Chapter 31
Dirk
I wake in the freezing old bedroom, the only warmth the slumbering form beside me. Millie never let me cuddle this close, not for long, and never all night. Lucy sleeps heavily. Her breath makes soft mist in the semidarkness.
Around me, the old house creaks as wind whistles and roars outside. I go to leap up, to rush to the clinic to sort out the never-ending paperwork, but my heart slows and I realize I’m free of it. That was the past.
Lucy wakes slowly, gives a languorous smile, then yawns hugely, turns to me, closes her eyes and snuggles back down for more sleep.
I am so tempted to surround her form with my own, to nestle her more closely and discover her, to run my hands across her curves, and wake her gently, with caresses, with kisses. It would be so easy. Too easy.
Suddenly, I’m wary. Drifts of our conversation beside the fire last night come back to haunt me.
Lucy told me she loved pruning the roses, loved this house.
She told me all about her shabby chic furniture, and suddenly I can see it all ahead of me like a trap, like a spider’s web.
Before I know it, Lucy Beston will not only have another diamond ring.
She’ll force me back into this old maddening, demanding house; back into my old routine, into the routine I hated.
I am not doing it. I am never coming back to this house, to be its slave. I don’t care how alluring Lucy Beston might be, and I like her, I do. I’m a little bewitched by her, I’ll admit, but I am no college boy. I’m a grown man and I will not be trapped again.
Walt was right. I am free; freer than I’ll ever be.
Jamison keeps telling me I was a sportsman, and sportsmen need sports cars.
He says a man with a sports car can date anyone, any time.
Not that I want to. But I know what I don’t want, and that is to be trapped back in a house like this beside any woman with her eyes on a rose garden and a house as pretty as a picture.
Never needed it and don’t want it now. Not ever.