He ignored her, bending to pick up a heavy cardboard box full of oily black motor parts. He lifted it as though it weighed no more than a kitten and set it on a workbench to sort through it. His attitude was one of dismissal and irritating in the extreme.

“Why are you making this so difficult?” Serena asked.

He turned his head and gave her a nasty, sardonic smile. “Because I’m a difficult kind of guy. I thought you might have figured that out by now. You’re an intelligent woman.”

“Frankly, I’m amazed you would credit a woman with having a brain. You strike me as the sort of man who sees women as being useful for only one purpose.”

“I said you were intelligent, not useful. I won’t know how useful you are until I have you naked beneath me.”

Heat flared through Serena like a flash fire. She attributed it to anger. Certainly it had nothing to do with the sudden image of lying tangled in the sheets with this barbarian. She crossed her arms in front of her defensively and made a show of looking all around them before returning her belligerent gaze to Lucky. “Pardon me, I was just checking to see if I had somehow been transported back into the Stone Age. Are you proposing to hit me over the head with a dinosaur bone and drag me back to your cave, Conan?”

He raised a warning finger, his brows drawing together ominously over glittering eyes. “You got a mouth on you, chere.”

He shuffled toward her, backing her up against the door frame. He braced his forearms on the wood above her head and leaned down close. His breath was warm against her cheek and scented with the smoky taint of tobacco and whiskey.

“I have never forced a woman,” Lucky said, his voice low and soft, the molten gold of his eyes burning into Serena’s. “I never have to.”

She was a spoiled society bitch and he wanted nothing to do with her. He’d been burned badly enough to know better. Dieu, he’d learned his first lesson at the hands of her twin! To get that close again was to give in entirely to the demons of insanity.