«Anyhow,» Will said, gulping down his embarrassment. «I oughta be goin'.» He shuffled backward toward the door, swinging a long, bony arm in the direction of the kitchen. «I just left the stuff on the counter.»

«Yes, thank you. I'm sure Lucky will appreciate it,» Serena said, resurrecting her manners and her smile. «It was nice meeting you, Will.»

He blushed and shrugged, ducking his head and grinning shyly. «Yeah, you too. See ya 'round.»

He bolted out the front door and loped across the yard to a canoe beached on the bank of the bayou. Serena wandered out onto the gallery and waved to him as he paddled away. Even from a distance she could see him blush. Adolescence. What hell. She shook her head in a combination of amusement and sympathy, and wondered what Lucky might have been like at that age.

As if she didn't have enough to figure out about the grown man. If he wasn't a poacher, then what was he? A bootlegger? A gun runner with a heart of gold?

Her gaze drifted across the porch to the stairs that led up to the overhanging grenier, the forbidden room.

Never you mind what I keep up here… It's nothing for a pretty shrink to go sniffing through… You're a helluva lot better off not knowing.

She was better off not knowing, or he was safer if she didn't know?

She was on the steps before she could tell herself not to go on. Whether it was a need to understand the man that compelled her, or a need to justify her attraction to him, she didn't try to discern. In fact, she tried not to think at all. Almost as if they belonged to someone else's body, she watched her feet ascend one step at a time, watched her hand reach for the doorknob and turn it, watched the door swing back.

Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. Not in her wildest imagination had she suspected this. She thought she had been prepared for anything-crates of guns, bales of drugs, boxes of stolen goods-but she hadn't been at all prepared for beauty, for art.

The room was ringed with paintings. Canvases, stacked three deep, leaned back against the walls. An easel took center stage in the open, airy room. On it was propped a work in progress.

Serena wandered into the room, gazing all around her in a daze. Unlike the first floor, the attic was not divided, but was one large room with windows at either gable end and skylights punctuating the ceiling on the north side. The light that filtered in through the blinds was soft and dusty-looking, spilling onto the floor in oblong bars of gold. There was a long workbench against one wall, loaded with jars of brushes and tubes of paint, sketch pads, pencils, paint-spotted rags. A heavy sheet of canvas served as rug and drop-cloth, covering a large area of the wooden floor surrounding the easel. The smell of oil paint and mineral spirits hung heavy in the air like cheap perfume.

So this was Lucky's deep dark secret. He was an artist.

Serena walked around the edge of the dropcloth, trying to take in the paintings propped against the wall. They depicted the swamp as a solitary place of trees and mist, capturing the stillness, the sense of waiting. They were beautiful, hauntingly, powerfully beautiful, filled with a dark tension and an aching sense of loneliness. They were magnificent and terrifying.

She stood before one that featured a single white egret, the great bird looking small and insignificant among the columns of gray cypress trunks and tattered banners of gray moss and smoke-gray morning mist. She stood there in the hot, stuffy room and felt as if the painting were drawing her in and swallowing her whole. She could feel the chill of the mist, could smell the swamp, could hear the distant cries of birds.

All the paintings shared that ability to draw the viewer into the center of the swamp and the center of the artist's anguish. They were extraordinary.

«Oh, Lucky,» she whispered as understanding dawned painfully inside her. She closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her face.

This was what he hadn't wanted, for her to see beyond the facade of macho bravado, not because he was ashamed of what she would find, but because it was too personal, too private. He wasn't a man who would easily share his inner self; she'd known that all along. But she had never suspected his inner self would be so tender, so full of pain and longing.

Hugging herself, she looked at a painting of a storm building over the swamp. An angry sky churned in a turmoil of gray, green, and yellow above the stillness of the bayou. Tears rose in her eyes.

He had told her more than once he didn't want her prying into his life. He was nothing more than her unwilling guide and unwilling host. But she had pushed and prodded, excusing her behavior as professional curiosity, telling herself she had a right to know just how dangerous he really was, and in doing so she had violated the most basic human right-the right to inner privacy.

She turned to leave and jumped back, sucking in a startled breath as her heart vaulted into her throat. Lucky stood at the open door, staring at her. He was perfectly still, but there was a terrible sense of raw tension vibrating in the air around him. His eyes flashed like lightning warning of a coming storm.

«I'm sorry,» Serena whispered. She realized dimly that she was trembling. «I shouldn't have come in here.»

«No, you shouldn't have,» he said, his voice low and thrumming with fury.

He stared at her, struggling to hold himself from flying into a rage. What he did in this room he did for himself. This had been his solace, his salvation when he came back from Central America. He spent hours in this room, healing, focusing on his canvases to keep his mind together and to vent what was trying to tear him apart. These paintings were his most private feelings, the pain he couldn't escape, the fear he wouldn't acknowledge. Having someone see them was like stripping his soul bare and putting it on public display. It was unthinkable. And now it was inescapable.

«I didn't mean to pry,» Serena said stupidly.

«Of course you did,» Lucky snapped. He strode into the room and began throwing cloths over the paintings, his movements jerky with anger. «That's what shrinks do best, isn't it? Dig into people's heads, dig out their secrets.»

«I was only trying to see if you were doing something illegal. I have a right to know who I'm staying with,» she said, the words sounding self-righteous and foolish even to her.

He wheeled around suddenly and grabbed her by the arms, jerking her up against him, bending over her so that she had to arch her back to look up at him. «You don't have any rights out here,» he growled. «You don't belong here. This isn't polite society, Shelby. There are no rules except my rules.»

«Serena.» Her name trembled on her lips. She stared up at him, at the wild look in his eyes, genuinely afraid of him for the first time. I'm over the edge…Folks say he's half-crazy…»I'm Serena, Lucky,» she said softly, her heart pounding as she watched him struggle to pull himself back from that edge.

Lucky blinked at her, his mind sliding back from the darkness and chilling as he realized what she had said. He straightened and let go of her abruptly. She stumbled against the easel, setting the canvas on it rocking.

«I know who you are,» he said bitterly. Plowing his hands through his hair, he began to pace the width of the room like a caged tiger, his head down, eyes burning bright with fury and pain and fear.

«Damn you. Damn you,» he muttered as the breath soughed in and out of his lungs in gusts. So much had been taken from him-his youth, his innocence. It seemed all he had left was his pride and his privacy, and the woman standing there staring at him with doe eyes full of fear was stripping him of both. He didn't want her interference. He didn't want the reminder of his past she brought him. He didn't want the fire she set in his blood. Damn her, damn her!