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
is a California native who loves to travel. Every chance they get, she and her husband are taking off on another research trip. The author of more than sixty books, Maureen loves a happy ending and still swears that she has the best job in the world. She lives in Southern California with her husband, two children and a golden retriever with delusions of grandeur. Visit Maureen’s website at www.maureenchild.com.
SANDRA HYATT
After completing a business degree, traveling and then settling into a career in marketing, Sandra Hyatt was relieved to experience one of life’s eureka moments while on maternity leave-she discovered that writing books, although a lot slower, was just as much fun as reading them.
She knows life doesn’t always hand out happy endings and figures that’s why books ought to. She loves being along for the journey with her characters as they work around, over and through the obstacles standing in their way.
Sandra has lived in both the U.S. and England and currently lives near the coast in New Zealand with her high-school sweetheart and their two children.
You can visit her at www.sandrahyatt.com.
