Luke stares down at the photo of Sal, taken earlier this morning as they exited the hospital. Splashed across the front page of the tabloid news website the Nashville Star is the headline Luke Kincaid’s Wife Back from the Dead.
The photo’s grainy, snuck on a cell phone, but still has Luke seeing every shade of red in the rainbow.
This is exactly why he wanted to keep Sal’s homecoming under the radar. She’s not even home yet and already the media’s sniffing around. Asking questions. Wanting her photo. Trying to take advantage when she’s at her most vulnerable. It’s why he’s asked friends and family to stay away until Sal feels up to visitors. Overwhelming her ain’t an option. It’s her pace or no one’s.
“Jesus,” Seth mutters.
Luke growls. “How in the hell did they find out?”
Mort has the phone against his ear. “Workin’ on that now, son.”
Scrubbing a hand down his face, Luke watches as his manager sticks his earpiece in and launches into take-charge mode. However Mort will squash it, Luke will let him.
There was a moment, early last year, when Luke wasn’t sure Mort was the right manager for the band. Mort was pushing the Brothers Kincaid to go mainstream—a change Luke wasn’t comfortable with. However, after Mort discovered that it was Clive Jasper who’d sent Sal the photo that had caused her accident, Mort proved his worth and Luke never looked back. The Brothers Kincaid re-signed their contract with Six String Records.
The soft pad of footsteps sound somewhere behind Luke. He stands when he sees Sal coming down the corridor. Almost warily, she sidesteps Mort before hovering in the doorway to the lounge.
“Hey,” Luke says, moving toward her. “All okay?”
“Fine,” she says. “Just exploring.”
The husky lilt of Sal’s voice nearly has Luke’s knees buckling. He’s still not used to the sight of her, appearing like an apparition, only a hundred times more real. She stares up at him with those big green eyes, and all the air leaves his lungs. God help him. He wants to kiss her so damn bad. Just take her in his arms and tell her that he’ll never leave her, that it’s her he’s loved all these years.
But he’s kept his distance. It’s her decision if she wants to be touched by him. By anyone. She barely knows him. He’s a stranger to her, just like everyone else. Just having her back is more than he deserves.
It’ll take time for Sal to heal. And he’ll be beside her every step of the way, helping her with whatever she needs, giving her whatever she wants.
“What do you think of the bus?” he asks.
“It’s like a maze.” Sal raises her eyes up, looking around with a kind of innocent awe. “A palace on wheels.” She arcs an inquisitive brow. “So do you do this a lot? The whole bus thing?”
Luke smiles. “The whole bus thing? You mean touring?”
“Uh-huh.”
“We did.”
A tilt of her dark head. “I went with you?”
He swallows past the dryness in his throat. “Always.”
Even with Sal’s job as a paramedic, even to Mort’s chagrin, Luke managed to coordinate his schedule with hers so that she always went on tour with him. He never went without her.
Sal considers this, then her eyes are widening, fixed on a point above Luke’s shoulder. Following her gaze, he turns to see her sights on the rolling green hills and snaky roads that make up the Tennessee hills. Down in the valley, twenty minutes from Nashville, sits their old farmhouse.
“Is that home?” Her voice borders on awe.
Home. Even the thought of it bamboozles his brain. Sal, home. With him.
This second chance. He can’t fail.
“Yeah,” Luke says hoarsely. “Wild Antler Farm.”
When Luke thinks of their farm, he thinks of Sal. The day he came home from the bank and there she was, a hammer in her hands, ready to bust down the walls on their fixer-upper. That was his wife, never willing to wait, always ready to take on the world and make it theirs.
“Oh, wow,” she murmurs, pushing past him for the front of the bus. She hangs over the shoulder of the driver, taking in the scenery through the large windshield. A wraparound porch, peach trees, stables, the tree line of forest.
“This is gorgeous,” she tells Luke as he comes to stand beside her.