Luke said nothing. Meg looked up, met his gaze and nodded her understanding.
As she shrugged off her jacket, he moved to stand behind her, helped ease it from her shoulders and down her arms. He caught the scent of green apples but couldn’t afford to be distracted by it. “You can’t tell me you don’t want to get divorced, too?” She turned, they were so close that he could encircle her with his arms. Hold her. Tell her everything. His wife in name only. Or they could not talk at all. He could taste her lips. Touch her skin. Feel her heat.
“Of course I want it, too.”
Divorce, they were talking about divorcing.
“That’s why I don’t need to get involved in your personal life. Any more than I already am.”
He hung up her jacket. “Any more than you are?”
She swallowed. “I’m living in your house. And I’ve made friends with some of your friends and their partners. I couldn’t help it. When they learned about me, they wanted to meet me, to get to know me. They’ve been kind. I like them.”
He nodded, gave her time to go on.
“Julie finally left her husband. She stayed here for a week when she first left. And Sally and Kurt are expecting their second child. She’s due in three months. I said I’d help with babysitting when she went into hospital. And when she came out. You know how organized she is. Of course that might not be so easy now.” She was talking fast, not meeting his gaze. “And I’m sorry. It just sort of happened.” She looked up at him, apology in her eyes.
Just like he used to when he’d been sick, he’d gotten distracted by the soft cadence of her voice rather than focusing on the specifics of her words. The details of her supposed crime had washed over him. And today there had been the added distraction of his very real ability to do something about it. He could reach out, trail a finger down the softness of her cheek, touch it to those lips. Desire stirred.
Three
Meg stepped back from Luke, the husband she didn’t know, away from the warmth in his eyes. Warmth that had her thinking things she had no business thinking. She blamed the window. She’d come back from her walk with Caesar and looked up to see him standing at the wide picture window, wearing only boxers, his torso lean and sculpted, and a purely feminine thrill of appreciation had swept through her.
“I’m glad you found friends here, that you weren’t alone,” he said after a pause so long that she’d thought he hadn’t been going to answer.
His softly spoken words disconcerted her. She didn’t want to like him. At least not in the softening, melting way she could feel herself liking him. That was far more dangerous than the physical pull of attraction that she-and most likely the majority of the female population who came within his sphere-felt for him. She’d agreed to marry him because he’d believed-rightly-that his death was a real possibility and it had seemed imperative to him that Jason not be able to inherit. She’d been prepared to do anything to ease his agitation.
But he hadn’t died.
He was very much alive.
And watching her.
“But hopefully they have the good sense to stay away now that I’m back. All I want is peace and quiet.”
Meg remembered the dinner. He might want peace and quiet but he wasn’t going to get it. Not tonight, which was probably a good thing because Meg wasn’t so sure she wanted to be alone with him.
“Show me round the house.”
“I haven’t changed anything. You don’t need me to show you round it.” Regardless of what he did or didn’t need,
She was lonely. That was all. Her life had been on hold these last few months, but she was picking up the pieces again. She didn’t need to lean on Luke.
Her work with the Maitland Foundation since she’d been back had been a welcome distraction.
“You’ve been having parties. That’s a change.”
“Do you mean last night? That was a final committee meeting.”
“You put up Christmas decorations.” He continued, not taking her opening to ask what the committee meeting was for. “That’s a change. A bigger one than you know.” He flicked one of the red bows tied to the stair uprights. “I don’t usually do Christmas.”
It seemed a sad thing to say. She couldn’t imagine not marking Christmas in some way. “That’s not changing as much as adding something temporary.” She was going to have to tell him about tonight.
The bow slipped and they both reached to catch it, hands tangling as they trapped the red velvet against the smooth wood of the post, halting its downward slide. For a second they stilled. His warm hand covered hers, pinning it with the bow beneath it.
He was close again. And again his proximity, his warmth and scent had her resolutions slipping. Meg slid her hand from beneath his, bringing the broad ribbon with it, and took a step back. With nerveless fingers she smoothed out the loops of the bow. From the kitchen she heard the strains of “All I Want for Christmas is You.”
“Do you remember our promise?”
She glanced up to see him watching her closely, desire kindling in the depths of his eyes. He couldn’t mean the promise her thoughts had leaped to. He must have meant their vows. “To love and honor? And only those vows because there was no time to write our own. ‘In sickness and in health and to disinherit your brother and give me somewhere to live when I got back here.’”
A smile flickered and vanished. “That wasn’t the promise I was talking about.”
Oh. That promise. The one she’d secretly cherished in her darkest hours, something full of the possibility of tenderness and passion and the affirmation of life, and the one she’d now hoped he’d forgotten. “I don’t think anything we said or did back then applies to the here and now.”
“Some things transcend time and place,” he said evenly. “And a promise is a promise.”
Meg swallowed and tugged a little more at the bow.
“I sometimes think that promise was what I lived for,” he said, almost to himself, “what kept me hanging on when I should have died waiting for the antibiotics to reach me.”
She took another step back. His smile returned, knowing and tempting. “If it helped, then I’m glad of it.” The bow came completely undone in her unsteady fingers.
He reached for the loose end, so that it became a connection between the two of them. “Did you ever think of it? Or did you forget about me altogether?”
She avoided the first of his two questions. “I didn’t forget about you.”
He pulled his end of the ribbon closer to him, bringing her hand with it. Then he lifted her hand, supported it with his own and with a sudden frown studied the ring that adorned her ring finger. “Our wedding ring?”
Meg shrugged, though with him cradling her fisted hand in his palm, nonchalance was the last thing she felt. “I had to have something. People were asking. I bought it over the internet so nobody would see me going to a jeweler’s to get it.”
“And this convinced them?” With the forefinger of his free hand he touched the simple thin gold band. “I would have chosen something a little more…expensive.”
“Its importance is in what it symbolizes, not what it’s worth. As I told your friends, this was all I wanted. Its simplicity and purity were the perfect representation of our relationship. Besides, I didn’t want to spend a lot.”
He straightened her fingers and the velvet ribbon whispered to the floor between them. “You paid for it yourself?”
“Of course.” She tried to ease her hand free, but he held firm. “It wasn’t much.”
“I can tell. And our engagement ring?” He looked from her hand to her face. “Where’s that?”
She shook her head. “We weren’t able to get a suitable engagement ring. It was hard enough getting the
