“Not tell anyone that you got me naked within an hour of meeting me.”
“Not even my brothers?”
“No one,” she said firmly.
He chuckled. “Okay, I won’t tell anyone. But speaking of telling—was there anyone you wanted to call? Or have you already posted newborn photos from your phone on Facebook or Twitter?”
She shook her head. “I don’t do the social media thing.”
His brows lifted. “Do you do the telephone thing?”
“Of course, but I don’t think any of my friends or family is expecting to hear any news about a baby just yet.”
“He’s only a couple weeks ahead of his due date,” Lukas reminded her.
Which was true. It was also true that no one was expecting any birth announcement because no one had known that she was pregnant. Not even her parents, because it wasn’t the type of news Julie wanted to tell them over the phone. She’d wanted to talk to her mother in person, to share her joy—and her fears—with the one person she was sure would understand everything she was feeling. But she’d been traveling for work for the past seven months and hadn’t had a chance to go home. In fact, no one aside from her boss at The Grayson Gallery knew, and it wasn’t Evangeline’s voice that Julie wanted to hear right now—it was her mother’s.
But more than she wanted to hear Lucinda’s voice, she wanted to see her, to feel the warmth of her arms around her. Julie wondered at the irony of the realization that never had she more craved the comfort of her own mother than after becoming a mother herself.
“I guess I need to figure out a way to get home.”
“You’re not going anywhere until this storm passes,” Lukas pointed out to her.
Watching the snow swirl outside the window, she couldn’t dispute the point.
She’d hoped to be home before the weekend. She’d only taken this detour through Pinehurst to discuss some issues with the lawyer her brother had recommended. Of course, she hadn’t admitted to Daniel that she was the one in need of legal advice, because he would have demanded to know what the issues were and insisted that he could handle whatever needed to be handled.
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