Christmas at Holiday House - RaeAnne Thayne Page 0,118
he’d done it, walked up to her and tried to talk to her without knowing she was his own freaking wife?
He felt like a fool.
He released a breath, fighting down the resurgence of anger.
How was he supposed to endure several more hours of this proximity with her?
He could handle it. For the sake of his children, he had no choice. He had to clear his name. A cloud of suspicion followed him everywhere he went in Haven Point and it was long past time he shed it.
He knew Cassie and Bridger heard the whispers. While he had his undeniable supporters, with his sister and her friends chief among them, plenty of people in Haven Point still believed he had murdered his wife and dropped her body down an abandoned mine shaft or carried it up into the mountains where it had never been found.
Hell, the new Lake Haven district attorney was so convinced Luke had done just that, she was willing to press charges above the protests of nearly everyone in local law enforcement.
He had to move on. He had known where Elizabeth was for months. He could have hauled her back to town long ago and this whole thing would have been done but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to face her.
He hadn’t been ready, he supposed, and had needed time to absorb the new reality that she hadn’t taken her own life, she had only chosen to walk away from the one they had created together.
The winds began to blow harder as he left Portland, swirling sleet and snow against the windshield. It was taking most of his concentration to keep the vehicle on the road, yet Elizabeth slept on soundly, face tucked against the leather seat as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
Once, she had been the best thing in his life, the one who made him laugh and see the joy and beauty around him. Sometimes he felt as if he had loved her forever but it hadn’t been until the summer after her junior year of college that he’d really known her as anything more than one of his younger sister’s friends.
They had been at a party, some Fourth of July thing at the lake. He hadn’t wanted to go, too busy working construction and studying for the tests he needed for his general contractor license to take the time, but a friend had dragged him along.
She had worn a light blue swimming suit with stars on it, he remembered, and her smile had been brighter than the hot summer sun glinting off the lake.
He had fallen hard, right then and there.
He had dated plenty of women. He’d been twenty-five, not an innocent, but none of them had been as funny or as smart or as openhearted as Elizabeth Sinclair. Somehow that night while fireworks exploded over the lake, he had tumbled in love with her. To his everlasting astonishment, she had fallen right back.
They had married a year later, after she graduated, and he still remembered the magic of their first months of wedded bliss. They thought they could do anything, could conquer the whole world. She was working as a secretary/receptionist at an insurance office in Shelter Springs while he had continued working construction. They had saved up for a down payment on a house and made an offer on the little house on Riverbend Road in need of serious repairs.
Together, they had started fixing up the place and everything had been exciting and wonderful. For the first time in his life, he felt as if fate had dealt him a pretty good hand. They had even started working toward having a family. Neither of them wanted to wait.
Then her parents had been killed in a tragic boating accident on Lake Haven, her mother falling out of a fishing boat and her father drowning while he tried to rescue her.
Everything had changed.
Elizabeth had gone from happy and loving and generous to lost and grieving and withdrawn in a blink.
She had been dealing with hard things. He understood that. The death of her parents had hit her hard, knocking the legs out from under her. The Sinclairs had adored their only daughter and she had loved them back. They had been a warm and loving family, one of the first things that had drawn him to her.
He had tried to support her, to say all the things he thought she needed to hear, to simply hold her when she needed it. None of it had been enough. Instead of turning toward him, she had turned away.
A month after her parents died, she found out she was two months pregnant with Cassie. She had burst into tears when she told him, not happy tears but grief-stricken that she could no longer share the joyous news with her parents, two people she loved so dearly.
Though he knew she tried to be happy about the pregnancy, to compartmentalize her pain over losing her parents and focus instead on the impending birth, he sensed she was only going through the motions. Her smiles had been too bright, her enthusiasm not quite genuine.
He thought the birth of their daughter would jolt her out of the sadness she couldn’t shake. Instead, what he understood now was postpartum depression had hit her hard.
Treatment and therapy had helped, but Elizabeth never quite returned to the woman she’d been the first year of their marriage.
Time would heal, the therapists said, and he held onto that, praying they could find each other again once things returned to normal.
When she told him she wanted to have another baby, he resisted hard but eventually she had worn him down and convinced him things would be different this time, that it would be the best thing for their marriage.
It hadn’t. The next two years were hell. This time the postpartum hit with harsh ferocity. After Bridger was born, she had days when she couldn’t get out of bed. She lost weight and lost interest in all the things she usually enjoyed.
They went to round after round of specialists, but none of their therapies seemed to make a difference. By the time she disappeared, when Cassie was almost three and Bridger less than a year, he couldn’t leave her alone with the children. He hired someone to stay with them through the day and took care of them all night.
He had lost his wife long before she actually disappeared.
Anger and misery were a twisted coil in his chest as he drove east through the increasing snow along the Columbia River.
He wanted those early days back, that heady flush of love they had shared, with an ache that bordered on desperation. Right now they didn’t even seem real, like a home movie he had watched of somebody else’s life.
He couldn’t have them back. All he could do now was move forward: clear his name, get the divorce and let her walk away for good this time.
It was what he wanted and what his children needed.
For their sake and his own, he couldn’t let this unexpected attraction he felt for Elizabeth 2.0 get in the way.
Coming Home for Christmas
by RaeAnne Thayne
Available now from HQN Books!
Copyright ©2019 by RaeAnne Thayne
ISBN-13: 9781488056031
Christmas at Holiday House
Copyright © 2020 by RaeAnne Thayne
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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