He turned and trudged up the rest of the steps, letting himself into the cabin without looking back. Serena felt stunned, as if someone had hit her between the eyes with a rock. Well, she'd gotten what she deserved, hadn't she? In his usual no-nonsense style Gifford had cut through to the heart of the matter. She had thought she'd come out here and simply set things straight, put her world back on track, rearrange things to her satisfaction. She had inherited that take-charge manner from Gifford. She used it to great success in her everyday life back in Charleston. But they weren't in Charleston.

Damn this place. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hands over her face, erasing what was left of her makeup.

«I'm sorry, Miz «Rena,» Pepper said, climbing the stairs to stand beside her, his wriggling, clicking crawfish sack hanging down from his fists. «You know old Giff. He gets in a temper, him, there's no tellin' what he say. He don' mean half.»

Serena tried without much luck to muster a smile. «Does that mean you'll run me home after all?»

He frowned, something that looked completely foreign to his face, as if his mouth didn't quite know how to turn that way. «Can't. Dat old boat, she's not runnin'. Lucky, he bring the part, but dat don' make her run. Take me a coupl'a days to fix.»

Serena hadn't thought it possible for her spirits to sink any lower. She'd been wrong. They seemed to fall now from their last toehold into a bottomless black pit. It must have been a painful thing to watch, because Pepper made another attempt to frown. He shuffled his feet on the worn tread of the step, working up to making a run for it.

Why, oh, why had she let her temper goad her into coming out here without thinking it through, without first finding out exactly what was going on? Now she was stuck in this god-awful place. Turned out by her own grandfather. Turned over to the care of a man who wouldn't know a scruple if it bit his handsome butt.

She turned her bleak gaze to Lucky. He stood absently scratching the head of one of the coon hounds as he watched her, his expression inscrutable. In the long, sinister shadows seeping across the ground as the sun slid away, he looked more dangerous than ever.

«Get in the boat, chere,» he said softly. «Looks like we're stuck with each other for a little while longer.»

«COME ON,» LUCKY SAID, NODDING TOWARD THE pirogue. «I'll bring you back tomorrow and you can have all day to hound him.»

Serena followed him reluctantly to the waters edge. She looked out across the bayou and at the black forest that seemed to be looming ever larger as the light faded. Fear started to claw its way past the last wall of her resistance.

«I'll pay you anything if you just take me home.» The words were out of her mouth before she was even aware of thinking them, but she didn't try to take them back. They were true. She could have managed staying at the cabin with Gifford and Pepper, but the idea of staying with a stranger-a dangerous stranger-and having him see her fear… she couldn't do it. At that moment she would have given him the keys to her Mercedes if he would have agreed to take her back to civilization. She wanted a long hot bath, a meal, some aspirin, and an explanation from her sister-not necessarily in that order.

«Anything?» Lucky arched a brow and gave her a slow, wicked smile as he considered. «That's tempting, sugar, but I just plain can't take you back tonight. I have a previous engagement.»

Serena ground her teeth and forced the word through them. «Please.»

Lucky bent and lifted the box of motor parts out of the bow of his boat, setting it aside on the bank. «Look, angel,» he said as he straightened, resting his hands just above the low-riding waist of his fatigue pants. «I'm sure you think I'm gonna take you back to my place, tie you to the bed, and ravish you all night long, but I've got more important things to do. You'll just have to content yourself with fantasizing.»

Serena gave him a look of complete disgust. He ignored her, wading out and pushing the pirogue away from the shore.

«Come on, sugar, allons. Get in the boat, or you can spend the night with Gifford's coon hounds out in the woodshed.»

What choice did she have? Serena knew her grandfather. He was fully capable of leaving her to spend the night outside. He seemed angry enough to do it. Not even the idea of sharing a house with Lucky Doucet seemed as terrible as the idea of being out alone all night.

Dragging her tattered cloak of pride around herself once again, she lifted her nose and walked out onto the dilapidated dock to get in the boat.

They headed away from Gifford's and deeper into the wilderness. The bayou narrowed to a corridor flanked on both sides by what looked to be impenetrable woods. Cypress and tupelo trees stood in dark, silent ranks in their path like a natural slalom course. Dusk had fallen, casting everything in one last dusty glow of surrealistic light.

Serena sat, trying to keep her back straight, trying to keep from crying. Now that the confrontation with Gifford was over and the anger had subsided, pain rushed in unabated. She had come for him. Couldn't he see that? How could he accuse her of being so callous as to be thinking only of her inheritance? She had never even thought about him dying, much less what he would leave her.

Gifford dying. In her mind she relived the horror of watching him turn purple and collapse. She couldn't bear the thought of losing him. She especially couldn't bear the thought of losing him now when he seemed so angry with her, so disappointed.

Tears welled in her eyes and she blinked them back furiously. She would not cry now. She would not cry in front of Lucky Doucet and give him yet another reason to sneer at her. She couldn't let go and cry now, anyway, because she was afraid that once she started, she wouldn't be able to stop and she had too much yet to face before this day was over.

That was hardly a cheerful prospect, she thought, fighting another wave of despair. She already felt as if she'd been dragged by the hair for eight hundred miles and brutally dismembered. The person she had been just yesterday was no longer recognizable; she had been dismantled by this place and its people and the memories and emotions they evoked. She was exhausted from the ordeal, but she clung to her one last shred of strength and dignity and fought back the tears.

Lucky stood behind Serena, watching the little tremors that shook her shoulders. He could hear her catch a breath and knew she was trying valiantly not to cry. Proud, stubborn little thing. He felt something twist in his chest and did his best to ignore it.

He was having a hard time maintaining his image of her as an ice bitch. The woman who had tried to hire his services had been a professional woman, prim and cool, consummately businesslike in her designer suit, not a hair out of place. That woman had been easy for him to dislike. But that guise was long gone now, and her efforts to appear calm and in control were no longer irritating but touching-or they would have been had he been susceptible.

She hiccuped and sniffled and swatted at the mosquitoes that were rising off the water in squadrons to swarm up around her head, and Lucky clenched his jaw against the very foreign urge to feel sympathy.

«I hate this place,» Serena announced, smacking at the mosquitoes with both hands. The swarm dispersed and regrouped to mount another sortie. She hiccuped and sniffed again, sounding perilously close to bawling. Her voice trembled with the effort to hold the tears back. «I have always hated this place.»

Great. Lucky frowned. The fate of the swamp was coming to rest on the shoulders of a woman who hated it.

He eased the pirogue to a halt and secured the pole. He stepped gingerly around Serena, narrowly avoiding having her hit him in the groin as she slapped at the mosquitoes. He snatched up the wad of baire he kept in the front of the boat and tossed the sheer netting over her like a dust cover over an old chair.