Chapter Two
T alk about good deeds coming back to bite her! Holy smokes, she had a husband! A very-much-alive husband, who apparently wasn’t any happier to find himself married than she was. Sarah ran down the forest path as if the demons of hell were nipping at her heels, then picked her way along the lakeshore until she came to her thinking rock. Trembling uncontrollably, she climbed up the huge boulder and sat down in the deep bowl sculpted into its side facing the lake. Only then, once she was settled in her private little hidey-hole, with her knees pulled up to her chest and her face buried in her hands, did she finally break into gut-wrenching sobs.
A husband. What in the world was she supposed to do with a towering, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed husband? Alex Knight was even taller than his equally imposing brother Ethan and as forebodingly scary as Paul was boyishly charming.
This was Grady’s fault, dammit, for talking her into marrying his dead son. What had looked like a perfect way to get the children she’d always wanted without the usually requisite husband had turned into her worst nightmare when Alex Knight had come back from the dead. Actually, he looked as if he’d crawled his way back; his face and hands were covered with cuts and bruises, he was as gaunt as a ghost, and his eyes—though they definitely matched the eyes in his photo—looked downright hunted. Sarah was honestly happy that Delaney and Tucker had their dad back, and sincerely glad for Grady and Ethan and Paul. The Knights had been devastated by the loss of what Sarah had come to realize was the foundation of their family. Alex Knight seemed to have been the anchor that held them all together, and his death had cast them adrift with nothing to cling to but their mutual grief. But that would change tomorrow, when they arrived home to a Thanksgiving feast that truly would be a celebration. Yet she was now in an extremely awkward position. She knew exactly what Alex was feeling—
arriving home to a wife he’d never met much less wanted—because she was feeling just as angry, frustrated, and confused. But most especially angry.
She had subtly probed her new employers—mostly Paul—in the two and a half months she’d been here and had learned that Alex’s marriage to Charlotte hadn’t exactly been wedded bliss and that he’d been quite content being a single father for the last five years. Just as Sarah had been happily widowed for four years, since her marriage to Roland Banks had been no picnic. Sarah wiped away her tears, then hugged her knees to her chest to hold in what warmth she could to her shivering body. She couldn’t believe how quickly John Tate had figured out Grady’s plan to protect Delaney and Tucker. Grady had warned her that people in town might question her marriage, but if they all stuck to their story, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. John had visited enough for her to realize he was a close family friend, and she believed he would keep his promise not to tell anyone. And knowing what a close-knit family the Knights were, Sarah didn’t think Alex was about to run around town denouncing his marriage, either. Which meant that for the time being, she was stuck with another husband she didn’t want.
Roland Banks had been quite full of himself, and quite convinced that a naive seventeen-year-old bride had been the perfect solution to his problem, as well as a good way to keep his dragon of a mother off his back. Sarah had spent the next twelve years with Martha Banks hanging on her back instead, while being ignored by her husband for the eight years before he’d drowned at sea. Well, ignored except when Roland needed a pretty wife to show off.
Youthful ignorance, misplaced gratitude, and a warped sense of duty had locked Sarah into a terrible mess at seventeen, and it had taken her twelve years to get free. And what had she done with her newfound freedom? She’d placed herself right back in another heart-wrenching trap. How could she just walk away from Delaney and Tucker? She couldn’t love those kids more if she had given birth to them herself. But she couldn’t stay married to a stranger, either.
Maybe she could quietly divorce Alex and go back to being their housekeeper until she got her sporting camps up and running in the spring. Yes—she could keep to her original plan to reopen the lodge and eight cabins, three miles down the shoreline, which Grady had offered to lease to her when he’
d stayed at her bed-and-breakfast on Crag Island in August.
But she couldn’t live in the same house with her ex-husband until spring; that would be much too awkward. Dammit! Grady had better come up with a solution when he got home tomorrow. He’d made this mess, and he needed to fix it!
“Sarah! Sarah, where are you?”
Uh-oh. Her ghost-husband had come looking for her. Sarah scrunched into a ball to make herself as tiny as possible. She didn’t want to talk to him. Not yet—preferably not ever.
“Sarah, you didn’t take a jacket, and it’s getting cold out here. Sarah! Show yourself!”
The man sure did love to shout. First he’d yelled at Paul to open the door, then he’d yelled at her when he’d found out Paul wasn’t home, and he was still shouting. Sarah slid deeper into her seat. She’d rather freeze to death than face him right now, and she’d go home when she was good and ready, dammit.
“Look, I’m sorry I shouted at you back there,” he hollered. “And I’m sorry if I scared you. I promise to be a gentleman if you come back to the house, where it’s warm.”
Sarah could tell he was only several yards away by the sound of his voice. She pursed her lips together and refused to answer.
She heard him growl under his breath and let out a frustrated sigh. “Okay,” he said loudly. “I’ll just leave your jacket on this bush, and you can come home when you’re ready. I promise, I’m not angry anymore.”
That was a flat-out lie. Mr. Alexander Knight was very angry: because he had a wife he didn’t want, because he’d been anxious to see his kids and family and they weren’t here, and because she wasn
’t listening to him. Well, she didn’t care; she wasn’t going home until she had worked up the nerve to spend an entire evening and night alone in the house with a virtual stranger. Sarah’s watch started beeping, and she slapped her hand over her wrist to muffle the sound, frantically poking the buttons to make it stop. A rock farther down the shoreline rolled against another rock, and Sarah prayed the lapping waves had drowned out the alarm.
“Sarah?” she heard him say from about thirty yards away. She held her breath for what seemed like forever before a snapping branch told her he’d finally gone into the woods. Still, she didn’t move, just in case it was a trick to make her think he’d left. She scowled at her watch; it was five minutes to four, and the alarm had been to remind her that Oprah’s show was coming on. Sarah leaned her head against the boulder with a frustrated sigh. So much for her plans to watch Oprah and then a quilting show on satellite TV. After that she had intended to sit in front of a crackling fire and work on her plans for the abandoned sporting camps she intended to turn into a first-rate tourist destination. And then she’d planned to go to bed and finish the novel she’d started last night. Sarah stared up at the clouds rolling in from the northwest and thought about the heroine in the book she was a third of the way through. What would Rachel Foster do if she found herself in this position? Sarah gave a soft snort. Rachel sure as heck wouldn’t be hiding in a hole in a rock, freezing her tail off. She’d be standing on tiptoe right in her unwanted husband’s face, telling him to quit shouting. Oh, to be like one of those women who seemed to pop right off the pages of the books she couldn’t get enough of. Ever since she’d discovered romance novels in the mail-order library catalog nine years ago, Sarah had been trying to live up to their wonderful examples. Even though she knew they were fictional, those women always seemed to be smart, feisty, and ever so sure of themselves. They had the bravado to love manly men, were confidently sexual creatures in their own right, and went after their dreams with the tenacity of salmon swimming upstream.
She’d almost been living her own dream. She had found her slice of heaven here in these beautiful mountains, with two children who needed her and two brothers and a father figure she could love. And come spring, she would be a competely independent businesswoman and run her sporting camps the way she wanted to run them. Yes, she had found happily ever after, just like one of the women in her books.
Well, except for the handsome hero part. But she wasn’t even thirty yet; there was still time for a flaming affair. In the historical romances especially, being a merry widow meant a woman was free to indulge in affairs of the heart. And that’s what Sarah had been planning on doing once she worked up the nerve.
“Okay, enough dreaming,” she scolded herself in a whisper. “What would Rachel Foster do if she found herself married to a complete stranger?”
Rachel was a fictional architect who lived on the coast of Maine, who had sworn off men—or at least passionate men. So Rachel probably wouldn’t care what her back-from-the-dead husband thought of being married to her. She would just go about her business as if he didn’t exist, wouldn’t she? Yeah, Rachel Foster would simply ignore the shouting man, and maybe even pretend he was still dead until everyone got home tomorrow.
That certainly sounded doable to Sarah. She could just go back to the house and finish her preparations for tomorrow’s feast, watch her shows on the kitchen television, and then head to her room and lose herself in Rachel’s story. Alex Knight wouldn’t exist for her; he could have the great room to himself and the entire upstairs of the house.
Sarah sat up with a resigned sigh. She should probably feed him, though. He had said he just wanted to shower, eat, and sleep until his kids got home. She could fix him a tray of food and serve him in the great room, so he could eat in front of the fire and not in her kitchen. Maybe…maybe she’d pour him a drink—or even two—of Grady’s whiskey. That should knock him out for the night. Come to think of it, maybe she’d pour herself a tall glass of whiskey mixed with a bit of lemonade and sip her way through the awkward evening ahead. Rachel Foster would have a drink, wouldn’t she?
Sarah turned to peek over the top of the boulder and spotted her jacket hanging on a branch. She climbed down onto the shoreline, stepping from rock to rock to avoid getting her feet wet, grabbed the jacket, and slipped it on. Then, with the fictional Rachel Foster giving her courage, Sarah marched back to the lodge with all the dignity of a smart, feisty, confident heroine.
Alex leaned back on the couch with a sigh of utter and complete satisfaction, lacing his fingers over his full belly as he stared at the empty plates on the coffee table. He’d literally licked them clean, not willing to miss even one drop of the most delicious pork gravy ever to grace a potato. And the stuffing! In a million years, he wouldn’t have thought he’d like toasted almonds and dried cranberries in his pork stuffing, but the taste lingering on his tongue had been divinely inspired. Alex spotted a carrot curl that had fallen off his plate and sat up to pop the thin, perfectly steamed ribbon into his mouth. Then he picked up the second glass of whiskey Sarah had poured him when she’d brought in fresh ice cubes a few minutes ago, and swirled the contents. The large wooden tray teemed with empty dishes, a tall glass of what had been lemonade, and a tiny vase arranged with some berry-laden twigs, all sitting on a crisp white linen place mat. The napkin accompanying the meal had been folded to look like a bird.
Alex had stayed at a few five-star hotels in his time, and he couldn’t remember ever being served a tastier dinner in finer style. No wonder his dad had hired Sarah to keep house for them, if this was how they had been treated last summer.
When Sarah had returned to the house, she’d gone straight to the fridge while reminding him to call his father, and she’d started making dinner without even giving him a glance. She’d been a completely different woman from the one who had run from the house in a panic. This Sarah was calm, politely aloof, and all business. She was still working in the kitchen; he could hear pans rattling and cupboard doors opening and closing occasionally, all over the sound of the television blaring out some sort of how-to program. After listening closely for several minutes, Alex realized that Sarah was watching a cooking show. Which made sense, as the smells that spilled through the swinging door whenever she came floating in with more food or drink made Alex wonder if he wasn’t having a culinary dream. At this rate, he’d gain back his twenty pounds—along with several extra—in less than a month. He took a sip of whiskey and leaned back on the couch to gaze around the great room, cataloging the many changes, some of them subtle and some obvious. The curtains were new, Grady’s favorite old chair had been reupholstered, and the windows gleamed spotlessly as they reflected the interior lighting. There wasn’t one dust bunny or cobweb to be found. The furniture was the same and his mother’s knicknacks were all still here, but everything had been tastefully rearranged and polished to an almost blinding shine. Hell, the place looked like a staged photo from Better Homes and Gardens. Actually, it looked like a very upscale bed-and-breakfast.
“Have you been able to reach Grady yet?” Sarah asked as she came floating through the swinging door, this time carrying an armful of wood that she dropped into the box by the hearth.
“You don’t need to lug in wood, Sarah,” Alex said, setting down his glass to stand up. She shook her head and waved at him to stay sitting. “Don’t move,” she ordered, picking up the tray of empty dishes. “I don’t mind carrying in wood. I always wanted a fireplace back on Crag Island, but all we had was an ancient potbellied stove in the parlor.” She set the tray against one hip to free one of her hands and leaned down to top off his glass of whiskey from the bottle she’d left on the table. “You just sit back and enjoy being home. Did you find the towels for your shower okay? I moved them into the hall closet, where there was more room.”
He’d noticed that the closet in the bathroom had been set up for everyone in the house to have his own shelf, labeled with their names. There was one empty shelf, and Alex assumed it was to have been his when he returned on schedule in a couple of months.
“Excuse me?” he asked, frowning up at her when she asked him another question.
“Were you able to reach Grady?”
He shook his head. “No. They must still be out. I left a message with the desk clerk for Dad or Ethan to call home when they got in.”
Sarah shot him a broad grin that made Alex catch his breath. Damn, she was beautiful when she smiled. “They’re going to jump right on that plane and fly home tonight, once they hear your voice,” she said.
Alex shook his head again. “They could take off from the airport in Portland, because the plane is amphibious, but Ethan won’t land on the lake in the dark. Not with the kids on board, anyway.”
“Oh. So they will have to wait until morning.”
Alex nodded, his attention drawn back to the tray when she pulled it off her hip to hold with both hands. “Do you spoil everyone this way, Sarah, and wait on them as if they’re at your inn? Good Lord,”
he said, rolling his eyes. “You’re going to turn my kids into spoiled brats.”
She looked confused, if not a bit insulted. “I don’t spoil anyone. I just do my job well.”
“You’ve turned this old house into a showcase, and you haven’t stopped working since you came back from your walk. Or are you trying to impress me, afraid I might tell my father that I think you should leave?”
For a moment, Alex was sorry he’d said that. But dammit, she’d spent the last four hours acting as if she were serving the lord of the manor, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“I’m not trying to impress you or anyone,” she said tightly, her back rigid with anger—which only served to accent her lush figure, Alex couldn’t help but notice. “Just because I like to keep a nice house and cook nice meals doesn’t mean I have a hidden agenda.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his eyes so he’d quit trying to picture what was under that pretty pink sweater. “The house is beautiful, and the meal was wonderful. And the whiskey,” he added, picking up his refilled drink, “was a very thoughtful and much appreciated addition.”
“You’re welcome,” she softly snapped, turning and marching through the swinging kitchen door. Uh-oh. She had definitely noticed him noticing her chest. Well, dammit, a blind man would appreciate the way she filled out a sweater! He winced at the sound of several pans loudly clanging together, then again when a cupboard door slammed shut and the television volume was turned up higher. So his curvy housekeeper-wife had a bit of a temper, did she, as well as an aversion to being ogled?
How…interesting. Alex tucked both those little facts away with a smile and saluted the kitchen door with his drink before he took another long sip.