*
He heard Julie suck in a breath. Einstein, who had positioned himself at his master’s feet as he was in the habit of doing whenever there was food in the vicinity, whimpered. Beyond that, there was no sound.
No hum of the refrigerator, no low rumbling drone of the furnace. Nothing.
And the silence was almost as unnerving as the darkness.
“So much for the power holding out,” he commented, deliberately keeping his tone casual.
Thankfully, he had an emergency flashlight plugged into one of the outlets in the hall. It ran on rechargeable batteries and automatically turned on when the power went out, so the house wasn’t completely pitch black. But it was pretty close.
While he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he reached for Julie’s free hand, found it curled into a fist on top of the table. He covered it with his own, squeezed gently.
He heard the distant howl of the wind outside, a sound even more ominous than the silence. Julie heard it, too, and shivered.
“I’ve got some candles by the stove,” he told her. “I’m just going to get them so we can find our food.”
He found half a dozen utility candles in the drawer, set a couple of them in their metal cups on the counter and lit the wicks. The scratch of the head against the rough paper was loud in a room suddenly void of all other sound. He lit a couple more and carried them to the table.
They were purely functional—a little bit of illumination so that they could see what they were eating. And yet, there was something about dining over candlelight—even if the meal was nothing more than soup and sandwiches and the lighting was necessity rather than mood—that infused the scene with a romantic ambiance he did not want to be feeling. But somehow the simple dishes and everyday glassware looked elegant in candlelight. And when he glanced across the table, he couldn’t help but notice that Julie looked even more beautiful.
“Dig in before it gets cold,” he advised.
She dipped her spoon into the bowl, and brought it up to her mouth. Before her lips parted to sample the soup, they curved upward and her gaze shifted to him. “Chicken and Stars?”
“So?” he said, just a little defensively.
“So it’s an unusual choice for a grown man,” she said.
“It’s my niece’s favorite.”
“How old is your niece?”
“I have two nieces,” he told her. “Two nieces and two nephews. Matt’s daughter, Pippa, is only a baby. Jack’s daughter, Ava, is twelve going on twenty.”
Her brows drew together, creating a slight furrow between them. “Is Jack short for Jackson?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Why?”
“Your brother is Jackson Garrett?”
Now it was his turn to frown. “You know Jack?”
“Actually, he’s the reason I came to Pinehurst,” she admitted.
Luke carefully set his spoon down in his bowl, the few mouthfuls he’d consumed settling like a lead weight in the pit of his stomach. “Please tell me that he isn’t the father of your baby.”
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