Tempting Lucas

“I’m afraid,” Emily said, wondering how many times she was going to have to apologize to him for one thing or another, “that she’s behaving very ungraciously toward you and your grandmother, and I’m sorry. I think it’s just that she’s afraid of change, of not being in control of the events shaping her life. What with her failing health and now this latest problem, she sees her independence seeping away, and it terrifies her, but she’s too proud to admit it.”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Growing old can be hell, Emily, and some people react just as your grandmother does, fighting it every step of the way.”

“Still, that’s no reason for you to have to put up with her ill humor.”

When he laughed, the years melted away from his face, leaving only the threads of silver in his hair to betray his true age. “I might as well get used to it. It looks as if we’re all stuck with each other—at least for the next little while.”

“Stuck with each other? Oh, I don’t think so!”

“You have some other solution up your sleeve?”

“Well, I...no, not exactly—not yet. How could I, when I only just found out the hotel can’t take us? But I’ll come up with something.”

“I can’t imagine what. Your grandmother made it plain enough last night that she’s not budging far from home. And quite frankly, even if the idea of moving in with relatives did sit well with her, I doubt her doctor wants to see her traveling any great distance right now. She’s a lot frailer than she might seem, you know.”

“So what are you saying? That the only other choice is... ?” She lapsed into silence, still unwilling to accept the solution staring her in the face.

Entertaining no such uncertainty, Lucas finished the question for her. “Roscommon? Afraid so.” Another of those brief smiles illuminated his face. “Don’t look so horrified, Emily. We don’t have rats in the pantry or bugs in the beds, and, although it might not be her home, realistically it’s probably the best place for Monique to be right now. She’ll be on relatively familiar territory, able to keep an eye on repairs to Belvoir, voice her disapproval of everything the workmen do—which will keep her happy even if it does run them ragged!—and at the same time give my grandmother someone else to bully besides me.”

His summation was right on target: sensible, practical, convenient. But Emily was too dismayed to acknowledge any of those supremely sane responses—so dismayed, in fact, that she blurted out her true thoughts without taking time to edit them first or consider how they might be interpreted. “Lucas, I couldn’t possibly stay another night under the same roof as you!”

She hadn’t meant to sound so insulting but he allowed her no time to rephrase her objection. His eyes narrowed, their brilliant blue stripped of any amusement. “Why not?” he drawled. “Forewarned is forearmed. I have a lock on my bedroom door and I’ll make a point of using it.”

She had thought he could never hurt her again, that nothing could come close to the pure agony of having him reject her and turn to another woman for all those things she had been willing to give him. But his softly uttered contempt seared her more thoroughly than anything he’d flung at her the night she’d conceived his child. Devastated, she spun away from him, stepping blindly off the edge of the sidewalk and out into the road.

A horn blared, brakes shrieked. The bright red fender of a car reared up and seemed to hover perilously close as she stumbled to regain her balance.

I’m going to be killed, she thought in mild surprise, and wondered who’d come in her place to take care of Monique.

And then Lucas’s hand shot out, grabbing her urgently by the scruff of the neck and yanking her back to safety. Or increased danger, depending on one’s perspective. Because finding herself pressed up against him, pressed so close that they were imprinted on each other from knee to breast, was just as life-threatening in a different kind of way.

For the first time since they’d met again, his eyes neither avoided hers nor skittered past her as if the sight of her was too repugnant to be endured. Instead, his gaze burned into her, ablaze with impassioned horror. To the people passing by, they might have appeared to be lovers locked in wordless conflict, so furiously did he clutch her to him.

But they weren’t lovers. And the fact that, even knowing that, she still wanted to lean into him, to bury her face in his neck and inhale the warm, well remembered scent of him, enraged her.

So she shrugged him off and flicked at her hair to restore it to some sort of order. “Do you mind?” she said, too discombobulated to care that, considering he’d just spared her serious injury and possibly even saved her life, the question was downright ridiculous.

Lucas passed a trembling hand over his face. “Damned right,” he said hoarsely. “Jeez, Emily, if you want to teach me to think before I speak in future, a smack in the mouth will suffice, OK? You don’t have to lay your life on the line to make your point.”

She allowed him a small smile, then looked away. Just as well. It would never have done for her to see how shaken up he was, how close to losing it, and all because of her. How could he have explained such a reaction when he didn’t understand it himself?

It wasn’t as if the car had actually touched her. In fact, it had squealed to a halt a good six feet away. It was those seconds in between that had left him such a mess. One minute she’d been standing there, perfect in pale green linen and straw accessories, clearly repelled by the thought of living in the same house with him, breathing the same air, and the next he’d retaliated with a blow so low it was unforgivable, and the damage was done.

She’d blanched with shock. Her eyes had seemed to fill her face, huge brown wells of pain, and her mouth had opened in a perfect, soundless pink O, leaving him feeling as if he’d just kicked a puppy in the teeth. Then, before he could begin to form an apology, she’d swung around in a graceful arc and floated out of his reach and practically under the wheels of the passing car.

“Lucas?” She was looking at him again and rubbing absently at the back of her neck where he’d grabbed hold of her.

“What? Did I hurt you?”

She lifted one elegant shoulder in a ghost of a shrug. “Not really. But this other business—about us living at Roscommon until Belvoir’s been repaired—how can it possibly work, Lucas, with things the way they are between us?”

“What say I buy you lunch and we’ll talk about it? We’ve still got a couple of hours to kill before we collect Grandma.”

“I’m not very hungry.”

She looked a bit pale and more than a little apprehensive, as though the potential pitfalls of such a living arrangement were more than she could face. “Then you can watch me eat while we deal with all the history between us,” he said, “because the way things are shaping up we aren’t going to be able to avoid each other for the next little while. And although I can’t speak for you, Emily Jane, I don’t mind admitting that it’s going to be rough going for me unless we clear the air a bit.”

“All right, whatever you say,” she muttered.

He took her to a restaurant overlooking the April river. From the front it was nothing but a narrow, brick-faced building with a canopied entrance and a wrought iron railing, but inside it opened onto a long courtyard with a fountain in the middle and a profusion of flowering plants spilling down the walls and over the edges of ceramic containers.

They were shown to a table on the south side, shaded by a tilted sun umbrella. Disregarding what she’d said about not being hungry, Lucas ordered for both of them—fish chowder with sourdough bread, and iced tea. “So,” he began, immediately the waiter left, “do you want to start the ball rolling, or shall I?”

“You,” she said unhesitatingly.

“OK.” He took a swig of iced tea. “The way I see it, you and I got off track the last summer we spent here.”

“No.” She shook her head. “It happened long before that, Lucas. It all began the summer I turned fifteen and you kissed me for the first time. Or are you going to pretend you’ve forgotten about that?”

He stirred the lemon wedge around in his glass and wished he could look her in the eye and lie. It had been such a brief incident, after all, hardly one to hang onto through the years. But, “No,” he admitted, expelling a long breath. “I remember only too well.”

“Why did you do it, Lucas? Kiss me, I mean?”

“Why?” He lifted his shoulders, feigning bafflement. “Don’t ask me. It wasn’t something I planned. Hell, you’d always been just another of the cousins from next door, all pigtails and big brown eyes. The kid I’d taught to swim when she was about five. Then you...changed.”

“Are you saying it was my fault that time, too?”

In a way, yes, he thought, but he could hardly come out and tell her that, over the preceding winter, she’d grown into a leggy adolescent with breasts. Or that they had been the first thing he’d noticed when she’d come to Belvoir that particular summer.

A couple of his brothers had noticed, too. “Emily Jane’s grown hooters,” fifteen-year old Sean had whispered, bug-eyed with awe. “Man, hand me my catcher’s mitt!”

Ted, who at seventeen had thought himself vastly more experienced in such matters, had scoffed, “They’re not big enough to fill a bra let alone a baseball glove. Save your energy, kid!”

But Lucas, who’d turned twenty the previous November and had, at their age, been prone to much the same kind of irreverence, had known an inexplicable urge to flatten both brothers. Feigning lofty indifference, he’d stalked inside to catch up on the reading requirements for his second year of university, due to start that September.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said now.

“Well, thank you for that much,” she said. “Particularly since I remember that summer as being one of the happiest I spent at Belvoir.”

“For me too,” he admitted. And it was true, up to a point. As the days had gone by, the phenomenon of Emily’s breasts had gradually ceased to elicit wonder among the brothers at Roscommon House and by the middle of August the old, easy camaraderie between the younger members of the two families had re-established itself.

“It marked the end of an era,” he went on. “We were never that carefree again.”

“No.” Her voice was soft, her brown eyes hazy, as though pictures from that summer were unrolling in her mind. “We clowned around every day, shoving each other off the end of the diving pier or cannonballing into the river, and sat around a bonfire nearly every night. One big, happy family, with no hidden agendas or undercurrents to spoil things.”

“Until the night I kissed you,” Lucas said. “Nothing was ever the same after that. It was the last day of the summer vacation, as I recall, and the last year that we were all together like that. We’d gone swimming after dark, my brothers and I, and you and all your cousins from Belvoir, and we were making one hell of a noise.”

“And your grandmother came out and hammered on the old ship’s bell hanging from the back porch of Roscommon, and told us to get inside before we were all arrested for disturbing the peace!”