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“Can I have them now?” Digger asked, eyes bright.
“How about next Saturday?”
“Can we have a sleepover?” Digger wanted to know.
“Of course,” Holly said.
“I only have sleepovers with you,” Lukas complained that night.
“Not next Saturday,” Holly told him. “You know you’re glad to have them. And it will give Elias and Tallie a bit of a break.”
“Nobody’s giving me a break,” Lukas muttered.
But they’d all had a good time. Digger had even looked at Holly and said, “We should keep her,” to his uncle when the boys were going home.
“Suits me,” Lukas said.
Holly told herself to not even think about it. But it was getting harder and harder to live for the moment when the moments seemed to want to add up to something more. Of course that was only in her mind, and Holly knew it.
She couldn’t tell what was in Lukas’s mind. Most of the time he was all smiles, charm and good conversations. But sometimes he grew remote, distracted. At night when they made love, he could be tender and gentle or passionate, almost desperately intense. Maybe he was tiring of her and didn’t know how to say so. Maybe he was trying to recapture the enthusiasm of their first days together.
Holly didn’t know. She didn’t dare ask.
She just told herself it would be good when August finally got here. Soon their affair would be over. They would go their separate ways.
* * *
Holly knew Lukas couldn’t go to Althea’s wedding with her. It was the same day that the MacClintock grant recipients were being feted along with recipients of several other grants at the Plaza. Lukas had to be there.
So she was surprised when he came out of the bedroom, still knotting his tie, that morning and said, “Save me a dance.”
“A dance?”
“At the reception.” He was looking remote and distracted, though, even as he said it, and she wondered why he had.
“You won’t have time to come to the reception.”
He shot her a moody look as he shrugged into his suit coat. “I’ll be there.”
He wouldn’t be.
Holly knew Lukas. Lukas dealt with what was in front of him. He was a man who responded to the moment, and today would be full of moments requiring him to deal with the MacClintock Foundation winners, the mayor and lots of other movers and shakers of the Big Apple. He wouldn’t have a moment to think about her.
Which was, Holly assured herself, actually just as well.
They only had a few days left. She needed to wean herself away from Lukas, stop thinking about him day and night.
Althea’s wedding was a perfect chance to do that. Just as Lukas wouldn’t have time to think of her today, she’d barely have a moment to give him a thought. It was a relief to get to the hotel where the wedding party was changing into their finery. She was hustled up in one of the elevators to the thirtieth floor where Althea, her mother, a hairstylist and a makeup artist swooped down upon her.
“Hairstylist? Makeup artist?” Holly gave Althea a wide-eyed disbelieving look. None of her other weddings had required such expertise.
Althea shrugged. “I’ve got a famous groom. What can you do? There’s press here. I don’t want them to think Stig is marrying beneath himself.”
“He’s not,” Holly assured her.
“But there will be stories,” Althea’s harried mother, Laura, said. “Stig and Althea haven’t made it a secret that Althea has had a bit of trouble, er, making up her mind. The least we can do is look elegant and put-together.”
Elegant and put-together sounded like a plan. Holly did her best to get with the program, to focus on the wedding, all the while wondering where Althea found the courage to give her heart all over again. Sometimes Althea seemed shallow, vague and flighty. Today, though, Holly thought she was incredibly brave.
“Sit.” The stylist pointed Holly to a chair. “We don’t have much time.”
This wedding was a bigger madhouse than any of Althea’s other weddings had been, and yet Holly recognized that this time there was a sense of rightness that the others had lacked. Maybe it was the look Holly saw in Stig’s eyes as he looked past her to watch Althea come toward him down the aisle. Maybe it was the tears that had brimmed in Althea’s when she spoke her vows. Or the way they kissed the first time as man and wife.
Holly didn’t know. But as the wedding turned into the reception, as Stig and Althea danced together, were toasted and celebrated, smashed wedding cake in each other’s faces and never ever stopped smiling, she knew she was happy for them, happier than she’d been at any of Althea’s other weddings.
