Love, Come to Me(94)

Heath had once told her that the demands she made would be too overwhelming for some people to handle. She loved strongly. She needed strongly. Lucy couldn’t deny that it would be a long time before she felt secure enough to be comfortable with their relationship as it was. Her instinct was to take every opportunity she had to reinforce her hold over Heath, constantly searching for ways to strengthen their bond, when she should merely relax and allow him the freedom he needed.

She turned and looked at Heath, forcing herself to smile lightly. “Should I have another place set for dinner?”

He returned her smile, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Please do.”

After he left the room, Lucy continued staring at the spot where he had stood. Heath Rayne, the Northeastern newspaper tycoon, looked and sounded very different from the man she had married. He was less playful now, more authoritative. The carefree air had been replaced by a formidable aura of power and responsibility. Even the sunny gold of his hair had darkened in the winter months to ash brown, making him look older than his twenty-seven years. The air of mystery around him had intensified. He was more compelling, more baffling, less accessible than ever.

Lucy sighed in frustration, acknowledging for the first time that there were differences in him, both outward and inward, that she would have to start accepting. Why had no one told her that men changed after courtship was over and the marriage had begun?

She had expected that Heath would have enjoyed being fussed over and cosseted while he recovered from his illness. The fact that her assumption was completely wrong served to prove once again how little she knew him. He had barely tolerated her coddling and her sympathy. There were times that she had to touch him or press a kiss to his cheek, just to reassure herself that he was all right, but he was outwardly unresponsive to her gestures of affection. Pale, quiet, and controlled, he had accepted his confinement to the bed with a surprising lack of argument, until now.

In response to Lucy’s private questions, Dr. Evans had said that Heath’s behavior was nothing out of the ordinary, and that it would take him several weeks to recover the health he had enjoyed before the illness. However, Lucy felt certain that the changes she saw in Heath, his enigmatic moods, his uncustomary quietness, were only partly a result of his physical condition. The other cause was something far more troubling. It seemed that he had come to some realization during his struggle with the fever, some self-recognition that bothered him exceedingly. He did not speak of it to her. Indeed, he seemed at times to be guarding against the possibility of mentioning it.

Raine. Though neither of them had ever mentioned her name to the other, her name hung in the silence between them, preventing the free exchanges they had once shared. Lucy didn’t know if Heath remembered anything about the delirium in which he had been trapped for so long. Did he know that he had mentioned Raine so often? Did he even suspect it of himself?

The suspicions that plagued Lucy were not eased by his apparent lack of interest in her. They occupied separate rooms, slept in separate beds each night, and though the time was long past when they could have resumed their former habit of sleeping together, Heath gave no indication that he would prefer a change in the current arrangements. All of the half-formed plans in Lucy’s mind for casually moving back into the master bedroom had dissolved over the past several days. She had let it go on for too long; now it would be difficult and awkward to return to Heath’s bed. Was there truly any need for her to have to seduce her way into the position that was already rightfully hers? Surely not. But why, then, was she half-afraid that she would be refused? She wasn’t certain. It was the coward’s way out, to wait until he mentioned something about wanting her again, but her confidence was bruised, and she didn’t want to risk greater damage.

Damon visited the house often to consult with Heath about the Examiner. If he noticed that things were not right between Lucy and Heath, he didn’t say a word. His concern was the newspaper, and currently that took precedence over everything else. Without Heath to keep them directed and motivated, the employees of the paper tended to be fractious and less careful about their work. Damon was a hard taskmaster, demanding, sarcastic, and impatient with others’ weaknesses. He freely admitted that he didn’t have Heath’s patience, nor his ability to play reporters off one another in order to extract their best efforts.

It was with great relief that everyone welcomed Heath back to the offices of the Examiner. As his familiar footsteps sounded on the floor of the editorial room, there was a chorus of greetings and a deluge of questions, which he fended off with raised hands and a familiar, confident grin.

“In my office. I’ll talk to you one at a time. Starting with the A’s and through to the Z’s . . . that is, if anyone around here has learned how to alphabetize yet.”

Damon raised a dark eyebrow as Heath passed by his desk. “I had expected a more ceremonious return.”

Heath stopped and looked down at him, his smile broadening marginally. “You think I should have made a speech?”

“Hardly. I’m just glad you decided to get your indolent self out of bed and get back to the business of publishing a newspaper. You haven’t exactly earned your keep the last few weeks.”

“After reading yesterday’s issue and seeing how you’ve been handling things in my absence, I decided it was time to come back.”

“You think you could have improved upon yesterday’s issue?” Damon inquired, with a condescending expression that would have made the rest of the Redmond clan proud.