Luke’s hands clenched into fists at his side. For an instant he remained poised, and then he retreated as suddenly as he had come.
Joey was not certain how long he was gone. She concentrated on the moments free of him, to gather her balance and remind herself, as many times as necessary, why she was here. When he returned to thrust a hot mug of coffee into her hands, she was able to take it with perfect composure and smile up at him again.
“Thanks. Just what I needed.” The coffee was at that perfect temperature somewhere between scalding and warm, she sipped at it and inhaled the steam. It cleared the last of the fuzziness from her mind.
She found Luke in the carved rocking chair, legs stretched out toward the hearth, his strong chin resting on folded hands. “You didn’t have any?” she said, setting her own mug carefully on the floor beside the sofa.
Raising his head to regard her, Luke shifted his feet and almost smiled. “I only keep it for guests.”
Whatever his intention, his words had the effect of making Joey content to keep silence between them. The quiet stretched for a long while, Joey could hear sounds outside the cabin she could not identify that made her glad to be indoors, even under these circumstances.
Once she was sure she heard the howling of wolves, and her eyes sought the pelts on the wall and the carvings on the two side tables.
Her eyes strayed again and again to Luke after that. For a while he sat as she did, almost unmoving, lost in thoughts she could not begin to guess at. Then he got up to pace—a restless series of turns about the room, seemingly without any purpose but to overcome some internal conflict. His expression tightened and relaxed, and had he been the sort to do so, Joey might have expected him to talk to himself. But he maintained the silence and returned at last to his chair with a half-carved piece of wood.
His deft, expert movements with the small knife fascinated Joey and relieved any threatening boredom. She watched him carve a long, narrow body, shaping short legs and a wisp of a tail, a foxlike head. She played a game of guessing what sort of animal he pulled out of the unremarkable block, and she realized how much time had passed only when Luke got up to throw more wood on the dying fire. In spite of herself, she yawned broadly.
Luke’s keen gaze met hers for the first time in what seemed like an age. “Are you tired?” The sound of his voice after long silence was welcome. Joey shook her head. She could not yet afford to be tired, not while matters stood as they did.
“No, not quite yet. What time is it?” She realized belatedly that her watch had been lost sometime in the struggle with the men at the lake, and Luke did not seem to possess a clock in any visible location.
He cocked his head, looking off into space as if consulting some internal timepiece. “Close to midnight. Perhaps a little later.” At once his eyes came back to hers, dark except for the glitter of firelight. “Is there anything you need?”
Joey considered the question and examined it for double meanings. His look was so intent and focused, so like the ones he had turned on her when he’d first begun his pursuit, that she suspected more than one layer in the casual remark.
For a long moment she wondered if she should put things off a little longer, try to draw him out. But even she had limits, and this had not been an easy day. She drew in a deep breath and met his gaze.
“Yes I need to know why—why you left the way you did last week. ”
The only reaction to her question was a sudden hooding of his eyes, a deepening of the lines between his dark brows. She knew with inward certainty that he had been waiting for that question, he raised his head and stared down at her almost fiercely. “I can’t tell you that.”