The Seduction of His Wife

by Janet Chapman

  Sarah snapped open her eyes. Was that what Alex had been looking for? A kiss? Had he brought her flowers to see if maybe she had recovered from their bedroom debacle, hoping she’d give him some sign that she forgave him?

  Sarah walked to the table and picked up the vase, holding the roses to her nose. Did it really matter why he’d given them to her? They were beautiful and smelled divine, and she cherished them, no matter the reason.

  Sarah spent the next hour foolishly smiling at the roses, all because of what Alex had written: To the sweetest woman this side of the Canadian border. She carried the roses into the great room and set them on the table by her chair, turned on the television, and watched Martha Stewart pot outdoor plants to bring inside for the winter. She looked around the great room for someplace to set out a few plants. Everything had turned brown outside with the fall frosts, so maybe she should buy some flowering plants the next time she went to Greenville.

  Sarah picked up the roses and set them in her lap to enjoy their smell as she learned how to care for a Christmas cactus. And when the show was over at two o’clock, she took her vase of beautiful roses and climbed the stairs to the attic.

  Wind-driven rain battered the roof, but she was so intent on her project that she didn’t even notice. She set the vase on a nearby table, pulled a chair up to another table, then opened her pad of paper and proceeded to sketch out a pattern that would transform her beautiful flowers into a tiny quilt. But she wasn’t sending this quilt to Clara in New York. No, this one was going to hang in Sarah’s private suite at her sporting lodge.

  Chapter Eight

  O n Tuesday morning, the first day of December, Sarah found herself standing in front of a monster. The darn thing actually had a ladder built into it for climbing up into the cab, and it was such an ugly green that it looked like a seasick monster. Heck, even the tires were taller than she was.

  But what truly alarmed Sarah was that Alex was smiling at her with the same expectant smile she often saw on Tucker whenever there was trouble brewing. What was Mr. Alex Knight up to now? He had pulled her aside after breakfast this morning and asked if she would like to come to the cutting with them today, adding that maybe he would even let her drive his skidder.

  Surprised by his offer, though admittedly more curious than anything else, Sarah had said yes without even stopping to wonder why he was offering. Besides, if Delaney and Tucker could drive a skidder, she wanted to learn how.

  Which was why she was standing in a logging yard full of downed timber, suddenly uncertain as she eyed the ugly green monster. Then she looked at Alex and found him inspecting her. Sarah tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, remembering that he had told her to braid and pin it out of the way. It was dangerous work they did in the woods, and loose clothing and long hair were a no-no.

  Apparently satisfied that she passed inspection, Alex plopped a hard hat on her head that covered her eyes. He laughed and removed it, adjusted the inner band, and plopped it down again. “Climb aboard,” he said, bowing formally and gesturing with his hand. “Your chariot awaits.”

  “This,” Sarah said as she climbed the ladder, “is the ugliest chariot I’ve ever seen.”

  Alex helped her along by placing his hands on her hips to give her a lift. “This is my Mean Green Machine, lady, and don’t you insult it.”

  Sarah stopped climbing when she reached the entrance to the cab, trying very hard to ignore the heat of his hands on her hips as she looked inside. “Ah, are you sure we’ll both fit in here?”

  “Sure we will, providing you keep your elbows to yourself,” he said as he climbed up behind her.

  Oh, Lord. Now his chest was cradling her bottom, and Sarah closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. She’d been doing so well this last week about keeping her attraction to Alex in check, and here she was with his arms holding the ladder on either side of her, wrapping her in an embrace of heat and denim. Sarah scrambled into the cab, sat down in front of the steering wheel, and stared at the array of switches, dials, and levers.

  She looked at Alex, who was still standing on the ladder. “About the only thing I recognize is the steering wheel. I’ll never be able to drive this,” she muttered, her voice betraying her disappointment.

  Alex dismissed her worry with a smile of assurance. “Sure you will. I’ll teach you in no time,” he promised as he climbed into the cab. He picked her up, ignoring her squeak, and sat her back down on his lap.

  Alex groaned. And then, like any sane man, he carefully set Sarah beside him, pinning her between his thigh and the cab wall, and calmly let out his breath—until she suddenly squirmed. Alex buried his second groan in the grinding of the large diesel motor as he brought the huge skidder roaring to life.

  This may not have been one of his more brilliant ideas. Spending the morning plastered against Sarah might be more than his overactive imagination could handle. But how in hell else could he seduce a woman who had mastered the fine art of being invisible? Getting Sarah alone had been an exercise in frustration for the last six days. If she wasn’t busy running the Knight Bed-and-Breakfast Inn, she was giving Delaney sewing lessons or helping Tucker fix up his room to look like the inside of the space shuttle. And when she wasn’t being indispensable to everyone, the woman kept vanishing into thin air.

  Sometimes she went for walks in the woods, Alex knew, because he would find carefully arranged bowls of twigs, moss, birch bark, and pine cones placed throughout the house. And other times, when he’d pop home unexpectedly in the middle of the day—with an unexplainable need to make sure she hadn’t run off to Crag Island—Alex would call her for two or three minutes before Sarah came down from upstairs dressed in a heavy sweater, her cheeks red with cold and her eyes looking as guilty as a mouse in the pantry.

  So this morning he’d come up with what he thought was a brilliant way to get Sarah all to himself. Now, though, he wondered if he was brilliant or masochistic. Alex ended up groaning a hundred times that morning. It may have been only thirty-five degrees outside, but it might as well have been a hundred degrees inside the cab. The skidder had a heater, but he’d shut it off after the first half-hour. Between his raging hormones and Sarah’s squirming backside, there was no need for artificial heat. She had shed her own jacket two hours ago, and Alex could only hope she was suffering as much as he was.

  The woman was all over the place. If she wasn’t turning this way or that to see everything at once, she was sticking her head out the window to watch the trees dragging behind them, thus sticking her cute little backside in his face. Alex gritted his teeth and hauled her back into the cab for the hundredth time in as many minutes.

  She was smiling more than he’d seen her smile since he met her. And she kept asking him dozens of questions about everything, acting worse than his kids. Alex knew he was finally seeing the real Sarah—the real woman behind her eager-to-please facade. That fool Roland had to be responsible for her having learned to hide her emotions so well. It was obviously a defense she had polished so well that Alex suspected Sarah didn’t even realize she did it.

  But she was coming alive today, driving him nuts in the process. Sarah was a stunningly beautiful woman at her worst times, but today her glowing face left him speechless. She had also left his crew speechless when she had asked them one question after another during their morning break. Caught up in her own curiosity, she hadn’t noticed the way the men could only stare, not knowing exactly what to make of her. They had all solemnly tried to answer her questions but had smiled foolishly whenever she turned her back. They’d also given Alex a few envious looks.

  Not that he could blame them. Sarah’s jeans fit her like a second skin. And Alex knew exactly how thin they were, because those jeans had been burning a hole in his thigh all morning. His only saving grace with the men was that Sarah had put on her jacket when she’d gotten out of the skidder.

  Alex pulled her inside the cab yet again, this time with a stern look to stay put. Honest to God, he hadn’t
had this much trouble on Tucker’s first ride when the boy was two.

  Lunch was a repeat of the morning break, the men all sitting on downed logs in the loading yard to eat their meals. Ethan suddenly cursed. Alex followed his stare, then cursed as well. Sarah had taken off her jacket as the weak noon sun had brought the temperature up to a blistering thirty-six degrees. She was bent over the food basket, her perfectly molded fanny facing them. Alex heard a few choked coughs as coffee went down the windpipes of several men, and he grabbed Sarah’s coat and stood up to throw it over her fanny. Or her shoulders. Or her head. He wasn’t sure what he should cover, since every inch of her was enticing. He spun her around, stuffed her into the jacket, and zipped it up to her chin. “I—ah—I don’t want you to catch a cold,” he said at her questioning look.

  But when Alex thought he heard someone softly mutter the words “chest cold,” he decided lunch was over for Sarah and himself. He grabbed her hand and hauled her toward the skidder.

  Sarah smiled over her shoulder at the crew as they watched Alex drag her off. “Alex is in such a hurry because he’s going to let me drive his Mean Green Machine,” she called back.

  “Hell!” Ethan yelped.

  “No!” Paul shouted.

  Grady stepped in front of his sons. “Not one word, you understand? Don’t either of you say anything to Alex,” he commanded. And then he smiled. “He’ll find out soon enough about Sarah’s driving abilities.”

  “But dammit, Dad, that’s a skidder, not a truck. She’s going to take ten years off his life, not to mention shave all the bark off every tree we own,” Ethan argued.

  Grady beamed brighter. “Lord, I hope so. Giving Alex a go at teaching her to drive will do him, and me, a world of good.”

  The two brothers nodded, their worry turning to grins as they sat down to watch the show. They were not disappointed. They heard the engine start and the gears grind as the powerful green beast suddenly lurched forward, digging up the ground as it roared into the forest. All the men wore stunned expressions that turned to pained winces when they heard small trees snapping and saw large trees shuddering. If they listened very carefully, they could hear colorful curses scorching the air, but nobody was sure if it was Alex yelling…or the forest.

  Well, so much for that bright idea. Alex downed his fourth beer amid the swirling waters of the hot tub and pictured his excited wife in the house, likely crying her eyes out.

  God, he’d yelled at her. He’d even cursed her. Alex closed his eyes, trying to block out the images of their hair-raising ride this afternoon. The crazy woman only knew one speed, apparently, and that was full speed ahead. No matter if there were a few trees in the way—she simply drove right over them. Alex figured NorthWoods Timber had at least three new logging trails, one of them coming damn close to the lake. That was when he had finally lost it and grabbed the wheel.

  It had been the longest fifteen-mile ride home he had ever taken. Sarah had sat silently beside him in the pickup, and Alex had felt like a bigger monster than his skidder for turning her bubbling excitement into head-hanging shame. When they’d gotten home, she hadn’t even been able to look him in the eye but had walked quietly into the house.

  Damn it to hell. He’d been making such progress.

  Maybe more roses?

  Dinner was a quiet affair that night, Sarah’s glaring absence reminding everyone that all roads occasionally had bumps. Alex felt as if he’d driven into a major washout. Sarah was sitting in the great room, watching another one of those incessant how-to shows while mending shirts, saying she wasn’t hungry. Delaney and Tucker were merely pushing their food around on their plates, when they weren’t scowling at Alex.

  Grady, Ethan, and Paul were somber but understanding. Each of them had tried to teach Sarah to drive, Grady had finally admitted. No one had fared any better than Alex, but they had never reached the yelling stage. However, they had never put Sarah behind the wheel of a ten-ton skidder dragging two tons of logs through the forest.

  “We told you Sarah can’t drive,” Ethan said into the silence. “Is there any particular reason you decided to start her lessons in a skidder?”

  Alex looked down the table at his father, then at Paul, Delaney, and Tucker, before looking back at Ethan and shrugging. “I thought she just couldn’t drive on state roads because she didn’t have a license. How in heck can anyone not have the sense to steer around immovable objects instead of through them?”

  “It’s not the steering Sarah can’t get a handle on,” Paul said. “It’s the speed. She can’t seem to coordinate the two.”

  “She won’t push softly on the gas,” Ethan clarified. “She’s either got the throttle shoved all the way to the floor, or she’s slamming on the brakes and driving our faces into the dash.”

  “She’s the same with the sewing machine,” Delaney softly interjected, her cheeks tinged pink for tattling. “She keeps breaking needles because she’s always got the machine going at full speed. That’s why she does most of her sewing by hand.”

  “She drives a bike real good,” Tucker piped up. “She rides down our lane to the artery with me all the time. But she does like to go fast,” he admitted with a proud grin. “I have to pedal really hard to keep up.”

  “You need to apologize for yelling at her,” Delaney added, “because it’s not Sarah’s fault she doesn’t know how to drive. You just need to teach her.” She scowled at Ethan and Paul. “They gave up after only a few tries.”

  “Yeah,” Ethan said evenly. “She’s your wife, you teach her. But in a pickup, not a skidder.”

  Alex had had enough. He really hadn’t done anything wrong this afternoon, other than react like any normal, terrified man. He pushed away from the table with an overloud sigh and headed into the great room to straighten out the mess he’d made, with encouraging smiles from his offspring and snickers from his brothers following him through the swinging door. He quietly walked up to the television, shut it off, then walked over to Sarah and held out his hand.

  It took her a minute to look up from her mending, and then she simply stared at his outstretched hand.

  “Come for a walk with me, Sarah.”

  “I have to finish mending this shirt for Grady,” she said, looking back at her work.

  Alex gently pulled the shirt out of her grasp, set it on the table beside her, and held out his hand again, wiggling his fingers. “Your mending will be right here when you get back. I promise, Grady won’t do it himself.”

  She finally looked at him, and Alex felt a spurt of hope that the large brown eyes meeting his were not filled with shame or embarrassment but with impatience. “You’re not actually afraid of me, are you?” he asked before she could say anything, keeping his smile to himself when her chin came up. “I mean, my yelling today didn’t leave any bruises, did it?”

  She tapped the side of her head and cupped one ear toward him, her eyes guilelessly wide. “Excuse me?” she said a bit loudly. “Could you please repeat that? I seem to be deaf in my left ear.”

  Alex reached down with a bark of laughter, captured her hands, and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, brat. Let’s get out of here before Ethan and Paul realize they’re stuck with the dishes again.”

  “I don’t want them doing my dishes,” she said as Alex all but dragged her into the kitchen.

  “I’ll help,” Delaney offered, scrambling away from the swinging door and picking up her plate from the table. “I know where everything goes.” She beamed a smile at Sarah. “You and Daddy go for a nice, long walk.”

  Alex frowned as he led Sarah over to the wall of jackets. Delaney was acting a little too eager for his liking. He glanced at his family sitting at the table. Hell, they all looked too eager. Alex handed Sarah her jacket, then slipped into his own, fully aware of the five sets of expectant eyes watching them.

  Dammit, he had warned his dad and his brothers that the marriage was only temporary and had told them not to read anything into his actions concerning Sarah
. Delaney and Tucker, however, were proving to be a more delicate matter. Alex had tried, but he couldn’t seem to get through to them that Sarah would be leaving in January and that they shouldn’t get their hopes up. Tucker kept insisting Sarah was their mom now and that she would never, ever leave them. Delaney only smiled her young lady smile and silently patted Alex’s arm.

  Just when had his little girl grown up?

  “I’ll wash the pots,” Sarah said over her shoulder as Alex herded her out the door. She stopped on the porch to glare up at him. “They dented my roaster the other day.”

  He took hold of her hand. “It will still roast with a dent in it,” he said, letting her go when she wiggled her fingers to get free. “Let’s walk this way,” he suggested, taking the path around the house that led to the lake.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, falling into step beside him.

  “Just for a walk. It’s a beautiful night, and I want to see the moonlight on the lake.”

  “You didn’t have to bring me on a walk to apologize. A simple ‘I’m sorry for yelling and cursing you out’ would have been sufficient.”

  Alex stopped and faced her. “I have no intention of apologizing for anything. There’s not a man alive who wouldn’t have reacted exactly the same way. You tore up nearly two miles of woods and murdered thousands of trees, Sarah.” He turned away and started down the lawn. “It’s a miracle we’re both still in one piece.”

  “Then why didn’t you stop me?” she asked, running to catch up. She pulled him to a halt by grabbing his sleeve. “What took you so long to grab the wheel?”

  “I was frozen in horror. Hell, Sarah, all you had to do was slow down and turn the wheel whenever you came to a tree. How could you not grasp that simple concept?”

  She glared up at him, the moonlight bright enough for Alex to see her cheeks were pink with anger. She pushed on his arm as she let go of his sleeve and shoved her hands, which were fisted, into her jacket pockets. “Then if you have no intention of apologizing, why are we going for a walk?”