She was lonely. That was all. Her life had been on hold these last few months, but she was picking up the pieces again. She didn’t need to lean on Luke.
Her work with the Maitland Foundation since she’d been back had been a welcome distraction.
“You’ve been having parties. That’s a change.”
“Do you mean last night? That was a final committee meeting.”
“You put up Christmas decorations.” He continued, not taking her opening to ask what the committee meeting was for. “That’s a change. A bigger one than you know.” He flicked one of the red bows tied to the stair uprights. “I don’t usually do Christmas.”
It seemed a sad thing to say. She couldn’t imagine not marking Christmas in some way. “That’s not changing as much as adding something temporary.” She was going to have to tell him about tonight.
The bow slipped and they both reached to catch it, hands tangling as they trapped the red velvet against the smooth wood of the post, halting its downward slide. For a second they stilled. His warm hand covered hers, pinning it with the bow beneath it.
He was close again. And again his proximity, his warmth and scent had her resolutions slipping. Meg slid her hand from beneath his, bringing the broad ribbon with it, and took a step back. With nerveless fingers she smoothed out the loops of the bow. From the kitchen she heard the strains of “All I Want for Christmas is You.”
“Do you remember our promise?”
She glanced up to see him watching her closely, desire kindling in the depths of his eyes. He couldn’t mean the promise her thoughts had leaped to. He must have meant their vows. “To love and honor? And only those vows because there was no time to write our own. ‘In sickness and in health and to disinherit your brother and give me somewhere to live when I got back here.’”
A smile flickered and vanished. “That wasn’t the promise I was talking about.”
Oh. That promise. The one she’d secretly cherished in her darkest hours, something full of the possibility of tenderness and passion and the affirmation of life, and the one she’d now hoped he’d forgotten. “I don’t think anything we said or did back then applies to the here and now.”
“Some things transcend time and place,” he said evenly. “And a promise is a promise.”
Meg swallowed and tugged a little more at the bow.
“I sometimes think that promise was what I lived for,” he said, almost to himself, “what kept me hanging on when I should have died waiting for the antibiotics to reach me.”
She took another step back. His smile returned, knowing and tempting. “If it helped, then I’m glad of it.” The bow came completely undone in her unsteady fingers.
He reached for the loose end, so that it became a connection between the two of them. “Did you ever think of it? Or did you forget about me altogether?”
She avoided the first of his two questions. “I didn’t forget about you.”
He pulled his end of the ribbon closer to him, bringing her hand with it. Then he lifted her hand, supported it with his own and with a sudden frown studied the ring that adorned her ring finger. “Our wedding ring?”
Meg shrugged, though with him cradling her fisted hand in his palm, nonchalance was the last thing she felt. “I had to have something. People were asking. I bought it over the internet so nobody would see me going to a jeweler’s to get it.”
“And this convinced them?” With the forefinger of his free hand he touched the simple thin gold band. “I would have chosen something a little more…expensive.”
“Its importance is in what it symbolizes, not what it’s worth. As I told your friends, this was all I wanted. Its simplicity and purity were the perfect representation of our relationship. Besides, I didn’t want to spend a lot.”
He straightened her fingers and the velvet ribbon whispered to the floor between them. “You paid for it yourself?”
“Of course.” She tried to ease her hand free, but he held firm. “It wasn’t much.”
“I can tell. And our engagement ring?” He looked from her hand to her face. “Where’s that?”
She shook her head. “We weren’t able to get a suitable engagement ring. It was hard enough getting the wedding band, which we had brought over from another island.” She filled him in on the details of the story she’d concocted for his friends. “You wanted us to choose the engagement ring once you came home, but I was going to argue against that. I like the band on its own.”
“What else were we going to do once I came home?”
She swallowed. “Well, there was…our honeymoon. People asked about that.” Which now that his return was real would be a divorce instead. Meg tugged at her hand and he allowed it to slide free.
Luke folded his arms across his chest and she could read nothing of his thoughts, how he felt about the stories she’d had to make up because she hadn’t been able to tell people he married her out of desperation. It had seemed important that nobody, and especially the half brother he was so keen to disinherit, knew the true circumstances. “Do we know where we’re going for that?”
“You wanted St. Moritz or Paris, but I wanted Easter Island.”
“So we compromised?”
Meg allowed a small smile. “Um…no. We settled on Easter Island because you’ve been to St. Moritz and Paris before, but neither of us has been to Easter Island. And besides, we both wanted to see the statues.” They had talked about the statues in one of their bedside conversations.
“I agreed they’d be amazing to see. Doesn’t mean that’s where I’d take my bride. I’d definitely go for a little more luxury. A little more hotel time, something a little more romantic.”
“That’s how people know how smitten you are with me.”
“Smitten?”
“Hey.” She smiled at his indignant expression. “It was my fantasy.”
“Was it not supposed to be reality-based?”
“You’re saying it’s beyond the realms of possibility?” Her smile faded. Of course someone like him, a multi-millionaire, consistently named in most-eligible-bachelor lists, wouldn’t really ever be interested in her, Meg Elliot, nurse. “Your friends believed it,” she said in her defense, then frowned. “At least they said they did. They thought I was good for you.”
“That’s not what I meant. I was talking about realistic honeymoon destinations, not the reality of you and me together.”
But Meg was on a roll. “They said I’m not like the women you’ve dated in the past-ones who don’t challenge you emotionally, who let you shut yourself off from them. You must have finally realized what’s important in life, must have trusted your ability to give and receive love.”
“All my friends said that, or just Sally, who thinks one psych paper in college makes her Carl Jung?”
Meg hesitated, then sighed. “Mainly Sally,” she finally admitted. But she’d so wanted to believe her, wife of one of Luke’s friends, that she’d bought into her assessment.
Luke’s sudden burst of laughter was the last thing she expected. “So, Easter Island, I can’t wait to see those statues.”
“It’s not funny.” He was still laughing at her. “I didn’t realize when I agreed to this pretence how complicated it would get. I thought I’d come here and, well…I guess I didn’t really think about it at all. But there were people with questions and expectations and I had to tell them something.”
“I’m sure you did the best you could.”
“But you would have handled it better? What would you have told them?”
“To mind their own damn business.”
“You can’t say that to people. And certainly not to your friends.”
“I can and I do. And friends are the ones who take it the best.”
“That’s not my style.”