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It always bothered him that Sullivan hadn’t struggled at all, not even as he tightened the rope. Sedatives crossed his mind when he first began the autopsy but he hadn’t used them so he didn't look for them. It never occurred to him that Tessa, with her conscience and the feelings she once held for the man, might have strayed from the plan.
When the results came in and he realized she’d disobeyed him, he hopped right in his car. It might have been hypocritical but Lucas threw the rest of the plan out of the window. He’d been thinking rationally, clinically when he first decided that they had to wait at least three months before they could chance seeing each other again. Tessa would move from her apartment and he would leave Hamlet behind and they could just start over together.
And then the report came in. One detail, one small thing had the power of ruining everything he worked so hard for. Her soft heart could’ve cost them both. He had to see her because this was one discussion they couldn’t have on a disposable phone or in coded e-mail messages. Lucas had to assure himself that Tessa was still as devoted to him as he was her.
Of course, when his own impulsive need to see her, touch her, talk to her again led him to pack up his car and leave Hamlet in his rearview, he forgot one major thing. That, no matter what, she held his heart in her dainty, little hands. Seeing her beautiful eyes fill with tears made him ache.
“Come here, Tessa.” He opened his arms for her. She pushed off of the recliner, shuffling uncertainly toward the safety of his embrace.
Lucas reached out and grabbed her hand, pulling her onto his lap. As she laid her head against his chest, his fingers ghosted over the tousled waves of her hair. He cocooned her in his arms. He was always amazed at how perfect they fit together. As if they were made for each other.
Tessa glanced up at him. His gaze grew so heated as their eyes locked, she felt like she was melting. In moments like these, when he looked at her like that, Tessa wondered how she could ever compare this man to ice.
“I missed you,” she admitted. Knowing he was hers at last, waiting for him for these last six weeks, it had been torture. She didn’t know how she was going to make it another six weeks. So what if he came all this way to scold her? She didn’t care. Not when she could hold him.
“I love you,” he told her.
And definitely not when he said that. In a matter-of-fact tone because his love for her was something that just was, so simply stated because it was as part of him as his being a doctor. Forget about melting. Tess burned for Lucas De Angelis.
She snuggled into his embrace. For the first time since they set their plan into motion, she felt like she could breathe again.
25
When they started their affair more than a year ago, neither one of them ever anticipated what it would become. What started out as a spark of attraction, blossomed into a firestorm of epic proportions that eventually burned everyone in its path.
It began innocently enough. Six years ago, when Tessa was a fresh-faced undergrad student still taking nursing courses, Lucas visited her college campus as a guest lecturer.
Though he was the only doctor in Hamlet, he was extremely intelligent, highly educated and had a desire to get out of there as often as he could. He wouldn’t leave his sister on her own for long, and Caitlin refused to let him out of her sight for more than a few days at a time, but he used his profession as an excuse to momentarily escape either by taking classes, attending seminars, or giving lectures.
It was during one of those lectures that the young woman caught his attention. Tessa Ryan. From the moment he first laid eyes on her, Lucas knew she was meant to be his. His one and only. He always understood that his marriage to Caitlin was nothing more than a front; already crumbling, it wouldn’t outlast his initial attraction to a light-haired, golden-eyed co-ed.
At first, it was innocent. They exchanged emails from time to time, even continuing to talk after Tessa switched her major from nursing to education. It wasn’t long before they fell in love, though neither one acknowledged it for quite a while.
Lucas was still married to Caitlin. Tessa was in a committed relationship with Jack Sullivan that only grew more serious as the years passed.
Since she never thought she would have a future with a married man, when Jack proposed, Tess accepted.
Lucas immediately tried to convince her to change her mind. He offered to divorce Caitlin right away. Tessa refused. He had his life. She had hers. He was established in Hamlet and wouldn’t leave—as quick as he was to toss his wife to the side, he wouldn’t budge on that point. Tessa wanted to finish school. She didn’t want to go to Hamlet.
Not yet, anyway.
As much as she cared for Jack, the passion she felt for Lucas wouldn’t die. She forced herself to ignore it, going so far as to stall her engagement to Jack for as long as possible until she simply ran out of excuses.
Three years after he proposed, Tess married Jack in a simple courthouse wedding. That day, she promised that she would give her new husband everything she had. He wasn’t the one who gave her butterflies in her stomach, but he loved her and did his best to do right by her.
It was enough. It had to be.
She emailed Lucas the morning after her wedding and told him it was over. He showed up two days after she returned from her honeymoon, cornering her in the parking lot at the school where she worked before basically begging her to leave her new husband. Caught up in a jealous rage, he forgot that their fling was supposed to be both carefree and secret.
Alarmed by the depths of his reaction, she refused. It didn’t matter that his inevitable divorce to Caitlin was final and had been for years. She owed too much to Jack. She wouldn’t leave him.
Lucas went back to Hamlet alone, already plotting how to change that. And while Tessa managed to avoid contacting him for nearly three weeks after her wedding, she eventually rekindled their long distance romance. She wanted to stay away and she tried to—but Lucas was all too willing to wait. A patient hunter, he let Tessa come back to him, knowing that once she did, he'd never let her go.
And he didn't. Emails and stolen phone calls became weekend-long trysts when Jack was away on business and Caitlin thought Lucas was out of town for his work. All the while, he kept lying in wait. His problem? He considered another man’s wife to be his. The solution was incredibly clear to him from the start.
Get rid of the other man.
Already hatching his plan, Lucas waited. No one—not Tessa, not his ex, not his sister—could tell the depths of his plotting. After Mack Turner, this one would be a cinch. Methodical and precise, he approached it as he would any other operation. The goal? Separating Tessa from Jack Sullivan. Simple surgery.
