rush after her and attempt to play peacemaker.
“I think that went rather well,” Audra said, grinning at her brother as they stood by the side door and watched Ali’s car speed up the long driveway that led back to the main road.
“Yeah,” he replied dryly. “No one’s bleeding.” Audra’s thoughts turned to Luke Banning. “Not yet anyway.”
CHAPTER ONE
THE sun was hot for mid-May, but Ali tipped back her head as she knelt in the small flower bed that ringed her mailbox and took a moment to enjoy the way it felt on her face. Northern Michigan’s winters were always long, especially when lake-effect storms were added in. This winter had felt interminable. Just a few weeks earlier the last of the snow had finally melted from the woods that bordered the northern edge of her property. Trillium, the three-petaled flower for which the Lake Michigan island was named, bloomed there now, offering a much warmer carpet of white.
It was Sunday, which meant she had just three days to reconcile herself to seeing Luke again. She was over him, no matter what Audra seemed to think. But he’d been Ali’s first love, which made him impossible to forget. And he’d left her behind after three years of dating without a second thought, which made his desertion impossible to forgive. So of course the prospect of seeing him again had her on edge. That was only natural.
It didn’t help that Audra had ideas for this reunion that clearly went beyond business. In the past week, her twin had hinted broadly that Ali might want to do something with the shoulder-length hair she always wore pulled into a simple ponytail. And she had tried to convince Ali to wear more fashionable clothing than the conservative button-down blouses and straight, below-the-knee skirts that populated her wardrobe.
Ali ignored the unsolicited advice. This was business, not a social call. She wasn’t going to doll herself up for Luke Banning’s return. No, indeed.
Indifference, that’s what Wednesday’s meeting called for. Nonchalance.
Ali yanked a weed out of the flower bed and tossed it atop the small heap of wilting interlopers next to her, warming to her strategy.
She would be ruthlessly polite and exceedingly casual when she and Luke were finally face-to-face. She would show him, Audra and everyone else who thought otherwise that the past was ancient history, and that the fact he’d spent the past decade in New York City growing wealthy and respected and enjoying the tabloid-documented attentions of supermodels and liposuctioned socialites was of absolutely no concern to her.
She snatched up her gardening trowel and hacked at the hard ground with its daggerlike metal point.
On Wednesday, she would be professional and businesslike. She would be cordial, but in a detached—hack! hack!— and disinterested—hack! hack!— way.
She swiped at the sweat beading on her brow and then set aside the trowel so she could wrap her fist around the base of another weed. As she knelt there locked in an intense tug-of-war with a deep-rooted dandelion, she heard the motorcycle. The mere sound of the engine reeled her back in time, as it always did, resurrecting the bittersweet memories she’d just convinced herself were safely buried and of no threat to her emotional well-being.
Even as her heart seemed to kick out an extra beat, she told herself she was being foolish. It wasn’t Luke. It couldn’t be Luke. She still had three days, nearly seventy-two hours, before she would see him again. Besides, he wouldn’t still be driving a damned motorcycle after all these years. He probably traveled in a limousine, a stretch one so long it would barely fit on the ferry that brought vehicles over from the mainland.
But as she shielded her eyes from the sun with one grimy hand, a Harley Davidson Sportster crested the hill and rumbled into view.
In the years he’d been gone, sightings of Trillium Island’s most famous son seemed to be about as common as sightings of Elvis, and they’d proved to be as reliable. There was no mistaking the Harley rider’s identity, though, especially since he was flouting state law by forgoing a helmet.
Even with the space of thirty yards and the span of more than a decade separating them, Ali knew him at a glance. Wind ruffled the almost-black hair she’d once run her fingers through. He was wearing it shorter these days, looking more like a respectable adult than the rowdy teenager and young man he’d been. Aviator sunglasses obscured his eyes, but she remembered that they were the same shade of blue as the cool waters of the great lake that surrounded the island.
A dozen feet from her driveway the bike slowed and all hope that Luke would somehow fail to spot her evaporated.
Indifference, she reminded herself.
Disinterest.
Nonchalance.
And yet all she felt was mule-kicked when he brought the bike to a stop in front of her mailbox, grinning for a long moment in that sexy way that had haunted her dreams and taunted her heart.
Finally he switched off the engine and swung one denim-encased leg over the seat.
“Hi.”
The sparseness of his greeting jolted her back to her senses. He’d been gone nearly a dozen years and the first word out of his mouth was hi? She wasn’t sure what she had expected him to say, but he didn’t even have the decency to look contrite or uncomfortable or babble his way through an apology, which she would of course decline to accept. No. He was smiling, as handsome and overconfident as ever, and acting as if he hadn’t sped away on that same damned Harley more than a decade earlier without so much as a backward glance.
Studying him, Ali wondered what she had ever seen in the man…beyond his staggering good looks. Those, she noted sourly, had only improved with age. It wasn’t fair. He should be balding or overweight, but the photographic images she’d seen of him over the years hadn’t been airbrushed or otherwise doctored. His hair was still thick, his physique lean and muscled, and his face chiseled and gorgeous.
It dawned on her then that she was still on her knees gazing up at him like the same starry-eyed girl whose heart he’d broken.
Pride fired Ali to her feet. She wiped her soiled hands on her jeans and inwardly cursed her habit of not wearing gardening gloves. There was no help for her dirty cuticles or her perspiration-damp appearance beneath the ball cap she wore, but she damn well wouldn’t kneel like some supplicant before Luke Banning of all people.
“Hello.”
To her relief her voice sounded normal, its tone just this side of cool, but he was smiling as if he thought she were delighted that he’d rumbled down her lane, disturbing her peace and nature’s quiet on this sunny Sunday afternoon.
“God, you look the same as I remembered…give or take a dirt smudge.”
Laughing, he reached out and touched her cheek, presumably to wipe away some errant soil. His smile dimmed when Ali backed up a step and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Believe me, I’ve changed.”
“I guess we all have.” He slipped off the glasses and she felt lost in those blue eyes until he added, “Ten years will do that.”
“It’s been eleven.”
He nodded and one side of
