Tempting Lucas

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?”