Coming Home for Christmas

by RaeAnne Thayne

  At the door of the vehicle, she hovered uncertainly, struck with the humiliating realization that she was stuck. She couldn’t step up into the vehicle. It simply was too high. She couldn’t move her bad leg that far and didn’t have the upper body strength to pull herself up.

  “We’ve got to move,” he growled. “Storm’s going to get stronger.”

  How could she possibly tell him she needed help? She closed her eyes, shame as cold as the wind blowing off the water.

  She could do this. Somehow. Over the last years, she had discovered stores of strength she never would have guessed she had inside her. She gripped the metal bar beside the door—the sissy handle, her dad used to call it—and tried to step up at the same time, but her foot slipped off the running board.

  Luke made a sound from the other side of the truck but came around quickly.

  “You should have said something,” he said gruffly.

  Like what? Sorry, but I have the muscle tone of a baby bird?

  Without a word, he put his hands at her waist and lifted her into the pickup as if she weighed nothing, less than a feather from that baby bird.

  It was the first time he’d touched her in seven years. The first time any man had touched her, except medical professionals.

  The contact, fleeting and awkward, still was enough to fill her with an intense ache.

  She had craved his touch once, had lived for those moments they could be together. She had loved everything about his big, rangy body, from the curve of his shoulders to the hardness of his chest to the line of dark hair that dipped to points lower.

  The memories seemed to roll across her mind, faster and faster. His mouth on hers, his hands in her hair, falling asleep with his warm skin against her.

  Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how very much she missed a man’s touch. Not just any man. This man.

  She gave a shaky breath as he closed the vehicle door. Then she settled into her seat and pulled her seat belt across with hands that trembled.

  She couldn’t do this. Eight hours alone in a vehicle with Luke Hamilton. How could she survive it?

  He climbed in and fastened his seat belt, then pulled away from Brambleberry House. As she watched her refuge disappear in the rearview window, she told herself it was only a drive. She could endure it.

  She had lived through much worse over the past seven years.

  * * *

  Luke drove at a steady pace through the falling snow, heading east on the winding road toward Portland. On summer Sunday evenings, Elizabeth knew, this road would be packed with tired, sunburned beachgoers heading back to Portland for the week ahead. Now, on a Sunday evening in December, they encountered very little traffic going in either direction.

  He said nothing, the silence in the vehicle oppressive and heavy. With each mile marker they passed, she felt as if the weight of the past pressed down harder.

  “How did Elliot find me?” she finally had to ask again.

  He sent her a sideways look before jerking his gaze back to the road. “You will have to ask him. I don’t know all the details.”

  “I’m still having a hard time believing he and...Megan are together. Last I knew, she was still grieving Wyatt Bailey. Now...you tell me she’s marrying his brother.”

  “She grieved for Wyatt for a long time. But I guess people tend to move on eventually.”

  He said the words in an even tone but guilt still burned through her. She had earned his fury through her choices.

  “What is Megan up to? Is she...still running the inn?”

  He didn’t answer her for a full moment, focused on driving through a tight series of curves. Finally, he glanced over. “Don’t expect that we’re going to chat the entire drive to Haven Point.” His jaw was firm, his hands tight on the steering wheel. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want anything to do with you. In fact, I’m going to pretend you’re not here, which isn’t that hard since you haven’t been for seven years.”

  She folded her hands in her lap, telling herself she couldn’t let his words wound her. “You don’t want to know...what happened or why I left?”

  “I especially don’t want to hear that. I don’t give a damn, Elizabeth. After all these years, I can honestly say that. You can spill all your secrets, spin all your explanations, to the district attorney.”

  She wanted to argue but knew it would be pointless. Her words would tangle and she wouldn’t be able to get them out anyway. “Fine. But I’m not going to...sit here in silence.”

  She turned on the radio, which was set to the classic rock she knew he enjoyed. She was half tempted to turn the dial to something she knew would annoy him—Christmas music, maybe—but she didn’t want to push.

  After several more moments of tense silence, the leaden weight of everything still unsaid between them, she settled into the corner and closed her eyes. She intended only to escape the awkwardness for a moment, but the day’s events and the adrenaline crash after the shock of seeing him again seemed to catch up with her.

  She would never have expected it, but somehow she slept.

  * * *

  Elizabeth.

  Here.

  Sleeping next to him. Or at least pretending to—he couldn’t be sure. Her eyes were closed, her breathing even and measured, but he couldn’t tell if she was genuinely asleep or simply avoiding conversation. He couldn’t really blame her for that, since he’d shut her down hard when she tried to talk to him.

  She was close enough he could touch her if he wanted—which he absolutely didn’t.

  His hands tightened again on the steering wheel. At this rate, his fingers would stiffen into claws by the time they reached home.

  Since the moment Elliot had handed him that piece of paper with a single name and an address, he had imagined this moment, when he would see her again.

  His whole world had been rocked by the revelation that she wasn’t dead. Months later he still hadn’t recovered. He had done his best to put it aside, figuring if she wanted him to know where she was, she would have told him herself.

  After finding out about the district attorney’s plans the day before, that choice had been taken out of his hands.

  He had to retrieve her and take her back to Idaho so he could clear his name. He had been so focused on the task at hand, though, that he hadn’t given the rest of it much thought.

  The grim reality was sinking in now. He would have to spend several hours trapped in a vehicle with the wife who had walked out on him and their children without a backward look.

  Or had she looked back? He had to wonder. If she hadn’t looked back, why would she continue returning to Haven Point to check up on her children?

  He thought of her the last time he had seen the mystery woman, at a play Cassie’s school had performed for Halloween. Cassie and a couple of her friends had played a trio of witches trying to prove they weren’t as bad as everyone thought. He remembered seeing the intriguing stranger—how again hadn’t he guessed she was Elizabeth in disguise?—sitting in the back row, clapping enthusiastically.

  That jarring information seemed again to twist everything he thought he knew about her.

  He cringed, remembering he’d actually had the wild idea at the play that the next time he saw her, he should strike up a conversation to at least ask her name and what child she was there to support.

  What if he’d done it, walked up to her and tried to talk to her without knowing she was his own freaking wife?

  He felt like a fool.

  He released a breath, fighting down the resurgence of anger.

  How was he supposed to endure several more hours of this proximity with her?

  He could handle it. For the sake of his children, he had no choice. He had to clear his name. A cloud of suspicion followed him everywhere he went in Haven Point and it was long past time he shed
it.

  He knew Cassie and Bridger heard the whispers. While he had his undeniable supporters, with his sister and her friends chief among them, plenty of people in Haven Point still believed he had murdered his wife and dropped her body down an abandoned mine shaft or carried it up into the mountains where it had never been found.

  Hell, the new Lake Haven district attorney was so convinced Luke had done just that, she was willing to press charges above the protests of nearly everyone in local law enforcement.

  He had to move on. He had known where Elizabeth was for months. He could have hauled her back to town long ago and this whole thing would have been done, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to face her.

  He hadn’t been ready, he supposed, and had needed time to absorb the new reality that she hadn’t taken her own life—she had only chosen to walk away from the one they had created together.

  The winds began to blow harder as he left Portland, swirling sleet and snow against the windshield. It was taking most of his concentration to keep the vehicle on the road, yet Elizabeth slept on soundly, face tucked against the leather seat as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

  Once, she had been the best thing in his life, the one who made him laugh and see the joy and beauty around him. Sometimes he felt as if he had loved her forever, but it hadn’t been until the summer after her junior year of college that he’d really known her as anything more than one of his younger sister’s friends.

  They had been at a party, some Fourth of July thing at the lake. He hadn’t wanted to go, too busy working construction and studying for the tests he needed for his general contractor license to take the time, but a friend had dragged him along.

  She had worn a light blue swimming suit with stars on it, he remembered, and her smile had been brighter than the hot summer sun glinting off the lake.

  He had fallen hard, right then and there.

  He had dated plenty of women. He’d been twenty-five, not an innocent, but none of them had been as funny or as smart or as openhearted as Elizabeth Sinclair. Somehow that night while fireworks exploded over the lake, he had tumbled in love with her. To his everlasting astonishment, she had fallen right back.

  They had married a year later, after she graduated, and he still remembered the magic of their first months of wedded bliss. They thought they could do anything, could conquer the whole world. She was working as a secretary/receptionist at an insurance office in Shelter Springs while he had continued working construction. Before they married, they had saved up for a down payment on a house and made an offer on the little house on Riverbend Road in need of serious repairs.

  Together, they had started fixing up the place, and everything had been exciting and wonderful. For the first time in his life, he felt as if fate had dealt him a pretty good hand. They had even started working toward having a family. Neither of them wanted to wait.

  Then her parents had been killed in a tragic boating accident on Lake Haven, her mother falling out of a fishing boat and her father drowning while he tried to rescue her.

  Everything had changed.

  Elizabeth had gone from happy and loving and generous to lost and grieving and withdrawn in a blink.

  She had been dealing with hard things. He understood that. The deaths of her parents had hit her hard, knocking the legs out from under her. The Sinclairs had adored their only daughter and she had loved them back. They had been a warm and loving family, one of the first things that had drawn him to her.

  He had tried to support her, to say all the things he thought she needed to hear, to simply hold her when she needed it. None of it had been enough. Instead of turning toward him, she had turned away.

  A month after her parents died, she found out she was two months pregnant with Cassie. She had burst into tears when she told him, not happy tears but grief-stricken that she could no longer share the joyous news with her parents, two people she loved so dearly.

  Though he knew she tried to be happy about the pregnancy, to compartmentalize her pain over losing her parents and focus instead on the impending birth, he sensed she was only going through the motions. Her smiles had been too bright, her enthusiasm not quite genuine.

  He thought the birth of their daughter would jolt her out of the sadness she couldn’t shake. Instead, what he understood now was postpartum depression had hit her hard.

  Treatment and therapy had helped, but Elizabeth never quite returned to the woman she’d been the first year of their marriage.

  Time would heal, the therapists said, and he held on to that, praying they could find each other again once things returned to normal.

  When she told him she wanted to have another baby, he resisted hard, but eventually she had worn him down and convinced him things would be different this time, that it would be the best thing for their marriage.

  It hadn’t been. The next two years were hell. This time the postpartum hit with harsh ferocity. After Bridger was born, she had days when she couldn’t get out of bed. She lost weight and lost interest in all the things she usually enjoyed.

  They went to round after round of specialists, but none of their therapies seemed to make a difference. By the time she disappeared, when Cassie was almost three and Bridger less than a year, he couldn’t leave her alone with the children. He hired someone to stay with them through the day and took care of them all night.

  He had lost his wife long before she actually disappeared.

  Anger and misery were a twisted coil in his chest as he drove east through the increasing snow along the Columbia River.

  He wanted those early days back, that heady flush of love they had shared, with an ache that bordered on desperation. Right now they didn’t even seem real, like a home movie he had watched of somebody else’s life.

  He couldn’t have them back. All he could do now was move forward: clear his name, get the divorce and let her walk away for good this time.

  It was what he wanted and what his children needed.

  For their sake and his own, he couldn’t let this unexpected attraction he felt for Elizabeth 2.0 get in the way.

  Chapter Three

  Sleep had become her sanctuary over the past seven years.

  Here, in dreams, Elizabeth could escape into the life she ached to recapture. She was free of the pain that had become her constant silent companion, the grinding headaches that could hit out of the blue, the muscle spasms that left her in tears. Especially the terrifying seizures that she had to fight off with every ounce of her strength.

  She could be with her family again. Cassie, Bridger. Luke. While she was sleeping, she could become the best version of herself, the mother she had wanted to be. She sat on the floor and played with her children; she held them in her lap and rocked them to sleep; she could read to them for hours on end.

  Though she did have the occasional nightmare, for the most part, sleep was just about the best thing in the world, and she loved sliding into her bed in her room by the big windows at Brambleberry House, pulling the soft blankets up around her shoulders and escaping into the heavenly fantasy.

  Alas, morning always came. While she might have liked to hibernate, nestled under the covers for months where her mind could live in that joyful fantasy world, her body had pesky physical needs, like food and drink and medication. Plus, she unfortunately had to go outside of the house and work at a job that could provide enough income to pay for those necessities.

  The transition was never easy. Her subconscious fought the return to reality, trying to squeeze out as much REM as possible. She always awoke slowly, reluctantly. This time, the journey to consciousness seemed harder than usual.

  Her eyes fluttered open. For a few seconds, she couldn’t remember where she was or why she had this vague sense of dread surrounding her. She sensed movement but didn’t know where she was going. It was dark. She was a passenger in a moving vehicl
e. Outside the darkened windows, she saw the gleam of snow in headlights.

  Panic, thick and hard, hit her then, and she suddenly couldn’t breathe. Another night. Another storm. Searing, devastating pain.

  Sometimes the idyllic refuge of her dreams could shift to a nightmare in an instant.

  A cry escaped her and the sound of her own voice dragged her further to the other side of sleep.

  “Easy. It’s okay.”

  Odd. What was Luke’s voice doing in her nightmare? It was a discordant, jarring note in the otherwise familiar setting. He hadn’t been there that night. She had left him and their children.

  Reality hit her like a fist punching through the windshield. She opened her eyes the rest of the way, turned in her seat and found him through the darkness, hard and unforgiving as he drove through the storm.

  “Luke.”

  He shifted his eyes briefly from the road. “Were you expecting someone else when you woke up? Hoping you could open your eyes and find out I was just a bad dream?”

  He was a good dream. Always the best dream.

  “No. Sorry.” She sat up, trying to ignore a wicked cramp in her leg.

  “Where are we?”

  “About a hundred or so miles past Portland. You slept a few hours. I need to pull off at the next town for gas.”

  He was driving slowly through the storm, she could tell by the trees inching past the window. She could see few other cars on the road.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said, panic surging again. “There’s no...traffic coming from the other direction.”

  “I know.” He kept his gaze focused on the road. Now she noticed his knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Was that from her presence or from the storm? Or both?

  “Maybe...maybe it’s an accident or something else has closed the freeway.”