Under the Millionaire's Mistletoe (9 page)

SANDRA HYATT

To the wonderful women and men of RWNZ and especially Barbara and Peter Clendon.

T
he babble of chatter and laughter ceased.

The only sounds left in the sudden hush of the living room were the rich baritone of Bing Crosby crooning “I'll Be Home for Christmas,” and the crackle of the fire in the stone fireplace.

Perplexed, Meg Elliot turned, careful not to spill the pyramid of Christmas tarts from the silver tray in her hands.

And came face-to-face with a stranger.

Face-to-chest, actually. She had to look up from the navy polo shirt stretched across his shoulders to see his face. Dark, wavy hair, in need of a cut, brushed his forehead. He was clean-shaven and tanned. Too tanned for this time of year at Lake Tahoe, and not a skier's tan. But it was the silver eyes boring into her with unreadable intent that stilled her.

She knew those eyes.

But she didn't know this man.

She'd met so many people in the last few months, it was no surprise that she might forget a face. Except for the fact that this man was not the forgettable type—imposing, disconcerting and way too handsome.

How had he even gotten in? Caesar, guard dog extraordinaire, invariably created an unholy ruckus when anyone, even her friends, approached the house. It had taken him all of the three months she'd lived here to get used to her. And the stranger standing in front of her, silent and watchful, most definitely did not fall into the category of friend. He dropped a leather overnight bag to the carpet with a quiet thud.

There was something so expectant in the way he and, she realized, her guests, watched her. And waited.

The seconds ticked by. Who was he? She needed the answer to that single, simple question before she knew how to react.

He glanced up. Above her hung a chandelier, and incongruous among the glinting crystal dangled a sprig of mistletoe. Surely not?

Meg looked back at him, looked again into those eyes.

Eyes she'd only ever seen the likes of once before.

She felt the color drain from her face. He eased the tray from her hands, placed it on the table behind her. “Luke?” His name left her lips on a whisper.

He watched her struggle for calm, and his mouth stretched into a smile that held little humor. He slid large hands over her jaw to cup her face. “Hi, honey, I'm home,” he said softly as he lowered his head.

Too stunned to react, Meg stood rooted to the spot.
Warm lips collided with hers. There was hunger in his kiss, hunger and a quest for control.

She wouldn't react. Wouldn't
let
herself react.

His fingers threaded into her hair as he claimed her mouth in a blatant attempt to dominate her, and then he gentled his kiss. That surprising gentling melted her defenses and dissolved rational thought.

He was alive. He was home. He was kissing her again.

He'd kissed her only once before. She'd thought her memories had been colored by the circumstances of the time.

Apparently not.

This kiss was every bit as beguiling and as latent with promise as that first one.

But the moment she found herself kissing him back, reaching for him, he lifted his head and then set her away from him as though it was she who had initiated the kiss and he needed to put distance between them to prevent her from doing it again.

Dimly, she heard a burst of applause.

Her awareness returned. Her guests—the organizing committee for tomorrow night's charity dinner—were witnessing this scene play out. She felt the color rush back to her cheeks.

Luke's gaze didn't leave her face. “Aren't you going to introduce me, darling? I saw only a few familiar faces.”

Not daring to look away, she said, “Everyone,” and the word came out a hoarse whisper that made him grin a shark's grin. She cleared her throat. “This is Luke Maitland. My husband.”

Then it all happened in a blur: hugs, congratulations, assurances that they knew she'd want to be alone with
her husband after his unexpected return. Within minutes she and the stranger she'd married stood together at his front door as the quiet purr of the last departing vehicle faded into the night.

Meg stepped out and away from the arm he had draped possessively and firmly—as though he knew she wanted to bolt after that final car—over her shoulder. Frigid air wrapped itself around her in its stead.

He followed close as she led the way back to the high-ceilinged living room. His living room. Platters of nibbles still sat on the coffee table, Bing still sang, but everything had changed.

Those eyes. How could she not have known him instantly?

Finally, when the silence had stretched way beyond comfortable, Meg spoke. “You're looking…better.” The last time she'd seen him he'd been lying, pale and unshaven, on a makeshift hospital bed on an Indonesian island. And taller. In the few days she'd spent with him, he'd invariably been lying down, or bent with pain when he'd tried to stand. Illness had a way of diminishing people. There was nothing diminished about him now. Upright and strong, he comfortably cleared six foot.

“Disappointed?” he asked quietly.

The question stunned her. “No! How can you ask that? I thought you might die.”

“So did I. But that wouldn't necessarily have worked out badly for you.” He glanced around the sumptuous living room.

They'd spent only a few days together, but she'd thought she'd had a bond with the observant, insightful man in her care. A man who, despite his pain, had made her laugh. The man she remembered had been nothing like this—cool and distant. Suspicious. Then again, the
man she remembered had been close to death. “No, it would have worked out terribly.”

His gaze never wavered. “You got my house. It could have been permanent. And you'll have realized by now that there's much more than the house.”

Back then, he'd talked only of the beauty and magic of the area, of how he'd wanted someone who could appreciate it to have it, someone who understood him. She'd had no idea when she'd married him just how wealthy he was, that when he'd said house he meant mansion on the shore of Lake Tahoe, complete with private jetty, indoor pool, game room, boardroom and a library stocked floor to ceiling with books. She could have lived happily for years in the library alone.

Meg crossed to the fireplace and positioned herself behind an armchair, her fingers pressing into the padding of its high leather back. “You have no right to just walk in here—”

“To my own house?”

“To just walk in,” she continued, “and start accusing me of…what exactly is it you're accusing me of?”

He paused and she held her breath, waiting, uncertain. “Nothing,” he said on a rough sigh, dragging a hand across the back of his neck, and some of the accusation leached from his eyes.

“Luke, it was all your idea. You practically demanded I marry you.”

He strolled closer, picked up one of the Christmas cards from the mantelpiece and glanced at the inside before replacing it. “I don't remember much more than a token resistance from you.”

“You were sick, so let me help you remember. As I recall it, you were desperate. You even invoked the memory of your mother.”

She'd met his mother only once. Meg had gone with a friend to hear her speak at a lunchtime fundraiser in L.A. and had been so impressed that she'd introduced herself to her afterward. They'd ended up having coffee together and talking for hours. It was as a result of that one fateful meeting that when things had ended between Meg and her then-boyfriend she'd thought of doing something completely different. Had thought of Indonesia and the Maitland Foundation. A path that had led her to here and now. “You asked me to do it for her—because of how much I'd respected her and because I knew how revered she'd been on the island. And you even threatened that if I didn't accept you were going to propose to the very next woman who walked into the room.” She'd believed him to be serious and in an uncharacteristic fit of possessiveness Meg hadn't wanted anyone else to have “her” patient, the man she'd spent so many hours talking to. “You said I was doing you a favor.”

Hard to imagine how that could be true now, how plain Meg Elliot, with little to call her own, could have done a handsome millionaire a favor by marrying him.

He rested an arm on the mantel and stared at the fire. A smile touched his lips and then vanished. Uncomfortable in the same room as the stranger who was her husband, Meg edged around the chair and toward the door. She needed space, needed to get to her own room and process what was happening, figure out what she did next. His return changed everything.

“You must be tired.” She had no idea where he'd come from or how far he'd traveled today. But it was late and deep lines creased the skin around his eyes, so she assumed her guess had some foundation. “We can talk all this through in the morning.”

Luke straightened and strode to the door, cutting off
her exit. “You're right. I am tired.” He looked down at her, then lifted his hand to twist a lock of her hair around his finger. “I take it our bed's in the master bedroom.”

Meg swallowed. “Our?” He was joking. Testing her. She was sure of it. Almost one-hundred-percent sure. Ninety-eight at least. Even if she had been the type of woman someone like him would be attracted to, theirs had been an arrangement of practicality and desperation. An arrangement that they'd agreed would end when he returned home.

“You got the benefits of being my wife. Surely I get some benefit in being your husband?”

She pushed his hand away and squared off to him. “You got benefits. Because of me, your brother hasn't moved into this house already.”

“Half brother,” he corrected her. “And that wasn't the benefit I was thinking of.”

“It was when you married me. Or maybe you didn't care about there being any benefit to you, but you most definitely cared about making sure Jason didn't benefit. Cared enough to marry a stranger.”

“A stranger with the gentlest hands.”

Meg stilled.

“I thought about those hands as I was recuperating.”

His sudden change of tone and topic disconcerted her and she took a step back. He was still trying to dominate her, unsettle her, this time with words. That was all it was. She couldn't let him know the effectiveness of his strategy, how very unsettled she was. She, too, had thought about her hands on him.

“You have a lot to explain to me. Where have you been? Why haven't you been in touch before now?”

He watched her steadily. “Nagging me already?”

“Legitimate questions.”

“I have several of my own.”

“Understandably. So I suggest we both get a good night's sleep and deal with them in the morning. The guest wing is that way.” She pointed down the hallway.

“The guest wing? In my own house?”

“My things are in your room. I'll shift them out tomorrow. But for tonight, yes, you can have the guest room.” Over the lonely months Meg had imagined many possible scenarios for Luke's homecoming—they had varied from tender to joyful to passionate.

This tension-laden standoff certainly hadn't been one of them.

 

Luke watched his wife's pretty blue eyes as he searched for the familiar in her face, searched for the differences. Time was, women jumped at the chance of going to bed with him. Although admittedly he was a little out of practice. Still, appalled horror was definitely a first for him.

He'd dreamed of this woman. And granted, many of those dreams had been the product of delirium. Many, but not all. The others had been the product of good old-fashioned desire. He hadn't known whether that attraction was merely the product of time and circumstance.

And he still couldn't answer that question for sure. Different time, different circumstance and he could still feel the pull of the woman standing in front of him.

Who was this woman he'd married?

He recognized the irony in his situation. Most of his life he'd kept people at a distance and now he had a wife he scarcely knew.

He reached for the tendril of golden-brown hair that curled against her pale throat. She blocked his hand, wrap ping slender fingers around his wrist. “Afraid of
me, Meg?” Her scent was something floral. Innocent. And distracting.

She dropped his wrist, lifted her chin and her wide clear eyes searched his face. Defiance overlaid a glimmer of wariness. “Should I be?”

He could still feel the imprint of her fingers, her skin against his. It had been like that whenever she'd touched him. “What do you think?” He didn't know why he was goading her. He'd had scarcely more than a few hours' sleep in the last forty-eight hours. All he really wanted was to lie down somewhere, he didn't care where, and close his eyes. He'd come home, not knowing what to expect, but knowing she couldn't have been as simultaneously wholesome and desirable as his memory wanted to paint her. Besides, he'd never really been into wholesome.

“I think, no.”

He hadn't even known if he'd be able to find her. He certainly hadn't expected her to be hosting a party in his own house. It tarnished the wholesome image, made him doubt his judgment and his memories. “You're sure?”

“I think, for some perverse reason, you'd like me to be afraid of you. But the man I remember was decent and kind.”

He watched her lips, a soft coral pink. He hadn't intended on kissing her. But her lack of recognition of him had galled. And besides, she had been standing under the mistletoe. What was a husband supposed to do? “I was sick. I wasn't entirely myself.”

“Some things don't change.”

Another first, someone defending him to himself. “And some things change completely, Mrs. Maitland.” For instance, he now had the wife he'd sworn he'd never burden his life with.

“I'm not Mrs. Maitland. I never took your name. It didn't seem right.”

He didn't know whether he was relieved or affronted. “Just my house. My money. My life.” He curled his hand around the newel at the base of the stairs.