Teresa Hill by Luke’s Wish

so big and so blue, and she seemed to stop breathing all together. “No one,” she said softly. “Not for a long time.”
    “I think it’s time someone did.” He brushed the pad of his thumb across her bottom lip.
    She exhaled shakily, her breath skimming across his thumb. Joe caught her face between both hands. Ready to take his time, to savor the moment, because he hadn’t wanted to kiss a woman so much in a long, long time, he started at her eyes, kissing them softly, finding them still wet from her tears. The skin of her cheek was soft, and the tip of her nose was cold. He kissed all of those spots.
    She relaxed a little against him. Then Joe lowered his mouth to hers and gently kissed her lips.
    He wasn’t doing this because he’d come in here and found her crying or because he wanted to see her smile or because the loneliness radiated from her like light shining from the lamp in the corner. He was doing it because he had to see if this kiss was anywhere near as good as he imagined it would be.
    It felt so good. Nothing had felt this good to him in the longest time. And he wanted to—
    “Dad! Dani’s bugging me!” Luke bellowed, then came charging into the room, tripping over his own two feet just inside the door and not seeming to notice anything that was going on in the room. He righted himself and then proceeded to launch into his list of complaints. “I’m making a tower with the blocks and she keeps knocking it down. And then I tried to make her leave me alone and she started to cry!”
    Joe took his time stepping away from Samantha, and he had to remind himself that he loved his son very much, even if the little urchin had the manners of a savage. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to teach Luke to knock on a closed door, to go find someone—instead of yelling—when he wanted to talk to the person or to respect anyone’s privacy.
    Samantha looked mortified.
    “Will you come’n make her leave me alone, Dad? Please?”
    “Luke, that’s a door,” Joe said, pointing it out to his son, in case Luke missed it. “It’s the door to Dr. Carter’s office, and it was closed. What does that mean you should do?”
    “But Dani was bugging me!”
    “Luke,” he warned.
    “Knock, okay? I should knock. Sorry.”
    “Don’t tell me. Tell her.” He nodded toward Samantha. “And while you’re at it—” he dug into his pocket and came up with the pretty fairy “—give her this and see if you can explain what you did and why. I’ll go find your sister and deal with her.”
    “’Kay,” Luke said miserably, sighing as he took the fairy into his hand.
    “Dani and I’ll be waiting out front,” he said, then allowed himself one more look at Samantha. Her cheeks were flushed.
    Joe winked at her, which had soft color flooding her cheeks once again and making her look even more kissable than ever.
    As he turned to go, he realized she still hadn’t told him who Abbie was or why she missed the little girl so much. And he still hadn’t managed to make Samantha smile.
     

    Samantha’s head was spinning, for reasons she simply couldn’t understand.
    All he’d done was kiss her. It wasn’t as though she’d never been kissed. But then, she’d never been kissed by Joe Morgan. Could it make that much difference which man did the kissing?
    Perplexed, her spinning head making her dizzy, Samantha concentrated on Luke Morgan, cute as ever and looking absolutely miserable as he stood in front of her, clutching her favorite fairy figurine to his chest.
    He didn’t say anything for the longest time, just scuffed one of his sneakers against the other and sighed big heavy sighs. Finally he held the fairy out to her.
    “I took it,” he said. “Yesterday, when I was here. But I didn’t mean to keep it. Honest, I didn’t. I just had to take it home for a little while.”
    “Why, Luke?”
    “I had to see if it was the one, if she was the fairy in the book, and she was. That’s all I had to see. I didn’t