Chapter 42
Jenna knew she should step away from Luke.
Every careful instinct told her to put distance between them, to fold this feeling down.
But she didn’t step back.
She couldn’t seem to make herself want to.
Luke looked at her now the way he used to look at her. How he used to look at her before Chicago caught up with her. Before she walked out of his life. Before their time apart had carved them both into people who flinched at creaking floors.
His face was mostly shadow now, but Jenna didn’t need the light to read him. Standing this close, with the day’s defenses worn down to nothing, she still instinctually could sense his reactions.
“Luke.” She wasn’t sure what she meant to say after it. His name was as far as she got.
He lifted a hand and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, his fingers brushing her jaw. The touch went through her like warmth through cold ground.
He didn’t pull away.
Neither did she.
He leaned in. The moment narrowed to only a few inches of dusk between them.
She’d spent months aching for this and telling herself she’d given up the right to dream about a future with her husband. But what if she’d been wrong?
Her eyes drifted closed. Her heart slammed against her ribs.
Luke’s hand came up slowly, like he was giving her every chance to step back. His fingers found her jaw, barely touching, just the weight of them against her skin. She didn’t step back.
She didn’t breathe either.
The whole world narrowed down to the inch of air between them. The warmth of him. The way he smelled like woodsmoke and something familiar she hadn’t let herself think about in two years. His thumb moved, just slightly, along her cheekbone.
She tilted her chin up.
Luke stepped closer, and his breath ghosted across her lips—
“Mama?”
The voice carried thin and high across the yard from the porch.
Cora.
They shot apart as if an explosion had blasted between them.
Jenna’s pulse roared in her ears, and she pressed a hand to her chest as if she could steady it by force. Luke had gone still, his jaw tight, his hand falling back to his side.
Up at the house, Cora stood in the lit doorway. “Mama, you said you’d do my braid for tomorrow!”
Jenna swallowed hard and found her voice. “I’m coming, baby.”
She didn’t move yet. Neither did Luke.
In the near-dark, he looked at her, and she looked at him. The unfinished moment hung between them, charged and aching and entirely unresolved.
“We should go in.” His voice didn’t quite sound steady.
Hers wasn’t either as she said, “Yes, we should.”
But for one more breath, neither of them moved toward the house. As the last light died off the water, Jenna let herself stand in the almost of it just a moment longer.
Luke hadn’t kissed her.
But something had shifted all the same. Some door Jenna had believed was permanently closed eased open just far enough to let in a thin, terrifying line of hope.
She held onto that realization as they walked back up toward the warm windows of the house.
By ten, the house had gone quiet.
Luke lay awake on top of the covers in the dark, the way he had every night that week, listening to the old farmhouse settle and turning over everything he couldn’t fix.
The near-kiss at the pond sat in his chest, unresolved and insistent. He’d almost crossed a line tonight that he wasn’t sure he was ready to cross. He didn’t know yet whether he regretted the interruption or not.
He was still chasing that thought when Hamilton began barking downstairs.
It wasn’t his usual bark. This was sharp, frantic, and climbing.
A second later Good Boy joined him.
Luke was on his feet before he’d decided to move.
An odor hit him at the top of the stairs.
Smoke.
The scent was faint but unmistakable.
He didn’t think the smell came from upstairs. The dogs were facing the back door. He’d check there first.
He took the stairs two at a time and yanked open the back door.
His stomach dropped.
Orange light flickered at the back of the property. The tree line behind the cottages had caught, and the fire was already climbing. A ragged wall spread along the dry underbrush, throwing sparks up into the black sky.
They hadn’t had much rain this season. The whole back acreage was tinder, and the cottages sat right in the path of it.
“Fire!” he bellowed into the house before running up the stairs to wake everyone.