Brenda Harlen - A Very Special Delivery

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.”

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