Fletcher's Woman by Linda Lael Miller

from the beach.
    Griffin Fletcher stood still where the path and the shoreline met, watching her with weary, haunted eyes. His skin was pale beneath its deep tan, and a muscle in his jaw flexed, then relaxed again.
    Rachel felt a devastating, contradictory urge to run to him, to hold him in her arms and comfort him as she would a child.
    He broke the spell with a gruff, biting statement. “It’s time to leave.”
    Rachel glared at him. “I simply can’t wait to find out where you’re dragging me off to this time, Doctor!”
    The remark had an odd effect on him; some of the misery drained from his eyes, and a tentative smile twisted his lips. Something ancient and powerful crackled back and forth between him and Rachel, overriding all the terrible experiences of the day.
    At last, he held out one hand. “You know, Rachel, when my mother first presented me to my father, I don’t think she said, ‘Let’s call this one “Doctor”!’ My name is Griffin.”
    Rachel held back stubbornly; suddenly, his outstretched hand seemed imperious, rather than inviting. “You are wretched and impossible,” she muttered. “Where are you taking me?”
    He raised one dark eyebrow, his hand still extended, and there was weary mockery in his tone. “The food is good and the roof keeps out the rain, so what do you care?”
    â€œI care, Dr. Fletcher!”
    â€œGriffin,” he corrected.
    â€œAll right! Griffin!”
    He relented. “You’ll be spending a few days at my house—under the fierce protection of my friend and housekeeper, Molly Brady.”
    Curious, and knowing that a vigorous argument would be a waste of precious energy, Rachel accompanied him to his house. It was a huge structure, fashioned of natural rock; and apple trees, aflame with silken pink blossoms, seemed toencircle it. Lamplight glowed, in golden welcome, from the windows.
    But Rachel was stricken by that warm light, rather than bouyed. Who but a loving, devoted wife would see that lamps were lit against the gathering twilight?
    She swallowed miserably as Griffin Fletcher helped her down from the buggy seat and abandoned both the vehicle and the weary horse to the care of a huge, gangly boy. Not once had it occurred to her that he might be married, and she found the possibility distinctly unpleasant.
    â€œI can’t imagine how I overlooked this house, since I must have passed it twice today,” she said, in a light, false voice, glancing back toward the familiar road that led on to Jonas Wilkes’s house.
    Griffin’s dark eyes, calm only a moment before, were suddenly brooding and remote. “Jonas’s place is pretty imposing,” he said, opening an iron gate in the stone fence and half-pushing Rachel through it. “Your eyes were probably too full of all that brick and gilt and marble to notice.”
    There was something profoundly wounding in the way he spoke, but Rachel couldn’t quite identify it. Her nerves were suddenly throbbing and raw, as though they’d all been bared to the brisk evening wind, and her voice trembled when she spoke.
    â€œI really should go back to my tent.”
    Griffin laughed, but there was no humor in the sound, and no warmth. “You speak as though you have a choice, Miss McKinnon. And believe me, you don’t.”
    Rachel was too tired to match wills with this surly man, but she did manage a flippant, “I doubt that your wife will appreciate an unexpected houseguest.”
    He looked away quickly, but Rachel saw the brutal annoyance in his face all the same, and something that went far, far beyond it.
    â€œI don’t have a wife,” he said shortly, as they climbed the stone steps leading onto the porch.
    Rachel wondered as he opened the front door and ushered her inside. She wondered why part of her wanted to kick this insufferable tyrant in the shins and part of her rejoiced that he had no