IT WAS A NO-WIN SITUATION. IF SHE STOOD HER ground, she lost her ride. If she gave in, it was another blow to her pride and another peg up for Mr. Macho’s overinflated ego. Serena took a slow, deep breath of air that was as dense as steam and tasted metallic and bitter. Maintaining as much of her dignity as she could, she lifted her slim nose and gave Lucky a long, cool look.

One corner of his lush mouth curled like the end of a cat’s tail. “What’sa matter, chere? You’d rather give orders than take them? Well, I’m not your hired boy. You want a ride, then you climb in the boat. You wanna boss somebody around, you can take a hike.”

Serena was certain she could actually feel her temper start to boil the blood in her veins. She clenched her jaw and fought a valiant battle to keep the lid on when all she wanted to do was tell Lucky Doucet to take a long walk off a short pier. Despite her name, her apparent serenity was little more than a shield, a defense mechanism, protective camouflage.

All her life she’d had to struggle with strong doses of Sheridan temper and stubbornness. Now she wrestled one into submission with the other. The man was doing his best to make her angry, so she stubbornly refused to lose her temper.

“You are a remarkably obnoxious man, Mr. Doucet,” she observed in the calmest of voices, as if she were commenting on nothing more interesting than the weather.

“I always try to excel.”

“How admirable.”

“So are you comin’?” He set his box down on the dock and sat beside it, dangling his long legs off the pier.

“I’ll need to stop by Chanson du Terre for a few things. You wouldn’t have any objection to that, would you?”

He gave her a flat look.

Serena motioned impatiently to the suit she was wearing. “You don’t really expect me to travel out into the swamp dressed this way, do you?”

He scowled and grumbled as he lowered himself into his boat. “Non. Come on, then. I been here too long already. Just look at the trouble I got myself into, havin’ to haul you around.”

Serena moved to the edge of the dock and looked down. It was then that the full folly of what she was about to do hit her. Lucky’s boat was no more than twelve feet in length, slender as a pea pod, and it looked about as stable as a floating leaf. Sitting in it would put her no more than an arm’s length from the black water of the bayou.

Fear rose up in her throat and wedged there like a tennis ball. What was the matter with her? Had she completely lost her mind? She was about to put her life in the hands of a man she wouldn’t sit next to on a bus and trust him to take her into the deep swamp in a boat that looked about as seaworthy as her broken shoe.

The swamp. Where anything could happen. Where people could get lost and never be found.

A chill raced over her flesh, settling into her arms and legs in trembling pools. She clenched her jaw and held her breath, forgetting every relaxation technique she taught her own patients. It had been too long since she’d been assaulted by this fear. The strength of it took her by surprise. It swelled and shook her, crowding at the back of her throat like a scream demanding release.

Lucky stood in the pirogue, watching her, annoyed by her dawdling. Then the color drained out off her face and his annoyance was replaced by something he refused to name. Serena Sheridan had come across as a lady who could handle herself in most situations. She had stood up to him better than most men did. Now she looked like a piece of porcelain about to crack from some fierce internal pressure. Something deep inside him responded to that, commiserated with it.

He ground his teeth, resenting the feeling and giving in to it at the same time. As hardened as he liked to think he was, he couldn’t just stand there and watch her fall apart. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to have to deal with a woman in hysterics. Besides, he had already decided the safest thing for him was to keep her half mad at him all the time. A man stayed wary of a snake poised to strike; it was the ones that appeared to be docile and dozing in the sun that were dangerous.

“You don’ like my boat, chere?” he drawled, an unmistakable note of challenge in his voice.

“A-um-“ Serena pulled herself out of her trance with difficulty, trying to focus not on her memory but on the boat and the man standing in it leaning indolently against a long push-pole. “It’s not exactly what I had in mind. Don’t you have something a little… bigger?”

“Like a yacht?” he asked sarcastically. “This ain’t Saks Fifth Avenue, sugar. I don’t have a selection for you to try on for size. Now, are you gonna get on down here or do I get to spend the rest of the day lookin’ up your skirt?”

A welcome surge of reckless anger warmed the chill that had shaken Serena from within. She narrowed her eyes as she pressed her knees together demurely and pulled her slim skirt tightly around them. Clutching her purse and shoe in one hand, she lowered herself awkwardly to the rough planks of the dock, dropping her legs over the edge and grimacing as she felt her pantyhose run all the way down the back of one leg.

She looked down at the pirogue bobbing gently on the oily water and a second wave of apprehension rose up to her tonsils. She hadn’t gone out on the bayou in a boat of any kind in fifteen years. She doubted she would have felt safe on the Queen Elizabeth II, let alone this simple shell of cypress planking. Still, why couldn’t he at least have had a nice big bass boat with a motor on it? Nobody used pirogues anymore… except Lucky Doucet.

“My pirogue is all the boat I need,” Lucky said as he reached up for her. “What’d you think-that I’d go around in a cabin cruiser on the off chance I might have to give some belle a ride somewhere she hadn’t oughta be going in the first place?”

Serena flashed him a glare. “No. I was just hoping against hope that you weren’t as uncivilized as you appear to be.”

He laughed as his big hands closed around her slender waist. She gave a little squeal of protest as he lifted her down into the boat. The pirogue rocked beneath his spread feet and she sacrificed pride for panic, dropping her shoe and purse and grabbing on to Lucky’s biceps for support.

For an instant she clung to him as if he were the only thing keeping her from falling into the gaping jaws of hell. Her breasts pressed against his upper rib cage, her belly arched into his groin as his big hands splayed across the small of her back, holding her close. His thighs were as solid as oak trees against hers. A shiver of primitive awareness shimmied down her back as she looked up at him.

He flashed her a smile that would have given the devil goose bumps. “Oh, I’m every bit as uncivilized as I look.” His voice dropped to that throaty purr that set all her nerve endings humming like tuning forks. “You gonna try to do somethin’ ‘bout that, chere? You gonna try to domesticate me?”

The suggestion elicited an involuntary trill of excitement inside her. It was like a starburst of sensation deep in her belly, and Serena cursed it for the foolish- j ness she knew it was. Any woman who took on the task of domesticating Lucky Doucet was just asking for trouble. Still, she couldn’t seem to quell the feeling as she looked up at him, at his hard, beard-shadowed jaw and that decadent mouth. She steeled herself against it, pushing herself back from him. He let her put an inch of space between them, but only after letting her know he could have held her there all day if he’d been of a mind to.

“Domesticate you?” Serena said derisively, arching a delicate brow. “Couldn’t I just have you neutered?”

“No need.” He gave her a little push that landed her on the plank seat of the pirogue with an unceremonious thump, and turned to get his box of motor parts. “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole, lady.”