Their Baby Miracle

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“Yes!” Her scalp prickled with anger, and acid rushed up into her throat. She carried a child fathered by a stranger, it seemed. “I lost this baby’s twin, although I didn’t realize I was still pregnant for another month and a half. Good grief, Lucas, you couldn’t possibly believe I staged it, could you? Staged any of it? How could I?”

He shook his head and closed his eyes, as if totally at a loss, and images of last year flashed through their minds, once again. September and November, Indian summer and winter’s first chill. They’d known too many different emotions together, in too short a time…

Reba sat in the Indian summer shade on the bank of the creek and watched Lucas casting his line for trout. He stood in the water in thigh-high wading boots borrowed from her father, with his legs braced wide against the current. The muscles in his back rippled and tightened as he whipped his body back then forward to make the cast.

For half a second, the nylon filament caught the sun and made a scribble of light against a background of cool green shade, then the delicate fly silently hit the water and the line disappeared. Lucas’s whole focus arrowed to the task of working the rod and the line.

Reba’s breath caught and tightened in her chest as she watched him. It was like vertigo, and she was frightened of it—not sorry that he would be leaving tomorrow morning. She would need some space by then, and some time to think without the storm of sensual distraction that built inside her whenever she was with him.

This relationship wasn’t meant to last.

They both knew that.

It’s a turning point, that’s all, she thought. A window thrown open in my mind.

Lucas had already caught three good-size fish, enough to cook and eat outdoors for lunch, over an open fire. In the expectation that he would fish as well as he seemed to do everything else, Reba had packed the pickup truck with the appropriate accompaniments, and soon they would drive the mountain track up to the cabin, where her grandfather had once made the ring of stones that the Grant family had been using as a picnic hearth on summer days for nearly fifty years.

And she had no doubt as to what she and Lucas would do up there after the meal was over.

For the last time?

They ate the fresh fish with bread and butter and salt and lemon, washed down with ice-cold mouthfuls of light beer, and then they didn’t have to say a word, they just doused the fire, opened the door of the cabin and went upstairs.

In the small, tidy bedroom, Reba wondered if she’d ever be able to come to this place again without thinking of Lucas. Their awareness of each other, and their impatience, seemed to crowd the air and make it sing.

She knew she’d remember it every time she saw the dappled light dancing through the windows as a breeze moved the tree branches, every time she smelled the scent of lavender, because of the flowers she’d put here and the homemade sachets that scented the cotton sheets.

Pulling her top over her head, she felt Lucas’s touch sear across her body. His hands curved around her ribs, brushed across her breasts, made her neck tingle. They tried to help each other undress, but just ended up laughing and kissing, fighting their uncooperative clothing.

“Are we in a hurry, here, or something?” he whispered.

“So slow down.”

“Can’t.”

“Neither can I.”

They only managed to do that when they got to the really important part—the part where they couldn’t talk anymore, because their breathing was coming too fast and every sense was too overwhelmed. Then he held her and slid into her with a teasing control that had her pulling at him, crying out for more, until they both exploded, with pulses of light behind her closed lids like fireworks, or stars.

That night, she drove into Biggins, parked her pickup quietly in the far corner of the steakhouse parking lot and slipped across Main Street to Lucas’s motel. He took her into Cheyenne for a long, slow meal and then brought her back again.

“I’ll need to head out of here pretty early tomorrow to make my flight to New York,” he told her, at the door of his room.