Catherine Spencer - Tempting Lucas

She allowed him a small smile, then looked away. Just as well. It would never have done for her to see how shaken up he was, how close to losing it, and all because of her. How could he have explained such a reaction when he didn’t understand it himself?

It wasn’t as if the car had actually touched her. In fact, it had squealed to a halt a good six feet away. It was those seconds in between that had left him such a mess. One minute she’d been standing there, perfect in pale green linen and straw accessories, clearly repelled by the thought of living in the same house with him, breathing the same air, and the next he’d retaliated with a blow so low it was unforgivable, and the damage was done.

She’d blanched with shock. Her eyes had seemed to fill her face, huge brown wells of pain, and her mouth had opened in a perfect, soundless pink O, leaving him feeling as if he’d just kicked a puppy in the teeth. Then, before he could begin to form an apology, she’d swung around in a graceful arc and floated out of his reach and practically under the wheels of the passing car.

“Lucas?” She was looking at him again and rubbing absently at the back of her neck where he’d grabbed hold of her.

“What? Did I hurt you?”

She lifted one elegant shoulder in a ghost of a shrug. “Not really. But this other business—about us living at Roscommon until Belvoir’s been repaired—how can it possibly work, Lucas, with things the way they are between us?”

“What say I buy you lunch and we’ll talk about it? We’ve still got a couple of hours to kill before we collect Grandma.”

“I’m not very hungry.”

She looked a bit pale and more than a little apprehensive, as though the potential pitfalls of such a living arrangement were more than she could face. “Then you can watch me eat while we deal with all the history between us,” he said, “because the way things are shaping up we aren’t going to be able to avoid each other for the next little while. And although I can’t speak for you, Emily Jane, I don’t mind admitting that it’s going to be rough going for me unless we clear the air a bit.”

“All right, whatever you say,” she muttered.

He took her to a restaurant overlooking the April river. From the front it was nothing but a narrow, brick-faced building with a canopied entrance and a wrought iron railing, but inside it opened onto a long courtyard with a fountain in the middle and a profusion of flowering plants spilling down the walls and over the edges of ceramic containers.

They were shown to a table on the south side, shaded by a tilted sun umbrella. Disregarding what she’d said about not being hungry, Lucas ordered for both of them—fish chowder with sourdough bread, and iced tea. “So,” he began, immediately the waiter left, “do you want to start the ball rolling, or shall I?”

“You,” she said unhesitatingly.

“OK.” He took a swig of iced tea. “The way I see it, you and I got off track the last summer we spent here.”

“No.” She shook her head. “It happened long before that, Lucas. It all began the summer I turned fifteen and you kissed me for the first time. Or are you going to pretend you’ve forgotten about that?”

He stirred the lemon wedge around in his glass and wished he could look her in the eye and lie. It had been such a brief incident, after all, hardly one to hang onto through the years. But, “No,” he admitted, expelling a long breath. “I remember only too well.”

“Why did you do it, Lucas? Kiss me, I mean?”

“Why?” He lifted his shoulders, feigning bafflement. “Don’t ask me. It wasn’t something I planned. Hell, you’d always been just another of the cousins from next door, all pigtails and big brown eyes. The kid I’d taught to swim when she was about five. Then you...changed.”

“Are you saying it was my fault that time, too?”

In a way, yes, he thought, but he could hardly come out and tell her that, over the preceding winter, she’d grown into a leggy adolescent with breasts. Or that they had been the first thing he’d noticed when she’d come to Belvoir that particular summer.

A couple of his brothers had noticed, too. “Emily Jane’s grown hooters,” fifteen-year old Sean had whispered, bug-eyed with awe. “Man, hand me my catcher’s mitt!”

Ted, who at seventeen had thought himself vastly more experienced in such matters, had scoffed, “They’re not big enough to fill a bra let alone a baseball glove. Save your energy, kid!”

But Lucas, who’d turned twenty the previous November and had, at their age, been prone to much the same kind of irreverence, had known an inexplicable urge to flatten both brothers. Feigning lofty indifference, he’d stalked inside to catch up on the reading requirements for his second year of university, due to start that September.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said now.

“Well, thank you for that much,” she said. “Particularly since I remember that summer as being one of the happiest I spent at Belvoir.”

“For me too,” he admitted. And it was true, up to a point. As the days had gone by, the phenomenon of Emily’s breasts had gradually ceased to elicit wonder among the brothers at Roscommon House and by the middle of August the old, easy camaraderie between the younger members of the two families had re-established itself.

“It marked the end of an era,” he went on. “We were never that carefree again.”

“No.” Her voice was soft, her brown eyes hazy, as though pictures from that summer were unrolling in her mind. “We clowned around every day, shoving each other off the end of the diving pier or cannonballing into the river, and sat around a bonfire nearly every night. One big, happy family, with no hidden agendas or undercurrents to spoil things.”

“Until the night I kissed you,” Lucas said. “Nothing was ever the same after that. It was the last day of the summer vacation, as I recall, and the last year that we were all together like that. We’d gone swimming after dark, my brothers and I, and you and all your cousins from Belvoir, and we were making one hell of a noise.”

“And your grandmother came out and hammered on the old ship’s bell hanging from the back porch of Roscommon, and told us to get inside before we were all arrested for disturbing the peace!”

“She bribed us with gingerbread and fruit punch,” he said.

“Right. And in the rush to get up to the house I slipped and fell among the reeds lining the river bank.”

And he’d been right behind her and had leaned down and yanked her to her feet more roughly than he’d meant to, and somehow she had crashed into him, and he’d had his arms around her to steady her, and she’d looked up at him with her big brown eyes and her lips had been parted and shining with water....

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