by Taylor Hart
“I agreed to find you a wife and teach you lessons on not being a weirdo. Eating all the M&M’s is weird.”
“Piggish, not weird.”
“Fine, have the candy.” She pulled the laptop closer to her, trying to focus. “I hate your aftershave, by the way.” It embarrassed her that he could still have such an effect on her.
He let out a long sigh. “Oh, you do?” He relaxed back against the headrest and took another M&M, not sounding convinced.
She decided to play it. “Yep, I’ve noticed it since the marina and I want you to know I hate it.” She turned back and stuck out her tongue, feeling ridiculous and not sure what to do about these feelings.
Luke responded by reaching out and tickling her on the sides of her ribs, which made her convulse back and giggle. “Stop!” she gasped. But he’d already started, and from past experience she knew he would win this if she let it get out of control. “Please.” She held herself in a still position, trying to fend off the attack.
He let out a breath, and pulled his hands back. “Is this lesson number four or are we on five now?”
Grateful that he allowed her to resume without the tickling, she nodded. “Yes, don’t bug the girl you’re dating.”
He ate more candy. “But we’re not dating, so I can bug you, right?”
She turned to him and saw a teasing glint in his eye. “Back to the ranch. Check her out.”
This woman had short red hair. She was super cute and had on her profile she was independently wealthy.
“Better.” Luke stared at her. He pointed to the fact she was an attorney. The side of his lip tugged up. “Hmm. Nope.”
“What?” Part of her was ticked because she’d spent a long time putting together the three profiles he just discounted in five seconds each.
“Attorneys usually don’t do well with attorneys.”
“Why?” She stared at the cute redhead on screen.
“Because we are too intense and Type A. Haven’t you heard opposites attract? I thought you were a matchmaker, for heaven’s sakes.”
Turning to him, she gave him her fiercest “I want to kill you” look.
He flashed her a wide grin. “You know I’m right.” Smug, that’s what he was.
Letting out a breath, she stared at the woman. “You said ‘better’ at first. What was better before you threw her away?”
He pointed to the red hair.
Her stomach flip-flopped. “Right, the red hair.” She didn’t turn to him and she was glad it was dark so he wouldn’t see her blush.
“I also like girls who, in fourth grade, wore their hair in pigtails, if you could add that to the profile.”
She couldn’t help but smile, thinking of herself in the fourth grade. “You’re crossing lines.”
“I’m not talking about you. See, people say I’m narcissistic, but maybe they are.” Luke nudged her.
She let out a breath, not looking at him. “No past talk, remember?”
“Fine.” He finished off the candy. “Then let’s talk about you in the now,” he said, using the spooky, dramatic way they’d been saying it.
“Nope.”
“Yep.”
“Why do you need to know me? You don’t. My clients don’t know me.”
“Do your clients pay forty grand?” he asked like he’d called out checkmate.
Irritation wove through her. But it felt inevitable. So she did the stupid thing: she finally gave in to him, knowing she would regret it. “Fine, what do you want to know about ‘now’ me?”
19
Luke couldn’t believe she’d agreed. His heart beat rapidly and he felt the same way he’d felt a few minutes ago when he’d asked her about himself. “Ahh.” He sat up straighter on the bed.
“C’mon, don’t you have questions, counsel?” She shoved her face closer to his.
He stared at her lips and tried to push her lemon scent out of his mind. He sat back, unsure if he dared ask.
“What?” she pushed.
He started with an easy one. “Tell me about moving around. Was it hard?”
Slowly, she pushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Yeah. It was.”
He shook his head. “How did it feel?” he insisted, mimicking her.
A vacant look crossed her face. “Every time orders were coming, we kind of knew. I mean, right? That’s what the job was. They would take you where they needed you, and when you got promoted you usually moved, too. Sean was a good soldier. He got promoted a lot.”
The news put him at ease, like she’d lifted a tiny portion of guilt from his shoulders.
She frowned.
“What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing.” She said too quickly and looked guilty.
“Savannah?” He drew her name out slowly.
She shook her head, then let out a breath. “I had anxiety, okay? Gosh.”
He searched her face.
Closing her eyes for a second, she pushed her hand to her heart. “I’d feel this pressure, ya know? Like, right here.” She put her hand to her chest. “It … Sean wanted me to get on medication or something. But I wouldn’t. It was too much like admitting defeat for me. I know, I’m not against meds for people. But I just …” She sighed, then pinched the top of her nose. “Uh, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I just felt like Sean was, like … going out on special ops, right? Like classified, dangerous missions. Every time he’d come back, less of him was there.” She turned and met Luke’s eyes. “And I didn’t want to lose myself. I didn’t want to be numb.”
Luke felt like a sponge, unable to get enough. This was unlike any other woman he’d dated. He wanted to know her. Of course, he wanted other things, but the most unsatisfying part was waiting for all of her to unfold. He didn’t know if he would ever be satisfied, but he didn’t push.
She blinked. “So it was like my own personal journey, to just stick it out. It was like if I could conquer it, I would be worthy to be his wife.”
He was breathless, thinking about how good she was.
She shook her head. “Bet you’re glad to know that.”
It was terrifying how much he wanted to know more. “You’re strong, Savannah. And Sean …” He looked down. “I wish … I wish I would have been there, ya know? To just … be there.” It was the truth. There had been an emptiness to his life since both of them left. “I loved Sean, too.”
They were both silent.
“Tell me about the infertility,” he said quietly.
“No.”
He hesitated.
She lifted a hand and shook her head. “I … it …” Putting her head into her hands, she let out a breath. “We tried and tried and had a couple of miscarriages.” Her face took on this war torn expression.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. For the first time, he was beginning to realize what she meant by not being the same person. “We don’t … we can be done talking if you want.” He moved to get off the bed.
“Then we found out he had low sperm count too,” she said quietly.
Luke didn’t move. He felt frozen to the bed, not understanding.
She turned to him, her face almost vicious. “I’d driven myself crazy that I couldn’t keep a child. And then, offhandedly, we decided to get his sperm count checked, and found it … it may be hard for me to stay pregnant, but he had low sperm count.”
Luke was on unsure ground.
“It, like … made him so angry. Almost …” She sighed. “It was a year before he died when we found out. That whole year, he was like a different person.” She sighed and blinked.
He saw tears on her cheeks.
“We started fighting all the time. It … he had this thing. He kept saying that I would have been better off married to someone else. It was the Achilles heel in our marriage.” She broke off.
His heart raced and he didn’t know what to say.
“Then … I …” She squeezed her eyes shut and tears streamed down her face.
Li
terally incapable of not holding her, he moved to her and pulled her into him.
Surprisingly, she didn’t fight it. She leaned into him. He felt the hiccupping gasps, felt and heard her cry at the same time. It was different than a normal cry. It was deep.
It scared him, but he continued to hold her. “Shh.” He ran his hand up and down her back. “Shh, Savannah, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
She hiccup-cried some more. “I finally told him I wanted to divorce him.”
He didn’t speak.
“But the part I’ll never forgive myself for … when he got mad and started yelling at me and shouting how I should have married you, I wanted to hurt him.”
Luke didn’t know what to say, but he thought that was pretty normal in a marriage.
“So I agreed with him.”
The reality of her statement settled around him like packed sand when his brothers had buried him at the beach; restraining and uncomfortable. “What?”
“I told him I should have married you.”
The truth of her words struck the core of his heart, but he tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. “You said it because you were angry.”
“Then he died.”
They stared at each other for a long time. In this moment, he realized he wanted to be the kind of man who could heal her. But it was also in this moment he realized … he didn’t know if he was.
“And I have to live with that.” She sighed. “Luke, I shouldn’t have told you that.”
His heart raced. “It’s fine.”
Her mouth set into a straight, determined line. And she shook her head and then waved him away. “But I’m going to find you a wife … then we’ll both move on. Please … go.”
20
Seven days. That’s how long it had been since Luke had spoken to Savannah. He sat at behind the desk in his office, ruminating on the fact he’d put so many good people in place that he didn’t have many problems to solve at the moment.
He’d tried to set up a meeting with her, but she’d told him to back off. So he had. The seven days of not seeing her had about killed him. All he could think about was what she’d confessed: she’d told Sean she should have married him, then sent him off to die.
For seven days he’d heard her words through his mind: I agreed with him. I should have married you.
Ugh. Closing his eyes, he ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the ends, wishing he could extract the way her words made him feel by simply yanking out his hair. If only he could hate her words more or find less comfort in them.
Obviously, the image of her and Sean in their perfect marriage was a fallacy. The selfish part of him was comforted by that. It was petty and stupid, but his life changed for the worse when they’d left him. He’d felt so abandoned.
He wished he didn’t feel this way about Savannah. He wished it had been different for her—for her and Sean. Wished they would have been the happy version he’d thought they were. Then he just felt sad for them.
No matter what he did, or tried to focus on, or how many laps he swam, she was there. He simply couldn’t forget that she was in Park City. Single. Widowed, he reminded himself. Widowed by the man who had one time been his best friend in the whole world. The man he’d grown up with, who’d been like a brother to him. And she was clearly broken.
He was in hell, he decided. Maybe Dante’s Inferno would be an accurate description, but he didn’t think they had a level for his situation. Ugh! That would be a whole new level. It was enough to drive a man crazy.
What kind of man was he? Who in his right mind would hire the woman he’d once been in love with to find him a wife? His plan, or what had been the remnants of a plan, was blown up. He cringed, wondering how he could have thought it would have been so easy.
Putting his head into his hands, he closed his eyes and hated that the only thing he could see was her.
“Ahh!” He stood. All he knew was that he couldn’t stay away from her.
The sound of an email coming through made him pay attention. It was from her. Profiles of women, ten of them.
She wrote, Hey, I’m in Salt Lake today interviewing two potentials. Please rate these and get them back to me. Sorry about the other night. I would prefer if we just moved forward, like normal.
Not looking at the profiles, he stared at her words. Like normal. He burst out laughing. “Normal?” He shook his head. For him, there was no normal. Like he could go back to whatever he had even been before she’d shown back up in his life. It was impossible. He had no plan and no solution to any problems at the moment.
He sighed, sat back into his leather, work chair and scrolled down through the profiles. Quickly, he rated them according to her scale and wrote a few comments, then sent them back.
She was in Salt Lake. His mind went through different scenarios of how he could see her. His phone buzzed and he picked it up, hoping it would be Savannah, but also hoping it wouldn’t.
It wasn’t, but it wasn’t all bad … it was Nathan Pennington.
“Pennington,” he said, and pushed back from his chair, staring out of his office window, feeling a bit relieved he could think about something he might be able to do something about.
“Luke, hey, sorry there has been such a holdup on all of this.”
“No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t fine, but Luke had found that when dealing with clients with lots of money, he couldn’t push them like he wanted. Kind of like Savannah, he thought.
“Well, I’ve been talking about some of the logistics with the resort and my brother and his wife had some interesting ideas,” Nathan said.
“Okay.”
“We’d like to fly you up to Jackson to talk about some things. Some changes we’d like to make. I have another friend, Montana Crew, one of the other investors, and he’d like to talk about an outdoor stadium for concerts in the summer.”
Dollar signs lit up his mind. This deal could be worth even more money. If there was something that excited him, it was putting together deals, making them work, watching things come together because of the fruit of his labor. Exciting times. A good distraction. “All right. When do you want me to come?”
“Day after tomorrow? We are all in town and it’s important to have you here. Sterling is leaving the country in a couple of days and I don’t know when we’ll have time to put this together again. I’ll send the jet?”
Instantly, he was worried. Admittedly, he was worried about things with Savannah. But … it was a billion dollar deal. “Great, see you then.”
Luke got off the phone. Boy, he’d like to take Savannah to Jackson. He knew she would never agree to it. Still, he knew the idea wouldn’t just go away. He needed a distraction. Something that would get his mind off everything.
The perfect idea came to mind: something he never would have done if Savannah hadn’t mentioned it.
21
Savannah drove through downtown Salt Lake after finishing up her last interview, which had been a huge success. She’d had a crazy day, but she’d found two hopefuls for Luke. It’d been a brutal two days, trying to sift through her own emotions that had risen to the surface too quickly in regards to Luke.
Her own insecurities. And she couldn’t believe she’d told Luke about the problems she’d had with Sean.
Slamming her hand against the steering wheel, she pulled in a breath. She had to get ahold of herself. She could do this. It had become more and more clear to her; if she could help Luke find a wife … then they could both be released from the past.
She had to be careful of Luke, she knew she was playing with fire.
That’s why she’d kept him at bay the last seven days. She had to remember there were things she could never tell him.
Ever.
She’d promised Sean and herself. Plus, the past needed to stay in the past.
So now she had to focus. It was pretty easy to focus if she really tried to find him a wife. It took all her attention to sort through his outrageous requirements.
/>
Honestly, Luke had been the worst, sending her a stream of rejections of the women she sent him, complaining she wasn’t using her A game. It’d gotten annoying.
She smiled as she drove toward the freeway. Out of the four potentials she’d interviewed this afternoon, two of them were nearly perfect—at least, according to what he said he wanted.
Driving past Primary Children’s Hospital, she made a U-turn. She would do something to take her mind off of it all; she would go hold a baby.
When she walked into the room and saw Luke holding Lincoln, she nearly burst out laughing. “This is unbelievable.”
Looking up at her, he blinked and scrunched up his face. “Hey.” He looked just as surprised as she felt.
The nurse moved into the room behind her. “Oh, Mr. Freestone, we didn’t expect to have anyone today, but I didn’t think you’d mind someone else being here to hold Lincoln. Do you mind sharing him?”
Her heart raced and she began backing up. “Ya know, it’s … I’ll go.” She hesitated when she looked at the cute little Lincoln’s smiley face.
“Stay.” Luke stood, taking a few steps toward her. His grin widened and she could swear he was blushing. “Here, take a turn, it’s all good. He’s the sweetest little guy.” He turned to Lincoln and shook his little hand. “Aren’t you?” he said in a silly falsetto voice.
It stunned her to see him here, and even more to see him holding and talking with Lincoln.
Carefully, Luke placed Lincoln into her arms, steadying the baby. “There.” He grinned when she sniffed the scent of baby powder. “He smells good, right?”
They shared a smile, and it just felt perfect. Warmth rushed through her, and then, blinking, she turned back to Lincoln. It was crazy how much she didn’t want to smell how good Luke smelled, and how ironic it was to be standing here, holding the baby together like they were a couple.
It made her feel vulnerable and all those feelings from the other night. Breaking away from him, she moved to the rocker. “Are you okay if I sit here?”
Luke hurried to fix the rocker cushion for her before she sat. “Of course, it’s a cozy chair.” He pulled the other chair up next to her. “Are you okay if I stay?”
