Teresa Hill

by Luke’s Wish

  No way, he told himself.

  She rolled her chair back so she could get away from him, but he slid across the desk until he was right in front of her, half sitting on the edge of it. He leaned over, catching her chair by its arms, then reached for her hands, instead. With one fluid motion he pulled her to him, had her plastered against him and clinging to him, this trembling mass of woman, smelling incredible and feeling like a frightened kitten that needed to be gentled to his touch and taught that she had nothing to fear from him.

  He drank in the scent of her, because she did smell very good. And she was a tiny little thing, all silky hair and shaky breaths and tears. They just kept falling.

  “Tell me,” he said again, knowing she wouldn’t feel better until she got it out.

  Her face was pressed against his chest, the contact muffling the sound as she whispered to him, “I was just talking to Abbie.”

  “Abbie?” He stroked her hair and bent down closer. “Who’s Abbie?”

  “A little girl. A nine-year-old girl. And she was crying and telling me that life just isn’t fair. Which I knew already. But why did she have to learn that at nine? Why does any kid?”

  “I don’t know, Doc.” He sighed and tightened his arms around her, because she was still trembling badly.

  He should have known this had something to do with a kid in trouble. Any woman who went to so much trouble to help little children not to be so afraid at the dentist obviously had a major soft spot where kids were concerned.

  He wondered just what this Abbie was to her. Obviously she cared about the little girl very much. “Tell me about Abbie.”

  “She lives in Seattle and I haven’t seen her in months. And I miss her so much,” Samantha whispered.

  Joe held her through the worst of it, until her sobs subsided and the trembling ceased, until he felt some warmth come back into her and then tension as she became aware of exactly where she was and who she was with.

  He felt her stiffen in his arms, felt her pull away slightly, then saw her staring at him as if she was suddenly afraid. Then she couldn’t get away fast enough. Color flooded her cheeks and she jumped back, hitting her chair. She probably would have fallen if his hands hadn’t shot out and grabbed her again.

  “Steady,” he said. “I don’t bite.”

  Warily she dried her eyes and pushed a stray hair behind her ear. She looked around the room as if she needed to reassure herself that she truly was in her own office, that this really happened.

  “I’m so sorry,” she began, then just stood there with her mouth hanging open.

  It made him think of kissing her again, which no gentleman would do right now, because that would clearly be taking advantage of her. And Joe had always thought of himself as a gentleman.

  But he was tempted. So tempted.

  Flustered, Samantha straightened her coat, then her hair again, then wiped her face dry. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Doc. It’s your office. You can cry all you want.”

  Color flooding her cheeks again, she reached for him, her fingertips brushing past his chest. “I got your shirt all wet.”

  He sucked in a breath and fought the urge to catch her hand and hold it there against him. “The shirt’s been wet before. No harm done.”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked utterly miserable and embarrassed and at a loss for anything else to say.

  Joe decided the woman was in dire need of someone to take care of her, to watch over her and fuss over her and reassure her a little. Wasn’t there anyone around to do that for her?

  He reached for her hand and held it in both of his. Her palm was flat against his, his other hand stroking the back of hers. “Who do you go home to at the end of the day, Doc?”

  “I used to go home to Felix,” she mumbled, tugging her hand from his.

  “Felix?” He certainly didn’t sound like much competition.

  “He’s a dog.”

  “A real one?” Joe asked hopefully. “Or the kind who walks on two legs?”

  She laughed a little then. “Four legs, wags his tail—a real dog.”

  “That’s it? A dog?”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t even have him anymore?”

  “No,” she said sadly.

  “No family?” He knew her father had died recently, but surely there was someone else.

  “No one,” she said, the look on her face making him want to haul her back into his arms.

  “No man in your life?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “No kids?”

  She shook her head and turned to look at the painting on the wall to the right, and Joe thought of Abbie. Who was Abbie?

  “Well, Doc, sounds like you need a friend.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, then obviously thought better of it and closed it again. He watched her waffling back and forth on just what she was going to say, watched the silence make her more and more uncomfortable.

  Finally she said, “I haven’t been in town that long.”

  “It’s a friendly town,” Joe said.

  “I’m sure it is.” She turned her wrist over, so she could see the time on that dainty gold watch of hers. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sure I’m keeping you from…something. Where’s Luke?”

  “In the waiting room. I thought I’d let him sweat it out a minute before he makes his apology. And I should warn you—my daughter’s here, too.”

  She hesitated, looking scared again. “You have a daughter?”

  He nodded. “Dani. She’s four. She’s so jealous of Luke’s glow-in-the-dark toothbrush she can hardly stand it. I promised her we’d find her one somewhere.”

  “Oh, no problem. I buy them by the case.” She put her hand into the big pockets of her white coat and pulled out a handful of stuff.

  He saw scarves in three different colors, coins, thick tongue depressors and a set of plastic teeth. Picking them up, he turned the crank and they started dancing along the desktop.

  Joe laughed, as he had this morning, while Samantha fished in the other pocket until she came up with two toothbrushes.

  “Pink or purple?” she asked.

  “Pink, definitely. What else have you got in those pockets?”

  “Tricks of the trade,” she said. “Anything to make the kids smile.”

  And then Joe simply couldn’t resist her anymore. Stepping close, tucking her hair behind her ear, then brushing his knuckles against the side of her face, he said, “Who makes you smile, Doc?”

  Her eyes got so big and so blue, and she seemed to stop breathing all together. “No one,” she said softly. “Not for a long time.”

  “I think it’s time someone did.” He brushed the pad of his thumb across her bottom lip.

  She exhaled shakily, her breath skimming across his thumb. Joe caught her face between both hands. Ready to take his time, to savor the moment, because he hadn’t wanted to kiss a woman so much in a long, long time, he started at her eyes, kissing them softly, finding them still wet from her tears. The skin of her cheek was soft, and the tip of her nose was cold. He kissed all of those spots.

  She relaxed a little against him. Then Joe lowered his mouth to hers and gently kissed her lips.

  He wasn’t doing this because he’d come in here and found her crying or because he wanted to see her smile or because the loneliness radiated from her like light shining from the lamp in the corner. He was doing it because he had to see if this kiss was anywhere near as good as he imagined it would be.

  It felt so good. Nothing had felt this good to him in the longest time. And he wanted to—

  “Dad! Dani’s bugging me!” Luke bellowed, then came charging into the room, tripping over his own two feet just inside the door and not seeming to notice anything that was going on in the room. He righted himself and then proceeded to launch into his list of complaints. “I’m making a tower with the blocks and she keeps knocking it down. And then I tried to make her leave me alone and she sta
rted to cry!”

  Joe took his time stepping away from Samantha, and he had to remind himself that he loved his son very much, even if the little urchin had the manners of a savage. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to teach Luke to knock on a closed door, to go find someone—instead of yelling—when he wanted to talk to the person or to respect anyone’s privacy.

  Samantha looked mortified.

  “Will you come’n make her leave me alone, Dad? Please?”

  “Luke, that’s a door,” Joe said, pointing it out to his son, in case Luke missed it. “It’s the door to Dr. Carter’s office, and it was closed. What does that mean you should do?”

  “But Dani was bugging me!”

  “Luke,” he warned.

  “Knock, okay? I should knock. Sorry.”

  “Don’t tell me. Tell her.” He nodded toward Samantha. “And while you’re at it—” he dug into his pocket and came up with the pretty fairy “—give her this and see if you can explain what you did and why. I’ll go find your sister and deal with her.”

  “’Kay,” Luke said miserably, sighing as he took the fairy into his hand.

  “Dani and I’ll be waiting out front,” he said, then allowed himself one more look at Samantha. Her cheeks were flushed.

  Joe winked at her, which had soft color flooding her cheeks once again and making her look even more kissable than ever.

  As he turned to go, he realized she still hadn’t told him who Abbie was or why she missed the little girl so much. And he still hadn’t managed to make Samantha smile.

  Samantha’s head was spinning, for reasons she simply couldn’t understand.

  All he’d done was kiss her. It wasn’t as though she’d never been kissed. But then, she’d never been kissed by Joe Morgan. Could it make that much difference which man did the kissing?

  Perplexed, her spinning head making her dizzy, Samantha concentrated on Luke Morgan, cute as ever and looking absolutely miserable as he stood in front of her, clutching her favorite fairy figurine to his chest.

  He didn’t say anything for the longest time, just scuffed one of his sneakers against the other and sighed big heavy sighs. Finally he held the fairy out to her.

  “I took it,” he said. “Yesterday, when I was here. But I didn’t mean to keep it. Honest, I didn’t. I just had to take it home for a little while.”

  “Why, Luke?”

  “I had to see if it was the one, if she was the fairy in the book, and she was. That’s all I had to see. I didn’t hurt her a bit. An’ I’m real sorry I took her, ’cause my dad’s so mad at me.”

  “Luke?” He was so sweet and so worried she had to fight not to smile. “Is that why you’re sorry? Because your dad found out what you did and he got mad?”

  Luke puzzled over that for a moment, as if it might be a trick question. “Well,” he admitted, “I am sorry he found out. And that he’s mad. But…I’m not s’pposed to take things that don’t belong to me. Is that what I’m s’pposed to be sorry about?”

  Samantha couldn’t help it. She smiled, then started to laugh, then felt all the tension leave her body. “I think you know what you did wrong, Luke.”

  “I really am sorry,” he said. “I liked it here and I liked you. Are you really mad at me?”

  “I think I can forgive you,” she said.

  “And you’ll still gimme my wish?” he asked earnestly.

  “Wish?”

  “You don’t have to pretend with me,” he whispered, then looked around as if to see if anyone was listening. “I know who you are.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. I recognized you from when you came to my school that day in your real clothes.”

  “Real clothes?” Oh, no. Samantha knew what was coming next.

  “You’re the tooth fairy! I know ’cause you look just like the one in my magic book. An’ I saw you do the magic, too! Tell me you’re not really mad. Tell me you’re still gonna gimme my wish.”

  Samantha got down on her knees in front of him and told herself not to ask. It was none of her business, and he wasn’t her kid. Much as she might wish for someone just like him in her life, there was no one. And she’d promised herself she’d never fall in love with another man’s kids again.

  It was too much of a risk. If she came to love Luke, as she’d loved Abbie and Sarah, then lost him, she simply wouldn’t survive it this time.

  “Please,” said the precious little boy, near tears now.

  Bracing herself, she ignored the whole argument about her magical powers and asked, “What do you want, Luke?”

  “My mom,” he said solemnly. “I want her to come back.”

  Samantha stared at him, unable to say anything.

  “Can you do it?” Luke asked with absolute sincerity. “I know you can. You have to, ’cause nobody else would.”

  Samantha shook her head, trying to clear it so she could think. “What do you mean, no one else would?”

  “Santa didn’t do it. And I wished on my birthday candles, but that didn’t work. I wished on a star and a four-leaf clover, but that didn’t work, either. But I didn’t know about you, then. I didn’t understand that the magic is real. And then I saw you do it, and I knew you were the one. I knew you could bring my mom back for me. So will you?”

  “Luke,” she began, then looked around in hopes that Joe might come back. Honestly, this wasn’t anything for her to handle. This was Joe’s son, Joe’s problem. It was none of her business.

  “I know I don’t have all the teeth yet, but I’m working on it. I thought a hundred would do it.”

  “A hundred!” She nearly shrieked. “A hundred baby teeth?”

  Luke nodded solemnly, and Samantha had to sit down. She took one of the smaller chairs pulled to the front of her desk, and Luke sat down in the other, as if they were going to negotiate some business between them here in Samantha’s office.

  “Is a hundred enough?” Luke asked. “I only have six now, but I’ve got two loose teeth. See?” He opened up his mouth and wiggled two of his teeth with his tongue. “And I know three other kids in my class who have loose teeth, too. One of ’em’s already promised me his for fifty cents and a really cool T-rex sticker I got at the zoo.”

  Samantha just sat there with her mouth hanging open, not knowing how to begin to explain this to him.

  “T-rex is a dinosaur,” Luke explained.

  “Oh, Luke,” Samantha said, then simply didn’t know what to add.

  Luke must have known something was wrong, because he looked near tears again. “You’re not gonna do it, are you?”

  “No. I mean, I’m not refusing to do it. I just… I have to talk to your father, Luke.”

  “I already asked him to bring her back, and he wouldn’t.”

  “He wouldn’t? Or he couldn’t? It’s not the same thing, Luke.”

  The little boy was crying now. Samantha got down on her knees in front of him and pulled him into her arms. Skinny little arms crept around her neck, and his tears soaked into her collar as he hung on for dear life, much in the same way she’d hung on to Joe earlier.

  She couldn’t help but think of Abbie then. Somewhere, nearly three thousand miles away, Abbie was crying, too, because she loved Samantha like a mother, and Samantha was gone. Samantha worried that there wasn’t anybody to hold Abbie when she cried, so she made her arms even tighter around Luke.

  Two kids, she thought. Two mothers gone.

  She wouldn’t judge Luke’s mother too harshly, not without hearing from the woman herself about what happened. Because Samantha knew what it was like to have a child wrenched away.

  Surely there was nothing worse in the world.

  She wondered what sort of explanation Richard had given his girls for her leaving, wondered if he’d made her out to be the bad guy in all of this. She had certainly tried not to make him the villain in front of the girls, because he and his new wife were all the girls had left.

  And now Samantha wondered what had happened between Joe M
organ and his wife. She remembered when she and Joe had talked in her office yesterday.

  “What does Luke want?” she’d asked him. “Something that’s not within your power to give?”

  Still, he hadn’t said whether he couldn’t bring Luke’s mother back or whether he didn’t want to. There was a difference. Samantha wondered why Luke’s mother might refuse to come home; that was a possibility, too, that his mother simply wouldn’t come home. And she wondered why a kid as wonderful as Luke had to be standing here in Samantha’s arms sobbing his little heart out and plotting and scheming to get his hands on a hundred baby teeth to get his mother back.

  Life was so strange, she thought. And so very sad.

  But it shouldn’t be. Especially not for little children like Luke.

  Chapter Four

  Joe waited for five minutes while Dani danced around the waiting room. In the space of those five minutes, she’d already asked him ten times about the glow-in-the-dark toothbrush. She was the most impatient creature he’d ever encountered, even more impatient than his ex-wife. And that, Joe knew, was saying something.

  He was impatient to know what was going on between Luke and Samantha, to know whether she was mad at Joe about that kiss, now that she’d had a chance to think about it.

  He wondered exactly what had possessed him to do something so impulsive, some thing so dangerous, as kissing a woman the way he had.

  He’d promised himself that he would keep his relationships with women simple and straightforward from now on. He had his kids to think about, after all. Nobody got to hurt his kids again.

  But Samantha Carter wasn’t the kind of woman he could keep away from his kids, not if he was involved with her, which he couldn’t be.

  Still, he hadn’t been able to resist trying to comfort her when she cried, hadn’t been able to keep his lips off hers when she’d been so sad and sweet, so tempting.

  Joe dropped his head into his hands.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  Joe winced at the tone of his daughter’s words. “Nothing, sweetie. Let’s go find Luke,” he said.