Excerpt of Loving Luc by Vicki Crum

The crows were back. Dozens of them. Clustered along the electrical wires like dark smudges against the sky, shifting continuously and piercing the air with an occasional high-pitched caawk. And always, observing the world around them with a keen, almost human intensity.

Just like yesterday.

And the day before that.

And the day before that.

An unseasonably warm breeze blew Maggie McAllister’s hair around her face as she watched the sleek black birds from the wooden porch that wrapped around her house. She hated crows. She’d had an aversion to the nasty things since reading Poe’s The Raven when she was twelve years old. And as if the crows weren’t enough, the trees in her yard had been inundated with an army of bushy-tailed squirrels. Two nights ago she’d found a dead possum on the porch not far from where she was standing, and yesterday morning she’d discovered the half-eaten carcass of a rabbit out behind the garage. Odd, indeed.

High on her bluff that overlooked the rugged coastline of northern California, sea gulls reigned supreme. Their presence had always seemed to keep the crow population to a minimum, but the gulls had been noticeably absent the last few days. As for the influx of furry, four-legged creatures, it felt to Maggie as if they’d been unerringly drawn here, like the foam-tipped waves to the craggy rocks on the shore below.

Maybe that’s why she wasn’t surprised when the stranger showed up. A man, alone, on foot at the end of her drive. All she felt was a mild sense of deja vu, as if she’d been expecting him.

His gaze held her captive as his long-legged gait ate up the hundred or so feet of unpaved driveway between them. Tall and lean. Dark hair, dark clothing, dark backpack thrown over one shoulder. His bold, chiseled features were striking, even from a distance.

Seldom had Maggie witnessed such raw sensuality in a man. It radiated from him like early-morning vapor rising up from the sea. Ethereal, yet undeniable.

He seemed to grow taller as he neared the stone steps leading up to the yard. It was nothing more than an optical illusion, of course, but her position on the porch gave her the welcome advantage of being able to look down at him while she spoke.

Then he smiled, and Maggie realized it would take more than a four-foot elevation to grant her any kind of an advantage over this man.

A crackle of awareness shot through her as she quickly absorbed little details about him. The deep blue of his eyes, framed by long sable lashes. The way his lips tilted slightly at the corners, even after his dimpled smile relaxed. His smooth jaw, minus the three-day growth of stubble so many men seemed to favor these days. How profound his tan, though it was only mid-March and the damp California winter had yet to relinquish its hold on the land.

“Can I help you?” Maggie asked, raising one hand to shade her eyes from a swathe of afternoon sunlight that had stolen beneath the porch roof.

“I hope so.” His voice, as dark and mysterious as the man himself, held a faint Scottish burr. The first little blip appeared on Maggie’s radar screen. Her late husband had had a similar burr in his speech.

“I’m looking for David McAllister.” The stranger shifted his backpack from one arm to the other, drawing her attention to thick, broad shoulders beneath a worn black T-shirt. The very essence of the man rose up to engulf her, made her achingly aware of how accustomed she’d grown to living alone over the past few months.

“You know my husband?” she asked warily.

“I do, indeed. Our connection goes back many years. To childhood, in fact.” He treated her to another heart- tripping smile and said, “David and I grew up together.”

“Oh. I see.” That explained the accent. “So you’re from Killearn?”

An odd glint appeared in the stranger’s eyes, then quickly died away. “Is that what David told you?” He shook his head and grinned. “A bit of an exaggeration, I’m afraid. We come from a much smaller village far to the north of Killearn. We made the journey here to the States several years ago, but lost track of each other when David came west and I settled on the East Coast.”

Something in his words rang hollow, but Maggie couldn’t put her finger on precisely what it was. She dismissed the less-than-subtle suggestion that David had lied about his birthplace. It hardly mattered now, and besides, certain parts of David’s life had always been shrouded in mystery. It was part of his charm, and part of what had drawn her to him in the first place.

It wouldn’t be easy saying what needed to be said while staring into the stranger’s intense blue eyes, yet if what he’d told her was true, if he really was a good friend of David’s, she didn’t have much choice. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way for nothing, Mr....”

“Luc. Just call me Luc.”

Maggie took a step forward, her fingertips digging into the worn wooden newel post rising up on her right. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you...Luc.”

From where she stood, tiny crinkles at the corners of the man’s eyes were visible. They deepened when he squinted into the glare coming off the ocean, accentuating the small, diamond-shaped scar just below one eye. There was something hauntingly familiar about him. A crazy notion if she’d ever had one, since she was positive that she’d never set eyes on him before.

She cleared the thickness from her throat. “David was killed in a boating accident six months ago. Six months ago today.” Maggie’s gaze swung out over the water, in the general direction of a small cluster of rock formations about a mile and a half offshore. They’d have been virtually invisible the night her husband splintered his catamaran on them. She’d never understood what he had been doing out there in the wee dark hours of the morning, without so much as a full moon to light his way.

Luc’s amazing eyes went wide with shock as he struggled to come to terms with her words. His mouth thinned until it was a flat line of resignation, and he followed her line of vision out over the ocean. She should have said something, offered her condolences, at least, but nothing that sprang to mind seemed appropriate. Instead she just stood there, awkwardness clinging to her like an unwanted lover.

One minute the stranger was below her on the walkway, and the next he was towering over her at the top of the stairs. He reached out to her, but she was strangely hesitant to touch him. She didn’t want to be drawn in, weighed down, by another’s grief and sadness. She had made her own particular peace with what happened to David, or tried to, in any event.

Luc’s solemn gaze didn’t waver. If anything, it sharpened, like a piercing blue laser capable of cutting straight through to her heart and dissecting her emotions. Maggie threw up every invisible barrier she possessed to keep him out.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said.

She stared at his outstretched hand, where another thin white scar partially circled one knuckle before disappearing into the crease between his fingers. His nails were clean and neatly trimmed. His hand bespoke of strength and of gentility, and still she hesitated.

What did she think was going to happen if she touched him? Was it really his feelings she was afraid of divining, or that he might somehow guess her unpleasant little secret---that her grief over losing David only went so deep? That guilt, more than anything, was the source of her distress?

Perhaps a bigger concern, at the moment, might be the irrational path her thoughts were taking, and whether or not she was becoming delusional. The man couldn’t read her mind any more than that flock of crows observing them from on high. She brushed her uncertainties aside and laid her palm in his.