Meg still lay awake. “What if I loved you?” she whispered into the darkness.

She felt a deeper stillness steal over him.

He’d heard.

He said nothing.

And she knew there was no “what if” about it. Somewhere, somehow she’d fallen in love with him, with his quiet strength and his deep integrity, with his silver eyes and the way he kissed her, held her, and because he of all people seemed to see the person she was inside.

But he hadn’t asked for that-her love.

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” he said gently.


Luke felt Meg shrink a little away from him and against overriding impulse he didn’t pull her back. She didn’t really love him. She couldn’t because he was all wrong for her. He was too old, too cynical about life and people and love. He was a loner. Wasn’t he?

She deserved someone closer to her own age, someone closer to her in optimism and kindness. She imagined qualities in him he didn’t have.

He would let her go. Set her free.

In the morning.

And the thought filled him with desolation. It was the thought of a Meg-less existence that broke his resolve, made him pull her in closer to him, made him try to absorb a little of her essence into himself. He wanted something from her that he’d never wanted from a woman before-just to be with her, to have her near. And the nearer the better. The feelings were so new that he didn’t know what to do with them, how to deal with them.

She’d helped him so much. Helped him on the island when he’d first been injured, helped him by marrying him, and the very thought of her had sustained him when he’d been ill. Even now, lying here like this, her breathing soft and gentle, she soothed something within him, filled and completed him. In so many ways she was his better half. But she deserved more. She deserved to find her own better half.

So he would help her by letting her go.


The doorbell chimed through the house. Meg and Luke struggled to sitting, his arm falling from her. Through the windows a clear, bright day showed snow-covered mountains on the far side of the crystalline lake. Meg had never been so disappointed to see a beautiful day.

Luke stood, running a hand through his hair as he looked down at her. “That’ll be Mark.”

His attorney. That announcement, more than the weather even, told her that her time with Luke was over. She’d served her purpose, and in return had found a deep, brief perfection. That would be enough. It had to be.

They walked to the front door together. He would take Mark to his office. “This shouldn’t take too long.”

She nodded. She’d be gone before then. It was the best, the only, way. She wasn’t going to stay for the humiliation of the terms he wanted to end their connection with, no matter how gently he would do it.

He turned for his office. Mark looked at her, pity in his gaze. “He’ll look after you,” he murmured.

Great, even his attorney felt sorry for her.

Luke stopped at the office door. “Wait,” he said as though he knew she’d already decided to go. He held her gaze until she nodded.

Unable to stay in the house where for such a brief time she’d found bliss, Meg took Caesar outside, striding unseeing along the path she’d walked so often, and tried to shut out her awareness of the ticking time bomb that was Luke’s meeting with Mark.

Caesar found and then dropped a stick in the center of the path. “Not today, buddy.” She strode past it, but when he next overtook her, it was back in his mouth.

It was over. Her fantasy. And she knew the answer to the question she’d posed to Luke-would her working close by be a problem. It might not be for him, but it would be for her. Seeing him and having to not let him see she loved him. Hearing people talk about him. Seeing him dating other women. No, it definitely wasn’t going to work for her. She wasn’t that reasonable. She wasn’t that thick-skinned.

She stopped at the base of a dead and blackened pine that alone had at some point been struck by lightning. Caesar dropped his stick and sniffed, his nose tracking to the body of a small bird, a mountain chickadee, lying still and stiff. Meg stared at the little corpse, her heart breaking at the sight.

She had to leave.

Despite tacitly agreeing to wait, she couldn’t. She would get her car and go. She would do it before the meeting was even over, before Luke and Mark gently, kindly explained the details of how her happiness was to end. Because she knew she couldn’t take their explanations with anything like the dignity they deserved. She considered her options. Sally would come if she called. Her friend would take her to collect her car. And then she could go. Somewhere. Anywhere. Away.

Pulling her phone from her pocket, she hurried back along the path. She caught sight of the lake and the snow-capped mountains through the screen of pine trees and stopped. It was a sight that had always filled her with peace and given her strength. She took a moment to absorb the view for the last time.

Caesar dropped his stick onto her foot.

She shook her head at him. “You don’t give up, do you, buddy?” She bent to pick up the stick and stilled with her fingers wrapped around its roughened bark.

He didn’t give up. He never gave up. Not when it came to something he wanted. Even now he watched her, tail wagging, willing her to throw the stick.

Crystal-clear understanding and resolution welled within her.

Meg straightened and threw the stick. She wasn’t running away. Not this time. She wasn’t subjugating her needs. She wasn’t going to go without telling Luke that she loved him. Without asking him to at least try to love her back. To give her, them, a chance.

Something had begun between them back on the island and that something had blossomed and grown into so much more.

He’d said himself that she should give her needs priority, ask more for the things she wanted. And the only thing, the only one, she wanted and needed was him.

He could grow to love her back. She knew it. He just had to let himself. Because not only was he necessary to her, she was, if not necessary, then at least good, for him. She believed that much with all her heavy heart. A heart that nurtured an insistent flicker of hope.

All she had to lose was her pride. And it was worth the sacrifice to know that she wasn’t going to turn tail. She ran. Not away from him but toward him, toward their home, up the steps pausing briefly at the Christmas tree to make her wish on the single bright star at its top and burst into his office.

Conversation stopped as Luke and Mark looked up at her from the leather armchairs in front of Luke’s desk, surprise in two pairs of eyes. They both stood. Meg’s gaze went briefly to the single thin stack of papers neatly aligned on Luke’s desk. Divorce papers? Her heart hammered in her chest.

She walked up to Luke, lifted the mistletoe she’d pulled from the Christmas tree and held it above his head. Stretching up onto her tiptoes, she kissed him, joining her mouth to his, trying to put a forewarning of her love into the tenderness of her kiss.

His arms slid obligingly around her waist, he angled his head to deepen the kiss. She could almost give in to the temptation of just this, being held in his arms. But she needed more. She broke the kiss, stepped back and out of his hold. “Mark, I want to talk to my husband. Alone.” She kept her gaze on Luke, he met it steadily, emotions in his eyes she didn’t dare interpret and a glimmer of wry amusement at her demand.

“I was just going. I’ll see myself out.” Mark’s voice reached her seconds before he shut the office door quietly behind him. Leaving her alone with Luke.

For the longest time she stared at him, he was everything to her; he was the man she loved. She just had to tell him that.

She took a deep breath and pointed to his desk. “I won’t sign those papers.”

He frowned and his gaze flicked to the desk.

“I don’t care what you’re offering. I want more. I want you. I’m not going to let you shut me out of your life because you don’t want to need anyone. It doesn’t work that way. You need me. You just don’t know it. And I…I need you. I love you. You might not be ready for that yet, but you have to give it, me, a chance.”

Luke closed the distance she’d tried to establish and pressed a finger to her lips, silencing her. He eased the mistletoe from her fingers, held it above her head and sliding his finger from her lips, replaced it with his mouth, looped his arms once more around her.

Too soon he broke the kiss. “I don’t want you to sign those papers.”

“You don’t?”

“No.” He shook his head and a smile touched his lips. “They’re to do with Jason. Not you. Not us.”

“But I thought…Mark…he wasn’t here because of me, because of you wanting a divorce?”

“We did discuss you.”

“And?”

“I told him we’d slept together.”

“And?”

“And I told him I love you, which was wrong of me.”

Because it wasn’t the truth? Her jaw clenched with the force of suppressed emotion.

He stroked his thumbs over her cheeks. “Because you should have been the first one I told.” He brushed a kiss across her lips. “It wasn’t until Mark walked in that I was forced to contemplate a Meg-less existence. The prospect was dreadful. From the first moment I saw you, I knew you were somehow necessary to me. I didn’t realize how or why, but I do now. I want you in my life, my home, my heart. Always. If you’ll have me.”

Meg nodded, her throat too clogged to speak.

“Is that a yes?”

She nodded again.

He lifted his hands to her face, his silver eyes glittering with emotion. “Hi, honey, we’re home,” he said. And then, finally, he kissed her.

MAUREEN CHILD