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“It was an incredible experience for me, too.”
“Could you do one more thing for me, though?”
“What’s that?”
“Not tell anyone that you got me naked within an hour of meeting me.”
“Not even my brothers?”
“No one,” she said firmly.
He chuckled. “Okay, I won’t tell anyone. But speaking of telling—was there anyone you wanted to call? Or have you already posted newborn photos from your phone on Facebook or Twitter?”
She shook her head. “I don’t do the social media thing.”
His brows lifted. “Do you do the telephone thing?”
“Of course, but I don’t think any of my friends or family is expecting to hear any news about a baby just yet.”
“He’s only a couple weeks ahead of his due date,” Lukas reminded her.
Which was true. It was also true that no one was expecting any birth announcement because no one had known that she was pregnant. Not even her parents, because it wasn’t the type of news Julie wanted to tell them over the phone. She’d wanted to talk to her mother in person, to share her joy—and her fears—with the one person she was sure would understand everything she was feeling. But she’d been traveling for work for the past seven months and hadn’t had a chance to go home. In fact, no one aside from her boss at The Grayson Gallery knew, and it wasn’t Evangeline’s voice that Julie wanted to hear right now—it was her mother’s.
But more than she wanted to hear Lucinda’s voice, she wanted to see her, to feel the warmth of her arms around her. Julie wondered at the irony of the realization that never had she more craved the comfort of her own mother than after becoming a mother herself.
“I guess I need to figure out a way to get home.”
“You’re not going anywhere until this storm passes,” Lukas pointed out to her.
Watching the snow swirl outside the window, she couldn’t dispute the point.
She’d hoped to be home before the weekend. She’d only taken this detour through Pinehurst to discuss some issues with the lawyer her brother had recommended. Of course, she hadn’t admitted to Daniel that she was the one in need of legal advice, because he would have demanded to know what the issues were and insisted that he could handle whatever needed to be handled.
Instead, she’d told him that she had a friend in New York State—because she hadn’t been too far away at the time and heading in that direction, suddenly aware that she couldn’t go home until she had answers to some of the questions that had plagued her over the past several months—who was looking for a family law attorney and wondered if he had any contacts in the area.
“I guess you’re stuck with us for a little bit longer, then,” Julie finally said to Lukas.
“It’s a big enough house that we won’t be tripping over one another,” he assured her.
“When the snow stops, I’ll have my car towed and make arrangements for someone to come and get me.”
“I already called Bruce Conacher—he owns the local garage and offers roadside assistance—to tell him that your car was in the ditch. He’s put you on the list but warned me that there are at least a dozen vehicles ahead of yours.”
“I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse—knowing that I wasn’t the only one who slid off the road in that storm.”
“You definitely weren’t the only one,” he assured her. “And I’m sure there will be more before the night is over. But on the bright side, the storm hasn’t knocked out the power lines.”
She shuddered at the thought.
“It’s past dinnertime,” he pointed out. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” she admitted.
“How does soup and a grilled cheese sandwich sound?”
“It sounds wonderful,” she said.
Luke headed back to the kitchen where he’d left the soup simmering. He ladled it into bowls, then flipped the grilled cheese out of the frying pan and onto the cutting board. He sliced each sandwich neatly in half, then transferred them to the plates he had ready. He carried the soup and sandwiches to the table, then went to the drawer for cutlery.
“It smells delicious,” Julie said, coming into the room with Caden carefully tucked in the crook of one arm.
“Of course it does—you’re starving,” he reminded her.
She smiled at that, drawing his attention to the sweet curve of her lips.
He felt his blood pulse in his veins and silently cursed his body for suddenly waking up at the most inappropriate time. Because yes, he was in the company of a beautiful woman, but that beautiful woman had just given birth. Not to mention the fact that she was in his home only because there was a blizzard raging outside. There were a lot of reasons his libido should be in deep hibernation, a lot of reasons that feeling any hint of attraction to Julie Marlowe was wrong.
But after six months of self-imposed celibacy, his hormones apparently didn’t care to be reasoned with. Not that he’d made a conscious decision to give up sex—he just hadn’t met anyone that he wanted to be with. At least not longer than one night, and he was tired of that scene. He was looking for more than a casual hookup.
He could blame his brothers for that. Until recently, he hadn’t wanted anything more than the casual relationships he’d always enjoyed with amiable members of the opposite sex. And then he’d started spending time with Matt and Georgia, and Jack and Kelly, and he’d realized that he envied what each of them had found. He’d even had moments when he found himself thinking that he’d like to share his life with someone who mattered, someone who would be there through the trials and tribulations.
But he figured those moments were just a phase. And the unexpected feelings stirred up by Julie Marlowe had to be another anomaly.
She was simply a stranger who had been stranded in a snowstorm. He’d opened up his home to her because it was what anyone would have done. And he’d helped deliver her baby because circumstances had given him no choice. The fact that his body was suddenly noticing that the new mom was, in fact, a very hot mama, only proved to Luke that no good deed went unpunished.
She moved toward the closest chair, and he pulled it away from the table for her. As she lowered herself onto the seat, he caught just a glimpse of shadowy cleavage in the deep V of the robe she wore before the lights flickered. Once. Twice.
Then everything went dark.
* * *
He heard Julie suck in a breath. Einstein, who had positioned himself at his master’s feet as he was in the habit of doing whenever there was food in the vicinity, whimpered. Beyond that, there was no sound.
No hum of the refrigerator, no low rumbling drone of the furnace. Nothing.
And the silence was almost as unnerving as the darkness.
“So much for the power holding out,” he commented, deliberately keeping his tone casual.
Thankfully, he had an emergency flashlight plugged into one of the outlets in the hall. It ran on rechargeable batteries and automatically turned on when the power went out, so the house wasn’t completely pitch black. But it was pretty close.
While he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he reached for Julie’s free hand, found it curled into a fist on top of the table. He covered it with his own, squeezed gently.
He heard the distant howl of the wind outside, a sound even more ominous than the silence. Julie heard it, too, and shivered.
“I’ve got some candles by the stove,” he told her. “I’m just going to get them so we can find our food.”
He found half a dozen utility candles in the drawer, set a couple of them in their metal cups on the counter and lit the wicks. The scratch of the head against the rough paper was loud in a room suddenly void of all other sound. He lit a couple more and carried them to the table.
They were purely functional—a little bit of illumination so that they could see what they were eating. And yet, there was something about dining over candlelight—even if the meal was nothing more than soup and sandwiches and the lighting was necessity rather than mood—that infused the scene with a romantic ambiance he did not want to be feeling. But somehow the simple dishes and everyday glassware looked elegant in candlelight. And when he glanced across the table, he couldn’t help but notice that Julie looked even more beautiful.
“Dig in before it gets cold,” he advised.
She dipped her spoon into the bowl, and brought it up to her mouth. Before her lips parted to sample the soup, they curved upward and her gaze shifted to him. “Chicken and Stars?”
“So?” he said, just a little defensively.
“So it’s an unusual choice for a grown man,” she said.
“It’s my niece’s favorite.”
“How old is your niece?”
“I have two nieces,” he told her. “Two nieces and two nephews. Matt’s daughter, Pippa, is only a baby. Jack’s daughter, Ava, is twelve going on twenty.”
Her brows drew together, creating a slight furrow between them. “Is Jack short for Jackson?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Why?”
“Your brother is Jackson Garrett?”
Now it was his turn to frown. “You know Jack?”
“Actually, he’s the reason I came to Pinehurst,” she admitted.
Luke carefully set his spoon down in his bowl, the few mouthfuls he’d consumed settling like a lead weight in the pit of his stomach. “Please tell me that he isn’t the father of your baby.”
Chapter Four
“What?” Julie lifted her head to look at him, her blue-gray eyes wide. “No. Oh, my God, no! I’ve never even met the man.”
Luke exhaled a long, slow breath. “Okay,” he finally said. “So why were you coming to Pinehurst for a man you’ve never met?”
“Because my brother, Daniel, knows him. They went to law school together.” She picked up half of her sandwich, nibbled on the corner. “Why would you ask if your brother was the father of my baby?”
“Because it was only a few months ago that I found out Ava—the niece who likes Chicken and Stars soup—was Jack’s daughter.”
“She’s twelve and you only met her a few months ago?”
“No—I’ve actually known her since she was a baby,” he clarified. “But I didn’t know that my brother was her father.”
“I’m having a little trouble following,” she admitted.
“Ava’s mother, Kelly, was one of my best friends growing up. When she was in college, she had a fling with some guy and got pregnant, but she never told me who that guy was.”
Julie’s gaze dropped to her bowl again. “She must have had her reasons.”
“She had reasons,” he acknowledged. “But I’m not sure anything can justify that kind of deception.”
“Is your brother still as upset about it as you are?”
His smile was wry. “Is it that obvious?”
“There was a bit of an edge to your tone.”
“I was—maybe still am—upset,” he admitted. “I was the first person she told when she found out she was pregnant, because I was her best friend. When Ava was born, Kelly asked me to be the godfather, but she never told me that her baby was actually my niece.”
“And you didn’t even suspect the connection?”
“No, I didn’t suspect anything. Because I didn’t know that Jack and Kelly had been involved, however briefly.”
“So why didn’t your brother guess that the child she was carrying might be his?”
“Because he didn’t know she was pregnant. Kelly made me promise not to tell anyone,” he confided. “I thought she’d met someone when she was away to school, fallen for the wrong guy and ended up pregnant. So I promised, because I never suspected that her baby was my brother’s baby.”
“Why didn’t she tell him that she was pregnant?” Julie asked curiously.
“I guess she was planning to tell him, but by the time she knew about the baby, he was engaged to someone else.”
She winced. “That would hurt.”
“Yeah.” He could acknowledge that fact without accepting it as justification.
“How did his wife react to the news that he had a child with someone else?”
“She never knew. They were divorced more than five years ago,” he told her. “And now Jack and Kelly are engaged.”
“Apparently your brother has forgiven her for keeping their child a secret.”
“It took him a while, but he did. And Ava is thrilled that she’s finally going to have a mother and a father.”
“In a perfect world, every child would have two parents who loved him or her and one another,” she said.
Which told him absolutely nothing about her situation. Where was Caden’s father? Was he part of their lives? Luke didn’t think so, considering that she hadn’t wanted to contact anyone to let them know that she was in labor, or even later to share the news that she’d had her baby.
“I feel fortunate that I grew up in that kind of home,” he said, in the hope that offering information to Julie would encourage her to reciprocate.
But all she said was, “That is lucky.”
And then, in what seemed an obvious attempt to change the topic of conversation, “How long do you think the power will be out?”
Or maybe she was genuinely worried. He heard the concern in her voice and wished he could reassure her, but he didn’t want to give her false hope. “I don’t know. I think it depends on what caused the outage.”
“So it could be a while,” she acknowledged.
“It could,” he agreed. “But we’ve got the fireplace and lots of blankets, candles and flashlights, and a pantry full of canned goods. I promise—you might be bored, but you won’t freeze, get lost in the halls or starve.”
Her lips curved. “If nothing else, today has proven to me that there’s no point in worrying about things I can’t control.”
