at that place. I mean—” She exhaled. “Surely you don’t want to stay there, do you?”
His eyes narrowed, his expression turning cold and bitter. “Why not? After all, I stayed there for eighteen years, didn’t I?”
He yanked open the door and got out, putting minimal weight on his injured knee. He grabbed the crutches from the bed of her pickup and headed for the house. He made his way up the steps, carefully sidestepping the gaping hole in the porch decking.
He stopped at the door. Reached for the doorknob. Strangely, though, he didn’t go inside. Instead, he pulled his hand back. He dropped it to his side, flexing his fingers. After a moment, he reached for the doorknob again, his hand hovering over it.
And again he pulled it back.
In that moment, Shannon realized the truth. He can’t do it. He can’t even step inside that house.
Luke looked back over his shoulder. In the weak light of dusk, their eyes met, and even with the distance between them, she could feel his hesitancy. His indecision.
His desire to be anywhere else.
Finally he turned away from the door. He hobbled back across the porch and down the steps. But instead of going to her truck, he headed for his. Shannon opened the door of her truck and stepped out.
“Luke! What are you doing?”
“Can’t stay,” he said brusquely. “I forgot I had the utilities turned off. No lights, no air conditioning.” He got into his truck, shoving the crutches into the passenger area beside him.
“But you shouldn’t drive. The doctor said—”
He slammed the driver’s door.
“Money,” Shannon said. “What about money?”
Luke started the engine and pulled away from the house. He hit the gas hard enough that his tires spun on the gravel, then caught traction and propelled the truck up the road to disappear around the bend. Frustration ran wild inside her. Will you stop being a fool? For God’s sake, let me help you!
But that wasn’t going to happen. It had to hurt like hell to drive, but he was doing it anyway. And that meant he was still holding a grudge. A big one.
Fine. If that’s the way you want it, good-bye and good riddance!
But as she watched his taillights disappear into the darkness, she felt the most uncanny sense of loss, as if there was something left undone. Something she should have said and hadn’t. But if he’d been standing in front of her right then, she wouldn’t have had a clue what to say.
She got back into her truck, put it in gear, and started back up the road to the highway. Just before she rounded the thick stand of trees, she glanced in her rearview mirror. At the angle she was at, she could just make out a window on the side of the house. Probably a bathroom window, given how high it was.
And light shone through it.
She told herself he couldn’t bring himself to turn the doorknob, much less stay the night, because his father had died there. Rumor had it that he’d been found face down in the kitchen, still clutching an empty whiskey bottle. She understood how hard it was to face losing a loved one, but there had been no love lost between Luke and his father. And the Luke she knew was grounded enough in reality that a fear of lingering spirits, even in that god-awful house at nightfall, wasn’t even a possibility.
So what had kept him from opening that door?
Chapter 4
Luke still felt bleary from the anesthesia he'd been given during his knee surgery, but that didn’t stop the woman’s voice from stabbing at his nerves like a knife through a butcher’s block. He still couldn’t believe he’d gotten trapped in the passenger seat of her Volvo station wagon for the drive back to his motel, but in the end, he hadn’t had much choice.
During his preoperative consultation, they told him that even though it was minor surgery, he’d have just enough anesthesia in his system that he’d be a hazard behind the wheel. But that was no problem, they said, because they had volunteers from local churches who’d be happy to transport him. In Luke’s mind, “volunteer” became “social worker,” then “charity,” then “handout,” and he’d had enough of those things to last him a lifetime. So he decided a cab would be in order. Unfortunately, it had cost him nearly fifty bucks to make the trip from his motel on the outskirts of Austin to the hospital, with a tip on