Tempting Lucas

“I neither want nor need your money, Grand-mère, but I do think I’d like to have your company. I didn’t realize until this morning how much I’ve missed you.”

“If you’re asking if my door is open, Emily Jane, then let me remind you that it always has been. It was your choice to stay away, not mine.”

Emily touched her serviette to her mouth. “Well, if it’s all right with you, Grand-mère, I’d like to make up for lost time. May I come and live with you for a while?”

A tear splashed down Monique’s wrinkled cheek and fell into her soup. “You may,” she said, head lifted proudly to indicate that she wasn’t about to acknowledge such a maudlin display of weakness.

Later, after the dishes were cleared away and Consuela had brought in the tea tray, Monique selected a cigarette from the silver box at her elbow and nodded to Emily to light it for her. “What about your business, Emily Jane? Will you sell it, or is there someone who can manage it for you during your absence?”

“I have a friend who’s been interested in becoming a partner in Done To Perfection for about a year now. I think she’ll be more than happy to buy me out.”

“And you won’t miss it?”

“If I do, I can always open up another branch here, once I’m settled. I like to be busy, Grand-mère. Come to that, I like being my own boss and making a success of things.”

“Success is all very fine, child, but you can’t warm your feet on it when you go to bed. Your grandfather has been dead seventeen years but I’ve never become used to sleeping alone. I miss him every night.”

“Because you were happily married, that’s why, but I’m not interested in that sort of life.”

Choking a little as she inhaled, Monique peered through the smoke already wreathing her face. “It’s unnatural for a woman your age to be so indifferent to men, Emily Jane, and it leads me to suspect you’re hiding something. Is there, by chance, someone in your life that you don’t want me to know about?”

“Certainly not,” Emily said. But it was a lie. A new lie, scarcely more than a few hours old, to be sure, but a lie nonetheless. The back of her mind had been filled with his face, her heart with racing dread, ever since she’d learned that Lucas Flynn was widowed and living next door again.

Aware that her grandmother had fixed a very speculative gaze on her, Emily changed the subject. Pushing the ashtray a little closer to Monique’s elbow, she asked, “Does your doctor know you smoke, Grand-mère?”

“Naturally. He’s fool enough to think he has the right to know everything about me.”

“And he doesn’t object?”

“There’s a difference between a fool and an imbecile, child. He knows better than to intrude with his opinions where they’re not welcome.”

“But it can’t be good for you.”

“If your reason for wanting to live here is that you plan to try to rearrange the way I choose to lead my life, Emily Jane, I shall withdraw my permission and you may leave first thing in the morning,” Monique informed her acidly.

“I’m concerned for your health, that’s all.”

“When you reach my age, you’ll realize that there’s very little left that one can do for one’s health except enjoy what remains of it. Which I intend to do by living where and with whom I please, and smoking when and where I feel like it.” She puffed once or twice to underline her point and watched Emily through the veil of smoke curling up between them. “You look worn out, child. Don’t feel you have to stay up entertaining me.”

“I don’t want to leave you down here by yourself.”

“Why not? I’m used to it and I don’t need sleep the way I once did. You have your old room in the southwest turret. Consuela spent most of the last week getting it ready for you.”

Emily hid a yawn behind her hand. It had been a long day, made worse by the three hour time difference between Massachusetts and California. “If you’re sure you don’t mind, perhaps I will make an early night of it.”

“Go,” her grandmother ordered, rolling her eyes. “All this sudden attentive concern is beginning to annoy me.”

The memories had besieged her from the moment she’d set foot in the house, but they saved their most potent attack until the end of the day when she was at her most vulnerable. Exhausted not only from travel but also from a succession of small shocks one on top of the other, Emily felt, when she opened her bedroom door, as if she’d stepped into a huge time tunnel running in reverse, and was helpless to stop it.

Everything conspired against her. Her clothes hung in one half of the vast armoire, her lingerie in the lined mahogany drawers of the other half, leaving her nothing with which to distract herself. Velvet-napped towels lay draped over the edge of the huge claw-footed tub in the attached bathroom. The covers were turned back on the bed, a Thermos of hot chocolate sat on the nightstand.

On the surface, nothing had changed. The delicate painted panelling, the carved four-poster with its embroidered tester, the cheval glass looked exactly as they always had, as though to say there was no rewriting history. But, most of all, the smells were what peeled back the years: gardenia bath essence and starched cotton sheets dried in the warm Californian sun; patchouli and the musty gentility of antique silk draperies. They overlapped her senses and sent her swimming back to that other time.

The curved windows in the turret wall stood open to the sweet night air, luring her deeper into the time tunnel. The sheen of moonlight illuminated the bend in the river beyond which she knew rose Roscommon House. When she had been nineteen and in love with Lucas Flynn, she had kept vigil at this window and known the second he had gone to his room because his light would shine through the night, and she, foolish romantic that she’d been, had thought of it as a beacon lighting a path from her heart to his.

She had been wrong.

If she had known he was here again, she would not have come back. But she had not known, and now it was too late.

She stepped closer to the windows to pull down the blinds. Involuntarily, her gaze stole to the right and with an accuracy undulled by time found the break in the trees which, during the day, revealed the steeply pitched roof of Roscommon and the gable which housed Lucas’s room.

As if she’d activated a secret switch, a beam of light from his window suddenly pierced the darkness, as bright and golden as her hopes had been over eleven summers before.

She wanted to turn away. Even more, she wanted to stare at the sight and not care, not remember. But she was able to do neither. Remembrance flowed over her, merciless as a rogue wave sweeping its victim out to sea.

A breeze riffled past the gauzy white drapes and touched her skin. With a shudder, Emily pulled down the shades and shut out the sight of that light streaming through the darkness. Shut out the memories it brought with it.

She had been young then, barely out of school. Full of immature fantasies, no doubt, the way young women often were, but she’d grown up quickly, thanks to Lucas Flynn.

It didn’t matter where he was living now. He could move into the room next door to hers for all she cared. Parade up and down in front of her, showing off his big, male body, and doing his best to reduce her to drooling lust. But he wouldn’t succeed.

She’d never again give him the opportunity to flick her off as if she were just another summer insect buzzing around and annoying him. Nor would she allow him to spoil this special time with her beloved Grand-mère.

The mistakes had piled up, each more disastrous than its predecessor, that other summer. But she’d paid for them once, and dearly. She wasn’t going to let him make her pay again.

He shut down the computer just after midnight, knowing it was futile trying to annotate scientific data from his latest experiments when his thoughts repeatedly strayed to events from much earlier times, before medicine had become his ruling passion.

As a doctor, he’d accepted long ago the human mind’s amazing ability to connect telepathically with another, regardless of the time or distance separating them. Sydney, thoroughly rooted in reality as she was, had scoffed at the idea, claiming it was the learned response that came of being a doctor, but he’d seen it as an instinct that couldn’t be taught.

Either way, it all came down to the same thing now: when his grandmother had mentioned in passing that a member of Mrs. Lamartine’s family had come to take care of her he’d known with absolute if unsubstantiated certainty that the visitor at Belvoir was Emily Jane. And once he’d allowed the knowledge to take hold there’d been no going back to his work.

Instead, he stood at the window of his room and stared out. It was one of those perfect nights midway between winter and spring—cool and still.

In the garden below, the magnolia tree had shed its petals, which lay like abandoned saucers on the grass. The scent of heliotrope filtered up, a sweet, heady perfume that he’d dreamed about when he was in Africa where the smell of death had permeated everything. Overhead, the sky was dappled with moonlight, a sprinkling of stars hung so low that he could almost have reached up and grasped a handful.

He had made the right decision in coming back here. It was home, and as different from Africa as heaven was from hell. It defined his boyhood, his youth, and his emergence as a man, and held none of the misery of that godforsaken country on the other side of the world.

Tired suddenly, of himself and the memories that threatened to swamp him, Lucas rolled his head around to relieve the stiffness in his neck and shoulders. Four months ago he’d turned thirty-six. He was disillusioned about many things, saddened by others, but, damn it all and despite everything, in charge of what his life had become. He was under no obligation to relive the mistakes of his youth, particularly not as they related to Emily. The days when they had been friends were long gone and there was no reason for their lives to interweave again now, no reason for the even tenor of his life to be disturbed—if, indeed, she was the one visiting Belvoir.

The thought brought him a measure of peace. Before turning from the window, he inhaled deeply one last time, filling his lungs with the scents of heliotrope and spring. But something else had crept in to spoil the purity of the night, something faintly acrid floating on the air and leaving it not quite as sweet as it had been moments before.

Suddenly alert, he snapped off the bedside lamp and leaned further out, eyes scanning, searching for he knew not what. Below, the river continued to flow softly. Above, the moon rode high above the trees that marked the boundary between Beatrice’s property and the Lamartines’. God appeared to be in His heaven, and all right with the world, so who was Lucas Flynn to question otherwise?

He was about to turn away when a flicker of light through the trees, so brief he almost missed it, caught his eye, followed within seconds by a burst of orange.

Precious moments ticked by, moments of paralysed disbelief when he should have been responding to the emergency he wanted so badly to pretend wasn’t taking place. And then he was sprinting for the door, calling out through the quiet house for Beatrice to wake up, to phone for help.

Ignoring Emily wasn’t going to be quite as easy as he’d hoped. Because the Lamartine house was on fire.