Less of a Stranger Read online

  looked down on her. “I’ve thought about you and me in Paris, making love. I want to see your face in the morning when the light’s soft.”

  She touched his cheek. “Soon,” she whispered. “Marry me soon. I want to be with you.”

  He picked up the box that had fallen beside them. Drawing out the ring, he slipped it on her finger. Then, gripping her hand with his, he looked down at her.

  “Consider it binding, Meg,” he told her huskily. “You can’t get away now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” She lifted her mouth to meet his kiss.

  Epilogue

  Nervously, Megan twisted the emerald on her finger and tried to drink the champagne Jessica had pushed into her hand. She felt as though the smile had frozen onto her face. People, she thought. She’d never expected so many people. What was she doing, standing in a Manhattan gallery pretending she was an artist? What she wanted to do was creep into the back room and be very, very sick.

  “Here now, Meg.” Pop strolled over beside her, looking oddly distinguished in his best—and only—black suit. “You should try one of these—tasty little things.” He held out a canapé.

  “No.” Megan felt her stomach roll and shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m so glad you flew up for the weekend.”

  “Think I’d miss my granddaughter’s big night?” He ate the canapé and grinned. “How about this turnout?”

  “I feel like an impostor,” Megan murmured, smiling gamely as a man in a flowing cape moved past her to study one of her marble pieces.

  “Never seen you look prettier.” Pop plucked at the sleeve of her dress, a swirl of watercolored silk. “’Cept maybe at your wedding.”

  “I wasn’t nearly as scared then.” She made a quick scan of the crowd and found only strangers. “Where’s Katch?”

  “Last time I saw him he was cornered by a couple of ritzy-looking people. Didn’t I hear Jessica say you were supposed to mingle?”

  “Yes.” Megan made a small, frustrated sound. “I don’t think I can move.”

  “Now, Meg, I’ve never known you to be chickenhearted.”

  With her mouth half-opened in protest, she watched him walk away. Chickenhearted, she repeated silently. Straightening her shoulders, she drank some champagne. All right, then, she decided, she wouldn’t stand there cowering in the corner. If she was going to be shot down, she’d face it head on. Moving slowly, and with determined confidence, Megan walked toward the buffet.

  “You’re the artist, aren’t you?”

  Megan turned to face a striking old woman in diamonds and black silk. “Yes,” she said with a fractional lift of her chin. “I am.”

  “Hmmm.” The woman took Megan in with a long, sweeping glance. “I noticed the study of the girl with the sand castle isn’t for sale.”

  “No, it’s my husband’s.” After two months, the words still brought the familiar warmth to her blood. Katch, my husband. Megan’s eyes darted around the room to find him.

  “A pity,” the woman in black commented.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said it’s a pity—I wanted it.”

  “You—” Stunned, Megan stared at her. “You wanted it?”

  “I’ve purchased The Lovers,” she went on as Megan only gaped. “An excellent piece, but I want to commission you to do another sand castle. I’ll contact you through Jessica.”

  “Yes, of course.” Commission? Megan thought numbly as she automatically offered her hand. “Thank you,” she added as the woman swept away.

  “Miriam Tailor Marcus,” a voice whispered beside her ear. “A tough nut to crack.”

  Megan half turned and grabbed Katch’s arm. “Katch, that woman, she—”

  “Miriam Tailor Marcus,” he repeated and bent down to kiss her astonished mouth. “And I heard. I’ve just been modestly accepting compliments on my contribution to the art world.” He touched the rim of his glass to hers. “Congratulations, love.”

  “They like my work?” she whispered.

  “If you hadn’t been so busy trying to be invisible, you’d know you’re a smashing success. Walk around with me,” he told her as he took her hand. “And look at all the little blue dots under your sculptures that mean SOLD.”

  “They’re buying?” Megan gave a wondering laugh as she spotted sale after sale. “They’re really buying them?”

  “Jessica’s frantically trying to keep up. Three people’ve tried to buy the alabaster piece she bought from you herself—at twice what you charged her. And if you don’t talk to a couple of the art critics soon, she’s going to go crazy.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it.” He brought Megan’s hand to his lips. “I’m very proud of you, Meg.”

  Tears welled up, threatening to brim over. “I have to get out of here for a minute,” she whispered. “Please.”

  Without a word, Katch maneuvered his way through the crowd, taking Megan into the storage room and shutting the door behind them.

  “This is silly,” she said immediately as the tears rolled freely down her cheeks. “I’m an idiot. I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of and I’m crying in the back room. I’d have handled failure better than this.”

  “Megan.” With a soft laugh, he gathered her close. “I love you.”

  “It doesn’t seem real,” she said with a quaver in her voice. “Not just the showing . . . it’s everything. I see your ring on my finger and I keep wondering when I’m going to wake up. I can’t believe that—”

  His mouth silenced her. With a low, melting sigh, she dissolved against him. Even after all the days of her marriage, and all the intimate nights, he could still turn her to putty with only his mouth. The tears vanished as her blood began to swim. Pulling him closer, she let her hands run up the sides of his face and into his hair.

  “It’s real,” he murmured against her mouth. “Believe it.” Tilting his head, he changed the angle of the kiss and took her deeper. “It’s real every night when you’re in my arms, and every morning when you wake there.” Katch drew her away slowly, then kissed both her damp cheeks until her lashes fluttered up. “Tonight,” he said with a smile, “I’m going to make love to the newest star in the New York art world. And when she’s still riding high over the reviews in the morning papers, I’m going to make love to her all over again.”

  “How soon can we slip away?”

  Laughing, he caught her close for a hard kiss. “Don’t tempt me. Jessica’d skin us both if we didn’t stay until the gallery closes tonight. Now, fix your face and go bask in the admiration for a while. It’s good for the soul.”

  “Katch.” Megan stopped him before he could open the door. “There’s one piece I didn’t put out tonight.”

  Curious, he lifted a brow. “Oh?”

  “Yes, well . . .” A faint color rose to her cheeks. “I was afraid things might not go well, and I thought I could handle the criticism. But this piece—I knew I couldn’t bear to have anyone say it was a poor attempt or amateurish.”

  Puzzled, he slipped his hands into his pockets. “Have I seen it?”

  “No.” She shook her head, tossing her bangs out of her eyes. “I’d wanted to give it to you as a wedding present, but everything happened so fast and it wasn’t finished. After all,” she added with a grin, “we were only engaged for three days.”

  “Two days longer than if you’d agreed to fly to Vegas,” he pointed out. “All in all, I was very patient.”

  “Be that as it may, I didn’t have time until later to finish it. Then I was so nervous about the showing that I couldn’t give it to you.” She took a deep breath. “I’d like you to have it now, tonight, while I’m feeling—really feeling—like an artist.”

  “Is it here?”

  Turning around, Megan reached up on the shelf where the bust was carefully covered in cloth. Wordlessly, she handed it to him. Katch removed the cloth, then stared down into his own face.

  Megan had polished the wood very lightly, wa
nting it to carry that not-quite-civilized aura she perceived in the model. It had his cockiness, his confidence and the warmth the artist had sensed in him before the woman had. He stared at it for so long, she felt the nerves begin to play in her stomach again. Then he looked up, eyes dark, intense.

  “Meg.”

  “I don’t want to put it out on display,” she said hurriedly. “It’s too personal to me. There were times,” she began as she took the bust from him and ran a thumb down a cheekbone, “when I was working on the clay model, that I wanted to smash it.” With a half laugh, she set it down on a small table. “I couldn’t. When I started it, I told myself the only reason I kept thinking about you was because you had the sort of face I’d like to sculpt.” She lifted her eyes then to find his fixed on hers. “I fell in love with you sitting in my studio, while my hands were forming your face.” Stepping forward, Megan lifted her hands and traced her fingers over the planes and bones under his flesh. “I thought I couldn’t love you more than I did then. I was wrong.”

  “Meg.” Katch brought his hands to hers, pressing her palms to his lips. “You leave me speechless.”

  “Just love me.”

  “Always.”

  “That just might be long enough.” Megan sighed as she rested her head against his shoulder. “And I think I’ll be able to handle success knowing it.”

  Katch slipped an arm around her waist as he opened the door. “Let’s go have some more champagne. It’s a night for celebrations.”

  Keep reading for a special excerpt from the newest novel by Nora Roberts

  WHISKEY BEACH

  Available now in hardcover from G.P. Putnam’s Sons

  Through the chilly curtain of sleet, in the intermittent wash of the great light on the jutting cliff to the south, the massive silhouette of Bluff House loomed over Whiskey Beach. It faced the cold, turbulent Atlantic like a challenge.

  I will last as long as you.

  Standing three sturdy and indulgent stories above the rough and rugged coast, it watched the roll and slap of waves through the dark eyes of windows as it had—in one incarnation or another—for more than three centuries.

  The little stone cottage now housing tools and garden supplies spoke to its humble beginnings, to those who’d braved the fierce and fickle Atlantic to forge a life on the stony ground of a new world. Dwarfing those beginnings, the spread and rise of golden sand walls and curving gables, the generous terraces of weathered local stone sang to its heyday.

  It survived storm, neglect, careless indulgence, dubious taste, the booms and the busts, scandal and righteousness.

  Within its walls, generations of Landons had lived and died, celebrated and mourned, schemed, thrived, triumphed and languished.

  It had shone as bright as the great light that swept the water off Massachusetts’s rocky and glorious north shore. And it had huddled, shuttered in the dark.

  It had stood long, so long, now it was simply Bluff House, reigning above the sea, the sand, the village of Whiskey Beach.

  For Eli Landon it was the only place left to go. Not a refuge as much as an escape from everything his life had become over the past eleven horrible months.

  He barely recognized himself.

  The two-and-a-half-hour drive up from Boston over slick roads left him exhausted. But then, he admitted, fatigue cozied up to him like a lover most days. So he sat outside the house, in the dark, sleet splatting off his windshield, his roof, while he debated the choices of gathering enough energy to go inside or just staying put, maybe sliding into sleep in the car.

  Stupid, he thought. Of course he wouldn’t just sit there and sleep in the car when the house, with perfectly good beds to choose from, stood only a few feet away.

  But neither could he drum up the enthusiasm for hauling his suitcases out of the trunk. Instead he grabbed the two small bags on the seat beside him, ones holding his laptop and a few essentials.

  Sleet slapped at him when he climbed out of the car, but the cold, that whistling Atlantic wind, cut through the outer layers of lethargy. Waves boomed against the rock, slapped against the sand, combining into a constant hissing roar. Eli dragged the house keys out of his jacket pocket, stepped onto the shelter of the wide stone portico to the massive double entrance doors hewn more than a century before from teak imported from Burma.

  Two years, he thought—closer to three—since he’d been here. Too busy with his life, with work, with the disaster of his marriage to drive up for a weekend, a short vacation, a holiday visit with his grandmother.

  He’d spent time with her, of course, the indomitable Hester Hawkin Landon, whenever she’d come to Boston. He’d called her regularly, e-mailed, Facebooked and Skyped. Hester might have been cruising toward eighty but she’d always embraced technology and innovation with curiosity and enthusiasm.

  He’d taken her to dinner, to drinks, remembered flowers and cards, gifts, gathered with her and his family for Christmas, important birthdays.

  And that, he thought as he unlocked the door, was all just rationalization for not taking the time, making the time, to come to Whiskey Beach, to the place she loved most, and giving her real time, real attention.

  He found the right key, unlocked the door. Stepping inside, he flicked on the lights.

  She’d changed some things, he noted, but Gran embraced change even as she managed to embrace traditions—that suited her.

  Some new art—seascapes, gardenscapes—splashing soft color against rich brown walls. He dumped his bags just inside the door, took a moment to just look around the glossy spill of the entrance hall.

  He scanned the stairs—the grinning gargoyle newel posts some whimsical Landon had commissioned—and up where they curved gracefully right and left for the north and south wings.

  Plenty of bedrooms, he thought. He just had to climb the stairs and pick one.

  But not yet.

  Instead he walked through to what they called the main parlor, with its high, arching windows facing the front garden—or what would be once winter opened its claws.

  His grandmother hadn’t been home for more than two months, but he didn’t see a speck of dust. Logs lay in the hearth framed by the gleam of lapis and ready to light. Fresh flowers stood on the Hepplewhite table she prized. Pillows sat fluffed and welcoming on the three sofas ranged around the room, and the wide-planked chestnut floor gleamed like a mirror.

  She’d had someone come in, he decided, then rubbed his forehead where a headache threatened to bloom.

  She’d told him, hadn’t she? Told him she had someone looking out for the place. A neighbor, someone who did the heavy cleaning for her. He hadn’t forgotten she’d told him; he’d just lost the information for a moment in the fog that too often crawled in to blur his mind.

  Now looking out for Bluff House was his job. To tend to it, to, as his grandmother had asked, keep life in it. And maybe, she’d said, it would pump some life back into him.

  He picked up his bags, looked at the stairs. Then just stood.

  She’d been found there, there at the base of the steps. By a neighbor—the same neighbor? Wasn’t it the same neighbor who cleaned for her? Someone, thank God, had come by to check on her, and found her lying there unconscious, bruised, bleeding, with a shattered elbow, a broken hip, cracked ribs, a concussion.

  She might’ve died, he thought. The doctors expressed amazement that she’d stubbornly refused to. None of the family routinely checked on her daily, no one thought to call, and no one, including himself, would have worried if she hadn’t answered for a day or two.

  Hester Landon, independent, invincible, indestructible.

  Who might have died after a terrible fall, if not for a neighbor—and her own indefatigable will.

  Now she reigned in a suite of rooms in his parents’ home while she recovered from her injuries. There she’d stay until deemed strong enough to come back to Bluff House—or if his parents had their way, there she would stay, period.

  He wanted to th
ink of her back here, in the house she loved, sitting out on the terrace with her evening martini, looking out at the ocean. Or puttering in her garden, maybe setting up her easel to paint.

  He wanted to think of her vital and tough, not helpless and broken on the floor while he’d been pouring a second cup of morning