«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, chere. 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, chere,» 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.