13
After the garage door shut and Margot drove away, Lucas slowly went back into the house, shoulders drooping. There must have been something he could have done to prevent her from leaving, but damn him if he could think of what it might be.
As he entered the kitchen, his gaze fell on the glazed mug she’d used for her tea, still sitting on the counter next to the sink. He went over and picked it up, pressed his lips against the faint trace of the lipstick she’d left there, as if he could somehow recover some of the warmth of her touch by doing so. But the ceramic was cold and hard under his lips, and he shut his eyes, then growled, “Fuck!” before hurling the mug against the wall and watching it shatter into hundreds of pieces.
“Lucky” Lucas, his ass.
Hands clenched into fists, he left the kitchen and the mess he’d just made, stalking through the house with no particular destination in mind. It didn’t seem to matter where he went, though — it was now as if his home had been permanently imprinted with Margot’s presence, the ghost trace of her perfume. Margot bent over the checkerboard in the living room, dark hair haloed by firelight. Margot sitting at the dining room table and lifting a glass of blood-colored wine in response to his toast. Margot in his bed, flushed with desire, waiting for him.
How could she have done this when she’d only been here for two and a half days? How had she managed to do such a good job of insinuating herself into his home, into his life?
Into his heart?
Now he was glad for all those empty years, those times when he’d met women, seen them a few times, bedded them…and then forgot them, heart and mind untouched. He’d never done anything to hurt any of them, had always broken things off before they got too serious. All that time he’d wondered what was wrong with him, that all around him people seemed perfectly capable of falling in love and settling down, and yet there he was, alone when the rest of the world appeared to be pairing off. Now, though, he understood there was a price for making a connection. Because if that connection somehow was broken, it hurt worse than anything else ever could.
Eventually, he ended up sitting in the living room, staring out the tall windows at the snow-encrusted pines, the deep, deep snow drifts. At some point the snow would begin to melt, but now the temperature was still low enough that everything seemed in stasis, held in some perfect balancing point between light and dark, cold and warmth.
He glimpsed some motion then, saw a doe pick her way out from between the trees, stop in the middle of the backyard, and lift her head, as if smelling the wind. Her ears flicked this way and that, and it seemed that her dark gaze fastened on him, catching him watching her. Lucas didn’t move, barely dared to breathe. He didn’t want to frighten her off by making any sudden movements, since he wasn’t sure if she could even see him through the window glass.
Then she shook, turning away from him and moving back into the stand of pines. Heading south.
In that moment, he knew what he had to do.
* * *
Margot eventually got her suitcases out of the trunk, unpacked everything, putting the clothes she hadn’t worn back in the closet, depositing the items that needed laundering in the hamper. It felt right. That way, she was putting a period on her little episode with Lucas Wilcox. A fling, a bout of momentary madness. No one could really blame her for kicking up her heels a bit, as long as nothing changed in the end. To tell the truth, she should probably be grateful to him for showing his true colors, for letting her know he wasn’t quite as harmless as he pretended to be. Now she could settle back into her life again. In a few months, she would have forgotten all about him.
As the afternoon wore on, clouds began to gather again. So much for the forecasters saying the next few days would be clear. She switched on a few lamps, and, because the wind had picked up and chilly air was finding its way around the out-of-true door frames and chinks in the windowsills, she set a spark to the fire in the grate. There, all was cozy and quiet, just the way she liked it. In a little while, she’d go fix herself some soup, then settle out here with the book she’d forgotten to take with her up to Flagstaff. Perfect. Everything back to how it should be.
Someone knocked on the door, and she frowned. That had better not be Allegra, returning with some kind of manufactured errand. Margot somehow doubted it, though; it was almost six, and they tended to eat early in the Moss household.
She went to the door and opened it. Lucas stood there, staring down at her.
At first she was so startled she didn’t quite know what to do. Then she gathered the rags of her composure and asked coldly, “What do you want?”