“Dear God, what am I thinking?” she whispered on a ragged moan, burying her head on her arms.
There was only one answer. She had to find some way to get away from Luke, to put her tattered restraint back together. She had to get to White Pines before she made a terrible mistake, before the whole family was ripped apart again by what would amount to a rivalry for her affections.
Despite their occasional differences, she knew how deep the ties among Erik’s family members ran. They would consider themselves the protectors of Erik’s interests. Luke would be viewed as a traitor, a man with no respect for his brother’s memory. They would hold her actions against him, blaming him alone for their love when the truth was that she was the one who was increasingly powerless to resist it. She wouldn’t allow that to happen.
An image came to her then, an image of Luke returning from his pickup, his expression filled with guilt as he’d sworn he couldn’t find his cellular phone. More than likely she’d been in denial that night, longing for something that could never be, or she would have known what that expression on his face had meant.
Anger, quite possibly misdirected, surged through her. It gave her the will to act, to do what she knew in her heart must be done. She stood and grabbed Luke’s heavy jacket, poked her bare feet into boots several sizes too large, snatched up his thick gloves, and stomped outside.
She was promptly felled by the first drift of snow. She stepped off the porch and into heavy, damp snow up to her hips. She dragged herself forward by sheer will, determined to get to the truck, determined to discover if Luke had deliberately kept her stranded here.
Her progress could have been measured in inches. Her bare skin between the tops of the boots and the bottom of the coat was stinging from the cold. Still, she trudged on until she finally reached the pickup and tugged at the door. The lock was frozen shut.
Crying out in frustration, Jessie tried to unlock it by scraping at the ice, then covering the lock with her gloved hands in a futile attempt to melt the thin, but effective coating of ice. She tried blowing on it, hoping her breath would be warm enough to help. When that didn’t work, she slammed her fist against it, hoping to crack it.
Again and again, she jiggled the handle, trying to pry the door open. Eventually, when she could barely feel her feet, when her whole body was shuddering violently from the cold, the lock gave and the door came free. She jumped inside and slammed the door, relieved to be out of the biting wind.
Remembering that Erik had always left the keys above the visor, no matter how she’d argued with him about it, she checked to see if Luke had done the same. No keys. She doubted Luke was any more security conscious than his brother had been. She checked under the floor mat, then felt beneath the front seat.
That’s where she eventually found them, tucked away almost beyond her reach. Her fingers awkward from the gloves and the cold, she finally managed to turn on the engine. It might take forever for the truck to warm up, but she intended to spend as long as it took to thoroughly check the pickup for that cellular phone.
It didn’t take nearly as long as she might have wished. To her astonishment and instantaneous fury, she found it on the first try, right in the glove compartment. Luke hadn’t even bothered to lock it, though it was obvious to her that he had made a passing attempt to hide the phone under some papers. Clutching the phone in her hand, she sank back against the seat and simply stared at it.
“Luke,” she whispered, “what were you thinking?”
She was so caught up in trying to explain her brother-in-law’s uncharacteristic behavior that she didn’t hear the crunching of ice or the muttered oaths until Luke was practically on top of her. Suddenly the passenger door was flung open—the damned lock didn’t even stick under his assault—and Luke jumped into the seat beside her.
Jessie shot him an accusing look. His gaze went from her face to the cellular phone and back again. He muttered a harsh oath under his breath.
“It was here all along, wasn’t it?” she asked in a lethal tone.
He didn’t even have the decency to lie. He just nodded.
“Why, Luke?” Her voice broke as she asked. Unexpected tears gathered in her eyes, threatening to spill over. She felt betrayed somehow, though she couldn’t have explained why. Maybe it was because she had expected so much more of Luke. The hurt cut deeper and promised worse scars than anything Erik had ever done.
Luke shoved his hand through his hair and stared off into the distance. He didn’t speak for so long that Jessie thought he didn’t intend to answer, but eventually he turned to face her, his expression haggard.
“I couldn’t make the call,” he said simply. “I just couldn’t make it.”
“Do you hate your family so much?” she demanded. “How could you let them worry about me? How could you leave them wondering if there’d been an accident? My heaven, they must be out of their minds by now.”
He shot her a look filled with irony. “Do you really think that was what it was about?”
“What else?” she demanded, her voice rising until she didn’t recognize it. “What else could have made you do something so cruel?”
Before she could even guess what
