Luke straightened and strode to the door, cutting off her exit. “You’re right. I am tired.” He looked down at her, then lifted his hand to twist a lock of her hair around his finger. “I take it our bed’s in the master bedroom.”
Meg swallowed. “Our?” He was joking. Testing her. She was sure of it. Almost one-hundred-percent sure. Ninety-eight at least. Even if she had been the type of woman someone like him would be attracted to, theirs had been an arrangement of practicality and desperation. An arrangement that they’d agreed would end when he returned home.
“You got the benefits of being my wife. Surely I get some benefit in being your husband?”
She pushed his hand away and squared off to him. “You got benefits. Because of me, your brother hasn’t moved into this house already.”
“Half brother,” he corrected her. “And that wasn’t the benefit I was thinking of.”
“It was when you married me. Or maybe you didn’t care about there being any benefit to you, but you most definitely cared about making sure Jason didn’t benefit. Cared enough to marry a stranger.”
“A stranger with the gentlest hands.”
Meg stilled.
“I thought about those hands as I was recuperating.”
His sudden change of tone and topic disconcerted her and she took a step back. He was still trying to dominate her, unsettle her, this time with words. That was all it was. She couldn’t let him know the effectiveness of his strategy, how very unsettled she was. She, too, had thought about her hands on him.
“You have a lot to explain to me. Where have you been? Why haven’t you been in touch before now?”
He watched her steadily. “Nagging me already?”
“Legitimate questions.”
“I have several of my own.”
“Understandably. So I suggest we both get a good night’s sleep and deal with them in the morning. The guest wing is that way.” She pointed down the hallway.
“The guest wing? In my own house?”
“My things are in your room. I’ll shift them out tomorrow. But for tonight, yes, you can have the guest room.” Over the lonely months Meg had imagined many possible scenarios for Luke’s homecoming-they had varied from tender to joyful to passionate.
This tension-laden standoff certainly hadn’t been one of them.
Luke watched his wife’s pretty blue eyes as he searched for the familiar in her face, searched for the differences. Time was, women jumped at the chance of going to bed with him. Although admittedly he was a little out of practice. Still, appalled horror was definitely a first for him.
He’d dreamed of this woman. And granted, many of those dreams had been the product of delirium. Many, but not all. The others had been the product of good old-fashioned desire. He hadn’t known whether that attraction was merely the product of time and circumstance.
And he still couldn’t answer that question for sure. Different time, different circumstance and he could still feel the pull of the woman standing in front of him.
Who was this woman he’d married?
He recognized the irony in his situation. Most of his life he’d kept people at a distance and now he had a wife he scarcely knew.
He reached for the tendril of golden-brown hair that curled against her pale throat. She blocked his hand, wrap ping slender fingers around his wrist. “Afraid of me, Meg?” Her scent was something floral. Innocent. And distracting.
She dropped his wrist, lifted her chin and her wide clear eyes searched his face. Defiance overlaid a glimmer of wariness. “Should I be?”
He could still feel the imprint of her fingers, her skin against his. It had been like that whenever she’d touched him. “What do you think?” He didn’t know why he was goading her. He’d had scarcely more than a few hours’ sleep in the last forty-eight hours. All he really wanted was to lie down somewhere, he didn’t care where, and close his eyes. He’d come home, not knowing what to expect, but knowing she couldn’t have been as simultaneously wholesome and desirable as his memory wanted to paint her. Besides, he’d never really been into wholesome.
“I think, no.”
He hadn’t even known if he’d be able to find her. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be hosting a party in his own house. It tarnished the wholesome image, made him doubt his judgment and his memories. “You’re sure?”
“I think, for some perverse reason, you’d like me to be afraid of you. But the man I remember was decent and kind.”
He watched her lips, a soft coral pink. He hadn’t intended on kissing her. But her lack of recognition of him had galled. And besides, she had been standing under the mistletoe. What was a husband supposed to do? “I was sick. I wasn’t entirely myself.”
“Some things don’t change.”
Another first, someone defending him to himself. “And some things change completely, Mrs. Maitland.” For instance, he now had the wife he’d sworn he’d never burden his life with.
“I’m not Mrs. Maitland. I never took your name. It didn’t seem right.”
He didn’t know whether he was relieved or affronted. “Just my house. My money. My life.” He curled his hand around the newel at the base of the stairs.
Her eyes narrowed and her hands went to her hips. “You’re swaying, and talking almost as much gibberish as you were that last day on the island. Go to bed.”
“Come with me.” He was in no state to do anything other than sleep. But she didn’t know that. “I’ve been sleeping alone for so long.”
“Luke.” She said his name with such frustrated impatience, and none of her earlier trepidation, that maybe she did know.
“That wasn’t how you used to say my name.” He’d heard her the times when she’d thought he was sleeping. And even when she’d known him to be awake, there had been such tenderness in her voice. “And not how I dreamed of hearing you say it.”
“First my hands, now my voice. Any other parts of me you dreamed of?”
Luke smiled. “I don’t think you want to know.” Color climbed her cheeks.
Two
Luke woke alone in a broad, soft bed. Nothing unusual about the alone part, but the bed was a different story altogether. The snow-white sheets smelled fresh and clean and felt crisp against his skin. A feather pillow cushioned his head. Opening his eyes, he scanned the room. A miniature Christmas tree stood on the dresser. Christmas?
Then he remembered last night. Though he’d been so exhausted, it was all a little vague. Coming home. Finding Meg, the woman he’d married out of desperation and anger, here. And he remembered the mistletoe.
Throwing back the covers, he strode to the window and pushed the curtains wide, needing to orient himself to the time and the season. Outside, ponderosa pines framed a panoramic view of Lake Tahoe. A leaden sky hung low and oppressive with the threat of snow but gave no real clue as to the time of morning.
He stretched, easing his shoulder through a full range of movement. It was his shoulder that had started it all. A gash from a handsaw dropped from the roof of the almost-completed school building. In the heat and humidity the cut became infected. The infection steadily worsened. And the remote Indonesian island’s depleted medical supplies hadn’t run to the antibiotics he’d needed.
He’d only gone to the island to fulfill a long overdue promise to his mother to take a closer look at the Maitland Foundation’s work there. She’d headed up that office until her death a year ago. But while seeing the foundation’s
