“I had asked you to marry me,” Lucas reminded her without getting up, his voice low, his eyes shuttered.
“And I told you I wanted to wait until after I’d gotten a college degree before getting married,” she replied. “You said you’d wait, but I knew you were getting
impatient with my hesitation about making love with you.”
“You wanted to wait until the timing was right. I was impatient, but I understood. I didn’t turn to Lizzie to anyone else—because you weren’t yet ready for a physical relationship.”
“I thought you had,” she whispered. “I knew there had been other girls before me. I thought you’d gotten tired of waiting for me.”
“You were wrong. And if you’d talked to me the night I called, I would have told you so.”
Rachel looked blindly at the rock wall. “I was too young,” she repeated in a whisper. “I didn’t know what to do. Who to believe.”
“I didn’t know Lizzie had talked to you,” Lucas conceded. “I didn’t know about the charm.”
Rachel dashed impatiently at her damp cheek. “I should have talked to you. I thought there would be time—I thought maybe you could explain everything, somehow, once I was ready to hear it—but then you were gone.”
“It seemed the best thing for everyone. For you. For Emily. And maybe for me, too. I couldn’t stay in Honoria knowing I was suspected of murder, and wondering if you thought I was guilty as well.”
She met his eyes squarely. “I thought a lot of angry things about you, Lucas, but I never once belived you’d killed my brother.”
“You know now that I had no alibi.”
“That doesn’t matter. You didn’t kill Roger. You wouldn’t have.”
Lucas sighed and pushed a hand through his hair. “Which brings us back to square one. Roger died on these bluffs and neither of us knows why.”
“He found your stepmother’s bracelet and my father’s wallet, and we don’t know what that means either.”
“And now the bracelet has disappeared again, and we don’t know if it’s a coincidence or connected in some way to Roger’s wild theory.”
Rachel sighed. “It’s all very confusing.”
So much had changed during the past few days. So many things she’d believed had been turned upside down. So much had happened fifteen years ago that she hadn’t known about.
Time had seemed to fall away with every revelation, making it feel almost like yesterday that all these things had taken place.
Unfortunately, all her old feelings for Lucas were being brought to the surface, as well.
He caught her wrist and pulled her gently back down to the quilt. “Do you want some more coffee?”
She shook her head, folding her legs to one side. “No. We need to talk more about what I found. We should try to decide what, if anything, we need to do about it. We should...”
“First, there’s something I want to give you.” Lucas reached beneath the bench on the wall and brought out a small, wrapped package.
Rachel stared at it. “You brought something for me?”
“It’s Christmas,” he reminded her with a very faint smile.
She had been so lost in the past, so disturbed by the discovery of her father’s wallet that she had almost forgotten what day it was. She certainly hadn’t expected Lucas to give her a Christmas present.
“Open it.”
Her fingers were unsteady as she removed the white ribbons and peeled away the red foil paper. A moment later, her eyes flooded with tears, blurring her vision of the leather-bound first-edition book of poetry Lucas had given her.
The memories had been hard enough to hold at bay before. Now, here in the rock house with Lucas at her side and a book of love poems in her hands, Rachel couldn’t stop them from filling her mind.
Hungry kisses. Whispered promises. Shared secrets. Youthful dreams. Love so pure and so strong it had felt almost tangible, and had seemed destined to last a lifetime.