“The ferry’s coming in,” Alison said and by unspoken agreement they walked to the end of the pier to watch it glide toward the dock.
Standing side by side, they gazed out over the choppy water of Puget Sound. After a few minutes, Frank placed an arm around her shoulders. Alison leaned against him, savoring this closeness to the man she loved.
Without warning, he turned her so that she faced him and then he kissed her. His mouth was gentle and she instinctively opened to him. Seconds later his hands were in her hair, bunching it as he slanted his lips over hers and his kiss grew more insistent.
With his arms around her, Frank rested his chin on her head. “I told myself I wouldn’t do that,” he said in a low voice. “Not here, not like this.”
“I think I would’ve died if you hadn’t,” she whispered back.
“I’m no bargain, Alison.”
“Stop.”
“No, I mean it, but God help me, I love you and I know I’ll love Jazmine, too.”
Alison smiled softly. “She’s eager to meet you in person.”
His arms relaxed as he brushed his lips against her temple. “I have a week’s leave, but then I have to head back to San Diego. It isn’t much time to make an important decision, but I’m hoping that by the end of the week you’ll know how you feel about me.”
Alison didn’t need any time; her decision was made.
“I know you loved Peter and that he’s Jazmine’s father,” Frank continued.
“I’ll always love Peter,” Alison said.
“I want you to. He was your husband and he died serving his country. I respect him and I have no intention of replacing him in your life or Jazmine’s.”
“Frank, what are you saying?”
He inhaled harshly. “I was hoping, praying actually, that by the end of this week you might know your feelings well enough... What I mean is that I’d like you to be my wife.”
“I don’t need a week—”
“You do,” he told her, “we both do.” And he kissed her again with such abandon and joy that when he released her, Alison was convinced she’d rather be in his arms than breathe.
* * *
A week later, just before Frank was scheduled to return to San Diego, the three of them planned dinner together. While Alison flitted about the kitchen checking on their meal, Jazmine set the table.
Before they sat down to eat, Frank pulled two small boxes out of his pocket and ceremonially placed them on the table.
Alison was carrying a large green salad and nearly dropped the bowl when she saw the velvet cases.
Frank glanced at her with a mildly guilty look. “If you’d rather wait until after dinner, that’s fine, but I know I’d enjoy the meal a lot more if I had your answer first.”
“Do I get to choose between two rings?” she asked, wondering why he’d brought two boxes.
“No,” he said. “There’s a necklace in one of them for Jazmine.”
Her daughter came out of the kitchen clutching three bottles of salad dressing. It didn’t take her long to assess the situation. “The answer is yes,” Jazmine stated matter-of-factly.
“Yes,” Alison echoed, nodding vigorously.
Frank opened the first of the two velvet boxes and slipped the small single-pearl necklace around Jazmine’s neck and fastened it. “I felt it was important that I make a promise to you, too,” he said to Ali’s daughter. “I wanted to assure you that I will love you. I plan to be a good stepfather and, most importantly, I vow to always love your mother.”
Jazmine blinked back tears and so did Alison. “I’ll wear it every day and I swear I’ll never lose it.” Frank hugged the child.
Then he opened the second box and took out a large solitaire diamond ring. While Alison tried not to weep, he slipped it onto her ring finger. He held her gaze, and in his eyes Alison saw his love and the promise he was making. “I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you, too.”
The doorbell chimed, and before Jazmine could race toward it, the door opened and Shana hurried into the house, Adam directly behind her. “We aren’t too late, are we?” she asked, laughing and excited. “Frank’s still here, isn’t he?”
“Shana.” Alison ran across the room to her sister and they threw their arms around each other.
Frank and Adam shook hands and introduced themselves.
“Actually, your timing’s perfect,” Alison told Shana, and with tears clouding her eyes, she thrust out her left hand so her sister could examine her engagement ring.
Shana squealed with joy and hugged Alison excitedly, then hugged her brother-in-law to be.
“How did you know?” Alison asked.
“We didn’t,” Adam answered. “We came because we have some exciting news of our own.”
“We’re pregnant,” Shana burst out.
Now it was Alison’s turn to shout with happiness.
“Can I babysit?” Jazmine asked. “I could spend the summers with you in Hawaii and—”
“We’ll decide that later,” Alison said, cutting her daughter off. “We were about to sit down for dinner. Join us,” she insisted.
The two women immediately went into the kitchen. While Alison got out extra silverware, Shana took the dinner and salad plates from the cupboard, along with two extra water glasses. Jazmine promptly delivered them to the table.
Shana paused. “Less than a year ago who would’ve believed we’d both have Navy husbands?”
“Navy husbands,” Alison repeated as her diamond flashed in the light. “It has a nice sound to it, doesn’t it?”
“The nicest sound in the world,” Shana agreed.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from Herons Landing by JoAnn Ross.
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Herons Landing
by JoAnn Ross
CHAPTER ONE
SETH HARPER WAS spending a Sunday spring afternoon detailing his wife’s Rallye Red Honda Civic when he learned that she’d been killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.
Despite the Pacific Northwest’s reputation for unrelenting rain, the sun was shining so brightly that the Army notification officers—a man and a woman in dark blue uniforms and black shoes spit-shined to a mirror gloss—had been wearing shades. Or maybe, Seth considered, as they’d approached the driveway in what appeared to be slow motion, they would’ve worn them anyway. Like armor, providing emotional distance from the poor bastard whose life they were about to blow to smithereens.
At the one survivor grief meeting he’d later attended (only to get his fretting mother off his back), he’d heard stories from other spouses who’d experienced a sudden, painful jolt of loss before their official notice. Seth hadn’t received any advance warning. Which was why, at first, the officers’ words had been an incomprehensible buzz in his ears. Like distant radio static.
Zoe couldn’t be dead. His wife wasn’t a combat soldier. She was an Army surgical nurse, working in a heavily protected military base hospital, who’d be returning to civilian life in two weeks. Seth still had a bunch of stuff on his homecoming punch list to do. After buffing the wax off the Civic’s hood and shining up the chrome wheels, his next project was to paint the walls white in the nursery he’d added on to their Folk Victorian cottage for the baby they’d be making.
She’d begun talking a lot about baby stuff early in her deployment. Although Seth was as clueless as the average guy about a woman’s mind, it didn’t take Dr. Phil to realize that she was using the plan to start a family as a touchstone. Something to hang on to during their separation.
In hours of Skype calls between Honeymoon Harbor and Kabul, they’d discussed the pros and cons of the various names on a list that had grown longer each time they’d talked. While the names remained up in the air, she had decided that whatever their baby’s gender, the nursery should be a bright white to counter the Olympic Peninsula’s gray skies.
She’d also sent him links that he’d dutifully followed to Pinterest pages showing bright crib bedding, mobiles and wooden name letters in primary crayon shades of blue, green, yellow and red. Even as Seth had lobbied for Seattle Seahawk navy and action green, he’d known that he’d end up giving his wife whatever she wanted.
The same as he’d been doing since the day he fell head over heels in love with her back in middle school.
Meanwhile, planning to get started on that baby making as soon as she got back to Honeymoon Harbor, he’d built the nursery as a welcome-home surprise.
Then Zoe had arrived at Sea-Tac airport in a flag-draped casket.
And two years after the worst day of his life, the room remained unpainted behind a closed door Seth had never opened since.
MANNION’S PUB & BREWERY was located on the street floor of a faded redbrick building next to Honeymoon Harbor’s ferry landing. The former salmon cannery had been one of many buildings constructed after the devastating 1893 fire that had swept along the waterfront, burning down the original wood buildings. One of Seth’s ancestors, Jacob Harper, had built the replacement in 1894 for the town’s mayor and pub owner, Finn Mannion. Despite the inability of Washington authorities to keep Canadian alcohol from flooding into the state, the pub had been shuttered during Prohibition in the 1930s, effectively putting the Mannions out of the pub business until Quinn Mannion had returned home from Seattle and hired Harper Construction to reclaim the abandoned space.
Although the old Victorian seaport town wouldn’t swing into full tourist mode until Memorial Day, nearly every table was filled when Seth dropped in at the end of the day. He’d no sooner slid onto a stool at the end of the long wooden bar when Quinn, who’d been washing glasses in a sink, stuck a bottle of Shipwreck CDA in front of him.
“Double cheddar bacon or stuffed blue cheese?” he asked.
“Double cheddar bacon.” As he answered the question, it crossed Seth’s mind that his life—what little he had outside his work of restoring the town’s Victorian buildings constructed by an earlier generation of Harpers—had possibly slid downhill beyond routine to boringly predictable. “And don’t bother boxing it up. I’ll be eating it here,” he added.
Quinn lifted a dark brow. “I didn’t see that coming.”
Meaning that, by having dinner here at the pub six nights a week, the seventh being with Zoe’s parents—where they’d recount old memories, and look through scrapbooks of photos that continued to cause an ache deep in his heart—he’d undoubtedly landed in the predictable zone. So, what was wrong with that? Predictability was an underrated concept. By definition, it meant a lack of out-of-the-blue surprises that might destroy life as you knew it. Some people might like change. Seth was not one of them. Which was why he always ordered takeout with his first beer of the night.
The second beer he drank at home with his burger and fries. While other guys in his position might have escaped reality by hitting the bottle, Seth always stuck to a limit of two bottles, beginning with that long, lonely dark night after burying his wife. Because, although he’d never had a problem with alcohol, he harbored a secret fear that if he gave in to the temptation to begin seriously drinking, he might never stop.
The same way if he ever gave in to the anger, the unfairness of what the hell had happened, he’d have to patch a lot more walls in his house than he had those first few months after the notification officers’ arrival.
There’d been times when he’d decided that someone in the Army had made a mistake. That Zoe hadn’t died at all. Maybe she’d been captured during a melee and no one knew enough to go out searching for her. Or perhaps she was lying in some other hospital bed, her face all bandaged, maybe with amnesia, or even in a coma, and some lab tech had mixed up blood samples with another soldier who’d died. That could happen, right?
But as days slid into weeks, then weeks into months, he’d come to accept that his wife really was gone. Most of the time. Except when he’d see her, from behind, strolling down the street, window-shopping or walking onto the ferry, her dark curls blowing into a frothy tangle. He’d embarrassed himself a couple times by calling out her name. Now he never saw her at all. And worse yet, less and less in his memory. Zoe was fading away. Like that ghost who reputedly haunted Herons Landing, the old Victorian mansion up on the bluff overlooking the harbor.
“I’m having dinner with Mom tonight.” And had been dreading it all the damn day. Fortunately, his dad hadn’t heard about it
yet. But since news traveled at the speed of sound in Honeymoon Harbor, he undoubtedly soon would.
“You sure you don’t want to wait to order until she gets here?”
“She’s not eating here. It’s a command-performance dinner,” he said. “To have dinner with her and the guy who may be her new boyfriend. Instead of eating at her new apartment, she decided that it’d be better to meet on neutral ground.”
“Meaning somewhere other than a brewpub owned and operated by a Mannion,” Quinn said. “Especially given the rumors that said new boyfriend just happens to be my uncle Mike.”
“That does make the situation stickier.” Seth took a long pull on the Cascadian Dark Ale and wished it was something stronger.
The feud between the Harpers and Mannions dated back to the early 1900s. After having experienced a boom during the end of the end of the nineteenth century, the once-bustling seaport town had fallen on hard times during a national financial depression.
Although the population declined drastically, those dreamers who’d remained were handed a stroke of luck in 1910 when the newlywed king and queen of Montacroix added the town to their honeymoon tour of America. The couple had learned of this lush green region from the king’s friend Theodore Roosevelt, who’d set aside national land for the Mount Olympus Monument.
As a way of honoring the royals, and hoping that the national and European press following them across the country might bring more attention to the town, residents had voted nearly unanimously to change the name to Honeymoon Harbor. Seth’s ancestor Nathaniel Harper had been the lone holdout, creating acrimony on both sides that continued to linger among some but not all of the citizens. Quinn’s father, after all, was a Mannion, his mother a Harper. But Ben Harper, Seth’s father, tended to nurse his grudges. Even century-old ones that had nothing to do with him. Or at least hadn’t. Until lately.
“And it gets worse,” he said.
“Okay.”
One of the things that made Quinn such a good bartender was that he listened a lot more than he talked. Which made Seth wonder how he’d managed to spend all those years as a big-bucks corporate lawyer in Seattle before returning home to open this pub and microbrewery.
Navy Families Page 41