The guilt about leaving him that way had been an ever-present gnawing in her stomach.
She drew in a breath, held it and let it out slowly, then made a vow. Before she left this island, she’d apologize for leaving him with just a letter. It was long overdue.
CHAPTER FIVE
December 24
A couple of hours past dawn, Samuel stood in his library, bracing an arm on the window frame, swearing under his breath at the scene outside. Last night’s summer storm hadn’t died down. Instead it had picked up in energy and invited some friends over for the party—wind lashing everything in its path, rain beating down so hard he couldn’t see beyond the garden. No one was coming or going to the island today, maybe even a few days.
His gut clenched as tight as a fist.
Maddy wasn’t leaving.
Feeling like a caged lion, he pushed away from the window and prowled around the bookshelf-lined room. Two hours sleep wasn’t enough to fortify him for what was ahead. His feet led him back to the window and the irrefutable proof of his impending doom.
And that it was happening on Christmas Eve? That was the icing on the cake. The worst things in his life always happened at Christmas.
Two knocks came from the open door behind him. His shoulders stiffened but he didn’t turn. “The helicopter’s not coming,” he said.
“I know.” She sighed. “I just spoke to them. Apparently, the weather bureau thinks the bad weather has set in for a few days.”
Despite having suspected the same, having it confirmed made him swear under his breath again.
“Samuel,” she said almost hesitantly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to impose myself as an uninvited house guest.”
He coughed out a laugh as he swung to face her. “You said you weren’t leaving until I signed the papers, even if it took a year.”
“True, but you did sign. You kept your side so I should be out of your hair.” She drifted across to the window to gaze out past him to the scene he’d been watching only minutes earlier. “Now I’m here, eating your food, forcing you to accommodate me.”
He pressed his fingers to his pounding temples. He didn’t care about the damn food. He cared about surviving more hours—maybe days—wanting her so much, having her so near, without imploding into a messy fireball of need.
“We need a plan,” he said, leaning back against the cool wall. A survival plan, as essential as any fire evacuation plan.
She turned to face him. “Like who cooks?”
“Like who spends time in what room.” Maybe he could avoid seeing her more than occasionally passing each other in the hall, and just maybe that would be enough to stem the tide of his desire. He shook his head. That plan had two too many maybes for his liking.
“Has it really come to that between us, Samuel?” she asked softly.
“You can ask that?” he growled, incredulous. “You want a divorce to marry someone else. And you think we can act like best friends on a weekend away?”
She flinched. “Best friends might be too much, but surely we can spend a couple of days in each other’s company and remain polite?”
Was she really as indifferent to him as she appeared? After all they’d shared, all they’d lost, she was prepared to sit around and share small talk until the weather cleared?
Then an awful thought hit.
Had she always loved less than he had?
She’d been the one to stop the kiss last night, to walk away from him three years ago, to want to move on and remarry…. The realization was like a stake to the heart and he had to work at staying upright.
“Are you okay?” she asked, taking a step toward him then stopping. “You look a little pale.”
He cleared his throat and steeled his spine. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about making a plan—I’ll be writing in my office upstairs all day.” He headed for the door and paused at the threshold. “Make yourself at home.”
Maddy watched Samuel leave then dropped onto the window seat. Something had just happened between them but she had no idea what. One minute they’d been talking—okay, it had verged on an argument—but at least it had been real. Then he’d shut down. She thought back to her words before he’d changed…. She’d asked if they could be polite while she was stuck here. Then it was like a switch had been flicked off inside him.
Part of her longed to follow him, to see if he was all right. But that was what a wife would do. Now he’d signed the divorce papers, she no longer had the right to call herself his wife. And he’d just made it clear he didn’t even want to be in the same room as her. A plan, he’d called it. Hot tears pricked at her eyes but she blinked them away. She’d made her choice.
Restless with memories assaulting her from all sides, she wandered around the house for almost two hours, accompanied by Lochie. There were lovely walks on the island, plenty of things to do outside, but not in this weather. When she’d visited together with Samuel years ago, they’d spent their indoor time in the master bedroom, taking their pleasure together, needing no other entertainment than each other. Now he was upstairs working and she had nothing to fill her time but haunting memories and self-recrimination for how badly she’d handled things from the moment she’d decided to leave him three years ago.
As she entered the sunken living room, a cupboard in the corner caught her eye. She’d used it for some of her camera equipment. Her working cameras had been at their house and she’d packed them when she left, but she’d always kept an older camera and some assorted equipment on the island. After leaving, she hadn’t asked Samuel to forward her things on—it had seemed rude when she’d left the way she had.
She opened the cupboard and her digital camera and equipment were sitting there on the shelf just as she’d left them, albeit with added dust and cobwebs. Crouching down she took everything out then sat back on her haunches to examine it all. The case had kept the camera itself free of the dust and it looked as if it was still in working order.
She turned it on, but it had been too much to hope for that the battery had lasted. She flipped it over, took the battery out and popped it in the charger. Then she checked the spare batteries—the second one had enough charge left for her to see the photos in the memory. Her insides trembled as she flicked through, finding shots of Samuel. Samuel sitting on the couch, smiling his wolfish, hungry smile; Samuel writing at his computer, barely aware she was in the doorway; Samuel laughing, his gaze full of love for her.
Tears filled her eyes and, even as she tried to blink them back, spilled over and ran down her cheeks. Samuel stared back at her from the camera’s viewer, a lazy invitation in the tilt of his eyebrow. She flicked past it and was confronted with a candlelit dinner for two set on a table in the gazebo, a small pile of presents beside her plate. Her twenty-fourth birthday. Samuel had pulled out all the stops, from cooking a three course meal, to hiring a string quartet to serenade them as they ate.
And then other memories that weren’t captured on film resurfaced. The day they’d met—she’d been hired to take publicity photos for the jacket of his next book, but when he’d opened his front door, something had sparked between them. Something hot and all-consuming. After the shoot they’d gone to dinner, then back to his place, and, in a whirlwind of passion and laughter, they’d become husband and wife only months later. She’d been drunk on love.
To survive the time she’d been apart from him she’d avoided remembering moments like these, so their full force was hitting her square in the chest.
Determined to not be drawn under by memories that could only make the situation more difficult, she grabbed the battery that had been charging and switched it with the fading one in the camera. It wasn’t fully charged yet, but she needed to fill her mind with new images, and the quickest way to do that was through a camera lens.
She pointed it at the window and took a few shots of trees as they bent and twisted into shapes that caught her eye. At the edge of her vision, she saw a large dark shape move and, on instinc
t, turned and snapped. Lochie. She watched him for a moment as he sniffed a rain-drenched tree before relieving himself on the trunk.
Maybe Lochie had the right idea. It wasn’t raining at the moment—the clouds were still ominous above them, but there was a small break in the weather, perhaps while the storm regrouped. And Lochie was taking full advantage, trotting from tree to tree, investigating the changes the storm had wrought.
Before she could think better of the idea, she was in the mudroom, thrusting her arms through the sleeves of an all-weather jacket and heading for the beach.
CHAPTER SIX
Samuel scrubbed his hands through his hair, turning from his laptop to look through the tall window facing the turbulent ocean. This was ridiculous. The book he was writing had a deadline a few days after New Year and he needed to fix the ending, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Maddy. About that kiss.
About his realization that he’d always loved her more than she’d loved him.
His stomach lurched, as if ready to bring up the toast he’d forced down for breakfast. Had she fallen out of love during their marriage? Was that why it was so easy for her to walk away?
As if he’d conjured her from his thoughts, he saw her walking the track down to the small beach, Lochie at her heels. His heart missed a beat. What in hell did she think she was doing? The rain might have paused for a moment, but that wouldn’t last long and then she’d be caught outside in the midst of the next storm that rolled in.
“Damn it,” he muttered as he strode through the house, grabbed a raincoat from a hook in the mudroom, and followed her down to the beach.
When he reached her, she was standing on the wet, white sand, camera pointed out at the stormy sea, her hair whipping around her face.
She turned suddenly and he knew he was in the camera’s viewer. Her eyes lifted from the small screen, up to meet his gaze and he forgot everything he’d meant to say, standing there like a statue, mesmerized. She was beautiful—her delicate cheekbones, her almond-shaped eyes, her full bottom lip. But it was more than that. It had always been more than merely her beauty for him. She was so full of life—the air around her seemed to sparkle with her energy.
“Did you need me?” she asked.
He cleared his throat. “No, I was worried you might get caught when the storm picked up speed again.”
“I wasn’t going further than this.”
He nodded, acknowledging the end of their conversation. She was safe, so he had no reason to stay. To be near her. And yet, he couldn’t make himself leave.
He glanced at the camera in her hands. “That’s your old camera, isn’t it?”
She turned it over, examining it from different angles. “I found it in the cupboard.”
The sight of her holding a camera was so familiar that his chest ached. Many of his memories of their marriage involved Maddy with a camera—her dragging him outside because the light was beautiful and she needed a shot of the rocky shore, or Maddy taking endless photos of him when he was doing nothing more than washing the dishes or watching television. He hadn’t minded, it was part of who she was and he’d looked forward to the day her unique perspective that showed in her photos took the world by storm. She’d been working as a commercial artist until she was ready for an exhibition, but that should have happened long before now.
He frowned. “Why did you give up your dreams of an exhibition of your work?”
She shrugged one shoulder, as if it was no big deal. “I couldn’t support myself, so I had to be practical and focused on my career as a commercial artist.”
“So you gave up on yourself and your talent as well as giving up on our marriage?” He cocked an eyebrow, waiting, challenging.
“That’s not fair, Samuel,” she said, her voice low and deadly. “We had irreconcilable differences.”
Irreconcilable differences? There had been nothing more than teething problems wrong with their marriage. “A year is hardly enough time to give a marriage a fair go.”
“Nothing could change if we couldn’t talk things through. If I tried to talk about our relationship, you shut down.” She held up a hand, palm out, as if to punctuate her point. “Passion isn’t enough if there’s emotional distance.”
“You might have thought I was distant, but I opened myself up to you more than anyone and you still left.” In truth, she’d made demands for emotional intimacy that no one could ever have met, least of all him.
“I know you tried”—she paused, her eyes softening—“but it wasn’t enough.”
Her words bit deep. He’d been raised on a steady diet of secrecy and lies, but he’d tried to be a normal person for Maddy. Tried and failed, apparently.
Light sprinkles of rain began to fall, but he ignored them. “So if I’d opened myself up more, exposed my beating heart, we’d still be married?”
“Yes,” she said, then shook her head. “No. I don’t know. Things are never that simple.” She wrapped her arms around herself—against the weather or against him, he wasn’t sure. “All I know is that because we couldn’t talk about it, there was no hope for us when we hit an obstacle.”
The words she hadn’t said hung in the air as clearly as if she’d spoken them aloud—when one of us wanted a baby and the other didn’t.
Before they’d married she’d been as disinterested in having children as he was, so the night she’d told him she’d changed her mind, he’d assumed it was simply a phase that would pass.
The smattering of raindrops suddenly changed to something heavier, as if the heavens had opened. He grabbed her hand and they made a dash for the house.
When they made it to the mudroom, Maddy watched Samuel hang his coat on a hook, then take a towel from a shelf and rub Lochie down, something the wolfhound was enjoying immensely. Maddy pulled her camera out from under her coat, checking to see if it was wet. Seemed she’d been able to protect it, but her clothes hadn’t been so lucky—rain had seeped in under her collar and saturated her top. Even her trousers were damp.
“You’re soaked,” Samuel said from beside her.
She winced. “I didn’t bring another change of clothes.” Despite her threat to stay a year if needed, she’d thought she’d have caught the morning helicopter with the signed papers, and be home by now.
He nodded. “Come on,” he said and headed off through the house. She followed his steps down the hall and up the stairs, then turned into the main bedroom. He stood at the carved wooden wardrobe and wrenched the door open to reveal an assortment of her clothes where she’d left them last time she was here on holidays, three years ago.
“You kept them,” she said on a long breath.
“Did you expect I’d throw them out?”
She met his gaze. That was exactly what she’d expected—that he’d be so angry, he’d have got them out of the house as soon as he’d arrived. “Or use them as rags,” she said with a crooked smile.
The corners of his mouth twitched. “I thought about it.”
She looked around, only now noticing how bare the room was—no personal items on the bedside table, no slippers poking out from under the bed. “You’re not using this room?”
“I sleep in the room beside my study.” He shrugged. “It’s easier that way.”
She pulled out a pair of jeans, soft with age, and a sweater, then she paused. In many ways, it was ridiculous to want privacy after all they’d shared in this room as husband and wife, but it seemed too intimate to change her clothes in front of him. She clutched the jeans and sweater to her chest and glanced at the door.
He took the hint. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Samuel,” she said, and waited until he met her gaze. “Thank you.” She was thanking him for more than his discretion in leaving, but wasn’t sure if it was for keeping her clothes, or for revealing himself enough to let her know he’d kept them, or both.
He gave one sharp nod, turned and left, and suddenly the room felt colder.
CHAPTER SEVEN
/> Maddy curled up in the window seat in the sunken living room and rested her head against the cool glass. The storm had picked up since they came back from the beach a few hours ago, and its power showed nature at her most terrible, and her most magnificent. It was mesmerizing to watch.
A flash of bright yellow caught her eye. She peered through the rain and, as she fixed on the splash of color again, her heart stuttered to a halt. Samuel, wearing a long raincoat. Out in this unholy weather. Without pausing to think the plan through, she raced to the kitchen and through to the mudroom.
She grabbed an all-weather coat from a hook, slid her feet into galoshes and yanked open the door, protected a little by the overhanging roof while she searched for a view of Samuel again. If he was out there battening something down or protecting a piece of equipment from the storm, she should help. Of course, he wouldn’t want help from her, but she’d offer anyway—it was the least she could do while she was an uninvited houseguest.
Movement to her right had her scanning until she spotted him in the gazebo. Pulling the hood further down her face, she ran to the gazebo steps, not stopping or looking up till she was out of the rain.
“Maddy.” The voice was deep and gravelly and very close. “What are you doing out here?”
She pushed her hood back and wiped the water from her face. “I thought you might need help with whatever you were doing.”
“I’m watching the storm,” he said gruffly as he sank his hands into the coat’s pockets.
The gazebo was huge and they were almost as protected in the centre as they would be in the house, but it was hardly the most comfortable vantage point.
“You know,” she said, “the house has windows for that,”
One end of his mouth curved up just a little. “I was feeling a little…restless, so I thought I’d take a look from out here.”
And avoid her.
She understood his real meaning easily enough.
He turned sharply away and leaned an arm against the wide post in the middle of the structure. “You can go back in.”
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