His gaze never wavered. “You got my house. It could have been permanent. And you’ll have realized by now that there’s much more than the house.”
Back then, he’d talked only of the beauty and magic of the area, of how he’d wanted someone who could appreciate it to have it, someone who understood him. She’d had no idea when she’d married him just how wealthy he was, that when he’d said house he meant mansion on the shore of Lake Tahoe, complete with private jetty, indoor pool, game room, boardroom and a library stocked floor to ceiling with books. She could have lived happily for years in the library alone.
Meg crossed to the fireplace and positioned herself behind an armchair, her fingers pressing into the padding of its high leather back. “You have no right to just walk in here-”
“To my own house?”
“To just walk in,” she continued, “and start accusing me of…what exactly is it you’re accusing me of?”
He paused and she held her breath, waiting, uncertain. “Nothing,” he said on a rough sigh, dragging a hand across the back of his neck, and some of the accusation leached from his eyes.
“Luke, it was all your idea. You practically demanded I marry you.”
He strolled closer, picked up one of the Christmas cards from the mantelpiece and glanced at the inside before replacing it. “I don’t remember much more than a token resistance from you.”
“You were sick, so let me help you remember. As I recall it, you were desperate. You even invoked the memory of your mother.”
She’d met his mother only once. Meg had gone with a friend to hear her speak at a lunchtime fundraiser in L.A. and had been so impressed that she’d introduced herself to her afterward. They’d ended up having coffee together and talking for hours. It was as a result of that one fateful meeting that when things had ended between Meg and her then-boyfriend she’d thought of doing something completely different. Had thought of Indonesia and the Maitland Foundation. A path that had led her to here and now. “You asked me to do it for her-because of how much I’d respected her and because I knew how revered she’d been on the island. And you even threatened that if I didn’t accept you were going to propose to the very next woman who walked into the room.” She’d believed him to be serious and in an uncharacteristic fit of possessiveness Meg hadn’t wanted anyone else to have “her” patient, the man she’d spent so many hours talking to. “You said I was doing you a favor.”
Hard to imagine how that could be true now, how plain Meg Elliot, with little to call her own, could have done a handsome millionaire a favor by marrying him.
He rested an arm on the mantel and stared at the fire. A smile touched his lips and then vanished. Uncomfortable in the same room as the stranger who was her husband, Meg edged around the chair and toward the door. She needed space, needed to get to her own room and process what was happening, figure out what she did next. His return changed everything.
“You must be tired.” She had no idea where he’d come from or how far he’d traveled today. But it was late and deep lines creased the skin around his eyes, so she assumed her guess had some foundation. “We can talk all this through in the morning.”
Luke straightened and strode to the door, cutting off her exit. “You’re right. I am tired.” He looked down at her, then lifted his hand to twist a lock of her hair around his finger. “I take it our bed’s in the master bedroom.”
Meg swallowed. “Our?” He was joking. Testing her. She was sure of it. Almost one-hundred-percent sure. Ninety-eight at least. Even if she had been the type of woman someone like him would be attracted to, theirs had been an arrangement of practicality and desperation. An arrangement that they’d agreed would end when he returned home.
“You got the benefits of being my wife. Surely I get some benefit in being your husband?”
She pushed his hand away and squared off to him. “You got benefits. Because of me, your brother hasn’t moved into this house already.”
“Half brother,” he corrected her. “And that wasn’t the benefit I was thinking of.”
“It was when you married me. Or maybe you didn’t care about there being any benefit to you, but you most definitely cared about making sure Jason didn’t benefit. Cared enough to marry a stranger.”
“A stranger with the gentlest hands.”
Meg stilled.
“I thought about those hands as I was recuperating.”
His sudden change of tone and topic disconcerted her and she took a step back. He was still trying to dominate her, unsettle her, this time with words. That was all it was. She couldn’t let him know the effectiveness of his strategy, how very unsettled she was. She, too, had thought about her hands on him.
“You have a lot to explain to me. Where have you been? Why haven’t you been in touch before now?”
He watched her steadily. “Nagging me already?”
“Legitimate questions.”
“I have several of my own.”
“Understandably. So I suggest we both get a good night’s sleep and deal with them in the morning. The guest wing is that way.” She pointed down the hallway.
“The guest wing? In my own house?”
“My things are in your room. I’ll shift them out tomorrow. But for tonight, yes, you can have the guest room.” Over the lonely months Meg had imagined many possible scenarios for Luke’s homecoming-they had varied from tender to joyful to passionate.
This tension-laden standoff certainly hadn’t been one of them.
Luke watched his wife’s pretty blue eyes as he searched for the familiar in her face, searched for the differences. Time was, women jumped at the chance of going to bed with him. Although admittedly he was a little out of practice. Still, appalled horror was definitely a first for him.
He’d dreamed of this woman. And granted, many of those dreams had been the product of delirium. Many, but not all. The others had been the product of good old-fashioned desire. He hadn’t known whether that attraction was merely the product of time and circumstance.
And he still couldn’t answer that question for sure. Different time, different circumstance and he could still feel the pull of the woman standing in front of him.
Who was this woman he’d married?
He recognized the irony in his situation. Most of his life he’d kept people at a distance and now he had a wife he scarcely knew.
He reached for the tendril of golden-brown hair that curled against her pale throat. She blocked his hand, wrap ping slender fingers around his wrist. “Afraid of me, Meg?” Her scent was something floral. Innocent. And distracting.
She dropped his wrist, lifted her chin and her wide clear eyes searched his face. Defiance overlaid a glimmer of wariness. “Should I be?”
He could still feel the imprint of her fingers, her skin against his. It had been like that whenever she’d touched him. “What do you think?” He didn’t know why he was goading her. He’d had scarcely more than a few hours’ sleep in the last forty-eight hours. All he really wanted was to lie down somewhere, he didn’t care where, and close his eyes. He’d come home, not knowing what to expect, but knowing she couldn’t have been as simultaneously wholesome and desirable as his memory wanted to paint her. Besides, he’d never really been into wholesome.
“I think, no.”
He hadn’t even known if he’d be able to find her. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be hosting a party in his own house. It tarnished the wholesome image, made him doubt his judgment and his memories. “You’re sure?”
“I think, for some perverse reason, you’d like me to be afraid of you. But the man I remember was decent and kind.”