Tempting Lucas

“I don’t,” she replied stonily. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t thought about you in years until today.”

“Then you’ve been happy?”

“What do you care?” Oh, Emily, shut up! she told herself angrily.

His sigh this time was fraught with exasperation, as if he found having to explain such obvious and simple facts exceedingly tedious. “We were friends for a long time, Emily. Closer than friends, even. More like brother and sister. One night of ... indiscretion doesn’t negate all the good times. Of course I care.”

About as much as he cared about the weather! But he wasn’t her brother, she didn’t want his diluted affection, and she couldn’t bear his bold references to a time she’d truly tried to bury in the past where it belonged. She wanted to escape and shut herself in her room, to be alone before she faced the fact that he still had the power to affect her more deeply than any other man she’d ever met.

“Then, to answer your question, I am very happy, very successful, and very tired,” she said, stepping around him and heading for the door. “Thank you again for coming to our rescue tonight. Under the circumstances, it was very decent of you.”

“Decent?” Although she couldn’t see it this time, she heard the amusement in his voice. “What else could I have done? Left you to burn?”

“You might have, if you’d known I was visiting my grandmother.”

“Hardly,” he scoffed. “I took a professional oath a long time ago to preserve and honor human life.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, Even mine? but she bit back the words and said instead, “Of course. Well, don’t worry that we’ll make a habit of calling on you to bail us out of trouble. We pride ourselves on being very self-sufficient.”

Like every other assertion she’d made in the last little while, however, that last one of Emily’s turned out to be erroneous. By the following morning, Monique’s left knee was badly swollen. “I remember twisting it when I slipped,” she admitted to Lucas when, at Beatrice’s insistence, he came to take a look.

“If you had gone to the hospital to be checked over as I suggested, this could have been taken care of last night,” he pointed out.

“With everything else that was happening at the time, it didn’t seem worth mentioning. In any case, you’re supposed to be a doctor so you can take care of it now.”

“I’m not leaving myself open to your suing me for negligence, Mrs. Lamartine,” he informed her. “For a start, I have no malpractice insurance, and second, I don’t need the aggravation. Whether you like it or not, you’re going into town for X-rays. And consider yourself lucky you didn’t break a hip.”

“If this is an example of your bedside manner, it’s no wonder you had to give up practicing medicine,” Monique retorted.

Earlier, Emily had gone over to Belvoir to meet the fire marshall and hear his report on last night’s disaster. Although he’d allowed her to collect a few clothes and other basic necessities, he’d been adamant that the house was not safe in its present condition.

The drawing room, sadly, was destroyed, its furnishings blackened and soaked in water, and there had been structural damage to a supporting wall. Not surprisingly, the whole house also reeked of smoke. It would be weeks before they could go home again—news which Emily knew would not be well received.

In her view, all this was trouble enough for one day. She certainly didn’t need to run interference when Monique decided to bait Lucas—which was every chance she got. She had enough to do holding her own emotions in check where he was concerned.

“I’ll get you to the hospital,” she offered, hoping to distract her grandmother. “They phoned this morning to let us know that Consuela is ready to come home, so I have to drop by anyway, with a change of clothes for her and to collect her. Then, once you’re taken care of, we’ll go over to the hotel and take a suite there until we decide what to do next.”

“Whatever for?” Beatrice exclaimed, coming into the room just in time to hear the tail end of the conversation. “There’s plenty of room here for all of you without us falling over one another.”

“You’re very kind,” Monique said grandly, “but it would be an imposition and so quite out of the question.”

“Don’t be so quick to turn me down,” Beatrice said. “We’re heading into summer and the tourists are pouring into the area already. Suppose they can’t take you at the hotel? Where’ll you go then, Monique Lamartine, since you’re so dead set against burdening your family with your ill-tempered presence? Somehow, I don’t see you camping in a tent until your poor house is fit to live in again.”

“Phone for a taxi, Emily Jane,” Monique said, with lofty disdain for such pitiful reasoning. “We have business to which we must attend and I would like it concluded as speedily as possible.”

Beatrice opened her mouth to object to that idea too, but Lucas forestalled her with weary resignation. “I’ll drive you into town.”

“Thank you, but no,” Emily said. “That really is asking too much.”

“Not at all. I’ve got a number of errands to attend to.” He finished the last of his coffee and checked his watch. “If you could be ready to leave in half an hour?”

For all that he phrased them so politely, the words were a command, not a request, and underlined what he’d made patently clear the night before: their presence, particularly Emily’s, was an imposition of the highest order.

When they arrived at the hospital just after eleven, the first person they spoke to was Monique’s doctor, whose opinion, when he heard about the previous night’s events, coincided entirely with Lucas’s. Rapping out orders, he whisked his patient into a wheelchair and off for a complete physical, including an X-ray of her knee.

“Barring any unusual findings, you should be able to pick her up in about three hours,” he told Emily over his shoulder as he pushed aside the swinging doors through which her grandmother had already disappeared.

Lucas, who’d accompanied them inside the building, spoke for the first time. “That’ll give me plenty of time to take care of my business, so unless there’s something else I can do for you I’ll take off now and meet you back here around two.”

Without waiting for a reply, he did precisely that, disappearing with what Emily perceived to be enormous relief at being rid of them. She, however, was alarmed at the length of time her grandmother was to be detained.

“Does it normally take three hours to run a few tests?” she asked the nurse who’d assisted with Monique’s preliminary examination. “Or is the doctor concerned that my grandmother might have had another stroke, do you think?”

“Well, he’ll want to make sure that hasn’t happened, of course, but it’s more a precautionary measure. Also, things slow down a bit over the lunch hour so we don’t always get test results back as quickly as we’d like.” The nurse smiled reassuringly. “Hanging around the emergency unit’s enough to give anyone the willies and the food in the cafeteria is lousy. Why don’t you treat yourself to lunch in town? It’s a much pleasanter way to pass the time.”

But not the most efficient, Emily decided, particularly with the question of where they were all going to live for the next little while still unresolved.

It turned out not to be a problem for Consuela. “No hotel for me, Miss Emily,” she declared, accepting the clothes Emily had brought for her to wear. “My sister in-law’s been asking me to pay a visit for months, so now I will. When madame’s ready for me to come back to work, she can phone. I’m just across town and can be out to Belvoir in no time at all.”

“Well, at least let me see you off in a taxi,” Emily said.

“It was the cigarettes, you know,” Consuela confided some twenty minutes later, while they waited for the elevator. “Madame won’t admit it but it’s a miracle she hasn’t brought the house down about our ears before last night. She falls asleep while she’s smoking, you see.”

Her account confirmed what the fire marshall had stated in his report. “I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with the worry of it all by yourself, Consuela,” Emily said. “What you’re telling me now merely reinforces what I’ve already decided. We’re going to have to look at a better arrangement once Belvoir is fit to live in again. Meantime, we’ll be at the hotel if you need us for anything.”

But Beatrice appeared to have been blessed with divine foresight, because the April Water Hotel—the only hotel in town—could give them a room for two nights only. After that, the place was pretty well booked for the remainder of the season. Any hope of securing long-term residence was out of the question. Nor were any of the quaint bed-and-breakfast houses able to help. They didn’t cater for full-time guests.

It seemed that avoiding Lucas wasn’t going to pan out quite as neatly or quickly as Emily had hoped. Unless a miracle occurred within the next hour or two, she and Monique might have no choice but to accept Beatrice’s hospitality until Belvoir was habitable again.

The thought of having to face Lucas across the dining room table three times a day, not to mention running into him at other times in between, and of sleeping down the hall from him, left her dizzy with dismay.

CHAPTER THREE

IT SEEMED prophetic that the first person Emily ran into on the street after she’d seen Consuela off was Lucas. He’d just crossed the road from the post office, which was situated opposite the entrance to the hospital, and was so busy thumbing through the mail he’d picked up that he quite literally cannoned into her. “Sorry,” he muttered absently, reaching out a hand to steady her, then did a double-take when he realized who it was he’d almost knocked down.

For just a second, she was reminded of the day she’d fallen in love with him. He’d almost stumbled over her then, too, and a whole sequence of events had been set in motion. One kiss had led to another and she’d read “for ever” in them. Sadly, she’d been the only one to do so. She’d also been pathologically naive in those days.

“Good thing it wasn’t your grandmother,” he said now, the ghost of his old self emerging briefly. “She’d be threatening lawsuits for sure. So, did you get fixed up at the hotel?”

“No,” Emily said, dry-mouthed all over again at the sheer male magnificence of him.

He had no right to be so beautiful. He was too muscular in the chest and shoulders for a doctor, as if he’d spent the last eleven years in some work more physically strenuous than she could envision medicine being. He should have been stooped and the African sun should have left his skin all wizened. His eyes should have faded, been half-buried in wrinkles from squinting in the bright, tropical light; they should have peered out myopically through thick lenses. Instead, he was spellbinding, his lean-hipped, rangy grace lending elegance even to the blue jeans that seemed to be his preferred mode of dress these days.

“No?” He did have squint lines around his eyes when he glanced at her quizzically like that, but they were an asset, enhancing his good looks rather than detracting from them.

She shook her head. “Your grandmother was right. Except for a couple of days here and there, the hotel’s booked up right through September.”

If he was dismayed to hear that, he hid it well. “From Monique’s standpoint that might not be such a bad thing, you know. It’s my guess she’s damaged the ligaments in her knee and that she’ll be off her feet for the next week or so. Being confined to a hotel room would be no picnic for anyone, especially not someone of her. . . ah... temperament.”