The boy who ruined my life.

Macintyre W. Hudson. A voice whispered from her past. Everybody just calls me Mac.

Just like that seven years slipped away and she could see him, Mac Hudson, the most handsome boy ever born, with those dark, laughing eyes, that crooked smile, that silky chocolate hair, too long, falling down over his brow.

Just like that a shiver ran up and down her spine, and Lucy remembered exactly why that boy had ruined her life.

Only he wasn’t a boy any longer, but a man.

And she was a woman.

“Macintyre Hudson did not ruin your life,” Lucy told herself sternly. “At best he stole a few moments of it.”

But what moments those had been, a voice inside her insisted.

About the Author

CARA COLTER lives in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is a recent recipient of an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the ‘Love and Laughter’ category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her or learn more about her through her website: www.cara-colter.com

Second Chance
with the Rebel

Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

“HUDSON GROUP, HOW may I direct your call?”

“Macintyre Hudson, please.”

Could silence be disapproving? Lucy Lindstrom asked herself. As in, you didn’t just cold-call a multi-million-dollar company and ask to speak to their CEO?

“Mr. Hudson is not available right now. I’d be happy to take a message.”

Lucy recognized the voice on the other end of the phone. It was that same uppity-accented receptionist who had taken her name and number thirteen times this week.

Mac was not going to talk to her unless he wanted to. And clearly, he did not want to. She had to fight with herself to stay on the line. It would have been so much easier just to hang up the phone. She reminded herself she had no choice. She had to change tack.

“It’s an urgent family matter.”

“He’s not in his office. I’ll have to see if he’s in the building. And I’ll have to tell him who is calling.”

Lucy was certain she heard faint suspicion there, as if her voice was beginning to be recognized also, and was on the blocked-caller list.

“You could tell him it’s Harriet Freda calling.” She picked a fleck of lavender paint off her thumbnail.

“I’ll take your number and have him call you back when I locate him.”

“It’s okay. I’ll hold,” Lucy said with as much firm-ness as she could muster.

As she waited, she looked down at the paper in her purple-paint-stained hand. It showed a neat list of names, all of them crossed off save for one.

The remaining name stood out as if it was written in neon tubing.

The boy who ruined my life.

Macintyre W. Hudson. A voice whispered from her past, Everybody just calls me Mac.

Just like that, seven years slipped away, and she could see him, Mac Hudson, the most handsome boy ever born, with those dark, laughing eyes, that crooked smile, the silky chocolate hair, too long, falling down over his brow.

Just like that, the shiver ran up and down her spine, and Lucy remembered exactly why that boy had ru-ined her life.

Only, now he wasn’t a boy any longer, but a man.

And she was a woman.

“Macintyre Hudson did not ruin your life,” Lucy told herself sternly. “At best he stole a few moments of it.”

But what moments those were, a voice inside her insisted.

“Rubbish,” Lucy said firmly, but her confidence, not in great supply these days anyway, dwindled. It felt as if she had failed at everything she’d set her hand to, and failed spectacularly.

She had never gone to university as her parents had hoped, but had become a clerk in a bookstore in the neighboring city of Glen Oak, instead.

She had worked up to running her own store, Books and Beans, with her fiancé, but she had eagerly divested herself of the coffee shop and storefront part of the busi-ness after their humiliatingly public breakup.

Now, licking her wounds, she was back in her home-town of Lindstrom Beach in her old family home on the shores of Sunshine Lake.

The deeding of the house was charity, plain and sim-ple. Her widowed mother had given it to Lucy before remarrying and moving to California. She said it had been in the Lindstrom family for generations and it needed to stay there.

And even though that was logical, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect, Lucy had the ugly feeling that what her mother really thought was that Lucy wouldn’t make it without her help.

“But I have a dream,” she reminded herself firmly, shoring herself up with that before Mac came on the line.

Despite her failures, over the past year Lucy had de-veloped a sense of purpose. And more important, she felt needed for the first time in a long time.

It bothered Lucy that she had to remind herself of that as she drummed her fingers and listened to the music on the other end of the phone.

The song, she realized when she caught herself hum-ming along, was one about a rebel and had always been the song she had associated with Mac. It was about a boy who was willing to risk all but his heart.

That was Macintyre Hudson to a T, so who could imagine the former Lindstrom Beach renegade and unapologetic bad boy at the helm of a multimillion-dollar company that produced the amazingly popular Wild Side outdoor products?

Unexpectedly, the music stopped.

“Mama?”

Mac’s voice was urgent and worried. It had deep-ened, Lucy was sure, since the days of their youth, but it had that same gravelly, sensuous edge to it that had always sent tingles up and down her spine.

Now, when she most needed to be confident, was not the time to think of the picture of him on his website, the one that had dashed her hopes that maybe he had gotten heavy or lost all his hair in the years that had passed.

But think of it she did. No boring head-and-shoulders shot in a nice Brooks Brothers suit for the CEO of Hudson Group.

No, the caption stated the founder of the Wild Side line was demonstrating the company’s new kayak, Wild Ride. He was on a raging wedge of white water that funneled between rocks. Through flecks of foam, frozen by the camera, Macintyre Hudson had been captured in all his considerable masculine glory.

He’d been wearing a life jacket, a Wild Side product that showed off the amazing broadness of his shoulders, the powerful muscle of sun-bronzed arms gleaming with water. More handsome than ever, obviously in his element, he’d had a look in his devil-dark eyes, a cast to his mouth and a set to his jaw that was one of fierce concentration and formidable determination.

Maybe he didn’t have any hair. He’d been wearing a helmet in the photo.

“Mama?” he said again. “What’s wrong? Why didn’t you call on my private line?”

Lucy had steeled herself for this. Rehearsed it. In her mind she had controlled every facet of this conversation.

But she had not planned for the image that materi-alized out of her memory file, that superimposed itself above the image of him in the kayak.

A younger Mac Hudson pausing as he lifted himself out of the lake onto the dock, his body sun-browned and perfect, water sluicing off the rippling smooth lines of his muscles, looking up at her, with laughter tilting the edges of his ultra-sexy eyes.

Do you love me, Lucy Lin?

Never I love you from him.

The memory hardened her resolve not to be in any way vulnerable to him. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, and he used his good looks in dastardly ways, as very handsome men were well-known to do.

On the other hand, her fiancé, James Kennedy, had been homely and bookish and had still behaved in a completely dastardly manner.

All of which explained why romance played no part in her brand-new dreams for herself.

Fortified with that, Lucy ordered herself not to stam-mer. “No, I’m sorry, it isn’t Mama Freda.”

There was a long silence. In the background she could hear a lot of noise as if a raucous party was going on.

When Mac spoke, she took it as a positive sign. At least he hadn’t hung up.

“Well, well,” he said. “Little Lucy Lindstrom. I hope this is good. I’m standing here soaking wet.”

“At work?” she said, surprised into curiosity.

“I was in the hot tub with my assistant, Celeste.” His tone was dry. “What can I do for you?”

Don’t pursue it, she begged herself, but she couldn’t help it.

“You don’t have a hot tub at work!”

“You’re right, I don’t. And no Celeste, either. What we have is a test tank for kayaks where we can simu-late a white-water chute.”

Lucy had peeked at their website on and off over the years.

The business had started appropriately enough, with Mac’s line of outdoor gear. He was behind the name brand that outdoor enthusiasts coveted: Wild Side. First it had been his canoes. It had expanded quickly into kayaks and then accessories, and now, famously, into clothing.

All the reckless abandon of his youth channeled into huge success, and he was still having fun. Who tested kayaks at work?

But Mac had always been about having fun. Some things just didn’t change.

Though he didn’t sound very good-humored right now. “I’m wet, and the kayak didn’t test out very well, so this had better be good.”

“This is important,” she said.

“What I was doing was important, too.” He sighed, the sigh edged with irritation. “Some things just don’t change, do they? The pampered doctor’s daughter, the head of student council, the captain of the cheerleading squad, used to having her own way.”

That girl, dressed in her designer jeans, with hun-dred-dollar highlights glowing in her hair, looked at her from her past, a little sadly.

Mac’s assessment was so unfair! For the past few years she had been anything but pampered. And now she was trying to turn the Books part of Books and Beans into an internet business while renting canoes off her dock.

She was painting her own house and living on maca-roni and cheese. She hadn’t bought a new outfit for over a year, socking away every extra nickel in the hope that she could make her dream a reality.

And that didn’t even cover all the things she was running next door to Mama Freda’s to do!

She would have protested except for the inescap-able if annoying truth: she had told a small lie to get her own way.

“It was imperative that I speak to you,” she said firmly.

“Hmmm. Imperative. That has a rather regal sound to it. A princess giving a royal command.”

He was insisting on remembering who she had been before he’d ruined her life: a confident, popular honor student who had never known trouble and never done a single thing wrong. Or daring. Or adventurous.

The young Lucy Lindstrom’s idea of a good time, pre-Mac, had been getting the perfect gown for prom, and spending lazy summer afternoons on the deck with her friends, painting each other’s toenails pink. Her idea of a great evening had been sitting around a roaring bonfire, especially if a sing-along started.

Pre-Mac, the most exciting thing that had ever hap-pened to her was getting the acceptance letter from the university of her choice.

“Pampered, yes,” Mac went on. “Deceitful, no. You are the last person I would have ever thought would lower yourself to deceit.”

But that’s where he was dead wrong. He had brought out the deceitful side in her before.

The day she had said goodbye to him.

Hurt and angry that he had not asked her to go with him, to hide her sense of inconsolable loss, she had tossed her head and said, “I could never fall for a boy like you.”

When the truth was she already had. She had been so crazy in love with Mac that it had felt as though the fire that burned within her would melt her and everything around her until there was nothing left of her world but a small, dark smudge.

“I needed to talk to you,” she said, stripping any memory of that summer and those long, heated days from her voice.

“Yes. You said. Imperative.”

Apparently he had honed sarcasm to an art.

“I’m sorry I insinuated I was Mama Freda.”

“Insinuated,” he said silkily. “So much more palat able than lying.”

“I had to get by the guard dog who answers your phone!”

“No, you didn’t. I got your messages.”

“Except the one about needing to speak to you personally?”

“Nothing to talk about.” His voice was chilly. “I’ve got all the information you gave. A Mother’s Day Gala in celebration of Mama Freda’s lifetime of good work. A combination of her eightieth birthday and Mother’s Day. Fund-raiser for all her good causes. She knows about the gala and the fund-raiser but has no idea it’s honoring her. Under no circumstances is she to find out.”

Lucy wondered if she should be pleased that he had obviously paid very close attention to the content of those messages.

Actually, the fund-raiser was for Lucy’s good cause, but Mama Freda was at the very heart of her dream.

At the worst point of her life, she had gone to Mama Freda, and those strong arms had folded around her.

“When your pain feels too great to bear, liebling, then you must stop thinking of yourself and think of another.”

Mama had carried the dream with Lucy, encouraging her, keeping the fire going when it had flickered to a tiny ember and nearly gone out.

Now, wasn’t it the loveliest of ironies that Mama was one of the ones who would benefit from her own advice?

“Second Sunday of May,” he said, his tone bored, dismissive, “black-tie dinner at the Lindstrom Beach Yacht Club.”

She heard disdain in his voice and guessed the reason. “Oh, so that’s the sticking point. I’ve already had a hundred people confirm, and I’m expecting a few more to trickle in over the next week. It’s the only place big enough to handle that kind of a crowd.”

“I remember when I wasn’t good enough to get a job busing tables there.”

“Get real. You never applied for a job busing tables at the yacht club.”

Even in his youth, Mac, in his secondhand jeans, one of a string of foster children who had found refuge at Mama’s, had carried himself like a king, bristling with pride and an ingrained sense of himself. He took offense at the slightest provocation.

And then hid it behind that charming smile.

“After graduation you had a job with the town, digging ditches for the new sewer system.”

“Not the most noble work, but honest,” he said. “And real.”

So, who are you to be telling me to get real? He didn’t say it, but he could have.

Noble or not, she could remember the ridged edges of the sleek muscles, how she had loved to touch him, feel his wiry strength underneath her fingertips.

He mistook her silence for judgment. “It runs in my family. My dad was a ditchdigger, too. They had a nickname for him. Digger Dan.”

She felt the shock of that. She had known Mac since he had come to live in the house next door. He was fourteen, a year older than she was. When their paths crossed, he had tormented and teased her, interpreting the fact she was always tongue-tied in his presence as an example of her family’s snobbery, rather than seeing it for what it was.

Intrigue. Awe. Temptation. She had never met anyone like Mac. Not before or since. Ruggedly independent. Bold. Unfettered by convention. Fearless. She remembered seeing him glide by her house, only fourteen, solo in a canoe heavily laden with camping gear.

She would see his campfire burning bright against the night on the other side of the lake. It was called the wild side of the lake because it was undeveloped crown land, thickly forested.

Sometimes Mac would spend the whole weekend over there. Alone.

She couldn’t even imagine that. Being alone over there with the bears.

The week she had won the spelling bee he had been kicked out of school for swearing.

She got a little Ford compact for her sixteenth birthday, while he bought an old convertible and stripped the engine in the driveway, then stood down her father when he complained. While she was painting her toenails, he was painstakingly building his own cedar-strip canoe in Mama’s yard.

But never once, even in that summer when she had loved him, right after her own graduation from high school, had Mac revealed a single detail about his life before he had arrived in foster care in Lindstrom Beach.

Was it the fact that he had so obviously risen above those roots that made him reveal that his father had been nicknamed Digger Dan? Or had he changed?

She squashed that thing inside her that felt ridiculously and horribly like hope by saying, proudly, “I don’t really care if you come to the gala or not.”

She told herself she was becoming hardened to rejection. All the people who really mattered to Mama—except him—had said they would come. But her own mother had said she would be in Africa on safari at that time and many people from Lucy’s “old” life, her highschool days, had not answered yet. Those who had, had answered no.

There was silence from Mac, and Lucy allowed herself pleasure that she had caught him off guard.

“And I am sorry about messing up your Mother’s Day.”

“What do you mean, my Mother’s Day?” His voice was guarded.

That had always been the problem with Mac. The insurmountable flaw. He wouldn’t let anyone touch the part of him that felt.

“I chose Mother’s Day because it was symbolic. Even though Mama Freda has never been a biological mother, she has been a mother to so many. She epitomizes what motherhood is.”

That was not the full truth. The full truth was that Lucy found Mother’s Day to be unbearably painful. And she was following Mama Freda’s own recipe for dealing with pain.

“I don’t care what Day you chose!”

“Yes, you do.”

“It’s all coming back now,” he said sardonically.

“Having a conversation with you is like crossing a minefield.”

“You feel as if Mother’s Day belongs to you and Mama Freda. And I’ve stolen it.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” he said, a chill in his voice warning her to stop, but she wasn’t going to. Lucy was getting to him and part of her liked it, because it had always been hard to get to Mac Hudson.

It might seem as if you were, but then that devil-may- care grin materialized, saying Gotcha, because I don’t really care.

“Every Mother’s Day,” she reminded him quietly, “you outdo yourself. A stretch limo picks her up. She flies somewhere to meet you. Last year Engelbert Humperdinck in concert in New York. She wore the corsage until it turned brown. She talked about it for days after. Where you took her. What you ate. Don’t tell me it’s not your day. And that you’re not annoyed that I chose it.”

“Whatever.”

“Oh! I recognize that tone of voice! Even after all this time! Mr. Don’t-Even-Think-You-Know-Me.”

“You don’t. I’ll put a check in the mail for whatever cause she has taken up. I think you’ll find it very generous.”

“I’m sure Mama will be pleased by the check. She probably will hardly even notice your absence, since all the others are coming. Every single one. Mama Freda has fostered twenty-three kids over the years. Ross Chillington is clearing his filming schedule. Michael Boylston works in Thailand and he’s coming. Reed Patterson is leaving football training camp in Florida to be here.”

“All those wayward boys saved by Mama Freda.” His voice was silky and unimpressed.

“She’s made a difference in the world!”

“Lucy—”

She hated it that her name on his lips made her feel more frazzled, hated it that she could remember leaning toward him, quivering with wanting.

“I’m not interested in being part of Lindstrom Beach’s version of a TV reality show. What are you planning after your black-tie dinner? No, wait. Let me guess. Each of Mama’s foster children will stand up and give a testimonial about being redeemed by her love.”

Ouch. That was a little too close to what she did have planned. Did he have to make it sound cheap and smarmy instead of uplifting and inspirational?

“Mac—”

“Nobody calls me Mac anymore,” he said, a little harshly.

“What do they call you?” She couldn’t imagine him being called anything else.

“Mr. Hudson,” he said coolly.

She doubted that very much since, she could still hear a raucous partylike atmosphere unfolding behind him.

It occurred to her she would like to hang up on him. And she was going to, very shortly.

“Okay, then, Mr. Hudson,” she snapped, “I’ve already told you I don’t care if you don’t come. I know it’s way too much to ask of you to take a break from your important and busy schedule to honor the woman who took you in and pulled you back from the brink of disaster. Way too much.”

Silence.

“Still, I know how deeply you care about her. I know it’s you who has been paying some of her bills.”

He sucked in his breath, annoyed that she knew that.

She pushed on. “Aside from your Mother’s Day tradition, I know you took her to Paris for her seventyfifth birthday.”

“Lucy, I’m dripping water on the floor and shivering, so if you could hurry this along.”

She really had thought she could get through her life without seeing him again. It had been a blessing that he came back to Lindstrom Beach rarely, and when he had, she had been away.

Because how could she look at him without remembering? But then hadn’t she discovered you could remember, regardless?

Once, a long, long time ago, she had tried, with a desperation so keen she could almost taste its bitterness on her tongue, to pry his secrets from him. Lying on the sand in the dark, the lake’s night-blackened waters lapping quietly, the embers of their fire burning down, she had asked him to tell her how he had ended up in foster care at Mama Freda’s.

“I killed a man,” he whispered, and then into her shocked silence, he had laughed that laugh that was so charming and distracting and sensual, that laugh that hid everything he really was, and added, “With my bare hands.”

And then he had tried to divert her with his kisses that burned hotter than the fire.

But he had been unable to give her the gift she needed most: his trust in her.

And that was the real reason she had told him she could never love a boy like him. Because, even in her youth, she had recognized that he held back something essential of himself from her, when she had held back nothing.

If he had chosen to think she was a snob looking down her nose at the likes of him, after all the time they had spent together that summer, then that was his problem.

Still, just thinking of those forbidden kisses of so many years ago sent an unwanted shiver down her spine. The truth was nobody wanted Mac to come back here less than she did.

“I didn’t phone about Mama’s party. I guess I thought I would tell you this when you came. But since you’re not going to—”

“Tell me what?”

She had to keep on track, or she would be swamped by these memories.

“Mac—” she remembered, too late, he didn’t want to be called that and plunged on “—something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“You knew Mama Freda lost her driver’s license, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“She had a little accident in the winter. Nothing serious. She slid through a stop sign and took out Mary-Beth McQueen’s fence and rose bed.”

“Ha. I doubt if that was an accident. She aimed.”

For a moment, something was shared between them. The rivalry between Mama and Mary-Beth when it came to roses was legendary. But the moment was a flicker, nothing more.

All business again, he said, “But you said it wasn’t serious?”

“Nonetheless, she had to see a doctor and be retested. They revoked her license.”

“I’ll set her up an account at Ferdinand’s Taxi.”

“I don’t mind driving her. I like it actually. My concern was that before the retesting I don’t think she’d been to a doctor in twenty years.”

“Thirty,” he said. “She had her ‘elixir.’”

Lucy was sure she heard him shudder. It was funny to think of him being petrified of a little homemade potion. The Mac of her memory had been devil-maycare and terrifyingly fearless. From the picture on his website, that much had not changed.

“I guess the elixir isn’t working for her anymore,” Lucy said carefully. “I drive her now. She’s had three doctors’ appointments in the last month.”

“What’s wrong?”

“According to her, nothing.”

Silence. She understood the silence. He was wondering why Mama Freda hadn’t told him about the driver’s license, the doctor’s appointments. He was guessing, correctly, that she would not want him to worry.

“It probably is nothing,” he said, but his voice was uneasy.

“I told myself that, too. I don’t want to believe she’s eighty, either.”

“There’s something you aren’t telling me.”

Scary, that after all these years, and over the phone, he could do that. Read her. So, why hadn’t he seen through her the only time it really mattered?

I could never fall for a boy like you.

Lucy hesitated, looked out the open doors to gather her composure. “I saw a funeral-planning kit on her kitchen table. When she noticed it was out, she shoved it in a drawer. I think she was hoping I hadn’t seen it.”

What she didn’t tell him was that before Mama had shoved the kit away she had been looking out her window, her expression uncharacteristically pensive.

“Will my boy ever come home?” she had whispered.

All those children, and only one was truly her boy.

Lucy listened as Mac drew in a startled breath, and then he swore. Was it a terrible thing to love it when someone swore? But it made him the old Mac. And it meant she had penetrated his guard.

“That’s part of what motivated me to plan the celebration to honor her. I want her to know—” She choked. “I want her to know how much she has meant to people before it’s too late. I don’t want to wait for a funeral to bring to light all the good things she’s done and been.”

The silence was long. And then he sighed.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“No! Wait—

But Mac was gone, leaving the deep buzz of the dial tone in Lucy’s ear.

CHAPTER TWO

“WELL, THAT WENT well,” Lucy muttered as she set down the phone.

Still, there was no denying a certain relief. She had been carrying the burden of worrying about Mama Freda’s health alone, and now she shared it.

But with Mac? He’d always represented the loss of control, a visit to the wild side, and now it seemed nothing had changed.

If he had just come to the gala, Lucy could have maintained her sense of control. She had been watching Mama Freda like a hawk since the day she’d heard, Will my boy ever come home?

Aside from a nap in the afternoon, Mama seemed as energetic and alert as always. If Mama had received bad news on the health front, Lucy’s observations of her had convinced her that the prognosis was an illness of the slow-moving variety.

Not the variety that required Mac to drop everything and come now!

The Mother’s Day celebration was still two weeks away. Two weeks would have given Lucy time.

“Time to what?” she asked herself sternly.

Brace herself. Prepare. Be ready for him. But she al ready knew the uncomfortable truth about Macintyre

Hudson. There was no preparing for him. There was no getting ready. He was a force unto himself, and that force was like a tornado hitting.

Lucy looked around her world. A year back home, and she had a sense of things finally falling into place. She was taking the initial steps toward her dream.

On the dining-room table that she had not eaten at since her return, there were donated items that she was collecting for the silent auction at the Mother’s Day Gala.

There were the mountains of paperwork it had taken to register as a charity. Also, there was a photocopy of the application she had just submitted for rezoning, so that she could have Caleb’s House here, and share this beautiful, ridiculously large house on the lake with young women who needed its sanctuary.

One of her three cats snoozed in a beam of sunlight that painted the wooden floor in front of the old river-rock fireplace golden. A vase of tulips brought in from the yard, their heavy heads drooping gracefully on their slender stems, brightened the barn-plank coffee table. A book was open on its spine on the arm of her favorite chair.

There was not a hint of catastrophe in this wellordered scene, but it hadn’t just happened. You had to work on this kind of a life.

In fact, it seemed the scene reflected that she had finally gotten through picking up the pieces from the last time.

And somehow, last time did not mean her ended engagement to James Kennedy.

No, when she thought of her world being blown apart, oddly it was not the front-page picture of her fiancé, James, running down the street in Glen Oak without a stitch on that was forefront in her mind. No, forefront was a boy leaving, seven years ago.

The next morning, out on her deck, nestled into a cushioned lounge chair, Lucy looked out over the lake and took a sip of her coffee. Despite the fact the sun was still burning off the early-morning chill, she was cozy in her pajamas under a wool plaid blanket.

The scent of her coffee mingled with the lovely, sugary smell of birch wood burning. The smoke curled out of Mama Freda’s chimney and hung in a wispy swirl in the air above the water in front of Mama’s cabin.

Birdsong mixed with the far-off drone of a plane.

What exactly did I’ll be there as soon as I can mean?

“Relax,” she ordered herself.

In a world like his, he wouldn’t be able just to drop everything and come. It would be days before she had to face Macintyre Hudson. Maybe even a week. His website said his company had done 34 million dollars in business last year.

You didn’t just walk away from that and hope it would run itself.

So she could focus on her life. She turned her attention from the lake, and looked at the swatch of sample paint she had put up on the side of the house.

She loved the pale lavender for the main color. She thought the subtle shade was playful and inviting, a color that she hoped would welcome and soothe the young girls and women who would someday come here when she had succeeded in transforming all this into Caleb’s House.

Today she was going to commit to the color and order the paint. Well, maybe later today. she was aware of a little tingle of fear when she thought of actually buying the paint. It was a big house. It was natural to want not to make a mistake.

My mother would hate the color.

So maybe instead of buying paint today, she would fill a few book orders, and work on funding proposals for Caleb’s House in anticipation of the rezoning. Several items had arrived for the silent auction that she could unpack. She would not give the arrival of Mac one more thought. Not one.

The drone of the plane pushed back into her awareness, too loud to ignore. She looked up and could see it, red and white, almost directly overhead, so close she could read the call numbers under the wings. It was obviously coming in for a landing on the lake.

Lucy watched it set down smoothly, turning the water, where it shot out from the pontoons, to silvery sprays of mercury. The sound of the engine cut from a roar to a purr as the plane glided over the glassy mirror-calm surface of the water.

Sunshine Lake, located in the rugged interior of British Columbia, had always been a haunt of the rich, and sometimes the famous. Lucy’s father had taken delight in the fact that once, when he was a teenager, the queen had stayed here on one of her visits to Canada. For a while the premier of the province had had a summer house down the lake. Pierre LaPontz, the famous goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, had summered here with friends. Seeing the plane was not unusual.

It became unusual when it wheeled around and taxied back, directly toward her.

Even though she could not see the pilot for the glare of the morning sun on the windshield of the plane, Lucy knew, suddenly and without a shade of a doubt, that it was him.

Macintyre Hudson had landed. He had arrived in her world.

The conclusion was part logic and part instinct. And with it came another conclusion. That nothing, from here on in, would go as she expected it. The days when choosing a paint color was the scariest thing in her world were over.

Lucy had thought he might show up in a rare sports car. Or maybe on an expensive motorcycle. She had even considered the possibility that he might show up, chauffeured, in the white limo that had picked up Mama Freda last Mother’s Day.

Take that, Dr. Lindstrom.

She watched the plane slide along the lake to the old dock in front of Mama Freda’s. The engines cut and the plane drifted.

And then, for the first time in seven years, she saw him.

Macintyre Hudson slid out the door onto the pontoon, expertly threw a rope over one of the big anchor posts on the dock and pulled the plane in.

The fact he could pilot a plane made it more than evident he had come into himself. He was wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses, a leather jacket and knife-creased khakis. But it was the way he carried himself, a certain sureness of movement on the bobbing water, that radiated confidence and strength.

Something in her chest felt tight. Her heart was beating too fast.

“Not bald,” she murmured as the sun caught on the luscious dark chocolate of his hair. It was a guilty pleasure, watching him from a distance, with him unaware of being watched. He had a powerful efficiency of motion as he dealt with mooring the plane.

He was broader than he had been, despite all the digging of ditches. All the slenderness of his youth was gone, replaced with a kind of mouthwatering solidness, the build of a mature man at the peak of his power.

He looked up suddenly and cast a look around, frowning slightly as if he was aware he was being watched.

Crack.

The sound was so loud in the still crispness of the morning that Lucy started, slopped coffee on her pajamas. Thunder?

No. In horror Lucy watched as the ancient post of Mama Freda’s dock, as thick as a telephone pole, snapped cleanly, as if it was a toothpick. As she looked on helplessly, Mac saw it coming and moved quickly.

He managed to save His head, but the falling post caught him across his shoulder and hurled him into the water. The post fell in after him.

A deathly silence settled over the lake.

Lucy was already up out of her chair when Mac’s head reemerged from the water. His startled, furious curse shattered the quiet that had reasserted itself on the peaceful lakeside morning.

Lucy found his shout reassuring. At least he hadn’t been knocked out by the post, or been overcome by the freezing temperatures of the water.

Blanket clutched to her, Lucy ran on bare feet across the lawns, then through the ancient ponderosa pines that surrounded Mama’s house. She picked her way swiftly across the rotted decking of the dock.

Mac was hefting himself onto the pontoon of the plane. It was not drifting, thankfully, but bobbing co-operatively just a few feet from the dock.

“Mac!” Lucy dropped the blanket. “Throw me the rope!”

He scrambled to standing, found the rope and turned to look at her. Even though he had to be absolutely freezing, there was a long pause as they stood looking at one another.

The sunglasses were gone. Those dark, meltedchocolate eyes showed no surprise, just lingered on her, faintly appraising, as if he was taking inventory.

His gaze stayed on her long enough for her to think, He hates my hair. And Oh, for God’s sake, am I in my Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas?

“Throw the damn rope!” she ordered him.

Then the thick coil of rope was flying toward her. The throw was going to be slightly short. But if she leaned just a bit, and reached with all her might, she knew she could—

“No!” he cried. “Leave it.”

But it was too late. Lucy had leaned out too far. She tried to correct, taking a hasty step backward, but her momentum was already too far forward. Her arms windmilled crazily in an attempt to keep her balance.

She felt her feet leave the dock, the rush of air on her skin, and then she plunged into the lake. And sank, the weight of the soaked flannel pajamas pulling her down. Nothing could have prepared her for the cold as the gray water closed over her head. It seized her; her whole body went taut with shock. the sensation was of burning, not freezing. Her limbs were paralyzed instantly.

In what seemed to be slow motion, her body finally bobbed back to the surface. She was in shock, too numb even to cry out. Somehow she floundered, her limbs heavy and nearly useless, to the dock. It was too early in the year for a ladder to be out, but since Mama no longer fostered kids she didn’t put out a ladder—or maintain the dock—anyway.

Lucy managed to get her hands on the dock’s planks, and tried to pull herself up. But there was a terrifying lack of strength in her arms. Her limbs felt as if they were made of Jell-O, all a-jiggle and not quite set.

“Hang on!”

Even her lips were numb. The effort it took to speak was tremendous.

“No! Don’t.” She forced the words out. They sounded weak. Her mind, in slow motion, rationalized there was no point in them both being in the water. His limbs would react to the cold water just as hers were doing. And he was farther out. In seconds, Mac would be helpless, floundering out beyond the dock.

She heard a mighty splash as Mac jumped back into the water. She tried to hang on, but she couldn’t feel her fingers. She slipped back in, felt the water ooze over her head.

Lucy had been around water her entire life. She had a Bronze Cross. She could have been a lifeguard at the Main Street Beach if her father had not thought it was a demeaning job. She had never been afraid of water.

Now, as she slipped below the surface, she didn’t feel terrified, but oddly resigned. They were both going to die, a tragically romantic ending to their story—after all these years of separation, dying trying to save one another.

And then hands, strong, sure, were around her waist, lifting her. Her head broke water and she sputtered. She was unceremoniously shoved out of the water onto the rough boards of the dock.

Lucy dangled there, her elbows underneath her chest, her legs hanging, without the strength even to lift her head. His hand went to her bottom, and he gave her one more shove—really about as unromantic as it could get—and she lay on the dock, gasping, sobbing, coughing.

Mac’s still in the water.

She squirmed around to look, but he didn’t need her. His hands found the dock and he pulled himself to safety.

They lay side by side, gasping. Slowly she became aware that his nose was inches from her nose.

She could see drops of water beaded on the sooty clumps of his sinfully thick lashes. His eyes were glorious: a brown so dark it melted into black. The line of his nose was perfect, and faint stubble, twinkling with water droplets, highlighted the sweep of his cheekbones, the jut of his jaw.

Her eyes moved to the sensuous curve of his lips, and she felt sleepy and drugged, the desire to touch them with her own pushing past her every defense.

“Why, little Lucy Lindstrom,” he growled. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

All those years ago it had been her capsized canoe that had brought them—just about the most unlikely of loves, the good girl and the bad boy—together.

A week after graduation, having won all kinds of awards and been voted Most Likely to Succeed by her class, she realized the excitement was suddenly over. All her plans were made; it was her last summer of “freedom,” as everybody kept kiddingly saying.

Lucy had taken the canoe out alone, something she never did. But the truth was, in that gap of activity something yawned within her, empty. She had a sense of her own life getting away from her, as if she was falling in with other people’s plans for her without really ever asking herself what she wanted.

A storm had blown up, and she had not seen the log hiding under the surface of the water until it was too late.

Mac had been over on the wild side, camping, and he had seen her get into trouble. He’d already been in his canoe fighting the rough water to get to her before she hit the log.

He had picked her out of the water, somehow not capsizing his own canoe in the process, and taken her to his campsite to a fire, to wait until the lake calmed down to return her to her world.

But somehow she had never quite returned to her world. Lucy had been ripe for what he offered, an escape from a life that had all been laid out for her in a predictable pattern that there, on the side of the lake with her rescuer, had seemed like a form of death.

In all her life, it seemed everyone—her parents, her friends—only saw in her what they wanted her to be.

And that was something that filled a need in them.

And then Mac had come along. And effortlessly he had seen through all that to what was real. Or so it had seemed.

And the truth was, soaking wet, gasping for air on a rotting dock, lying beside Mac, Lucy felt now exactly as she had felt then.

As if her whole world shivered to life.

As if black and white became color.

It had to be near-death experiences that did that: sharpened awareness to a razor’s edge. Because she was so aware of Mac. She could feel the warmth of the breath coming from his mouth in puffs. There was an aura of power around him that was palpable, and in her weakened state, reassuring.

With a groan, he put his hands on either side of his chest and lifted himself to kneeling, and then quickly to standing.

He held out his hand to her, and she reached for it and he pulled her, his strength as easy as it was electrifying, to her feet.

Mac scooped the blanket from the dock where she had dropped it, shook it out, looped it around her shoulders and then his own, and then his arms went around her waist and he pulled her against the freezing length of him.

“Don’t take this personally,” he said. “It’s a matter of survival, plain and simple.”

“Thank you for clarifying,” she said, with all the dignity her chattering teeth would allow. “You needn’t have worried. I had no intention of ravishing you. You are about as sexy as a frozen salmon at the moment.”

“Still getting in the last shot, aren’t you?”

“When I can.”

Cruelly, at that moment she realized a sliver of warmth radiated from him, and she pulled herself even closer to the rock-hard length of his body.

Their bodies, glued together by freezing, wet clothing, shook beneath the blanket. She pressed her cheek hard against his chest, and he loosed a hand and touched her soaking hair.

“You hate it,” she said, her voice quaking.

“It wasn’t my best entrance,” he agreed.

“I meant my hair.”

“I know you did,” he said softly. “Hello, Lucy.”

“Hello, Macintyre.”

Standing here against Mac, so close she could feel the pebbles of cold rising on his chilled skin, she could also feel his innate strength. Warmth was returning to his body and seeping into hers.

The physical sensation of closeness, of sharing spreading heat, was making her vulnerable to other feelings, the very ones she had hoped to steel herself against.

It was not just weak. The weakness could be assigned to the numbing cold that had seeped into every part of her. Even her tongue felt heavy and numb.

It was not just that she never wanted to move again. That could be assigned to the fact that her limbs felt slow and clumsy and paralyzed.

No, it was something worse than being weak.

Something worse than being paralyzed.

In Macintyre Hudson’s arms, soaked, her Winnie the-Pooh pajamas providing as much protection against him as a wet paper towel, Lucy Lindstrom felt the worst weakness of all, the longing she had kept hidden from herself.

Not to be so alone.

Her trembling deepened, and a soblike sound escaped her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said as she admitted the full truth to herself. It was not the cold making her weak. It was him.

Lucy felt a terrible wave of self-loathing. Was life just one endless loop, playing the same things over and over again?

She was cursed at love. She needed to accept that about herself, and devote her considerable energy and talent to causes that would help others, and, as a bonus, couldn’t hurt her.

She pulled away from him, though it took all her strength, physical and mental. The blanket held her fast, so that mere inches separated them, but at least their bodies were no longer glued together.

History, she told herself sternly, was not repeating itself.

It was good he was here. She could face him, puncture any remaining illusions and get on with her wonderful life of doing good for others.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, putting her away from him, scanning her face.

She already missed the small warmth that had begun to radiate from him. Again, she had to pit what remained of her physical and mental strength to resist the desire to collapse against him.

“I’m fine,” she said tersely.

“You don’t look fine.”

“Well, I’m not hurt. Mortified.”

His expression was one of pure exasperation. “Who nearly drowns and is mortified by it?”

Whew. There was no sense him knowing she was mortified because of her reaction to him. By her sudden onslaught of uncertainty.

They had both been in perilous danger, and she was worried about the impression her hair made? Worried that she looked like a drowned rat? Worried about what pajamas she had on?

It was starting all over again!

This crippling need. He had seen her once, when it seemed no one else could. Hadn’t she longed for that ever since?

Had she pursued getting that message to him so incessantly because of Mama Freda? Or had it been for herself? To feel the way she had felt when his arms closed around her?

Trembling, trying to fight the part of her that wanted nothing more than to scoot back into his warmth, she reminded herself that feeling this way had nearly destroyed her. It had had far-reaching repercussions that had torn her family and her life asunder.

“This is all your fault,” she said. Thankfully, he took her literally.

“I’m not responsible for your bad catch.”

“It was a terrible throw!”

“Yes, it was. All the more reason you shouldn’t have reached for the rope. I could have thrown it again.”

“You shouldn’t have jumped back in the water after me. You could have been overcome by the cold. I’m surprised you weren’t. And then we both would have been in big trouble.”

“You have up to ten minutes in water that cold before you succumb. Plus, I don’t seem to feel cold water like other people. I white-water kayak. I think it has desensitized me. But under no circumstances would I have stood on the pontoon of my plane and watched anyone drown.”

Gee. He wasn’t sensitive, and his rescue of her wasn’t even personal. He would have done it for anyone.

“I wasn’t going to drown,” Lucy lied haughtily, since only moments ago she had been resigned to that very thing. He’d just said she had ten whole minutes. “I’ve lived on this lake my entire life.”

“Oh!” He smacked himself on the forehead with his fist. “How could I forget that? Not only have you lived on the lake your entire life, but so did three generations of your family before you. Lindstroms don’t drown. They die like they lived. Nice respectable deaths in the same beds that they were born in, in the same town they never took more than two steps away from.”

“I lived in Glen Oak for six years,” she said.

“Oh, Glen Oak. An hour away. Some consider Lindstrom Beach to be Glen Oak’s summer suburb.”

Lucy was aware of being furious with herself for the utter weakness of reacting to him. It felt much safer to transfer that fury to him.

He had walked away. Not just from this town. He had walked away from having to give anything of himself. How could he never have considered all the possibilities? They had played with fire all that summer.

She had gotten burned. And he had walked away.

And he had never even said he loved her. Not even once.

CHAPTER THREE

“YOU KNOW WHAT, Macintyre Hudson? You were a jerk back then, and you’re still a jerk.”

“May I remind you that you begged me to come back here?”

“I did not beg. I appealed to your conscience. And I personally did not care if you came back.”

“You were a snotty, stuck-up brat and you still are. Here’s a novel concept,” Mac said, his voice threaded with annoyance, “why don’t you try thanking me for my heroic rescue? For the second time in your life, by the way.”

Because of what happened the first time, you idiot.

“If I needed a hero,” she said with soft fury, “you are the last person I would pick.”

That hit home. He actually flinched. And she was happy he flinched. Snotty, stuck-up brat?

Then a cool veil dropped over the angry sparks flickering in his eyes, and his mouth turned upward, that mocking smile that was his trademark, that said You can’t hurt me—don’t even try. He folded his arms over the deep strength of his broad chest, and not because he was cold, either.

“You know what? If I was looking for a damsel in distress, you wouldn’t exactly be my first pick, either. You’re still every bit the snooty doctor’s daughter.”

She felt all of it then. The abandonment. The fear she had shouldered alone in the months after he left. Her parents, who had always doted on her, looking at her with hurt and embarrassment, as if she could not have let them down more completely. The friends she had known since kindergarten not phoning anymore, looking the other way when they saw her.

She felt all of it.

And it felt as if every single bit of it was his fault.

“Just to set the record straight, maybe it’s you who should be thanking me,” she told him. “I came down here to rescue you. You were the one in the water.”

“I didn’t need your help… .”

So, absolutely nothing had changed. She was, in his eyes, still the town rich girl, the doctor’s snooty daughter, out of touch with what he considered to be real.

And he was still the one who didn’t need.

“Or your botched rescue attempt.”

The fury in her felt white-hot, as if it could obliterate what remained of the chill on her. Lucy wished she had felt that when she had seen him get knocked off the dock by the post. She wished, instead of running to him, worried about him, she had marched into her house and firmly shut the door on him.

She hadn’t done that. But maybe it was never too late to correct a mistake. She could do the right thing this time.

She stepped in close, shivered dramatically, letting him believe she was weak and not strong, that she needed his body heat back. Mac was wary, but not wary enough. He let her slip back in, close to him.

Lucy put both her hands on his chest, blinked up at him with her very best will-you-be-my-hero? look and then shoved him as hard as she could.

With a startled yelp, which Lucy found extremely satisfying, Macintyre Hudson lost his footing and stumbled off the dock, back into the water. She turned and walked away, annoyed that she was reassured by his vigorous cursing that he was just fine.

She glanced back. More than fine! Instead of getting out of the water, Mac shrugged out of his leather jacket and threw it onto the dock. Then, making the most of his ten minutes, he swam back to his plane.

Within moments he had the entire situation under control, which no doubt pleased him no end. He fastened the plane to the dock’s other pillar, which held, then reached inside and tossed a single overnight bag onto the dock.

She certainly didn’t want him to catch her watching. Why was she watching? It was just more evidence of the weakness he made her feel. What she needed to be doing was to be heading for a hot shower at top speed.

Lucy had crossed back into her yard when she heard Mama’s shout.

“Ach! What is going on?”

She turned to see Mama Freda trundling toward her dock, hand over her brow, trying to see into the sun. Then Mama stopped, and a light came on in that ancient, wise face that seemed to steal the chill right out of Lucy.

“Schatz?”

Mac was standing on the dock, and had removed his soaking shirt and was wringing it out. That was an unfortunate sight for a girl trying to steel herself against him. His body was absolutely perfect, sleek and strong, water sluicing down the deepness of his chest to the defined ripples of his abs.

He dropped the soaked shirt beside his jacket and sprinted over the dock and across the lawn. He stopped at Mama Freda and grinned down at her, and this time his grin was so genuine it could have lit up the whole lake. Mama reached up and touched his cheek.

Then he picked up the rather large bulk of Mama Freda as if she were featherlight, and swung her around until she was squealing like a young girl.

“You’re getting me all wet,” she protested loudly, smacking the broadness of his shoulders with delight. “Ach. Put me down, galoot-head.”

Finally he did, and she patted her hair into place, regarding him with such affection that Lucy felt something burn behind her eyes.

“Why are you all wet? You’ll catch your death!”

“Your dock broke when I tried to tie to it.”

“You should have told me you were coming,” Mama said reproachfully.

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“Surprise, schmize.”

Lucy smiled, despite herself. One of Mama’s goals in life seemed to be to create a rhyme, beginning with sch, for every word in the English language.

“You see what happens? You end up in the lake. If you’d just told me, I would have warned you to tie up to Lucy’s dock.”

“I don’t think Lucy wants me tying up at her dock.”

Only Lucy would pick up his dry double meaning on that. She could actually feel a bit of a blush moving heat into her frozen cheeks.

“Don’t be silly. Lucy wouldn’t mind.”

He could have thrown her under the bus, because Mama would not have approved of anyone being pushed into the water at this time of year, no matter how pressing the circumstances.

But he didn’t. Her gratitude that he hadn’t thrown her under the bus was short-lived as Mac left the topic of Lucy Lindstrom behind with annoying ease.

“Mama, I’m freezing. I hope you have apfelstrudel fresh from the oven.”

“You have to tell me you’re coming to get strudel fresh from the oven. That’s not what you need, anyway. Mama knows what you need.”

Lucy could hear the smile in his voice, and was aware again of Mama working her magic, both of them smiling just moments after all that fury.

“What do I need, Mama?”

“You need elixir.”

He pretended terror, then dashed back to the dock and picked up his soaked clothing and the bag, tossed it over his naked shoulder. He returned and wrapped his arm around Mama’s waist and let her lead him to the house.

Lucy turned back to her own house, her eyes still smarting from what had passed between those two. The love and devotion shimmered around them as bright as the strengthening morning sun.

That was why she had gone to such lengths to get Macintyre Hudson to come back here. And if another motive had lain hidden beneath that one, it had been exposed to her in those moments when his arms had wrapped around her and his heat had seeped into her.

Now that it was exposed, she could put it in a place where she could guard against it as if her life depended on it.

Which, Lucy told herself through the chattering of her teeth, it did.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw Lucy pause and watch his reunion with Mama.

“Is that Lucy?” Mama said, catching the direction of his gaze.

“Yeah, as annoying as ever.”

“She’s a good girl,” Mama said stubbornly.

“Everything she ever aspired to be, then.”

Only, she wasn’t a girl anymore, but a woman. The good part he had no doubt about. That was what was expected of the doctor’s daughter, after all.

Even given the circumstances he had noted the changes. Her hair was still blond, but it no longer fell, unrestrained by hair clips or elastic bands, to the slight swell of her breast.

Plastered to her head, it hadn’t looked like much, but he was willing to bet that when it was dry it was ultra-sophisticated, and would show off the hugeness of those dazzling green eyes, the pixie-perfection of her dainty features. Still, Mac was aware of fighting the part of him that missed how it used to be.

She had lost the faintly scrawny build of a long-distance runner, and filled out, a fact he could not help but notice when she had pressed the lusciousness of her freezing body into his.

She seemed uptight, though, and the level of her anger at him gave him pause.

Unbidden, he wondered if she ever slipped into the lake and skinny-dipped under the full moon. Would she still think it was the most daring thing a person could do, and that she was risking arrest and public humiliation?

What made her laugh now? In high school it seemed as if she had been at the center of every circle, popular and carefree. That laugh, from deep within her, was so joyous and unchained the birds stopped singing to listen.

Mac snorted in annoyance with himself, reminding himself curtly that he had broken that particular spell a long time ago. Though if that was completely true, why the reluctance to return Lucy’s calls? Why the aversion to coming back?

If that was completely true, why had he told Lucy Lindstrom, of all people, that his father had been a ditchdigger?

That had been bothering him since the words had come out of his mouth. Maybe that confession had even contributed to the fiasco on the dock.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.