. Then every once in a while she would suddenly come forth with a small slice of affection, concern, love, offering it like a jewel. The gestures were both touching and unsettling.

“I will be,” Serena said quietly.

She crossed the lawn at a hobbling half run once again, suitcase banging against her leg, foot throbbing from the sliver she had yet to remove. She set her sights on the landing and worked unsuccessfully to force Shelby from her mind.

All their lives people had remarked to them how special, how close they must feel being twins, what a unique bond they must share. Serena had always taken the comments with sardonic amusement. She and Shelby had never been close. Aside from their looks, they were as different as summer and winter. By Shelby's decree, they had been rivals from birth. Shelby had always seemed to resent Serena for being born at the same time, as if Serena had done so purposely to steal Shelby's glory. In her attempts to avoid rivalry, Serena had drifted further away from her sister, cultivating separate interests and separate dreams, creating an even wider gap between them.

Serena had always regretted the fact that they weren't close. Being the twin of a virtual stranger seemed much lonelier than being an only child. But they were too different, existing on separate planes that never quite seemed to intersect. They shared no telepathy. Sometimes it was almost as if they didn't even speak the same language. The only thing that seemed to bind them was blood and heritage and Chanson du Terre.