Читать книгу Tempting Lucas - Catherine Spencer - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

EMILY surfaced from sleep slowly, reluctantly, the smell of the Alaska smoked cod Consuela had served for dinner connecting her vividly to the dream. Except that they’d had poached salmon for dinner and instead of fading, as dreams were supposed to, the odor winding in long, sinuous threads under her door was growing stronger, accompanied by a thin wail of distress from somewhere else in the house.

Suddenly wide awake, she bolted upright in the bed, her senses screaming a warning. Streaking across the room, she wrenched open the door, and found her worst fears confirmed by the blue haze of smoke rising in the stairwell.

“Grand-mère!” she cried, her voice echoing faintly, a whisper of dread. “Consuela!”

She raced into her grandmother’s room. It was empty, the covers thrown back from the bed, and the sight terrified her. Belvoir was huge; it had eight bedrooms, all with connecting baths, and five reception rooms, in addition to the kitchen and breakfast room, then the entire third storey, which once had housed a fleet of servants but which Consuela now had to herself. Where did a person begin to search?

Was that her own pitiful little voice, whimpering with fear, that she could hear as she turned toward the upper floor? Was that really her, rooted to the spot and doing nothing to help Consuela as she tottered down the narrow upper stairs with her nightgown flapping around her feet and threatening to pitch her head-first onto the main landing?

“Dear Lord, she’s done it again,” Consuela said hoarsely, clutching her chest and fighting to draw breath.

It was enough to jolt Emily into full awareness. The crackle of flames had joined that poisonous column of smoke to underline the danger closing in on two infirm and helpless old women trapped in a house ablaze. If she was to get them and herself out safely, she had to take charge and fast. “My grandmother isn’t in her room, Consuela. Do you know where she might—?”

Before she could complete the question, that wail of distress rose up from somewhere below on the main floor. Consuela heard it, too, and sighed with dull resignation. “Madame wanders...” she wheezed “... all over the place... when she can’t sleep—”

“Never mind!” With uncivilized disregard for Consuela’s age and lack of agility, Emily piloted her down the main staircase, driven by the knowledge that Monique was somewhere below, that she might be trapped by the flames or, worse yet, on fire herself. The possible outcome inherent in the situation didn’t bear thinking about.

It was a nightmare journey. The smoke, thicker now, filled the stairwell, making their eyes smart, obscuring their vision, tormenting their lungs. Once, Consuela tripped on her long, flowing nightgown and almost tumbled both of them head over heels the rest of the way. But by some miracle she regained her balance and finally they rounded the last curve of the staircase. Emily knew because the arched entrance to the drawing room lay to the left, and the flames crawling up the draperies at the window within were turned to dazzling Catherine wheels of color by the smoke-induced tears stinging her eyes.

Directly ahead lay the front door and beyond it the sweet sanity of fresh air that her tortured lungs craved. “Almost there,” she choked. “Just a couple more stairs, Consuela.”

Blinded by smoke, she felt the newel post of the banister under her hand and knew she’d reached the bottom stair; knew that her next step would bring her to the solid floor of the entrance hall. She stretched out her foot, expecting to touch the smooth Italian marble tiles. And instead made contact with the crumpled heap that was her grandmother.

Did she open her mouth to scream? Was that what caused her lungs to rebel at the overload of smoke and leave her gagging as well as blinded? Was the noise that filled her ears the sound of her own panicked blood roaring through her veins—or the double front doors smashing open and urgent male voices shouting to each other?

It didn’t matter. All that signified was the cool, firm grasp of another’s hand, of the arm at her waist shepherding her out to where the blessedly pure night air waited to restore her breathing. Collapsing on the lawn, she watched through bleary, flooded eyes as the tall figure that had rescued her returned to Belvoir, and a moment later reappeared with her grandmother in his arms.

If she had thought that they might one day meet again, Emily had not expected that it would be like this, with them avoiding each other’s eyes over Monique’s prostrate figure. She had not thought she would owe him gratitude or thanks. Nor did he seem to expect it. Satisfied that her grandmother was breathing, Lucas Flynn turned back to help the other man, a stranger, who was bringing Consuela out through the door.

“Over here,” he said, his voice full of quiet authority. “They’re far enough away to be safe here for now.” His gaze came to rest on Emily and just briefly, in the midst of the panic and fear, a spark of awareness more dangerous than the fire within the house flared between them. And then it was gone, doused by the blank indifference in his blue eyes. “Is there anyone else inside?” he asked.

She shook her head and held a hand to her painful throat. “No.”

“No pets or anything?”

How could she have forgotten her grandmother’s beloved, bad-tempered Robespierre? “There’s the cat—”

“He goes hunting,” Consuela wheezed, “every night. There is no one left inside.”

The other man, the stranger, spoke kindly. “Where’s your garden hose? The blaze seems confined to one room so perhaps I can put it out or at least contain it.”

“Don’t try going in there again,” Lucas said shortly. “Acting the hero isn’t going to help if you end up another casualty. That’s the last thing we need.”

“I’ll break the window and work from the outside.” The stranger’s manner was quietly confident, the hand he rested on Emily’s shoulder sympathetic. “We can’t stand by watching family treasures go up in smoke without doing something about it, now can we?”

“Suit yourself,” Lucas muttered, squatting beside Monique and checking her pulse.

After a moment, he sat back on his heels and blew out a breath. Without thinking, Emily reached out and touched his arm. If she’d grasped a live wire, the jolt could not have shocked her more. Snatching back her hand, she said, “How is she?”

“Better than either of you, it seems,” he replied, jerking a nod at Consuela who lay like a sack of flour, panting audibly.

His impersonal tone and the way he refused to look at her left Emily feeling like an interloper. Annoyed, she said as sharply as her beleaguered lungs would allow, “How can that be? She was passed out on the floor.”

“Exactly,” he replied loftily, as if only a complete fool would fail to figure it out for herself, “and smoke rises. She’s suffered almost no harmful inhalation.”

Monique chose that moment to assert herself. “I did not pass out,” she announced in distinct tones that left no one in any doubt about her umbrage at being treated as if she weren’t quite all there. “I slipped and fell.”

“Did you?” he said impassively. “And how are you feeling now?”

“Like hell, Lucas Flynn, and if you were any sort of doctor you’d know that without having to ask.”

Unperturbed, he began to examine her, probing gently along her neck and down her arms. “Want to tell me how you came to fall?”

“I was trying to alert my household to the fact that my home was on fire.”

“How do you think it started?”

“I have no idea,” she returned frostily.

“It was the same as before,” Consuela said. “Madame—”

“Be quiet!” Monique snapped. “How could you possibly know anything when you were upstairs snoring so loudly that I couldn’t sleep?”

Just then Beatrice Flynn, Lucas’s grandmother, came traipsing through the trees, clad in a brocade dressing gown and with her hair hanging down her back in a long gray braid. “Praise the Lord Lucas got you out alive!” she cried, the beam of the flashlight she carried swinging in a wide arc over them where they huddled on the lawn. “You could all have fried in your beds!”

“You must be terribly disappointed,” Monique retorted with a malevolent glare.

“That’s a wicked thing to say, Monique Lamartine. I wouldn’t wish anyone dead, not even you.”

Perhaps it was as well that the sound of sirens split the night just then, signaling the arrival of emergency vehicles and thus preventing another round in the yearsold feud between the two dowagers.

“Three casualties, none too serious,” Lucas informed the ambulance attendants, while the fire marshall organized his crew. “This one had a stroke recently, the other two suffered some smoke inhalation. A night in the hospital won’t hurt any of them.”

“I do not require hospitalization,” Monique declared, struggling to sit up, “but by all means take Consuela. She’s wheezing like a locomotive.”

“This hasn’t been easy on you either, Mrs. Lamartine,” he said as the paramedics loaded Consuela onto a stretcher. “You need rest and a thorough check-up, too.”

“You’re supposed to be a doctor and you’ve just given me a check-up. How many more do I need?”

“You’ll be better cared for in a properly equipped medical center.”

“No,” she said, waving aside his concern. “This is my home and here I intend to remain.”

“That’s impossible, as I’m sure you know,” Lucas replied, with thinly veiled impatience. “If you refuse to follow my advice then you’ll have to find some other place to stay because there’s no way you’ll be allowed back into your house tonight, nor, I suspect, for some time to come.”

“You’re quite right,” Emily said. “Grand-mère, we’ll phone for a taxi and take a room at the hotel, then in the morning I’ll contact the family and make temporary arrangements for you to stay with—”

“You will do no such thing, Emily Jane! Furthermore, if you attempt to use this unfortunate incident to convince me that my children are correct in thinking I’m unable to care for myself without their help, then not only are you a dreadful disappointment to me, are you also no longer welcome in my home.”

“Well, she’s welcome in mine,” Beatrice put in. “And so, come to that, are you, Monique Lamartine, though why I should put myself out for you I don’t know. It’s a miserable old woman you’ve become, and I pray I don’t turn out the same when I’m your age.”

“You’re already my age and then some!”

Beatrice did an about-turn and prepared to march back the way she’d come. “I’ll not waste breath arguing with you. If my house isn’t good enough, you can sleep under the stars for all I care. Emily Jane, if you decide to take me up on my offer, you know where I live.”

She was almost at the boundary of the two properties when Monique called out grudgingly, “I never said your house wasn’t good enough, you silly woman.”

Beatrice spun around in her tracks. “Are you saying you’d like me to prepare a room for you, then?” she inquired, exacting a full measure of revenge in the way she pointedly waited for a reply.

Emily could have sworn she saw her grandmother swallow the huge chunk of pride threatening to choke her before she managed, “Under these very unusual circumstances, I find that an acceptable alternative, yes.”

“In that case,” Beatrice said, “I’ll ask you, Lucas, to fetch the car round so that poor, feeble Mrs. Lamartine doesn’t have to trek through the woods at such an ungodly hour and her in nothing but a sootstained nightie.”

Even outdoors, with people and space between them, Emily felt his presence too acutely. The idea of finding herself confined with him in the close quarters of a car, even for the short time it would take him to drive them next door, filled her with dismay.

Apparently, Lucas felt likewise. “Of course,” he said, politely enough, his eyes resting on Emily, but then his gaze flicked away from her as if she were nothing but the unpleasant figment of someone else’s imagination.

Beatrice assigned her to the second guest suite, a big square room with a sitting alcove at one end and an en suite bathroom at the other. She had laid out a long cotton gown which, while it was certainly several sizes too large, was infinitely preferable to Emily’s own grassstained, smoke-drenched nightshirt. That and the deep tub lured her to delay the pleasure of crawling between the sweet-smelling sheets until she’d shampooed her hair and soaped her skin clean of the fire’s residue.

She had just emerged from the bathroom with her hair turbaned in a towel when a tap came at the bedroom door. “Emily Jane, darling, are you in bed yet?” Beatrice called softly.

“Not quite,” Emily said. “Come in, Mrs. Flynn.”

“I’ll not disturb you,” Beatrice said, popping her head around the door. “I just want to make sure you have everything you need. Also, I’ve made cocoa, and if you’re ready for it I’ll bring it up to you.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Emily said, walking over to the door and opening it wider. “It might be over ten years since I was last here, but I haven’t forgotten where the kitchen is and you’ve been disturbed enough for one night. Go to bed, please, or before you know it it’ll be time to get up again.”

“Well, I will, then, if it’s all the same to you.” Beatrice took Emily’s hands affectionately. “It’s a lovely woman you’ve grown into, Emily Jane, and I’ve missed you. Don’t let another ten years go by before you come to stay again.”

Was it being assailed by yet another shock, the after-effects of smoke or plain and simple fatigue that had Emily’s eyes threatening to fill with tears? “You were always so kind to us, Mrs. Flynn, despite...”

Beatrice knew what she meant. The ill-will between the grandmothers had been as much a part of everyday life as the river flowing past the bottom of their gardens. “And why would I not be? Two silly old women feuding over the Lord knows what have no business putting innocent children in the way of their bickering.”

Emily experienced a flash of guilt at that. How innocent had she been the night she’d tried to bring her romantic dreams to fruition? But if her grandmother held Lucas responsible for the outcome it was obvious from Beatrice’s attitude that she either remained ignorant of the true order of events or else chose not to assign blame.

“Make yourself at home and sleep as long as you like in the morning, darling,” she said, planting a kiss on Emily’s cheek. “There’s no rush to be up and about. We’ll look after your grandma for you; never doubt that.”

When Emily stole downstairs fifteen minutes later, the air was filled with the hush of a house at rest and nothing but the quiet tick of clocks to mark the passing hours. Except for a ray of light spilling out of the kitchen into the downstairs hall, the rooms lay in darkness.

Despite the addition of two built-in convection wall ovens and a dishwasher, the kitchen hadn’t changed much over the years. The same scrubbed pine table still occupied the middle of the red tiled floor, the copper pots still hung from a circular rack above it, and if the geraniums flowering on the windowsill above the sink weren’t the ones that had flourished in her childhood Emily couldn’t have told the difference.

She ought to have considered that he might also be in the room. Even if the theory of feminine intuition was based on nothing but a lot of wishful thinking, sheer common sense should have warned her, when she saw the tray containing a Thermos and two saucers but only one cup, that she was not alone.

But it was the shiny chrome surface of the Thermos that alerted her to his presence, mirroring his reflection as he stirred from his spot by the big, old-fashioned fireplace. And by then it was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen him, too late to worry that she looked ridiculous in the voluminous nightgown that had been in fashion at least fifty years before and whose hem she held hiked up around her knees, and much too late to rehearse this first private meeting with him since the night she’d slithered, uninvited, between the sheets of his bed and seduced him.

For a while it appeared that neither of them was willing to break the silence unspooling between them. Instead, they simply stared at each other, he remotely, like the stranger he undoubtedly wished he were, and she—ye gods, her gaze clung to him shamelessly, devouring his every feature with the rapacity of a woman on the brink of starvation.

In the more revealing light of the kitchen, she could see what had not been so apparent in the gloom of Belvoir’s garden. He had aged, but so graciously that he was even more beautiful than he’d been at twenty five. His hair lay as thick and unruly as ever, the only difference being that now it was lightly shot with silver.

As for his mouth. . . ! Oh, despite the hardships he might have known, his mouth was as she’d always remembered it, so blatantly sexy that her lips parted in mute supplication to know its touch again.

Just once more, her wayward heart cried. Just once and it’ll be enough. I’ll never ask again.

Appalled, she said primly, “If I’d realized you were down here—”

“You’d have remained upstairs.” He offered the merest suggestion of a shrug. “I could say the same thing but it would be pointless, wouldn’t it? You’re here, I’m here, and it seems that whether we like it or not we’re destined to acknowledge each other.”

She wished he hadn’t moved his shoulders in that sinuous way that drew attention less to their width, which had always been impressive, than to the fact that his shirt was unbuttoned and hanging loose at the waist of his blue jeans. Her gaze dropped from his mouth to the expanse of flesh that his gesture had uncovered.

The musculature of his chest was more defined than when she’d run her hands over its planes that other summer, the skin even more deeply tanned. His stomach, though, was the same: flat and hard, just as it had been then. Except for his mouth and his hands, he had been hard all over that night. . .

“I was going to say I wouldn’t have disturbed you,” she said, corralling her thoughts before they got her into more trouble than she could possibly cope with. “We’ve put you to enough trouble already, getting you out of bed to rush to our rescue.”

“I’m a night owl. I’m seldom asleep before one or two in the morning.”

You were the night I came sneaking in, she thought. You were out cold, lying with nothing but a sheet covering you, and it took me no time at all to whisk it aside and confirm every last delicious fantasy I’d ever harbored about you.

Her sharply drawn breath escaped before she could suppress it. Face flaming, she swung back to the Thermos of cocoa and hoped her hands wouldn’t betray her by shaking too visibly as she filled the lone cup.

The worst was over, surely? They’d come face to face, exchanged the barest civilities and both survived the ordeal. Now all she had to do was beat a not too obvious retreat before her unruly memory betrayed her more than it already had.

“How have you been, Emily?”

Instead of being fielded from across the kitchen, his question flowed over her shoulder, and she realized that he’d moved to stand close behind her. Much too close. Agitated, she sought refuge around the other side of the table. “Very well, thank you.”

“And your husband?”

“Husband?”

A smile settled fleetingly on his mouth, a glimmer of cool white amusement against the bronze of his skin. “The man you married.”

“I—he’s well, too.” Even had this been the time and place to divulge that her marriage was a thing of the past, Lucas Flynn was not the one to burden with the disclosure. It wasn’t as if he gave a damn; he was merely going through the socially correct motions, as was she when she said, “I was sorry to hear about your wife.”

He lifted his shoulders in another dismissive shrug. “These things happen,” he said, so dispassionately that Emily couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ousted Sydney from his life as easily as he’d evicted her.

“You make it sound as if her death was more inconvenient than tragic,” she heard herself remark acidly.

Annoyance thinned his lips, his amusement dispelled so thoroughly that, if memory hadn’t served her better, she’d have thought him incapable of smiling. “I hardly feel I have to justify to you how I choose to deal with personal tragedy, Emily Jane.”

“You never felt you had to justify anything to me!” The last thing she’d wanted was to be the one to resurrect the past. Even less did she want to come across as the woman wronged, particularly since she’d been the aggressor in their encounter, but the words were out before she could stop them, full of accusation and reproach.

He expelled a brief sigh. “I had hoped you’d forgotten,” he said. “I can’t imagine why you’d want to hang onto the memory.”

Of course he couldn’t, because he hadn’t been the one to offer his heart and have it tossed back without a word of appreciation or thanks. He’d walked away untouched, whereas she’d been permanently scarred by her botched attempt to make him love her as she’d loved him.

He had no idea, no idea at all, of the ultimate cost to her of the night she’d seduced him. Blissfully ignorant, he’d gone forward, married the woman of his choice, and left Emily to carry the burden of her guilt and sorrow alone. Knowing he hadn’t been to blame for that didn’t prevent her from resenting him for it.

“I don’t,” she replied stonily. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t thought about you in years until today.”

“Then you’ve been happy?”

“What do you care?” Oh, Emily, shut up! she told herself angrily.

His sigh this time was fraught with exasperation, as if he found having to explain such obvious and simple facts exceedingly tedious. “We were friends for a long time, Emily. Closer than friends, even. More like brother and sister. One night of ... indiscretion doesn’t negate all the good times. Of course I care.”

About as much as he cared about the weather! But he wasn’t her brother, she didn’t want his diluted affection, and she couldn’t bear his bold references to a time she’d truly tried to bury in the past where it belonged. She wanted to escape and shut herself in her room, to be alone before she faced the fact that he still had the power to affect her more deeply than any other man she’d ever met.

“Then, to answer your question, I am very happy, very successful, and very tired,” she said, stepping around him and heading for the door. “Thank you again for coming to our rescue tonight. Under the circumstances, it was very decent of you.”

“Decent?” Although she couldn’t see it this time, she heard the amusement in his voice. “What else could I have done? Left you to burn?”

“You might have, if you’d known I was visiting my grandmother.”

“Hardly,” he scoffed. “I took a professional oath a long time ago to preserve and honor human life.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, Even mine? but she bit back the words and said instead, “Of course. Well, don’t worry that we’ll make a habit of calling on you to bail us out of trouble. We pride ourselves on being very self-sufficient.”

Like every other assertion she’d made in the last little while, however, that last one of Emily’s turned out to be erroneous. By the following morning, Monique’s left knee was badly swollen. “I remember twisting it when I slipped,” she admitted to Lucas when, at Beatrice’s insistence, he came to take a look.

“If you had gone to the hospital to be checked over as I suggested, this could have been taken care of last night,” he pointed out.

“With everything else that was happening at the time, it didn’t seem worth mentioning. In any case, you’re supposed to be a doctor so you can take care of it now.”

“I’m not leaving myself open to your suing me for negligence, Mrs. Lamartine,” he informed her. “For a start, I have no malpractice insurance, and second, I don’t need the aggravation. Whether you like it or not, you’re going into town for X-rays. And consider yourself lucky you didn’t break a hip.”

“If this is an example of your bedside manner, it’s no wonder you had to give up practicing medicine,” Monique retorted.

Earlier, Emily had gone over to Belvoir to meet the fire marshall and hear his report on last night’s disaster. Although he’d allowed her to collect a few clothes and other basic necessities, he’d been adamant that the house was not safe in its present condition.

The drawing room, sadly, was destroyed, its furnishings blackened and soaked in water, and there had been structural damage to a supporting wall. Not surprisingly, the whole house also reeked of smoke. It would be weeks before they could go home again—news which Emily knew would not be well received.

In her view, all this was trouble enough for one day. She certainly didn’t need to run interference when Monique decided to bait Lucas—which was every chance she got. She had enough to do holding her own emotions in check where he was concerned.

“I’ll get you to the hospital,” she offered, hoping to distract her grandmother. “They phoned this morning to let us know that Consuela is ready to come home, so I have to drop by anyway, with a change of clothes for her and to collect her. Then, once you’re taken care of, we’ll go over to the hotel and take a suite there until we decide what to do next.”

“Whatever for?” Beatrice exclaimed, coming into the room just in time to hear the tail end of the conversation. “There’s plenty of room here for all of you without us falling over one another.”

“You’re very kind,” Monique said grandly, “but it would be an imposition and so quite out of the question.”

“Don’t be so quick to turn me down,” Beatrice said. “We’re heading into summer and the tourists are pouring into the area already. Suppose they can’t take you at the hotel? Where’ll you go then, Monique Lamartine, since you’re so dead set against burdening your family with your ill-tempered presence? Somehow, I don’t see you camping in a tent until your poor house is fit to live in again.”

“Phone for a taxi, Emily Jane,” Monique said, with lofty disdain for such pitiful reasoning. “We have business to which we must attend and I would like it concluded as speedily as possible.”

Beatrice opened her mouth to object to that idea too, but Lucas forestalled her with weary resignation. “I’ll drive you into town.”

“Thank you, but no,” Emily said. “That really is asking too much.”

“Not at all. I’ve got a number of errands to attend to.” He finished the last of his coffee and checked his watch. “If you could be ready to leave in half an hour?”

For all that he phrased them so politely, the words were a command, not a request, and underlined what he’d made patently clear the night before: their presence, particularly Emily’s, was an imposition of the highest order.

When they arrived at the hospital just after eleven, the first person they spoke to was Monique’s doctor, whose opinion, when he heard about the previous night’s events, coincided entirely with Lucas’s. Rapping out orders, he whisked his patient into a wheelchair and off for a complete physical, including an X-ray of her knee.

“Barring any unusual findings, you should be able to pick her up in about three hours,” he told Emily over his shoulder as he pushed aside the swinging doors through which her grandmother had already disappeared.

Lucas, who’d accompanied them inside the building, spoke for the first time. “That’ll give me plenty of time to take care of my business, so unless there’s something else I can do for you I’ll take off now and meet you back here around two.”

Without waiting for a reply, he did precisely that, disappearing with what Emily perceived to be enormous relief at being rid of them. She, however, was alarmed at the length of time her grandmother was to be detained.

“Does it normally take three hours to run a few tests?” she asked the nurse who’d assisted with Monique’s preliminary examination. “Or is the doctor concerned that my grandmother might have had another stroke, do you think?”

“Well, he’ll want to make sure that hasn’t happened, of course, but it’s more a precautionary measure. Also, things slow down a bit over the lunch hour so we don’t always get test results back as quickly as we’d like.” The nurse smiled reassuringly. “Hanging around the emergency unit’s enough to give anyone the willies and the food in the cafeteria is lousy. Why don’t you treat yourself to lunch in town? It’s a much pleasanter way to pass the time.”

But not the most efficient, Emily decided, particularly with the question of where they were all going to live for the next little while still unresolved.

It turned out not to be a problem for Consuela. “No hotel for me, Miss Emily,” she declared, accepting the clothes Emily had brought for her to wear. “My sister in-law’s been asking me to pay a visit for months, so now I will. When madame’s ready for me to come back to work, she can phone. I’m just across town and can be out to Belvoir in no time at all.”

“Well, at least let me see you off in a taxi,” Emily said.

“It was the cigarettes, you know,” Consuela confided some twenty minutes later, while they waited for the elevator. “Madame won’t admit it but it’s a miracle she hasn’t brought the house down about our ears before last night. She falls asleep while she’s smoking, you see.”

Her account confirmed what the fire marshall had stated in his report. “I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with the worry of it all by yourself, Consuela,” Emily said. “What you’re telling me now merely reinforces what I’ve already decided. We’re going to have to look at a better arrangement once Belvoir is fit to live in again. Meantime, we’ll be at the hotel if you need us for anything.”

But Beatrice appeared to have been blessed with divine foresight, because the April Water Hotel—the only hotel in town—could give them a room for two nights only. After that, the place was pretty well booked for the remainder of the season. Any hope of securing long-term residence was out of the question. Nor were any of the quaint bed-and-breakfast houses able to help. They didn’t cater for full-time guests.

It seemed that avoiding Lucas wasn’t going to pan out quite as neatly or quickly as Emily had hoped. Unless a miracle occurred within the next hour or two, she and Monique might have no choice but to accept Beatrice’s hospitality until Belvoir was habitable again.

The thought of having to face Lucas across the dining room table three times a day, not to mention running into him at other times in between, and of sleeping down the hall from him, left her dizzy with dismay.