Tempting Lucas
Catherine Spencer
Resisting sin with Dr. Flynn Lucas Flynn was still a dish, as tempting as he had been eleven years before when Emily had placed her naive teenage self in his bed and let him seduce her.Those years hadn't made Lucas any more kindly disposed to Emily - who longed to tell him about the consequences of their one-night stand, and that she'd never stopped wanting him. But this time she wasn't going to offer herself to him on a plate. If Lucas ever made love to Emily again, it would be because he had come to her!
“It looks as if we’re stuck with each other—at least for the next little while.” (#u0666c55d-3905-5261-b32d-04f436a69dc5)About the Author (#u0b25273f-d482-51c8-9062-61aaa93e0adf)Title Page (#u5edfb25e-6b86-59a6-836d-4a9f15a31c50)CHAPTER ONE (#ua130d005-3048-5bf1-98f0-9f03db4bf896)CHAPTER TWO (#u63b413a3-1fda-5f27-a908-76b29ea97519)CHAPTER THREE (#uf9def93a-f08f-5b0d-b275-c35a3f5155f0)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“It looks as if we’re stuck with each other—at least for the next little while.”
“Stuck with each other? Oh, I don’t think so!” said Emily.
“You have some other solution up your sleeve?”
“Well I...Lucas, I couldn’t possibly stay another night under the same roof as you!”
“Why not?” he drawled. “Forewarned is forearmed. I have a lock on my bedroom door and I’ll make a point of using it.”
CATHERINE SPENCER, once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about Harlequin romances. Within two months she changed careers, and sold her first book to Harlequin in 1984. She moved to Canada from England thirty years ago and lives in Vancouver. She is married to a Canadian and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons—plus three dogs and a cat. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques and grows tropical shrubs.
Tempting Lucas
Catherine Spencer
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
SHE hadn’t been back to Belvoir in eleven years, not since the year that she’d lost the baby. At the very least the place could have looked as if it had missed her a fraction as much as she’d missed it—shown its age a little, the way she was sure she showed hers. But no. It rose out of the morning mist, as pale and beautiful today as it had been then, evoking not just the innocent pleasures of her childhood but the sharp unhappiness of unrequited love and lost dreams as well.
Wisteria still wound in mauve clusters around the pillars supporting the upper balconies, the way it had every spring since her grandmother had come there as a bride. Gauzy white curtains still swirled over the windows of the comer turrets, and the brass bell at the massive front entrance gleamed with the same golden brilliance.
How often, when they’d been children, had they rung that bell for the sheer mischief of it, and brought one or other of the servants running and scolding? But not today.
“Miss Emily!” Consuela, who’d served as general factotum at Belvoir since before Emily had been born, bared her yellow old teeth in a smile. “What a welcome sight you are! Madame will be so pleased to see you.”
“Humph!” her grandmother grumbled, scowling over the half-glasses perched on her patrician nose when Emily stepped into the morning room. “I suppose I should be grateful that they had the good grace to send you to badger me, Emily Jane. Of them all, you at least have the wit to keep me entertained. You may kiss me, child.”
Emily bent, touched her lips to the papery cheek, and clamped down viciously on the tears suddenly damming behind her eyes. “You’re looking well, Grand-mère.”
“And you lie graciously but badly,” Monique Lamartine said. “Having you here might prove even more diverting than I’d anticipated, provided you understand that I am not about to move out of my house no matter what sort of pressure you bring to bear on me. I lived here with your grandfather and I intend to lie beside him in my grave, though not quite as quickly as my son and daughters might like. The body is a little frailer but the mind...” She tapped her forehead. “It’s still sound, never doubt that, and I will continue to lead my life as I see fit. So you’re very welcome to visit for a while, Emily Jane, but when you decide to leave you will not be taking me with you.”
Emily murmured something innocuous and tried again to hide her dismay. Monique Lamartine rose in her memory tall and proud and invincible; this shrunken, enfeebled old lady with the stick propped next to her chair bore little resemblance to the woman she knew as Grandmother.
Consuela reappeared, wheeling before her a trolley laden with sterling and translucent Limoges china. A tiered silver cake stand of delicacies baked fresh that morning occupied pride of place on the lower shelf.
“Pour the tea, Emily Jane, and give yourself something to do until you’ve composed yourself,” Monique ordered tartly.
In all the years Emily had known her, her grandmother had preferred coffee, a rich, full-bodied French roast in keeping with her ancestry. “I didn’t know you drank tea, Grand-mère.”
“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” her grandmother retorted. “That tends to happen when you avoid a person for over ten years.”
Emily was thirty and long past the age, or so she’d thought, when anyone could make her flush and feel as awkward as a teenager. But her grandmother’s barbed observation found its mark. The telltale pink spread over her face despite her attempt to rationalize what she knew must seem like inexcusable neglect on her part.
“I haven’t avoided you! You were at my wedding, and we saw each other again at Suzanne’s, a few months after. We celebrated New Year’s together in San Francisco four years ago, and met at the family reunion in Charleston when Peter graduated from the academy. We’ve talked on the phone, I’ve written, and sent you postcards whenever I’ve gone traveling.”
The rest of her might have dwindled, but Monique’s scorn had lost none of its sting. “I don’t know how long it took you to memorize such an impressive list, Emily Jane, but let me assure you it was a waste of time. On all those occasions, we were surrounded by other relatives and, of necessity, confined to meaningless exchanges which neither one of us particularly enjoyed. Of course, there was, as there always has been, another option, one which would have allowed us the privacy to reinforce those ties formed when you were a girl, but you chose not to employ it. You have not set foot in my home since the summer you turned nineteen.”
Emily looked away as a different sort of shame overwhelmed her. “It wasn’t you I was avoiding, Grand-mère, it was this house, this place. I wouldn’t be here now—”
“If it weren’t for the fact that my children think I’m incapable of looking after myself, so they’ve bribed you to try to get me to see things their way because they know that, for all that you’ve neglected me so abysmally for far too long, you’re still my favorite. Well, it doesn’t say much for you, Emily Jane, does it, that I had to be half crippled by a stroke before you could bring yourself to put aside your own feelings and give a thought to mine?”
“I’m sorry, Grand-mère.”
Emily didn’t for a moment expect that such an answer would be found acceptable, which was why she almost missed the cup into which she was pouring fragrant Lapsang Souchong tea when her grandmother said quite gently, “I know you are, child, and I know why you found coming back here so painful. It was that Flynn boy from next door.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, Grand-mère.”
Monique’s sympathy vanished in a flash. “Give me credit for having some intelligence, for pity’s sake! I saw the way you languished, the last summer you spent here, dreaming the hours away in the belvedere, hoping he’d show up, coming alive only when he deigned to spare you a moment’s attention.”
“Puppy love,” Emily said, regaining enough poise to pass a cup of tea to her grandmother without spilling a drop in the saucer. “All girls go through it.”
“Not all girls sneak out of the house after dark and return long after other respectable souls are asleep in their beds. Not all girls shut themselves away from the people around them, preferring to spend their time in seclusion, nor do they mark off the days in their diaries with quite the assiduous care with which you marked off yours, the last few weeks of that summer.”
“You read my diary?” Appalled, Emily stared at her grandmother.
“Certainly I read your diary,” Monique said, with shameless relish. “How else was I supposed to discover what was troubling you so deeply? You allowed that ... that rogue to rob you of your innocence, and then you worried yourself into a near breakdown wondering if you’d been left with child.”
“Left with child”. Such an old-fashioned, genteel way to characterize the disgrace an illegitimate pregnancy would have brought to the family. Given that that was exactly the predicament in which Emily had found herself, how was it that ultimately being left without child had such a destitute ring to it?
“Fortunately you were spared that,” Monique went on, blithely ignorant of the aftermath of that summer, “though even had you not been it would not have changed my love for you. You were always my special child.”
Emily’s eyes burned again with unshed tears. “Oh, Grand-mère!”
“I saw your face the day he came lollygagging over here and announced his engagement to that woman. Had your grandfather been alive, he’d have horse-whipped him. As it is, Lucas Flynn got his just deserts when not all his fancy medical training could save his wife and he had to bury her in some heathen African country. The pity of it is that whatever killed her didn’t carry him off too. The world does not need men like him.”
“I understand he’s a very fine doctor.”
Her grandmother let out the closest to a snort that she’d ever permit herself. “Not any more he isn’t! His doctoring days are over. Seems he lost his taste for medicine, or else his nerve. These days he’s a recluse, emerging into view only when conscience drives him to earn his keep around the house as a general handyman.”
In the short time since she’d arrived at Belvoir, Emily had weathered a range of emotions. She’d experienced nostalgia, shame, sadness and shock. To that list she now added dread. “What house? The last I heard, Lucas Flynn was running a clinic somewhere in Central Africa.”
“Then your information is sadly out of date,” Monique declared flatly. “Lucas Flynn is living next door with his grandmother. The neighborhood, I fear, has gone to the dogs since you were last here, Emily Jane.”
Her worst nightmare—having to face him again—had come to pass! Practically stammering with dismay, Emily asked, “But how—why is he here?”
“Because he’s a failure! What possible other reason could he have for letting his medical license lapse? And why else would his benighted grandmother feel compelled to make excuses for him every time she opens her mouth?”
“Excuses?” Emily repeated faintly. “Lucas Flynn was never the type to hide behind excuses, Grand-mère.”
“He is now,” Monique said with a satisfied little nod. “Spends half his time shut up in some university lab, peering into a microscope, and the other half recording his findings—except, as I just mentioned, when he deigns to mow the lawn or otherwise make himself useful next door. A bit of a come-down, wouldn’t you say, compared to his former grandiose laying-on-of-healing-hands plans?”
“There isn’t a university in April Water,” Emily said, still groping for the magic key that would release her from a dream that threatened to become worse long before it grew any better. Wasn’t confronting the shocking reality of her grandmother’s declining health enough, without this added complication?
“There are plenty in the San Francisco area,” Monique replied, then spoilt the possibility of reprieve by adding, “Not that he spends every waking hour there, what with all the fancy computer equipment he’s rumored to have had installed at Roscommon House. But why are we wasting breath on a man like him when we have more important matters to discuss, such as your marriage?”
She took Emily’s ringless left hand in hers. “Don’t make me drag the details out of you a syllable at a time, Emily Jane. I never expected it would last, of course, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in knowing how it ended.”
“We grew apart.” Emily shrugged, at a loss to know how to explain the lack of passion that had characterized her relationship with George.
“You were never together. Ambition and career advancement lured him to the altar and penance drove you.”
“That’s not fair, Grand-mère. George tried hard to be the sort of husband he thought I wanted. We both tried, but if anyone’s to blame for it all ending in divorce I am.”
Monique’s black eyes focused shrewdly on Emily’s face. “Why? Because you were married to one man and pining for another?”
How could her grandmother have known? Emily wondered. Was it written all over her face, as plain to see as if she’d actually committed adultery? “If you’re talking about the business with Lucas Flynn, Grand-mère—”
“Of course I am.”
“That all ended three years before I got engaged.” But the memory had remained vivid, embroidered to an unlikely magic by the passage of time. Had George sensed it? Was that what eventually had driven him into another woman’s arms and bed?
“I’m leaving you, Emily,” he’d announced over eggs Benedict, one rainy Sunday morning nearly eighteen months ago. “There’s someone else.”
“Do I know her?” Emily had asked, as politely as if they’d been discussing a fourth for bridge. Because, of course, Lucas had always been the third member of the party, even if his name never crossed her lips.
“No.” George had nudged his coffee-cup closer for a refill. “Just as well, probably. Less awkward all round.”
What had shocked Emily had not been that her marriage was coming to an abrupt and unexpected end, but that she had accepted the news with staggering equanimity. She’d added cream and two lumps of sugar to her husband’s coffee and, in the sort of tone that she might have murmured, “Have another croissant, dear” said, “I suppose you’d like a divorce.”
“Might as well. No immediate rush, of course, though I’d as soon not wait too long.”
“Do you miss him, Emily Jane?”
Emily blinked and looked at her grandmother in confusion. “Who? George?”
“If you thought I meant Lucas Flynn, then it’s small wonder your marriage failed. Even men like George Keller have their pride. Bad enough you were a melancholy bride, without compounding the sin and betraying yourself as a dissatisfied wife.”
“Perhaps if there’d been children—”
“It’s a blessing there weren’t!”
“But if there had been we might have felt we shared something worth saving.”
“In my day,” her grandmother observed with caustic insight, “a husband and wife took it upon themselves to make their marriage work. They didn’t expect innocent children to rescue it from its troubles.”
“But I think the lack of children made George feel inadequate. I think he blamed himself.”
“As he should. You come from select but hardy stock, Emily Jane. It’s hardly likely you’d have been unable to produce an heir had the opportunity presented itself.”
Was it? Emily had wondered many times since if the punishment for her short-lived, unhappy illegitimate pregnancy had been the absence of babies later on, when it would have been perfectly acceptable for her to bear them. “His new wife gave birth within six months of their getting married.”
“The hussy!” Monique hissed on an outraged breath. “They deserve each other!”
“George is a perfectly nice man, Grand-mère. He just wasn’t the right man for me.”
Her grandmother eyed her narrowly. “No, he wasn’t, any more than that rogue from next door was. Dare I hope, Emily Jane, that you’ve learned your lesson and will choose more judiciously in future?”
In light of her recent discoveries about Lucas, and their effect on her peace of mind, that was not a question Emily felt equal to answering honestly. However, she was spared having to lie because, when she glanced at her grandmother, she saw that, suddenly and quite completely, Monique had fallen asleep in her chair.
A fine wool shawl lay over the back of the sofa. Emily draped it carefully around her grandmother’s frail shoulders, then stole from the room.
Consuela met her in the hall. “She’s sleeping?”
Emily nodded. “Dropped off in a matter of seconds. Does that happen often?”
“More and more.” Consuela sighed and looked as if she might say something else, then pressed her lips tightly together.
“What is it, Consuela?”
“Nothing—nothing. You see, don’t you, that she’s...?”
“Old.” The word emerged bathed in guilt and sadness. Why had she waited so long to come back when there was so little time left for Monique?
Consuela’s hand on her arm was sympathetic. “It can’t be helped, sweet child. Neither of us is getting any younger.”
The truth of that became obvious over the next hour as Emily renewed her acquaintance with the house that held so many memories for her. Contrary to her first impression, the place was not as well kept as she’d thought. On the main floor, only the morning room, the small breakfast room and the kitchen were in daily use. The rest were closed off, their furnishings draped in dust sheets, and with cobwebs festooning the chandeliers. A light had burned out in the back hall and not been replaced, leaving the area dim even in the middle of the day.
“I’d have done it myself,” Consuela said apologetically, when she caught Emily installing a fresh light bulb, “but I’m not so good with heights any more.”
“Don’t even think about using this stepladder,” Emily scolded. “For heaven’s sake, Consuela, why hasn’t my grandmother brought in someone to give you extra help? It isn’t as if she can’t afford it.”
“She is proud, just as she’s always been. It grieves her to think we must call in strangers and let them see...” Consuela’s voice trembled slightly “... that we cannot manage as we once did.”
Emily could have wept anew with shame. “Come and talk to me while I prepare us all some lunch—and no, Consuela, don’t try to talk me out of it! I’m perfectly capable in a kitchen and you’ve carried this burden long enough by yourself. It’s past time my grandmother’s family took some of the responsibility on themselves.”
From the kitchen, she could see out to the sweep of lawn that once had been manicured to within an inch of its life. Now it ran unhindered into the untidy straggle of shrubbery lining the path to the river, reinforcing what was already apparent: the days were gone when Monique was mistress of all she surveyed. If she refused to leave Belvoir, someone would have to remain with her, to oversee the running of the estate as well as monitor her well-being. And there was little doubt who that someone would be.
Trying hard to be tactful, Emily brought up the subject that evening, during dinner. “Don’t you miss being closer to the people you love, Grand-mère?”
“Not enough that I’m willing to move, just to be near them,” Monique informed her.
“But if one of them was to live here at Belvoir, would you object?”
“That,” her grandmother declared, “would depend entirely on which one of my so-called loved ones you have in mind, Emily Jane.”
As if there’d ever been any question of the most suitable candidate! Who among the family had no personal ties elsewhere? Who, for that matter, was the only one who could get along with Monique for more than an hour at a time?
“I’ve been feeling that I need a change,” she said, and it wasn’t so far from the truth. “New England winters are long and cold, and Boston—”
“You have a business there. You told me once that you were very busy and very successful. Are you proposing to give it up, so that you can babysit a feeble old woman? Or is it my money you’re after?”
“I neither want nor need your money, Grand-mère, but I do think I’d like to have your company. I didn’t realize until this morning how much I’ve missed you.”
“If you’re asking if my door is open, Emily Jane, then let me remind you that it always has been. It was your choice to stay away, not mine.”
Emily touched her serviette to her mouth. “Well, if it’s all right with you, Grand-mère, I’d like to make up for lost time. May I come and live with you for a while?”
A tear splashed down Monique’s wrinkled cheek and fell into her soup. “You may,” she said, head lifted proudly to indicate that she wasn’t about to acknowledge such a maudlin display of weakness.
Later, after the dishes were cleared away and Consuela had brought in the tea tray, Monique selected a cigarette from the silver box at her elbow and nodded to Emily to light it for her. “What about your business, Emily Jane? Will you sell it, or is there someone who can manage it for you during your absence?”
“I have a friend who’s been interested in becoming a partner in Done To Perfection for about a year now. I think she’ll be more than happy to buy me out.”
“And you won’t miss it?”
“If I do, I can always open up another branch here, once I’m settled. I like to be busy, Grand-mère. Come to that, I like being my own boss and making a success of things.”
“Success is all very fine, child, but you can’t warm your feet on it when you go to bed. Your grandfather has been dead seventeen years but I’ve never become used to sleeping alone. I miss him every night.”
“Because you were happily married, that’s why, but I’m not interested in that sort of life.”
Choking a little as she inhaled, Monique peered through the smoke already wreathing her face. “It’s unnatural for a woman your age to be so indifferent to men, Emily Jane, and it leads me to suspect you’re hiding something. Is there, by chance, someone in your life that you don’t want me to know about?”
“Certainly not,” Emily said. But it was a lie. A new lie, scarcely more than a few hours old, to be sure, but a lie nonetheless. The back of her mind had been filled with his face, her heart with racing dread, ever since she’d learned that Lucas Flynn was widowed and living next door again.
Aware that her grandmother had fixed a very speculative gaze on her, Emily changed the subject. Pushing the ashtray a little closer to Monique’s elbow, she asked, “Does your doctor know you smoke, Grand-mère?”
“Naturally. He’s fool enough to think he has the right to know everything about me.”
“And he doesn’t object?”
“There’s a difference between a fool and an imbecile, child. He knows better than to intrude with his opinions where they’re not welcome.”
“But it can’t be good for you.”
“If your reason for wanting to live here is that you plan to try to rearrange the way I choose to lead my life, Emily Jane, I shall withdraw my permission and you may leave first thing in the morning,” Monique informed her acidly.
“I’m concerned for your health, that’s all.”
“When you reach my age, you’ll realize that there’s very little left that one can do for one’s health except enjoy what remains of it. Which I intend to do by living where and with whom I please, and smoking when and where I feel like it.” She puffed once or twice to underline her point and watched Emily through the veil of smoke curling up between them. “You look worn out, child. Don’t feel you have to stay up entertaining me.”
“I don’t want to leave you down here by yourself.”
“Why not? I’m used to it and I don’t need sleep the way I once did. You have your old room in the southwest turret. Consuela spent most of the last week getting it ready for you.”
Emily hid a yawn behind her hand. It had been a long day, made worse by the three hour time difference between Massachusetts and California. “If you’re sure you don’t mind, perhaps I will make an early night of it.”
“Go,” her grandmother ordered, rolling her eyes. “All this sudden attentive concern is beginning to annoy me.”
The memories had besieged her from the moment she’d set foot in the house, but they saved their most potent attack until the end of the day when she was at her most vulnerable. Exhausted not only from travel but also from a succession of small shocks one on top of the other, Emily felt, when she opened her bedroom door, as if she’d stepped into a huge time tunnel running in reverse, and was helpless to stop it.
Everything conspired against her. Her clothes hung in one half of the vast armoire, her lingerie in the lined mahogany drawers of the other half, leaving her nothing with which to distract herself. Velvet-napped towels lay draped over the edge of the huge claw-footed tub in the attached bathroom. The covers were turned back on the bed, a Thermos of hot chocolate sat on the nightstand.
On the surface, nothing had changed. The delicate painted panelling, the carved four-poster with its embroidered tester, the cheval glass looked exactly as they always had, as though to say there was no rewriting history. But, most of all, the smells were what peeled back the years: gardenia bath essence and starched cotton sheets dried in the warm Californian sun; patchouli and the musty gentility of antique silk draperies. They overlapped her senses and sent her swimming back to that other time.
The curved windows in the turret wall stood open to the sweet night air, luring her deeper into the time tunnel. The sheen of moonlight illuminated the bend in the river beyond which she knew rose Roscommon House. When she had been nineteen and in love with Lucas Flynn, she had kept vigil at this window and known the second he had gone to his room because his light would shine through the night, and she, foolish romantic that she’d been, had thought of it as a beacon lighting a path from her heart to his.
She had been wrong.
If she had known he was here again, she would not have come back. But she had not known, and now it was too late.
She stepped closer to the windows to pull down the blinds. Involuntarily, her gaze stole to the right and with an accuracy undulled by time found the break in the trees which, during the day, revealed the steeply pitched roof of Roscommon and the gable which housed Lucas’s room.
As if she’d activated a secret switch, a beam of light from his window suddenly pierced the darkness, as bright and golden as her hopes had been over eleven summers before.
She wanted to turn away. Even more, she wanted to stare at the sight and not care, not remember. But she was able to do neither. Remembrance flowed over her, merciless as a rogue wave sweeping its victim out to sea.
A breeze riffled past the gauzy white drapes and touched her skin. With a shudder, Emily pulled down the shades and shut out the sight of that light streaming through the darkness. Shut out the memories it brought with it.
She had been young then, barely out of school. Full of immature fantasies, no doubt, the way young women often were, but she’d grown up quickly, thanks to Lucas Flynn.
It didn’t matter where he was living now. He could move into the room next door to hers for all she cared. Parade up and down in front of her, showing off his big, male body, and doing his best to reduce her to drooling lust. But he wouldn’t succeed.
She’d never again give him the opportunity to flick her off as if she were just another summer insect buzzing around and annoying him. Nor would she allow him to spoil this special time with her beloved Grand-mère.
The mistakes had piled up, each more disastrous than its predecessor, that other summer. But she’d paid for them once, and dearly. She wasn’t going to let him make her pay again.
He shut down the computer just after midnight, knowing it was futile trying to annotate scientific data from his latest experiments when his thoughts repeatedly strayed to events from much earlier times, before medicine had become his ruling passion.
As a doctor, he’d accepted long ago the human mind’s amazing ability to connect telepathically with another, regardless of the time or distance separating them. Sydney, thoroughly rooted in reality as she was, had scoffed at the idea, claiming it was the learned response that came of being a doctor, but he’d seen it as an instinct that couldn’t be taught.
Either way, it all came down to the same thing now: when his grandmother had mentioned in passing that a member of Mrs. Lamartine’s family had come to take care of her he’d known with absolute if unsubstantiated certainty that the visitor at Belvoir was Emily Jane. And once he’d allowed the knowledge to take hold there’d been no going back to his work.
Instead, he stood at the window of his room and stared out. It was one of those perfect nights midway between winter and spring—cool and still.
In the garden below, the magnolia tree had shed its petals, which lay like abandoned saucers on the grass. The scent of heliotrope filtered up, a sweet, heady perfume that he’d dreamed about when he was in Africa where the smell of death had permeated everything. Overhead, the sky was dappled with moonlight, a sprinkling of stars hung so low that he could almost have reached up and grasped a handful.
He had made the right decision in coming back here. It was home, and as different from Africa as heaven was from hell. It defined his boyhood, his youth, and his emergence as a man, and held none of the misery of that godforsaken country on the other side of the world.
Tired suddenly, of himself and the memories that threatened to swamp him, Lucas rolled his head around to relieve the stiffness in his neck and shoulders. Four months ago he’d turned thirty-six. He was disillusioned about many things, saddened by others, but, damn it all and despite everything, in charge of what his life had become. He was under no obligation to relive the mistakes of his youth, particularly not as they related to Emily. The days when they had been friends were long gone and there was no reason for their lives to interweave again now, no reason for the even tenor of his life to be disturbed—if, indeed, she was the one visiting Belvoir.
The thought brought him a measure of peace. Before turning from the window, he inhaled deeply one last time, filling his lungs with the scents of heliotrope and spring. But something else had crept in to spoil the purity of the night, something faintly acrid floating on the air and leaving it not quite as sweet as it had been moments before.
Suddenly alert, he snapped off the bedside lamp and leaned further out, eyes scanning, searching for he knew not what. Below, the river continued to flow softly. Above, the moon rode high above the trees that marked the boundary between Beatrice’s property and the Lamartines’. God appeared to be in His heaven, and all right with the world, so who was Lucas Flynn to question otherwise?
He was about to turn away when a flicker of light through the trees, so brief he almost missed it, caught his eye, followed within seconds by a burst of orange.
Precious moments ticked by, moments of paralysed disbelief when he should have been responding to the emergency he wanted so badly to pretend wasn’t taking place. And then he was sprinting for the door, calling out through the quiet house for Beatrice to wake up, to phone for help.
Ignoring Emily wasn’t going to be quite as easy as he’d hoped. Because the Lamartine house was on fire.
CHAPTER TWO
EMILY surfaced from sleep slowly, reluctantly, the smell of the Alaska smoked cod Consuela had served for dinner connecting her vividly to the dream. Except that they’d had poached salmon for dinner and instead of fading, as dreams were supposed to, the odor winding in long, sinuous threads under her door was growing stronger, accompanied by a thin wail of distress from somewhere else in the house.
Suddenly wide awake, she bolted upright in the bed, her senses screaming a warning. Streaking across the room, she wrenched open the door, and found her worst fears confirmed by the blue haze of smoke rising in the stairwell.
“Grand-mère!” she cried, her voice echoing faintly, a whisper of dread. “Consuela!”
She raced into her grandmother’s room. It was empty, the covers thrown back from the bed, and the sight terrified her. Belvoir was huge; it had eight bedrooms, all with connecting baths, and five reception rooms, in addition to the kitchen and breakfast room, then the entire third storey, which once had housed a fleet of servants but which Consuela now had to herself. Where did a person begin to search?
Was that her own pitiful little voice, whimpering with fear, that she could hear as she turned toward the upper floor? Was that really her, rooted to the spot and doing nothing to help Consuela as she tottered down the narrow upper stairs with her nightgown flapping around her feet and threatening to pitch her head-first onto the main landing?
“Dear Lord, she’s done it again,” Consuela said hoarsely, clutching her chest and fighting to draw breath.
It was enough to jolt Emily into full awareness. The crackle of flames had joined that poisonous column of smoke to underline the danger closing in on two infirm and helpless old women trapped in a house ablaze. If she was to get them and herself out safely, she had to take charge and fast. “My grandmother isn’t in her room, Consuela. Do you know where she might—?”
Before she could complete the question, that wail of distress rose up from somewhere below on the main floor. Consuela heard it, too, and sighed with dull resignation. “Madame wanders...” she wheezed “... all over the place... when she can’t sleep—”
“Never mind!” With uncivilized disregard for Consuela’s age and lack of agility, Emily piloted her down the main staircase, driven by the knowledge that Monique was somewhere below, that she might be trapped by the flames or, worse yet, on fire herself. The possible outcome inherent in the situation didn’t bear thinking about.
It was a nightmare journey. The smoke, thicker now, filled the stairwell, making their eyes smart, obscuring their vision, tormenting their lungs. Once, Consuela tripped on her long, flowing nightgown and almost tumbled both of them head over heels the rest of the way. But by some miracle she regained her balance and finally they rounded the last curve of the staircase. Emily knew because the arched entrance to the drawing room lay to the left, and the flames crawling up the draperies at the window within were turned to dazzling Catherine wheels of color by the smoke-induced tears stinging her eyes.
Directly ahead lay the front door and beyond it the sweet sanity of fresh air that her tortured lungs craved. “Almost there,” she choked. “Just a couple more stairs, Consuela.”
Blinded by smoke, she felt the newel post of the banister under her hand and knew she’d reached the bottom stair; knew that her next step would bring her to the solid floor of the entrance hall. She stretched out her foot, expecting to touch the smooth Italian marble tiles. And instead made contact with the crumpled heap that was her grandmother.
Did she open her mouth to scream? Was that what caused her lungs to rebel at the overload of smoke and leave her gagging as well as blinded? Was the noise that filled her ears the sound of her own panicked blood roaring through her veins—or the double front doors smashing open and urgent male voices shouting to each other?
It didn’t matter. All that signified was the cool, firm grasp of another’s hand, of the arm at her waist shepherding her out to where the blessedly pure night air waited to restore her breathing. Collapsing on the lawn, she watched through bleary, flooded eyes as the tall figure that had rescued her returned to Belvoir, and a moment later reappeared with her grandmother in his arms.
If she had thought that they might one day meet again, Emily had not expected that it would be like this, with them avoiding each other’s eyes over Monique’s prostrate figure. She had not thought she would owe him gratitude or thanks. Nor did he seem to expect it. Satisfied that her grandmother was breathing, Lucas Flynn turned back to help the other man, a stranger, who was bringing Consuela out through the door.
“Over here,” he said, his voice full of quiet authority. “They’re far enough away to be safe here for now.” His gaze came to rest on Emily and just briefly, in the midst of the panic and fear, a spark of awareness more dangerous than the fire within the house flared between them. And then it was gone, doused by the blank indifference in his blue eyes. “Is there anyone else inside?” he asked.
She shook her head and held a hand to her painful throat. “No.”
“No pets or anything?”
How could she have forgotten her grandmother’s beloved, bad-tempered Robespierre? “There’s the cat—”
“He goes hunting,” Consuela wheezed, “every night. There is no one left inside.”
The other man, the stranger, spoke kindly. “Where’s your garden hose? The blaze seems confined to one room so perhaps I can put it out or at least contain it.”
“Don’t try going in there again,” Lucas said shortly. “Acting the hero isn’t going to help if you end up another casualty. That’s the last thing we need.”
“I’ll break the window and work from the outside.” The stranger’s manner was quietly confident, the hand he rested on Emily’s shoulder sympathetic. “We can’t stand by watching family treasures go up in smoke without doing something about it, now can we?”
“Suit yourself,” Lucas muttered, squatting beside Monique and checking her pulse.
After a moment, he sat back on his heels and blew out a breath. Without thinking, Emily reached out and touched his arm. If she’d grasped a live wire, the jolt could not have shocked her more. Snatching back her hand, she said, “How is she?”
“Better than either of you, it seems,” he replied, jerking a nod at Consuela who lay like a sack of flour, panting audibly.
His impersonal tone and the way he refused to look at her left Emily feeling like an interloper. Annoyed, she said as sharply as her beleaguered lungs would allow, “How can that be? She was passed out on the floor.”
“Exactly,” he replied loftily, as if only a complete fool would fail to figure it out for herself, “and smoke rises. She’s suffered almost no harmful inhalation.”
Monique chose that moment to assert herself. “I did not pass out,” she announced in distinct tones that left no one in any doubt about her umbrage at being treated as if she weren’t quite all there. “I slipped and fell.”
“Did you?” he said impassively. “And how are you feeling now?”
“Like hell, Lucas Flynn, and if you were any sort of doctor you’d know that without having to ask.”
Unperturbed, he began to examine her, probing gently along her neck and down her arms. “Want to tell me how you came to fall?”
“I was trying to alert my household to the fact that my home was on fire.”
“How do you think it started?”
“I have no idea,” she returned frostily.
“It was the same as before,” Consuela said. “Madame—”
“Be quiet!” Monique snapped. “How could you possibly know anything when you were upstairs snoring so loudly that I couldn’t sleep?”
Just then Beatrice Flynn, Lucas’s grandmother, came traipsing through the trees, clad in a brocade dressing gown and with her hair hanging down her back in a long gray braid. “Praise the Lord Lucas got you out alive!” she cried, the beam of the flashlight she carried swinging in a wide arc over them where they huddled on the lawn. “You could all have fried in your beds!”
“You must be terribly disappointed,” Monique retorted with a malevolent glare.
“That’s a wicked thing to say, Monique Lamartine. I wouldn’t wish anyone dead, not even you.”
Perhaps it was as well that the sound of sirens split the night just then, signaling the arrival of emergency vehicles and thus preventing another round in the yearsold feud between the two dowagers.
“Three casualties, none too serious,” Lucas informed the ambulance attendants, while the fire marshall organized his crew. “This one had a stroke recently, the other two suffered some smoke inhalation. A night in the hospital won’t hurt any of them.”
“I do not require hospitalization,” Monique declared, struggling to sit up, “but by all means take Consuela. She’s wheezing like a locomotive.”
“This hasn’t been easy on you either, Mrs. Lamartine,” he said as the paramedics loaded Consuela onto a stretcher. “You need rest and a thorough check-up, too.”
“You’re supposed to be a doctor and you’ve just given me a check-up. How many more do I need?”
“You’ll be better cared for in a properly equipped medical center.”
“No,” she said, waving aside his concern. “This is my home and here I intend to remain.”
“That’s impossible, as I’m sure you know,” Lucas replied, with thinly veiled impatience. “If you refuse to follow my advice then you’ll have to find some other place to stay because there’s no way you’ll be allowed back into your house tonight, nor, I suspect, for some time to come.”
“You’re quite right,” Emily said. “Grand-mère, we’ll phone for a taxi and take a room at the hotel, then in the morning I’ll contact the family and make temporary arrangements for you to stay with—”
“You will do no such thing, Emily Jane! Furthermore, if you attempt to use this unfortunate incident to convince me that my children are correct in thinking I’m unable to care for myself without their help, then not only are you a dreadful disappointment to me, are you also no longer welcome in my home.”
“Well, she’s welcome in mine,” Beatrice put in. “And so, come to that, are you, Monique Lamartine, though why I should put myself out for you I don’t know. It’s a miserable old woman you’ve become, and I pray I don’t turn out the same when I’m your age.”
“You’re already my age and then some!”
Beatrice did an about-turn and prepared to march back the way she’d come. “I’ll not waste breath arguing with you. If my house isn’t good enough, you can sleep under the stars for all I care. Emily Jane, if you decide to take me up on my offer, you know where I live.”
She was almost at the boundary of the two properties when Monique called out grudgingly, “I never said your house wasn’t good enough, you silly woman.”
Beatrice spun around in her tracks. “Are you saying you’d like me to prepare a room for you, then?” she inquired, exacting a full measure of revenge in the way she pointedly waited for a reply.
Emily could have sworn she saw her grandmother swallow the huge chunk of pride threatening to choke her before she managed, “Under these very unusual circumstances, I find that an acceptable alternative, yes.”
“In that case,” Beatrice said, “I’ll ask you, Lucas, to fetch the car round so that poor, feeble Mrs. Lamartine doesn’t have to trek through the woods at such an ungodly hour and her in nothing but a sootstained nightie.”
Even outdoors, with people and space between them, Emily felt his presence too acutely. The idea of finding herself confined with him in the close quarters of a car, even for the short time it would take him to drive them next door, filled her with dismay.
Apparently, Lucas felt likewise. “Of course,” he said, politely enough, his eyes resting on Emily, but then his gaze flicked away from her as if she were nothing but the unpleasant figment of someone else’s imagination.
Beatrice assigned her to the second guest suite, a big square room with a sitting alcove at one end and an en suite bathroom at the other. She had laid out a long cotton gown which, while it was certainly several sizes too large, was infinitely preferable to Emily’s own grassstained, smoke-drenched nightshirt. That and the deep tub lured her to delay the pleasure of crawling between the sweet-smelling sheets until she’d shampooed her hair and soaped her skin clean of the fire’s residue.
She had just emerged from the bathroom with her hair turbaned in a towel when a tap came at the bedroom door. “Emily Jane, darling, are you in bed yet?” Beatrice called softly.
“Not quite,” Emily said. “Come in, Mrs. Flynn.”
“I’ll not disturb you,” Beatrice said, popping her head around the door. “I just want to make sure you have everything you need. Also, I’ve made cocoa, and if you’re ready for it I’ll bring it up to you.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Emily said, walking over to the door and opening it wider. “It might be over ten years since I was last here, but I haven’t forgotten where the kitchen is and you’ve been disturbed enough for one night. Go to bed, please, or before you know it it’ll be time to get up again.”
“Well, I will, then, if it’s all the same to you.” Beatrice took Emily’s hands affectionately. “It’s a lovely woman you’ve grown into, Emily Jane, and I’ve missed you. Don’t let another ten years go by before you come to stay again.”
Was it being assailed by yet another shock, the after-effects of smoke or plain and simple fatigue that had Emily’s eyes threatening to fill with tears? “You were always so kind to us, Mrs. Flynn, despite...”
Beatrice knew what she meant. The ill-will between the grandmothers had been as much a part of everyday life as the river flowing past the bottom of their gardens. “And why would I not be? Two silly old women feuding over the Lord knows what have no business putting innocent children in the way of their bickering.”
Emily experienced a flash of guilt at that. How innocent had she been the night she’d tried to bring her romantic dreams to fruition? But if her grandmother held Lucas responsible for the outcome it was obvious from Beatrice’s attitude that she either remained ignorant of the true order of events or else chose not to assign blame.
“Make yourself at home and sleep as long as you like in the morning, darling,” she said, planting a kiss on Emily’s cheek. “There’s no rush to be up and about. We’ll look after your grandma for you; never doubt that.”
When Emily stole downstairs fifteen minutes later, the air was filled with the hush of a house at rest and nothing but the quiet tick of clocks to mark the passing hours. Except for a ray of light spilling out of the kitchen into the downstairs hall, the rooms lay in darkness.
Despite the addition of two built-in convection wall ovens and a dishwasher, the kitchen hadn’t changed much over the years. The same scrubbed pine table still occupied the middle of the red tiled floor, the copper pots still hung from a circular rack above it, and if the geraniums flowering on the windowsill above the sink weren’t the ones that had flourished in her childhood Emily couldn’t have told the difference.
She ought to have considered that he might also be in the room. Even if the theory of feminine intuition was based on nothing but a lot of wishful thinking, sheer common sense should have warned her, when she saw the tray containing a Thermos and two saucers but only one cup, that she was not alone.
But it was the shiny chrome surface of the Thermos that alerted her to his presence, mirroring his reflection as he stirred from his spot by the big, old-fashioned fireplace. And by then it was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen him, too late to worry that she looked ridiculous in the voluminous nightgown that had been in fashion at least fifty years before and whose hem she held hiked up around her knees, and much too late to rehearse this first private meeting with him since the night she’d slithered, uninvited, between the sheets of his bed and seduced him.
For a while it appeared that neither of them was willing to break the silence unspooling between them. Instead, they simply stared at each other, he remotely, like the stranger he undoubtedly wished he were, and she—ye gods, her gaze clung to him shamelessly, devouring his every feature with the rapacity of a woman on the brink of starvation.
In the more revealing light of the kitchen, she could see what had not been so apparent in the gloom of Belvoir’s garden. He had aged, but so graciously that he was even more beautiful than he’d been at twenty five. His hair lay as thick and unruly as ever, the only difference being that now it was lightly shot with silver.
As for his mouth. . . ! Oh, despite the hardships he might have known, his mouth was as she’d always remembered it, so blatantly sexy that her lips parted in mute supplication to know its touch again.
Just once more, her wayward heart cried. Just once and it’ll be enough. I’ll never ask again.
Appalled, she said primly, “If I’d realized you were down here—”
“You’d have remained upstairs.” He offered the merest suggestion of a shrug. “I could say the same thing but it would be pointless, wouldn’t it? You’re here, I’m here, and it seems that whether we like it or not we’re destined to acknowledge each other.”
She wished he hadn’t moved his shoulders in that sinuous way that drew attention less to their width, which had always been impressive, than to the fact that his shirt was unbuttoned and hanging loose at the waist of his blue jeans. Her gaze dropped from his mouth to the expanse of flesh that his gesture had uncovered.
The musculature of his chest was more defined than when she’d run her hands over its planes that other summer, the skin even more deeply tanned. His stomach, though, was the same: flat and hard, just as it had been then. Except for his mouth and his hands, he had been hard all over that night. . .
“I was going to say I wouldn’t have disturbed you,” she said, corralling her thoughts before they got her into more trouble than she could possibly cope with. “We’ve put you to enough trouble already, getting you out of bed to rush to our rescue.”
“I’m a night owl. I’m seldom asleep before one or two in the morning.”
You were the night I came sneaking in, she thought. You were out cold, lying with nothing but a sheet covering you, and it took me no time at all to whisk it aside and confirm every last delicious fantasy I’d ever harbored about you.
Her sharply drawn breath escaped before she could suppress it. Face flaming, she swung back to the Thermos of cocoa and hoped her hands wouldn’t betray her by shaking too visibly as she filled the lone cup.
The worst was over, surely? They’d come face to face, exchanged the barest civilities and both survived the ordeal. Now all she had to do was beat a not too obvious retreat before her unruly memory betrayed her more than it already had.
“How have you been, Emily?”
Instead of being fielded from across the kitchen, his question flowed over her shoulder, and she realized that he’d moved to stand close behind her. Much too close. Agitated, she sought refuge around the other side of the table. “Very well, thank you.”
“And your husband?”
“Husband?”
A smile settled fleetingly on his mouth, a glimmer of cool white amusement against the bronze of his skin. “The man you married.”
“I—he’s well, too.” Even had this been the time and place to divulge that her marriage was a thing of the past, Lucas Flynn was not the one to burden with the disclosure. It wasn’t as if he gave a damn; he was merely going through the socially correct motions, as was she when she said, “I was sorry to hear about your wife.”
He lifted his shoulders in another dismissive shrug. “These things happen,” he said, so dispassionately that Emily couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ousted Sydney from his life as easily as he’d evicted her.
“You make it sound as if her death was more inconvenient than tragic,” she heard herself remark acidly.
Annoyance thinned his lips, his amusement dispelled so thoroughly that, if memory hadn’t served her better, she’d have thought him incapable of smiling. “I hardly feel I have to justify to you how I choose to deal with personal tragedy, Emily Jane.”
“You never felt you had to justify anything to me!” The last thing she’d wanted was to be the one to resurrect the past. Even less did she want to come across as the woman wronged, particularly since she’d been the aggressor in their encounter, but the words were out before she could stop them, full of accusation and reproach.
He expelled a brief sigh. “I had hoped you’d forgotten,” he said. “I can’t imagine why you’d want to hang onto the memory.”
Of course he couldn’t, because he hadn’t been the one to offer his heart and have it tossed back without a word of appreciation or thanks. He’d walked away untouched, whereas she’d been permanently scarred by her botched attempt to make him love her as she’d loved him.
He had no idea, no idea at all, of the ultimate cost to her of the night she’d seduced him. Blissfully ignorant, he’d gone forward, married the woman of his choice, and left Emily to carry the burden of her guilt and sorrow alone. Knowing he hadn’t been to blame for that didn’t prevent her from resenting him for it.
“I don’t,” she replied stonily. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t thought about you in years until today.”
“Then you’ve been happy?”
“What do you care?” Oh, Emily, shut up! she told herself angrily.
His sigh this time was fraught with exasperation, as if he found having to explain such obvious and simple facts exceedingly tedious. “We were friends for a long time, Emily. Closer than friends, even. More like brother and sister. One night of ... indiscretion doesn’t negate all the good times. Of course I care.”
About as much as he cared about the weather! But he wasn’t her brother, she didn’t want his diluted affection, and she couldn’t bear his bold references to a time she’d truly tried to bury in the past where it belonged. She wanted to escape and shut herself in her room, to be alone before she faced the fact that he still had the power to affect her more deeply than any other man she’d ever met.
“Then, to answer your question, I am very happy, very successful, and very tired,” she said, stepping around him and heading for the door. “Thank you again for coming to our rescue tonight. Under the circumstances, it was very decent of you.”
“Decent?” Although she couldn’t see it this time, she heard the amusement in his voice. “What else could I have done? Left you to burn?”
“You might have, if you’d known I was visiting my grandmother.”
“Hardly,” he scoffed. “I took a professional oath a long time ago to preserve and honor human life.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, Even mine? but she bit back the words and said instead, “Of course. Well, don’t worry that we’ll make a habit of calling on you to bail us out of trouble. We pride ourselves on being very self-sufficient.”
Like every other assertion she’d made in the last little while, however, that last one of Emily’s turned out to be erroneous. By the following morning, Monique’s left knee was badly swollen. “I remember twisting it when I slipped,” she admitted to Lucas when, at Beatrice’s insistence, he came to take a look.
“If you had gone to the hospital to be checked over as I suggested, this could have been taken care of last night,” he pointed out.
“With everything else that was happening at the time, it didn’t seem worth mentioning. In any case, you’re supposed to be a doctor so you can take care of it now.”
“I’m not leaving myself open to your suing me for negligence, Mrs. Lamartine,” he informed her. “For a start, I have no malpractice insurance, and second, I don’t need the aggravation. Whether you like it or not, you’re going into town for X-rays. And consider yourself lucky you didn’t break a hip.”
“If this is an example of your bedside manner, it’s no wonder you had to give up practicing medicine,” Monique retorted.
Earlier, Emily had gone over to Belvoir to meet the fire marshall and hear his report on last night’s disaster. Although he’d allowed her to collect a few clothes and other basic necessities, he’d been adamant that the house was not safe in its present condition.
The drawing room, sadly, was destroyed, its furnishings blackened and soaked in water, and there had been structural damage to a supporting wall. Not surprisingly, the whole house also reeked of smoke. It would be weeks before they could go home again—news which Emily knew would not be well received.
In her view, all this was trouble enough for one day. She certainly didn’t need to run interference when Monique decided to bait Lucas—which was every chance she got. She had enough to do holding her own emotions in check where he was concerned.
“I’ll get you to the hospital,” she offered, hoping to distract her grandmother. “They phoned this morning to let us know that Consuela is ready to come home, so I have to drop by anyway, with a change of clothes for her and to collect her. Then, once you’re taken care of, we’ll go over to the hotel and take a suite there until we decide what to do next.”
“Whatever for?” Beatrice exclaimed, coming into the room just in time to hear the tail end of the conversation. “There’s plenty of room here for all of you without us falling over one another.”
“You’re very kind,” Monique said grandly, “but it would be an imposition and so quite out of the question.”
“Don’t be so quick to turn me down,” Beatrice said. “We’re heading into summer and the tourists are pouring into the area already. Suppose they can’t take you at the hotel? Where’ll you go then, Monique Lamartine, since you’re so dead set against burdening your family with your ill-tempered presence? Somehow, I don’t see you camping in a tent until your poor house is fit to live in again.”
“Phone for a taxi, Emily Jane,” Monique said, with lofty disdain for such pitiful reasoning. “We have business to which we must attend and I would like it concluded as speedily as possible.”
Beatrice opened her mouth to object to that idea too, but Lucas forestalled her with weary resignation. “I’ll drive you into town.”
“Thank you, but no,” Emily said. “That really is asking too much.”
“Not at all. I’ve got a number of errands to attend to.” He finished the last of his coffee and checked his watch. “If you could be ready to leave in half an hour?”
For all that he phrased them so politely, the words were a command, not a request, and underlined what he’d made patently clear the night before: their presence, particularly Emily’s, was an imposition of the highest order.
When they arrived at the hospital just after eleven, the first person they spoke to was Monique’s doctor, whose opinion, when he heard about the previous night’s events, coincided entirely with Lucas’s. Rapping out orders, he whisked his patient into a wheelchair and off for a complete physical, including an X-ray of her knee.
“Barring any unusual findings, you should be able to pick her up in about three hours,” he told Emily over his shoulder as he pushed aside the swinging doors through which her grandmother had already disappeared.
Lucas, who’d accompanied them inside the building, spoke for the first time. “That’ll give me plenty of time to take care of my business, so unless there’s something else I can do for you I’ll take off now and meet you back here around two.”
Without waiting for a reply, he did precisely that, disappearing with what Emily perceived to be enormous relief at being rid of them. She, however, was alarmed at the length of time her grandmother was to be detained.
“Does it normally take three hours to run a few tests?” she asked the nurse who’d assisted with Monique’s preliminary examination. “Or is the doctor concerned that my grandmother might have had another stroke, do you think?”
“Well, he’ll want to make sure that hasn’t happened, of course, but it’s more a precautionary measure. Also, things slow down a bit over the lunch hour so we don’t always get test results back as quickly as we’d like.” The nurse smiled reassuringly. “Hanging around the emergency unit’s enough to give anyone the willies and the food in the cafeteria is lousy. Why don’t you treat yourself to lunch in town? It’s a much pleasanter way to pass the time.”
But not the most efficient, Emily decided, particularly with the question of where they were all going to live for the next little while still unresolved.
It turned out not to be a problem for Consuela. “No hotel for me, Miss Emily,” she declared, accepting the clothes Emily had brought for her to wear. “My sister in-law’s been asking me to pay a visit for months, so now I will. When madame’s ready for me to come back to work, she can phone. I’m just across town and can be out to Belvoir in no time at all.”
“Well, at least let me see you off in a taxi,” Emily said.
“It was the cigarettes, you know,” Consuela confided some twenty minutes later, while they waited for the elevator. “Madame won’t admit it but it’s a miracle she hasn’t brought the house down about our ears before last night. She falls asleep while she’s smoking, you see.”
Her account confirmed what the fire marshall had stated in his report. “I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with the worry of it all by yourself, Consuela,” Emily said. “What you’re telling me now merely reinforces what I’ve already decided. We’re going to have to look at a better arrangement once Belvoir is fit to live in again. Meantime, we’ll be at the hotel if you need us for anything.”
But Beatrice appeared to have been blessed with divine foresight, because the April Water Hotel—the only hotel in town—could give them a room for two nights only. After that, the place was pretty well booked for the remainder of the season. Any hope of securing long-term residence was out of the question. Nor were any of the quaint bed-and-breakfast houses able to help. They didn’t cater for full-time guests.
It seemed that avoiding Lucas wasn’t going to pan out quite as neatly or quickly as Emily had hoped. Unless a miracle occurred within the next hour or two, she and Monique might have no choice but to accept Beatrice’s hospitality until Belvoir was habitable again.
The thought of having to face Lucas across the dining room table three times a day, not to mention running into him at other times in between, and of sleeping down the hall from him, left her dizzy with dismay.
CHAPTER THREE
IT SEEMED prophetic that the first person Emily ran into on the street after she’d seen Consuela off was Lucas. He’d just crossed the road from the post office, which was situated opposite the entrance to the hospital, and was so busy thumbing through the mail he’d picked up that he quite literally cannoned into her. “Sorry,” he muttered absently, reaching out a hand to steady her, then did a double-take when he realized who it was he’d almost knocked down.
For just a second, she was reminded of the day she’d fallen in love with him. He’d almost stumbled over her then, too, and a whole sequence of events had been set in motion. One kiss had led to another and she’d read “for ever” in them. Sadly, she’d been the only one to do so. She’d also been pathologically naive in those days.
“Good thing it wasn’t your grandmother,” he said now, the ghost of his old self emerging briefly. “She’d be threatening lawsuits for sure. So, did you get fixed up at the hotel?”
“No,” Emily said, dry-mouthed all over again at the sheer male magnificence of him.
He had no right to be so beautiful. He was too muscular in the chest and shoulders for a doctor, as if he’d spent the last eleven years in some work more physically strenuous than she could envision medicine being. He should have been stooped and the African sun should have left his skin all wizened. His eyes should have faded, been half-buried in wrinkles from squinting in the bright, tropical light; they should have peered out myopically through thick lenses. Instead, he was spellbinding, his lean-hipped, rangy grace lending elegance even to the blue jeans that seemed to be his preferred mode of dress these days.
“No?” He did have squint lines around his eyes when he glanced at her quizzically like that, but they were an asset, enhancing his good looks rather than detracting from them.
She shook her head. “Your grandmother was right. Except for a couple of days here and there, the hotel’s booked up right through September.”
If he was dismayed to hear that, he hid it well. “From Monique’s standpoint that might not be such a bad thing, you know. It’s my guess she’s damaged the ligaments in her knee and that she’ll be off her feet for the next week or so. Being confined to a hotel room would be no picnic for anyone, especially not someone of her. . . ah... temperament.”
“I’m afraid,” Emily said, wondering how many times she was going to have to apologize to him for one thing or another, “that she’s behaving very ungraciously toward you and your grandmother, and I’m sorry. I think it’s just that she’s afraid of change, of not being in control of the events shaping her life. What with her failing health and now this latest problem, she sees her independence seeping away, and it terrifies her, but she’s too proud to admit it.”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Growing old can be hell, Emily, and some people react just as your grandmother does, fighting it every step of the way.”
“Still, that’s no reason for you to have to put up with her ill humor.”
When he laughed, the years melted away from his face, leaving only the threads of silver in his hair to betray his true age. “I might as well get used to it. It looks as if we’re all stuck with each other—at least for the next little while.”
“Stuck with each other? Oh, I don’t think so!”
“You have some other solution up your sleeve?”
“Well, I...no, not exactly—not yet. How could I, when I only just found out the hotel can’t take us? But I’ll come up with something.”
“I can’t imagine what. Your grandmother made it plain enough last night that she’s not budging far from home. And quite frankly, even if the idea of moving in with relatives did sit well with her, I doubt her doctor wants to see her traveling any great distance right now. She’s a lot frailer than she might seem, you know.”
“So what are you saying? That the only other choice is... ?” She lapsed into silence, still unwilling to accept the solution staring her in the face.
Entertaining no such uncertainty, Lucas finished the question for her. “Roscommon? Afraid so.” Another of those brief smiles illuminated his face. “Don’t look so horrified, Emily. We don’t have rats in the pantry or bugs in the beds, and, although it might not be her home, realistically it’s probably the best place for Monique to be right now. She’ll be on relatively familiar territory, able to keep an eye on repairs to Belvoir, voice her disapproval of everything the workmen do—which will keep her happy even if it does run them ragged!—and at the same time give my grandmother someone else to bully besides me.”
His summation was right on target: sensible, practical, convenient. But Emily was too dismayed to acknowledge any of those supremely sane responses—so dismayed, in fact, that she blurted out her true thoughts without taking time to edit them first or consider how they might be interpreted. “Lucas, I couldn’t possibly stay another night under the same roof as you!”
She hadn’t meant to sound so insulting but he allowed her no time to rephrase her objection. His eyes narrowed, their brilliant blue stripped of any amusement. “Why not?” he drawled. “Forewarned is forearmed. I have a lock on my bedroom door and I’ll make a point of using it.”
She had thought he could never hurt her again, that nothing could come close to the pure agony of having him reject her and turn to another woman for all those things she had been willing to give him. But his softly uttered contempt seared her more thoroughly than anything he’d flung at her the night she’d conceived his child. Devastated, she spun away from him, stepping blindly off the edge of the sidewalk and out into the road.
A horn blared, brakes shrieked. The bright red fender of a car reared up and seemed to hover perilously close as she stumbled to regain her balance.
I’m going to be killed, she thought in mild surprise, and wondered who’d come in her place to take care of Monique.
And then Lucas’s hand shot out, grabbing her urgently by the scruff of the neck and yanking her back to safety. Or increased danger, depending on one’s perspective. Because finding herself pressed up against him, pressed so close that they were imprinted on each other from knee to breast, was just as life-threatening in a different kind of way.
For the first time since they’d met again, his eyes neither avoided hers nor skittered past her as if the sight of her was too repugnant to be endured. Instead, his gaze burned into her, ablaze with impassioned horror. To the people passing by, they might have appeared to be lovers locked in wordless conflict, so furiously did he clutch her to him.
But they weren’t lovers. And the fact that, even knowing that, she still wanted to lean into him, to bury her face in his neck and inhale the warm, well remembered scent of him, enraged her.
So she shrugged him off and flicked at her hair to restore it to some sort of order. “Do you mind?” she said, too discombobulated to care that, considering he’d just spared her serious injury and possibly even saved her life, the question was downright ridiculous.
Lucas passed a trembling hand over his face. “Damned right,” he said hoarsely. “Jeez, Emily, if you want to teach me to think before I speak in future, a smack in the mouth will suffice, OK? You don’t have to lay your life on the line to make your point.”
She allowed him a small smile, then looked away. Just as well. It would never have done for her to see how shaken up he was, how close to losing it, and all because of her. How could he have explained such a reaction when he didn’t understand it himself?
It wasn’t as if the car had actually touched her. In fact, it had squealed to a halt a good six feet away. It was those seconds in between that had left him such a mess. One minute she’d been standing there, perfect in pale green linen and straw accessories, clearly repelled by the thought of living in the same house with him, breathing the same air, and the next he’d retaliated with a blow so low it was unforgivable, and the damage was done.
She’d blanched with shock. Her eyes had seemed to fill her face, huge brown wells of pain, and her mouth had opened in a perfect, soundless pink O, leaving him feeling as if he’d just kicked a puppy in the teeth. Then, before he could begin to form an apology, she’d swung around in a graceful arc and floated out of his reach and practically under the wheels of the passing car.
“Lucas?” She was looking at him again and rubbing absently at the back of her neck where he’d grabbed hold of her.
“What? Did I hurt you?”
She lifted one elegant shoulder in a ghost of a shrug. “Not really. But this other business—about us living at Roscommon until Belvoir’s been repaired—how can it possibly work, Lucas, with things the way they are between us?”
“What say I buy you lunch and we’ll talk about it? We’ve still got a couple of hours to kill before we collect Grandma.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
She looked a bit pale and more than a little apprehensive, as though the potential pitfalls of such a living arrangement were more than she could face. “Then you can watch me eat while we deal with all the history between us,” he said, “because the way things are shaping up we aren’t going to be able to avoid each other for the next little while. And although I can’t speak for you, Emily Jane, I don’t mind admitting that it’s going to be rough going for me unless we clear the air a bit.”
“All right, whatever you say,” she muttered.
He took her to a restaurant overlooking the April river. From the front it was nothing but a narrow, brick-faced building with a canopied entrance and a wrought iron railing, but inside it opened onto a long courtyard with a fountain in the middle and a profusion of flowering plants spilling down the walls and over the edges of ceramic containers.
They were shown to a table on the south side, shaded by a tilted sun umbrella. Disregarding what she’d said about not being hungry, Lucas ordered for both of them—fish chowder with sourdough bread, and iced tea. “So,” he began, immediately the waiter left, “do you want to start the ball rolling, or shall I?”
“You,” she said unhesitatingly.
“OK.” He took a swig of iced tea. “The way I see it, you and I got off track the last summer we spent here.”
“No.” She shook her head. “It happened long before that, Lucas. It all began the summer I turned fifteen and you kissed me for the first time. Or are you going to pretend you’ve forgotten about that?”
He stirred the lemon wedge around in his glass and wished he could look her in the eye and lie. It had been such a brief incident, after all, hardly one to hang onto through the years. But, “No,” he admitted, expelling a long breath. “I remember only too well.”
“Why did you do it, Lucas? Kiss me, I mean?”
“Why?” He lifted his shoulders, feigning bafflement. “Don’t ask me. It wasn’t something I planned. Hell, you’d always been just another of the cousins from next door, all pigtails and big brown eyes. The kid I’d taught to swim when she was about five. Then you...changed.”
“Are you saying it was my fault that time, too?”
In a way, yes, he thought, but he could hardly come out and tell her that, over the preceding winter, she’d grown into a leggy adolescent with breasts. Or that they had been the first thing he’d noticed when she’d come to Belvoir that particular summer.
A couple of his brothers had noticed, too. “Emily Jane’s grown hooters,” fifteen-year old Sean had whispered, bug-eyed with awe. “Man, hand me my catcher’s mitt!”
Ted, who at seventeen had thought himself vastly more experienced in such matters, had scoffed, “They’re not big enough to fill a bra let alone a baseball glove. Save your energy, kid!”
But Lucas, who’d turned twenty the previous November and had, at their age, been prone to much the same kind of irreverence, had known an inexplicable urge to flatten both brothers. Feigning lofty indifference, he’d stalked inside to catch up on the reading requirements for his second year of university, due to start that September.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said now.
“Well, thank you for that much,” she said. “Particularly since I remember that summer as being one of the happiest I spent at Belvoir.”
“For me too,” he admitted. And it was true, up to a point. As the days had gone by, the phenomenon of Emily’s breasts had gradually ceased to elicit wonder among the brothers at Roscommon House and by the middle of August the old, easy camaraderie between the younger members of the two families had re-established itself.
“It marked the end of an era,” he went on. “We were never that carefree again.”
“No.” Her voice was soft, her brown eyes hazy, as though pictures from that summer were unrolling in her mind. “We clowned around every day, shoving each other off the end of the diving pier or cannonballing into the river, and sat around a bonfire nearly every night. One big, happy family, with no hidden agendas or undercurrents to spoil things.”
“Until the night I kissed you,” Lucas said. “Nothing was ever the same after that. It was the last day of the summer vacation, as I recall, and the last year that we were all together like that. We’d gone swimming after dark, my brothers and I, and you and all your cousins from Belvoir, and we were making one hell of a noise.”
“And your grandmother came out and hammered on the old ship’s bell hanging from the back porch of Roscommon, and told us to get inside before we were all arrested for disturbing the peace!”
“She bribed us with gingerbread and fruit punch,” he said.
“Right. And in the rush to get up to the house I slipped and fell among the reeds lining the river bank.”
And he’d been right behind her and had leaned down and yanked her to her feet more roughly than he’d meant to, and somehow she had crashed into him, and he’d had his arms around her to steady her, and she’d looked up at him with her big brown eyes and her lips had been parted and shining with water....
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