What is the battery chemistry?
It is not normally advisable to charge batteries without a proper charging scheme, which you won't get from a simple series regulator, particularly if you want maximum life and performance from your batteries. Additionally, putting batteries in series or parallel to charge them can create problems, since the state of each battery could be quite different, or one might even be faulty. I would suggest that you look at some of the battery charging chips available from companies like Texas Instruments.
Cheers,
Richard