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.”