He paused outside Jessie’s suite and listened. He could hear the faint sounds of movement, the murmur of voices. Or was it only one voice? Jessie’s, perhaps, as she soothed Angela back to sleep?
Unable to help himself, he quietly opened the door a crack and peered inside. The suite’s bedroom was in shadows. A silver trail of moonlight splashed across the bed.
In a corner of the room the whisper of the rocker drew his attention. Jessie was holding the baby to her breast, nursing her. The glow of moonlight made her skin incandescent. Luke’s gaze was riveted, his body instantly throbbing with an aching need.
He realized after a moment that the yearning he felt went beyond the physical. He wanted to claim Jessie and the baby as his own with a fierceness that staggered him. He wanted the right to be in that room beside them, to drink in the incredible sight of mother and child in an act as old as time. He wanted...so much more than words could possibly express.
He could deny it from now to eternity and it wouldn’t change the truth. Somehow Jessie had realized that and made peace with it, while he still struggled. He knew, even if she did not, that love did not always conquer the obstacles in its path. She would come to see him as a sorry prize, if he cost her the love of his family.
Suddenly he sensed her gaze was on him. When she looked up, he could see the sheen of dampness on her cheeks, and a dismay worse than anything he’d felt over betraying Erik cut through him.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a ragged whisper.
The rocker slowed. “For?” she asked cautiously.
The simple question stymied him. For making her cry? For loving her? For refusing to go down a path that could only lead to worse heartache?
“For everything,” he said at last.
He turned away then, a dull sensation of anguish crushing his chest. Knowing he was closing the door on so much more than just the sight of the two people he loved most in the world, he quietly pulled it shut.
Even then, though, he couldn’t move. In the gathering silence, he heard Jessie whisper his name. It was no louder than a sigh of regret, but to his ears it seemed louder than a shout. He resisted the longing to open that door—the only shield between him and a wildly escalating temptation—for a single heartbeat, then two.
“Luke?”
He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the sound of her voice, but the echo of his softly spoken name was already in his head, driving him crazy. A sigh shuddered through him and he knew he was lost. He opened the door, stepped inside, then closed it.
And as he did, he knew with every fiber of his being that nothing in his life would ever be the same.
15
Jessie watched with bated breath as Luke closed the door to the suite behind him. Her heart seemed to have stilled and then, as he took the first step toward her, it began to thunder mercilessly in her chest.
Dear heaven, how she loved him. Earlier tonight she’d been sure that she had lost him forever. She had run out of ways to combat his stubbornness, or so she had thought.
Apparently all it had taken was the whispered cry of his name on her lips, a soft command he’d been unable to resist. He crossed the room, reluctance still written all over his hard, masculine face, and sank slowly to the edge of the bed beside the rocker, careful not to allow his knees to brush against hers. Too careful. It told her how deeply his feelings for her ran and how much he feared losing control.
His gaze remained fixed on the baby in her arms. A soft, tender smile tugged at the corners of his lips. If she could have, without disturbing Angela, she would have touched a finger to that normally stern, unforgiving mouth. She would have tried to coax that smile to remain in place.
“Was it so very difficult?” she inquired dryly.
His gaze found hers. “What?”
“Walking into this room.”
“Not difficult,” he said, the smile coming and going again like a whisper. “Dangerous. When I’m around you, I can’t think. My common sense flies out the window. No one has ever had such control over me.”
“I don’t think feelings are something you can dictate with common sense,” she said.
“Maybe not, but actions are.” He studied her with a rueful expression. “You have the lure of a siren, Jessie. You and your baby.”
“Is that so terrible?”
“I’ve told you all the reasons it is.”
“Reasons, yes, but you’ve never said what was in your heart.”
Luke sighed and looked away. When he eventually settled his gaze on her again, there was an air of acceptance about him that she hadn’t seen before. It gave her hope.
“My heart,” he began, then shook his head. “I’m not sure I can find the words.”
She leveled a look at him, then said quietly, “Then show me.”
A soft moan seemed ripped from somewhere deep inside him. “Jessie, don’t...”
“It’s just the two of us here in the dark, Lucas. You can show me what’s in your heart. There’s no one to object.”
She thought she detected the faint beginnings of another wry smile.
“Not just two of us, Jessie. Angela’s right here with us. Hardly a proper audience for all I’d like to do to you, all the ways I’d like to show you how I feel.”
Jessie wasn’t about to let him seize an easy excuse for maintaining the status quo. Her entire body shook with her desperate yearning for his touch.
“She’s ready to be put down for the night,” she countered. “I’ll take her into the other room. After that,
