Mistletoe on Main Street (series t/k)

by Olivia Miles

  The waiter appeared with their order and quickly left. Grace took a sip of her drink, feeling her spirits lift with the sweet taste. Luke left his mug of beer untouched, sitting between them on the table. He looked hunched, haunted, like a man with a burden he couldn’t shed. This wasn’t the Luke she knew—but then, who was the person she thought she knew so well?

  “Why do you think about it?” she sighed. She peered at him, feeling her face crumble at the memory. “What does it matter now?”

  Luke shook his head, glancing away. “It shouldn’t matter. I know that. But it does. I… I’ve thought about it over the years, playing back the things you said, the look on your face.” He huffed out a breath, looking down at his tented fingers. “I wondered if I made a mistake.”

  Grace almost didn’t dare speak. Everything she had hoped and wished for was finally being spoken, but the joy of the moment had come years too late.

  “Then you shouldn’t have gotten married,” she said firmly.

  Anguish pulled at Luke’s rugged features, and Grace fought back a flicker of guilt. Did he think he could say these things to her, play with her heart, make her doubt every decision she had made for the past five years without some kind of price?

  No, she wasn’t going to let him off that easy. If he had any doubts, he should have voiced them then. Or kept his mouth shut now. She didn’t like living a life based on woulda-coulda-shouldas. It only led to remorse and regret, and the longing to change things that could never be changed.

  Her heart wrenched when she thought of the time that had passed, the pain she had suffered. She had stayed away from this town, kept her family at arm’s length, and now he was telling her that he had always wondered if he had made a mistake? Well, it was too late to go back and change it.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have,” he surprised her by saying.

  She eyed him across the table. “I thought you said you loved Helen. You loved her so much you rejected me, sent me away.”

  “I couldn’t trust you anymore, Grace,” he hissed, leaning closer across the table until Grace could see the blue in his eyes flash. “Don’t you see? You left me first. You were determined to move out of this town, claiming you needed something more. You wanted a life I couldn’t give you.”

  “I came back, Luke,” she insisted, meeting him halfway across the table, glaring into his eyes.

  “And what did you expect me to do?” he asked, pulling back. He stared at her, his breath heavy. “Believe that you suddenly had a change of heart?”

  She stared at him for a long, silent moment, finally nodding her head. “Yes.” It was so simple; none of it had to turn out the way it had.

  Luke shook his head. “You say that now, but I know you, Grace. You would have been miserable if you had stayed.”

  She inhaled sharply, holding his stare. She had no way of knowing if he was right or not. She’d like to think she could have stayed, that she had meant it when she told him she had made a mistake and that he was worth sacrificing everything else. Still, there was no way of knowing if she would have lived to regret her decision, if she would have felt trapped in this town, stifled. Bored.

  Now it was different. She had lived the city life for five years, gotten that thrill of excitement out of her system. She had made a success of herself. And a failure. She had seen where it all left her in the end.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said softly. She shook her head, shrugging. “I don’t know. All I know is that I missed you, and it killed me to see how quickly you had moved on. Six months was all it took for you to get over me.”

  “You have no idea how much you crushed me when you left, Grace. I thought it was going to be you and me. For life.”

  Grace looked down at her Special Snowflake, feeling like the name was taunting her, reminding her of a choice she had lived to regret. Boring town. She’d yearned for more, and look where it had gotten her. It really could have been them. She really could have had it all. She didn’t know at the time what she had then. Everything that mattered.

  “Then why Helen?”

  Luke tossed his hands in the air. “With Helen, I knew I was with someone who wanted the same things I did. Someone who was going to be satisfied with the life we shared. I didn’t have to worry about not being good enough.”

  “You were good enough,” Grace said. “You… are good enough.”

  He stared at her, his eyes roaming her face, searching for something she couldn’t quite determine. The truth maybe. It killed her to think he didn’t trust her anymore. That she had broken the bond that they had shared for so long.

  “Why didn’t you ever ask me to marry you?” she asked. It was a question she had mulled over for a long time. They had always talked about a future, of course, and they were young enough at the time that marriage didn’t seem urgent. At least not to her. “We were together for so long and then, within months of meeting Helen, you proposed to her.”

  His mouth thinned. “Do you want to know why I asked Helen to marry me so quickly? Because I learned from you that when you find someone who you can care about, you don’t let her go.”

  “You let me go,” she retorted.

  “Yes,” he said. “I did. And I also decided to come back to you.”

  A gasp lodged in her throat. “What?”

  Luke rubbed a hand over his face. He looked suddenly ashen, drawn. As if he had aged ten years since they had sat down. His beer remained untouched and he pushed it to the side, heaving a deep breath.

  “I wasn’t a good husband to Helen, and it’s something I’ve had to live with since her death.” He stopped and stared at the table, and Grace could see the labored rise and fall of his chest. “I thought I loved her, and I did, I did love Helen.” He paused. “But maybe I didn’t love her enough.”

  Grace narrowed her eyes. “Go on.”

  “There was a part of me that always wondered what life would have been like if I had taken the other path.” He looked up at her. “If I had gone back to you that day you came to my house.”

  Grace tipped her head. “That’s a destructive way of thinking.” She should know.

  “Yes. It is.” He took a sip of his beer and set it back on the table. “I think it’s part of the reason I’m having so much trouble letting go. I—I betrayed Helen.”

  Grace squinted at him. “Betrayed her? How?”

  “Helen and I had a life, and for a while, I was content. I had my job, the house, my family close by—”

  “Everything you wanted,” she pointed out. “Everything you would have lost if you had moved to New York with me.”

  “Everything I thought I would have lost,” he said. “Then, after a while, I started to realize that I had lost something. I lost you, Grace.”

  Grace could feel the blood coursing through her veins, and she stared at him, barely able to believe what she was hearing and certainly not daring herself to speak.

  “Things with Helen weren’t going well that last year of our marriage. I was busy with my job and she was busy working on a new business idea. She was very artistic. She liked making clothes. Designing them. That type of thing.”

  Grace frowned and something deep within her felt sorry for Helen. She hated this woman by default, the woman who had won Luke, the woman who slept in his bed and could call him her own. She didn’t even know Helen, and now she felt like a real person, with real interests. She might have even liked her, been friends, had the circumstances been different.

  “Something wasn’t there anymore with us,” he continued. “It was like we were on two different paths, friends more than…” He stopped himself. “I blamed myself for it. I wondered if I really loved her, if I had ever loved her. I wondered if she was the one for me, if I had married in haste or…” He lowered his gaze. “Married the wrong person.”

  He huffed out a breath and locked her eyes, and Grace waited for him to continue, her heart thundering. “I decided to see for myself, erase the doubts. I tracked you down, to see if I
had made a mistake in believing that you wouldn’t have really stuck around.”

  Grace’s mind whirled, racing with possibilities she couldn’t even count. When had this been? What phase in her life had she been in at that point? Was she already with Derek? What would she have said if he had knocked on her door, if she had opened it and seen him standing there? Luke. Her Luke.

  “You never came,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to come without having some kind of discussion with Helen. It felt too underhanded, too… sly. Instead, I was going to confront her and ask for a separation.”

  Grace furrowed her brow in confusion. “But you never did.”

  “I couldn’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  A heavy silence settled over the table and the sound of Christmas music filled the gap, like a mocking reminder of their less than cheerful conversation, and all the joy they should be feeling but couldn’t. Luke stared at the table, his jaw set, his brow furrowed. Finally, he looked up, his eyes locking with hers. “Because the morning I knew I had to do it, I took a long walk, to clear my head, to sort out everything I would say to her. And when I came home—” He kept his gaze fixed squarely on Grace, and she could see his chest rising with each heavy breath.

  “I couldn’t tell her,” he said. “Because when I walked into the room to tell her, she was gone.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  Luke waited for Grace to say something. To tell him what a monster he was, what a horrible husband he had been to his wife. Her silence was much worse.

  “So now you know.” He reached for his beer and took a long, hearty sip. He had kept these feelings bottled up for years, telling no one, perpetuating a lie and feeling increasingly disgusted with himself. Now the truth was out, though it didn’t bring any relief. Not that he had expected it to. “I betrayed Helen when she needed me the most. She died never knowing the truth.”

  Grace frowned. “I think she died believing she had your love. And she did.”

  He stared at her. He hadn’t expected that.

  “I was unfaithful to her, Grace. Emotionally.” Didn’t she get it? Didn’t she see it? Grace knew him better than anyone. His feelings for her were part of this big, sticky mess. If anyone could set him straight on this matter, it was her. She alone could tell him he had been foolish, he had wasted his heart and been cruel. How could she find any excuse for what he had done?

  “Unfaithful is a pretty extreme word in this instance.”

  “I had feelings for someone else,” he insisted, and she inhaled sharply, breaking his stare.

  When she looked at him again, she spoke cautiously. “You and I have a shared history. A long one. That can be a powerful thing. It doesn’t just go away.”

  He shook his head. “I hadn’t made peace with my past. For some reason I was compelled to find closure.”

  “She didn’t know that,” Grace countered. “She might have known you were having problems, but she didn’t know about any feelings you might have had for me.” She shifted her eyes on the last word. “You said yourself that you were going to tell her. You didn’t have the chance. Isn’t it better that way?”

  No, no it wasn’t better that way. The last thoughts he had of his wife were of leaving her. He had walked through the front door, calling her name, telling himself he would finally come clean with himself, with her. He would clear the air of the past, confront his demons, and then he would know for sure if he could move on with Helen or not.

  “The last conversation I planned to have with her was to tell her I wanted to leave her,” he explained. “What kind of man does that make me?”

  “I don’t know. Human? I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Luke.”

  “She died never knowing I had strayed, never knowing what my real intentions were.” His gut tightened with self-hatred. “She died living a lie, and I was the one who created it. How cruel is that?”

  “Relationships are complicated, Luke. You and I both know that.” Grace gave him a small smile, but her eyes were sad, pleading. “I feel partly responsible for the way you’ve let this haunt you.”

  “You? Why?”

  She shook her head, gazing blearily into the distance. “If I had never come back that day, never kissed you or questioned you about marrying her, you never would have had a reason to doubt your feelings for her.”

  He swallowed hard. “I guess not.”

  She pulled her bottom lip over her top, studying the table. “I’m sorry for that, then.”

  “Don’t be,” he said quickly. “You didn’t know. You came back and I—I pushed you away. Then I wondered… A part of me always wondered, Grace. I was never going to find peace with this situation or my decision, and so I was left to imagine alternate outcomes. What life would have been like if I had asked you to stay that day. What life could have been like if I had gone to New York with you in the first place.”

  She frowned at this. “That’s sort of how I felt once I got there,” she said with a lift of her eyebrow, and Luke felt his stomach roll over.

  “I always figured you never looked back,” he said.

  She snorted. “Tried to never look back is more like it. Especially after…” Her voice trailed off, but he knew. After that day. The day she had come back for him.

  “I thought of you a lot, Grace,” he said softly. “Too much, I guess. It’s why I read all your books. It was my only connection to you.”

  A shadow fell over her face. “I don’t like to talk about my books anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  Her eyebrows drew together. Her mouth was a thin, grim line. “I went after my dream. I sacrificed everything for it. And it all came crashing down.”

  “Oh, now,” he said, reaching out to take her hand. She flinched as his fingers grazed her smooth skin, but she didn’t pull away. He patted it twice, fighting the urge to take it in his, lace his fingers through hers the way he used to. “So the last one didn’t do as well as the others. It happens. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “You should talk.”

  He grinned. “Touché.”

  After a pause she said, “There is something I don’t understand, though.”

  He swallowed the remains of his beer. “What’s that?”

  “Helen died two years ago. You were planning on coming to see me that day. Why didn’t you come after?”

  Rubbing a hand over the stubble on his chin, he looked at the far wall, where a woman inserted a coin into an old-fashioned jukebox and then began swinging her hips to a corny Christmas tune. A man, presumably her boyfriend, jostled his way to her side, and they fell into soft laughter as they moved to the beat of the music, the woman crooning along to the words. An oldie but goodie. Helen had liked that song, he thought, closing his eyes briefly.

  Dragging his eyes back to Grace, he found her expression primed, curious. He drew a breath, letting it out with force. He had been waiting for this. It was the question anyone would have asked. The question he himself had denied. “I wasn’t emotionally faithful to Helen while she was alive,” he said. “It didn’t seem right to betray her after her death.”

  It was easier to blame Grace, to think of her as the temptress, the woman who had a permanent place in his heart that should have only belonged to Helen. If he could banish Grace and any thought of her from his life, he wouldn’t have to be reminded of how much he had failed Helen in the end.

  “So you were going to let it go then?” she asked. “Just pretend you and I never meant anything to each other?”

  Luke shrugged. “Guess so.”

  Grace nodded softly. “I assume that me showing up in town this week hasn’t helped matters.”

  Luke spared a wry grin. “Not really. If anything, it’s brought everything to the surface. This time of year is always tough for me,” he added, clearing his throat.

  Grace sighed and reached down for her coat, pulling it around her shoulders as she slid one arm into the
sleeve, followed by the other. She stared at him, the anger he had so recently seen replaced with sadness. Affection, if he didn’t know better. The look of an old friend who you could still count on, no matter how many years had passed.

  “So you’re really sticking around then?” he asked, his pulse stalling on the question. As much as it pained him to see her, he couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving again, moving on with life, going on without him.

  “I don’t know for sure yet,” she said. “I’ve realized that I’m needed here. And it feels good to be needed.”

  “You always did like to have a purpose.”

  “Well, I don’t have much purpose in New York these days,” she said with a brittle smile.

  Luke slid his empty beer glass around the table, swirling the condensation that formed in its path. He didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t trust himself to speak. He wanted to tell her to never go back, but the man in him that had always been there knew that when it came to Grace, he never wanted to be the person who would stand in the way of her dreams.

  So she’d had a bump in the road. He knew Grace, and he knew that if she went back to New York, eventually she’d land on her feet again.

  “I can keep my distance if that will make it easier,” she said, looking at him.

  It was what he wanted, what he needed, but somehow, hearing her offer it, his heart seized. She was right there, within his reach, and he couldn’t let her slip for a third time.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s fine. This is your town as much as it is mine.”

  He gave a grim smile as she dipped her chin once in understanding and then slid out of the booth. She hesitated at the table, her green eyes bright as they latched onto his. Her brown hair fell around her shoulders in loose waves, and she brushed a strand from her collar, heaving a breath.

  “Just so you know, I would have said yes.”

  His breath caught. He was so jarred from the silent pleasure of absorbing her beauty that it took him a split second to connect her words with the meaning.