“Splat,” said Tomas.
“Exactly,” Katrin said. “Off you go, and look both ways before you cross the road. I’ll be up in a minute.”
The two children, forgetting they were tired and hot, ran for the house, obediently stopping on the grass verge and checking for traffic. By the time they were out of earshot, Katrin had turned her back on them to face Luke. Her smile had vanished. “How dare you invade my private life?” she blazed. “You’ve got no right to be here, forcing yourself on my children like that.”
A cold fist squeezed his heart. “So they’re your children?”
“Who else’s would they be?” she retorted. “I don’t want you anywhere near here—I keep my work life and my personal life totally separate. Besides, I told you to leave me alone, remember?”
He said reluctantly, “They’re fine kids.”
“Yes, they are. And if you think I’m going to have some kind of a two-day fling with you and jeopardize my whole life, you’re crazy.”
Luke’s tongue felt thick, and his brain seemed to have stopped working altogether. Katrin was married, the mother of two children. What the hell was he doing here? He swallowed, clearing his throat. “Let’s keep something straight. I’ve not once suggested I wanted a fling with you.”
She flushed, shoving her hands into the pockets of her shorts. “Don’t insult my intelligence—I can read the signals.”
“Then you’re quite intelligent enough to know that some very basic chemistry’s operating between us. It’s not just me.”
“It is just you!”
Her cheeks were now a bright pink. Luke drawled, “We could have one of those exchanges best suited to Tomas and Lara. It’s not. It is. It’s not. It is…is that what you want?”
“I want you gone from here. And I don’t want you to come back,” she said with deadly precision.
He had the same sinking feeling in his gut that had overcome him ten years ago when he’d been outwitted by a broker whose financial wizardry had been exceeded only by his lack of morals. Now, as then, there was no way to recoup. His only recourse was to get out as gracefully as he could and accept his losses. He said with a sudden raw honesty that took him by surprise, “Okay. I’ll leave and I won’t come back. But I won’t find it easy to forget you…don’t ask me to explain that, because I can’t. And don’t for one minute think I make a habit of hitting on women when I’m at a conference. Nothing could be further from the truth—and that holds whether they’re waitresses or CEOs.”
He’d run out of words. There was nothing else to say that could make any difference. Game over.
As though he were taking another photograph, Luke found himself trying to memorize every detail as Katrin stood before him: the elegant lines of her cheekbones, the sudden uncertainty in her sky-blue eyes, the push of her breasts against her thin green top. Storing it all in his brain against the time when he’d be gone from here. When he’d never see her again.
She said stiffly, “Give me one good reason why I should believe you.”
“I can’t! Either you believe me or you don’t. And what does it matter anyway?”
“You’re right, it doesn’t matter.” She bit her lip. “Please leave now, Luke—I should go up to the house and make sure the kids are all right. Besides, Erik will be home shortly.”
The last person in the world Luke wanted to meet was Katrin’s husband. The man who shared her bed. The father of her children. With one small part of his mind he realized that this was the first time Katrin had called him by name, and would also be the last. “Goodbye, Katrin,” he said, turned on his heel and wound through the poplars toward his car, remembering on the way to snag his camera from the apple tree.
Just as he opened the car door, Lara and Tomas emerged onto the front step of the house, each clutching an icecream cone. They waved at him. “Bye, Luke,” Lara called.
“Goodbye, Lara. Bye, Tomas,” he called back, turned around in the road and drove north along the shore. In his rearview mirror he watched Katrin cross the road and walk toward the house.
Game over, indeed.
Except it didn’t remotely resemble a game. Rather, Luke felt like that little five-year-old boy in Teal Lake who’d finally realized his mother wasn’t going to come back home; that she hadn’t just gone to the store, or into Kenora for a visit. Then, as now, he had the same sensation that the earth had shifted, that there was nothing firm to stand on.
Katrin was married, the mother of two children. No matter how much he desired her, she belonged to someone else.
Once Luke was out of sight of the pale yellow house, he pulled up by the side of the road and gazed out over the lake. Its serenity mocked him, so placid was it, so much in harmony with the graceful willows that draped its shoreline.
He felt cheated. As though he’d caught a glimpse of beauty beyond his imagining, only to have it snatched away before he could grasp it.
A couple of teenage boys were slouching along the road toward him. Luke edged off the shoulder and drove on. But five minutes later, when the tearoom came in sight, he slowed down again. He didn’t want to go back to the resort and be convivial. He didn’t want to play golf or lift weights, and he’d already jogged this morning. While tearooms weren’t priority on his list, he could do with something cold to drink. And maybe a piece of chocolate pie, he thought wryly. The basic cure for a bruised ego.
Because that’s all this was. It wasn’t a major tragedy. He’d merely made a fool of himself for reasons he didn’t want to analyze, with a woman far too acute for his own comfort. Yeah, he thought, turning into the driveway between rows of pink and scarlet petunias. Chocolate pie. That’s what I need.
The tearoom wasn’t designed with six-foot-two men in mind: the tables were small, the curtains frilly, the wallpaper with more flowers than a Hollywood funeral. But in the cooler by the door there was a chocolate torte with thick layers of dark chocolate icing, and the proprietress gave him a friendly welcome. Luke smiled back. “I’ll have a big slice of the torte,” he said, “and iced tea with extra lemon, please.”
“Coming right up,” she said, her brown eyes twinkling at him. Her name tag was inscribed in such elaborate calligraphy that he had difficulty deciphering it; he was almost sure it said Margret. Her hair was the orange of marigolds, her eyeshadow blue as delphiniums, and she had no pretensions to youth. But something in her smile said that a tall, athletic-looking man could brighten her day anytime.
Luke picked up a newspaper from the stand by the door and sat down by the window. Six women were sharing a table on the far side of the room, and two more were seated nearer to him; he was the only man. Feeling minimally more cheerful, he unfolded the paper. When his iced tea arrived, he took a sip; it was exactly as he liked it. Then Margret arrived with a flowered plate bearing a huge slab of torte surrounded by swirls of chocolate sauce, sliced strawberries and whipped cream. He grinned. “No calories in that.”
“You’re in fine shape, you don’t need to worry,” she said, giving him a flirtatious wink. “You must be staying at the resort?”
“That’s right, there’s a mining conference going on.” Deliberately he added, “I was just driving through the village and met Katrin, who’s our waitress in the dining room.”
“Katrin Sigurdson, that’s right. She lives in the pink house two down from the church.”
Luke’s fork stopped in midair. “No…she was at the very end house in the village. Playing with her kids.”
Margret frowned. “Kids?”
“Lara and Tomas. Blond like her.”
“Katrin doesn’t