Luke stepped in from the back porch, dumped a load of wood beside the stove and took the match and box from her frozen fingers. “I’ll do that.”
She didn’t protest. The cold had seeped so deeply into her bones, that they ached, and she couldn’t stop trembling.
Luke pumped up the pressure in the lantern, struck the match and touched the flame to the wick. A warm glow illuminated a small circle around them.
“Maybe we should light another one, too,” she suggested.
Luke shook his head. “Better save it. We don’t know how long the power outage will last. Are there candles?”
“In the pantry.”
He picked up the lantern and motioned her toward the door. “You find them. I’ll light the way.”
Within a few minutes, Jennifer had located candles and holders and placed lighted tapers around the kitchen to chase away the gloom.
Luke made another trip to the back porch and began lugging in bags of groceries. No one ever had to ask Luke to help. When he saw a job that needed doing, he always tackled it on his own, without coercion and without expecting thanks or recognition.
He paused at the door with bags in his arms. “You okay?”
She shook herself out of her reverie. “I was just remembering the time Grandpa broke his wrist and you showed up every morning before dawn to do his chores and drive him to work before going to your summer job. You must have done that for two whole months.”
His grin made her insides flip-flop. “Yeah, you couldn’t have been more than eleven. I remember you tagging along. I thought you were a real pest.”
“Pest? I was trying to help.”
“You were more in the way than helpful, as I recall. It wasn’t until seven years later that I found your company so…” His eyes had lost their condemnation and warmed with memory.
“So…?” she prodded.
He hefted the bags onto the counter by the sink. “What’s in here? Bricks?”
She shook her head, amused at how deftly he’d sidestepped the memories. “Besides cleaning supplies and some food, it’s mostly bottled water. I wasn’t sure I could make the pump work.”
Luke pulled two of the gallon jugs from a sack and set them in the sink. “Good thing we have these. The well’s useless without electricity to operate the pump. At least we don’t have to worry about the pipes freezing. Jack Hartman helped me winterize the place after Henry died.”
“Winterize?”
“We drained all the pipes so they wouldn’t freeze and burst with the house unheated.”
Jennifer picked up a candle and checked the pantry. “There’re ten more gallon jugs of water in here. It may not be fresh, but it’ll do for washing up.”
Luke raised his head from lighting the kindling in the woodstove, and considered her with narrowed eyes. “Come over here,” he ordered.
Her glance was wary. “Why?”
“Because you’re freezing to death.”
She couldn’t argue with his assessment. The room was so cold she could see his breath fog the air as he spoke. But the last place she wanted to be was closer to the man who’d called her a liar. Apparently his trust in her had evaporated along with his love. The frosty misery in her bones, however, quickly won out over her pride, and she inched closer to the stove, which was already disseminating warmth into the kitchen.
Luke closed the door to the hallway, trapping the warmth and creating a cozy intimacy in the room. “We need something hot to warm us up.”
Her face colored at his words, which had brought to mind a scenario as hot as any she could imagine. Too many times she’d longed for, dreamed of making torrid love with Luke. Too many times she’d regretted his promise to her grandfather not to have sex with her. But Luke McNeil was nothing if not a man of his word. He’d never weakened, in spite of her best efforts to seduce him. She’d always regretted that she hadn’t succeeded. If she had persuaded him to succumb, at least she’d have had those memories to keep her warm.
She shook away the tantalizing thoughts and reached into one of the bags on the counter. “I’ll make coffee. And heat some clam chowder.”
With the woodstove pumping welcome heat into the kitchen, she stripped off her jacket and pushed up her sleeves. Luke shucked his jacket, too, and draped it over one if the chairs at the table.
As Jennifer prepared their food, everything she touched in the kitchen inundated her in a wave of sorrow at all she’d lost. She filled the large enamel coffeepot her grandmother had always kept simmering on the stove. Jennifer had found the overcooked brew undrinkable, but her grandfather had loved his coffee that way, the thicker and stronger the better. She sighed. Grandpa Henry would never again sit at the oak table with his big, gnarled hands around his favorite coffee mug.
She was reaching for a saucepan for the clam chowder when she caught sight of her grandmother’s apron on the peg by the back door, exactly as it had been the day Dolly had died. With her throat clogged with tears, Jennifer reached for the apron and held it to her face. Through the musty scent of the aging fabric came the tiniest hint of lavender from the sachets her grandmother had kept in all her drawers and closets.
Every hug Gramma Dolly had ever given her had smelled of lavender.
Grief crashed down on Jennifer like the maple that had destroyed Luke’s car. Driven from the house by her grandfather, she’d never had time to mourn for Dolly. Now Henry, too, was gone, and the anguish she’d been running from for the last ten years caught up with her with a vengeance.
In spite of her best efforts, a sob escaped her lips and she buried her face in her grandmother’s apron, soaking it with her tears.
She should never have returned to Jester. She could never escape the past here—neither her grief over her grandparents nor the fact that she was still hopelessly in love with Luke.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AT THE SOUND of Jennifer’s crying, Luke glanced up from the oak table he’d been cleaning. The sight of her slumped and quivering shoulders and her face hidden in her grandmother’s apron temporarily dissipated his anger at Jennifer’s desertion long ago and his current frustration over his ruined car.
She’d lost the only real family she’d ever had, and returning to their lonely, neglected home had to be tough. He’d never lived here, but being in the deserted house made him sadder than he wanted to admit.
Jennifer’s tears stirred his compassion, and without thinking of the consequences, he went to her and gathered her in his arms, cradling her against his chest. Sobs racked her body, and he pulled her closer, hoping to ease her pain. She wrapped her arms around his waist, and he buried his face in her hair, breathing in the faint scent of roses.
“I’m s-sorry,” she managed to stammer through her hiccups and tears. “I—”
“Shhh. You don’t have to apologize to me, sunshine. I miss them, too.”
She lifted her tearstained face, beautiful even in distress. “Oh, Luke, why do you have to be so…so—”
“So what?”
“So understanding.” She pressed her face against his shirt and cried harder. “Nobody’s ever understood me as well as you do.”
Her compliment pleased him, suffusing him with a warmth that had nothing to do with the heat radiating from the woodstove.
How could he not understand the woman he’d always considered the other half of himself?
He bent and scooped her into his arms, then settled into Henry’s rocker by the stove with Jennifer on his lap. She slid her arms around his neck and nestled her head into the hollow of his throat. His arms tightened reflexively around her.
This time, he wouldn’t let her go.
He’d been waiting for this moment, he realized, longing for it for over a decade. With gentle fingers, he tilted her chin until her face angled toward his.
“God knows, I’ve missed you, Jenny.”
Her extraordinary eyes widened in surprise, and her crying eased. “I thought you didn’t care.”
“I tho
ught you’d deserted me.”
“I wrote to you. I don’t know why Grandpa didn’t tell you.”
His head warned him not to believe her, that she’d break his heart again, but the rest of him was reveling in the delicious weight of her upon his thighs, the silkiness of her skin, and the steady tattoo of her pulse beneath his fingertips as he caressed the slender column of her throat.
He lowered his lips to hers, tasting first the salt of her tears, then the honeyed sweetness of her mouth. She twisted toward him, and the exquisite pressure of her small, firm breasts against his chest sent desire spiking through him like a sword thrust.
Go ahead, make love to her. Then you’ll feel even worse when she leaves you. Again.
She had sworn she hadn’t run out on him, he insisted to himself. That she’d left him a letter.
But she didn’t tell you what the letter said, did she, cowboy? How do you know—if such a letter ever existed—that it wasn’t just goodbye, good riddance?
He was saved from his raging inner battle by the sudden sizzle of liquid on the woodstove burner and the acrid stench of burning coffee where the pot had boiled over.
Jennifer jumped from his lap and, using her grandmother’s apron as a potholder, yanked the pot off the stove and set it on the sandstone countertop.
“Guess the coffee’s ready,” she said, obviously flustered by his kiss and revealing a trace of the shyness he remembered from when she was a little girl.
Her appealing blush made him yearn to tug her into his arms again, but she quickly turned away to remove mugs from a nearby cupboard. She filled them with coffee and handed one to him.
As much as he wanted to kiss her again, he was grateful for the steaming brew. Even though the stove was pumping out heat, the kitchen remained uncomfortably cool.
“Could you dig a can of clam chowder out of one of those bags?” she asked. “I’ll find the can opener.”
Tamping down his desire, Luke turned to the bags on the counter and began rummaging through the contents. Looking for the soup, he removed bottles of disinfectant, bleach, cleaning sprays and powders, toilet paper, paper towels—
And one box of a dozen condoms.
Suspicion surged through him. She’d almost duped him again with her demure, little-girl shyness. Hadn’t he learned by now he couldn’t trust her?
Holding up the box, he regarded her with raised eyebrows, his voice cold. “Expecting company?”
She eyed him with a puzzled look. “What’s that?”
With a flick of his wrist, he tossed the box across the room. Caught by surprise, she fumbled the carton and almost dropped it. After she’d turned it right side up to read the label, her face turned a deep crimson.
“Where did these come from?” she asked.
Luke had to give her credit. The woman was really talented at play-acting. He found himself almost believing she was as befuddled as she sounded.
“From the printing on the price sticker,” he said, irony dripping from every word, “I’d guess Cozy’s Drugstore.”
Her puzzled expression remained. “But I haven’t been to Cozy’s. I only stopped at the grocery.”
“And somehow, mysteriously, miraculously, a box of condoms jumped all the way from Cozy’s into your bag of groceries?” He shook his head in disgust. “How gullible do you think I am?”
Jennifer’s disoriented demeanor didn’t falter. “But I—”
“Hey.” He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “You don’t need to explain. You’re under no obligation to me. Lord knows, I found that out the hard way ten years ago. If you’re expecting someone, I’ll clear out as soon as the storm ends.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Anger had replaced her confusion. “First of all, I’m not expecting anyone. I have no idea how those condoms ended up with my groceries. Maybe they belonged to another shopper and the bag boy placed them with my purchases by mistake.”
The longer she talked, the more evident her anger became. She slammed the box on the counter and placed her fists on her hips. “Besides, I don’t owe you an explanation. It’s none of your business.”
Was this fire-spitting hellcat the same docile, tearful woman he’d held in his arms just a few minutes earlier? The woman he’d wanted to make love to? What had he been thinking? Although he had to admit she was even more gorgeous and desirable when she’d worked up a head of steam.
Marooned by the storm, however, they were stuck with each other, and making peace promised an easier time for both of them.
“You’re right,” Luke agreed, trying to sound reasonable. “It’s none of my business.”
“And another thing,” she continued hotly, apparently unmollified by his concession, “you can’t hike back to town through all that ice. You’d fall and break your neck before you reached the highway.”
“And would you care?” he retorted.
Her anger appeared to dissolve before his eyes.
“More than you know,” she admitted in a soft voice that set his nerve endings singing.
Now Luke was the one confused. Just when he thought he’d finally figured out exactly where Jennifer was coming from, she’d thrown him a curve. He turned back to the unemptied bags to hide his bewilderment. “I’ll find the soup.”
As they prepared lunch together, they worked in silence, Jennifer heating chowder on the woodstove and setting the table, Luke preparing a salad with romaine and tomatoes from the Stop N’ Shop supplies. They moved in an easy, companionable rhythm, as if this were a meal they had choreographed before and then repeated a thousand times.
This is what it would have been like, Luke thought, if they’d married the year after Dolly died. Except for the quiet. They’d have a roomful of hungry youngsters anxious to be fed—
“Soup’s on.” Jennifer’s announcement broke into his thoughts.
She placed a plate of crackers on the table and took a chair. Luke sat across from her.
Jennifer glanced up sharply, her expression questioning.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“I hope you like clam chowder. I forgot to ask.”
“If a man’s hungry enough, he’ll eat anything,” he said. Then, at her crestfallen expression, he added quickly, “But I do like chowder.”
They both dug into the soup, as satisfying for the warmth it provided as for its flavor. The only sounds in the room were the roar of the wind, the rattle of the windows, an occasional crack of a tree limb breaking under the accumulating ice and the friendly pop and sizzle of the fire in the stove.
Suddenly Jennifer dropped her spoon into her bowl. “Vickie!” she exclaimed loudly.
Luke glanced behind him, half expecting to see his sister, even though he knew she couldn’t have navigated to the farm through the storm. He looked back to Jennifer, whose eyes sparked with agitation and whose lips twisted in a sardonic smile.
“Vickie?” he asked. “What about her?”
“Your sister put the condoms in that bag.”
“Why would Vickie be carrying around a box of condoms from Cozy’s? She gets all the free samples of any medical supplies she needs from Nathan’s practice.”
“She wasn’t carrying them around. While I was shopping in the grocery store, she said she had an errand to run. I’ll bet she bought them then.”
“For a joke?” Luke was well aware that his sister was an incurable practical joker. He’d been the brunt of her humor on too many occasions. He even had the scars to prove it.
Jennifer shook her head. “Nope. On this issue I think Vickie’s so serious she’s dangerous.”
Luke scratched his head. “I know I’m supposed to be a trained crime solver, but you’ve lost me.”
“Your sister,” Jennifer said with a wry expression, “is not only a joker. She’s a matchmaker, too.”
Luke swallowed another spoonful of chowder and shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense. How could Vickie know that you’d be calling me to come out here?”
“She didn’t have to know. If Vickie had wanted you here, she’d have found a way to make it happen. You know how she is.”
Luke nodded. “She’s persistent, that’s for sure.”
Jennifer set her spoon down again. “You don’t think…”
“Think what?”
“No, it’s too far-fetched, even for Vickie.”
Luke grimaced, but his tone was affectionate. “Nothing’s too far-fetched for my sister.”
“Would she have hired those men in the Expedition to trespass, knowing I’d probably call you?”
Luke broke a cracker, popped half in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “If she’d thought of it. But I think you’re giving her matchmaking instinct too much credit.”
Jennifer dipped into her chowder again. “Of course, you’re right.”
Luke pointed to the window and shrugged. “But as for this ice storm and downing a tree on my car, I wouldn’t put that past Vickie at all.”
THE COLD, HARD KNOT in Jennifer’s chest eased as their laughter rang through the kitchen. This was the way she remembered the room—full of warmth, light, delicious aromas and, most of all, happiness.
And being here with Luke, still tingling from his kiss, she felt the happiest she’d been since she’d left Cottonwood Farm all those years ago.
Even as she savored the joy of the moment, however, she reminded herself that her happiness was only temporary. His kiss had been consolation, an expression of sympathy, and nothing more. As soon as the storm passed, Luke would be gone, and Jennifer would be left in the large, lonely house with only memories for company.
She realized now that she could never live at Cottonwood Farm. Even though she’d been a loner the past ten years, she’d always resided in places where she could forget the memories that haunted her. Remaining at the farm would bring her face-to-face every waking minute with the reality of all she’d lost. Her original plan was best. Clean the place up, sell it and move on. Goodbye, Gramma and Grandpa. Goodbye, Jester. Goodbye, Luke.
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