The Invitation

by Jude Deveraux

  Billy was right behind her. “I’m sorry. Here, let me help you,” he said, reaching above her head for a canister of fresh coffee beans.

  Jackie started to turn around and found herself looking straight into Billy’s sun-browned throat, then, as her eyes lifted, at his chin, a chin so square it could have been sculpted with a carpenter’s hand plane. For a moment she found her breath catching in her throat. Then she stopped herself and stepped from under his encircling stance. “My goodness, but you do look like your father. How is he, by the way?”

  “The same as he was when you saw him four days ago.”

  “Yes, of course. I…”

  Billy smiled at her, at some joke that only he knew, then pulled out a chair at the table in the corner of the pretty kitchen and motioned for her to sit down. “I will make the coffee,” he said.

  “You can do that?” Jackie was of the school that believed that men could do nothing except what they were paid for or received awards for. They could fight wars, run huge businesses, but they couldn’t feed themselves or choose their own clothes without a woman beside them.

  Billy poured the right number of beans into the grinder, then began to turn the crank, all the while watching her with a slight smile.

  “So tell me all about your life,” she said, smiling up at him, trying her best to remember that she had once changed this man’s diapers.

  “I went to school, graduated, and now I help my father do whatever needs to be done.”

  “Managing the Montgomery millions, right?”

  “More or less.”

  “No wife or children?” It seemed impossible to think that a kid she used to baby-sit could possibly be old enough to have a wife, let alone children.

  “I told you that you were the only woman I would ever love. I told you that on the day you left.”

  At that Jackie laughed. “On the day I left, you were eight years old and your nose came to my belt buckle.”

  “I’ve grown up since then.” As he said this he turned around and poured the ground beans into the coffee pot, and Jackie couldn’t help noticing that he had grown up very, very well. “So how’s your family?” she asked for at least the third time.

  Billy turned, removed his wallet from his back pocket, took out a stack of photographs, and handed them to her. “My nieces and nephews,” he said, “or at least some of them.”

  While the coffee was brewing he bent over her and showed her the photos, some of them of groups, some of individual children. She liked the fact that this man was sentimental enough to carry photos of children with him, that he knew their ages and something about the personality of each child. But for Jackie the experience wasn’t all that pleasant. She remembered the parents of these children as children themselves. There was one little dark-haired girl who was the same age as her mother had been when Jackie had last seen her.

  “I think I’m getting old,” Jackie murmured. In her own heart she hadn’t aged a day since she’d left Chandler. She still felt eighteen, still felt that there were lots of things she had to do before she became a grown-up and started acting like an adult. She wasn’t yet sure what she wanted to do with her life. She’d had a long adolescence flying airplanes in shows and races, doing stunts and tricks to dazzle the world, but now she was nearly ready to settle down and become an adult. She thought she might be ready to marry a “real” man, a guy who had a nine-to-five job, a man who came home at night and read the newspaper. She was even thinking that maybe now she was about ready to start a family. Terri thought this was hilarious since two girls from their high school class were grandmothers already.

  “You’ll never be old, Jackie,” Billy said softly, from just beside her ear.

  His breath on her skin made her jump, and Jackie had to mentally shake herself. What was wrong with her that she could allow the nearness of a child like Billy to affect her? “What—” she began but stopped as she heard a plane. It sounded as if it was coming in to land.

  Putting down her coffee cup, she went through the living room and out the front door toward the landing field, Billy just behind her. As she shaded her eyes against the sun, she could see the plane heading toward the airstrip. Immediately Jackie knew that the pilot wasn’t very experienced: the plane was too low too soon.

  The pilot managed to land the plane but only by the skin of his teeth, and Jackie planned to give him a piece of her mind. He could have taken the chimney off the old house on the hill, and the impact could have caused the plane to crash.

  As she briskly walked across the field, Billy passed her to get to the plane first, and he held up his arms when the pilot stepped out. Jackie realized belatedly that the pilot was a woman. Only a female could be that slender, that delicately curvaceous, and only a beautiful woman could so easily accept a man’s uplifted arms to help her down. She removed her goggles and leather helmet to release a torrent of midnight black hair before turning to Jackie with a look of chagrin on her lovely face. “I was so hoping to impress you,” she said, “but instead I nearly killed myself, a few trees, and…” She looked at Billy. “Was that a chimney I nearly hit?”

  “None other,” he answered.

  The words of scolding died on Jackie’s lips. She remembered the time she had wanted to impress Charley with her flying skills only to fly her worst when he was around. Instead of lecturing, she smiled at the girl.

  “You remember my cousin Reynata, don’t you?”

  At first Jackie didn’t, but then she looked at the girl in horror. “Rey? You’re little Rey?” When she had known this girl Reynata had been a plump five-year-old with perpetually dirty clothes and skinned knees. She was always trying to run after the older children, always falling and hurting herself. Now she was tall and beautiful and nubile. “Of course I remember you,” Jackie said, trying to sound gracious, but wondering if her hair was turning gray with every one of these “adults” she met. After shaking hands with the young woman, Jackie invited her in for coffee.

  “I’d love to, but I saw the truck just down the road and—Ah! Here it is now.”

  Jackie stood where she was as Rey, all energy and movement, ran toward the road leading into Eternity where a large truck was just now coming into view.

  “I think I’d better help,” Billy said, then moved forward to follow his cousin.

  Puzzled, Jackie followed them slowly. Just what was going on? The plane Rey had flown was a Waco, so shiny-new that it must have left the factory yesterday. It was the type of plane that she had told her rescuer, William, that she most wanted. Was this a coincidence or was the plane from William?

  By the time she reached the truck, it was being unloaded and things were being carried into the old hotel that she rented from Billy’s father—a bed and linens, a chair, a couple of small tables, lamps, clothes, and a rack to hold the hangers. The whole situation was so confusing that it was several moments before Jackie could speak. “Would you mind telling me what is going on?” she asked Billy after pulling him aside. “And would you mind telling those men to stop putting furniture inside my house? I already have enough furniture.”

  Billy looked surprised. “The top floor is empty, isn’t it? You didn’t rent that floor, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. Your father—”

  “Oh, I bought the hotel from Dad. He charged me five dollars for it. I tried to get him down to one dollar, but he wouldn’t hear of it. At first the scoundrel wanted ten, but I don’t have a degree in business for the fun of it. I won’t be cheated, even by my own father.”

  Jackie was sure the story was very amusing, but at the moment she wasn’t ready to be amused. “What is going on?”

  “I guess I should have asked your permission first. I mean, it is your house, or at least the bottom three floors are, but I really didn’t have time to ask. I had to make arrangements as fast as possible to give us as much time as possible to get ready for the Invitational. I thought it would be much more convenient if I lived nearby instead of driving from Chan
dler every day, so I bought the hotel from Dad and hired people to clean the top floor. My mother found the furniture in the attic for me and—”

  “Wait a minute!” she half shouted. “What do you have to do with the Invitational? What do I have to do with a race like that? Why do you keep talking about ‘we’?” The instant she said the words, she knew the answer. Standing in front of her, shading her from the sun, was not little Billy Montgomery but William, her rescuing knight, the man who had pulled her from a wrecked plane, the man who had intrigued her with his talk, had made her interested in life, and had even made her think about love once again. He was the man she had been fantasizing about, dreaming about, conjuring up a future with. The man she was beginning to fancy that she was in love with was actually a very tall little boy.

  Embarrassment was Jackie’s first emotion. “I think there’s been a mistake. You’ll have to remove your furniture and go back to Chandler.”

  With her head down so he wouldn’t see her reddened face, she started toward the hotel where the men were carrying a small table through the front door. But William caught her arm.

  “Jackie—” he began.

  “Didn’t your family teach you to call your elders by their proper title? I’m Miss O’Neill to you.”

  He didn’t release her arm. “I think we should talk about this.”

  “I don’t think we should talk at all. Hey!” she yelled to a man leaving the hotel to go back to the truck. “Don’t take anything else inside. Little Billy won’t be staying.”

  The men chuckled as they looked from Jackie to William, hovering over her. He was several inches taller than she, a good deal heavier, and he didn’t look like anyone’s idea of “little Billy.”

  William gave the men a curt nod. “Take a break,” he ordered. Then, still holding Jackie’s arm firmly, he pulled her down the street, a tumbleweed blowing across their path. He didn’t say a word as he pulled her into a building that had once been one of Eternity’s saloons. Inside were half a dozen broken chairs and a few dirty tables. Firmly he ushered her to the only chair that had all four legs and sat her on it. “Now, Jackie—”

  Like a jack-in-the-box, she came out of the seat immediately. “Don’t try explaining anything to me. This has been one huge mistake, that’s all. Now I want you to get your things out of my house—” She hesitated. “Or, if the place now belongs to you, I shall be the one to move.” At that statement her heart wrenched. She had taken a ninety-nine-year lease on the first two floors of the hotel, planning to lease a floor a year until it was all hers. When she’d first approached Jace Montgomery about renting the hotel, he’d asked for more than she had to spend, so she asked him how much per floor. Trying to keep from smiling, he had divided the rent into five equal parts. Then Jackie had asked for a discount for renting two floors. With a ten percent discount, she was able to afford both floors, and after six months she’d added the third floor, at a twelve and one-half percent reduction. The ninety-nine-year lease made her feel secure enough to spend all the money she had in decorating it, and now she was going to have to leave her pretty house.

  “I’ll start moving now.”

  “What is wrong with you?” William asked, putting himself between her and the door. “You’d think I’d jilted you in a love affair. I thought we agreed that we were going to run a business together. Was there any more between us? Something I didn’t know about?”

  Jackie sat back down, praying that she would be able to live through this day. Of course he was right. She was acting like an idiot. There had been nothing between them except what was in her head. He had known all along that night who she was, had known that she was old enough to be his…well, his older sister. He had known that she was his former baby-sitter.

  So that meant that everything, absolutely everything that she had imagined herself feeling, was all on her side. He had kissed her, but she had to be honest with herself: it wasn’t a kiss to set the world on fire. Well, maybe at the time she’d thought it was a great kiss, but in hindsight it was more of a friendship kiss. And what about all their talk? That had been normal too. If he wanted her awake he couldn’t very well have asked her boring questions about her second grade teacher.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

  She was looking at him and thinking that this could not possibly work with both of them living under the same roof in the isolated ghost town. She would have liked to think that the town gossips would be up in arms, but the truth was that they would no doubt think of her and William as teacher and pupil, with no possibility of scandal. Jackie was sure this was the way William saw it, too. Jackie was his mentor, his hero, his teacher, the one who had shown him how to catch bugs, how to swing on ropes, how to hold his breath for a full minute. No, she was sure she would have no problem with William.

  The problem would be with Jackie herself. For the life of her she could not look at this gorgeous young man and remember that he was just a boy and that she was, by comparison, an old woman. When you feel that you are eighteen, it’s difficult to remember that you aren’t. Sometimes it’s a shock to look in the mirror and see the aging face looking back. Never again was a man going to say to her, “When you wake up, you look like a kid.” Now she didn’t look like a kid even after an hour spent putting on makeup. Oh, she looked good, and she well knew it, but she no longer looked eighteen and she never would again.

  “I think it would be better if you lived in Chandler,” she said in her best adult voice. “It would be better for…It would just be better, that’s all.” She did her best to keep her voice neutral. If you lusted after a man ten years younger than you, a man you used to baby-sit, was that incest?

  “In order to start a business we must spend a great deal of time together, and I think it would be ridiculous to have to drive the forty miles back and forth to Chandler every day. What if we wanted to discuss something at night?”

  “Telephone.”

  “What if you needed help with the planes?”

  “I’ve gotten along rather well without you until now. I think I can continue to manage.”

  “What if I suddenly had a question?”

  “Wait until morning. You know, like you have to wait until morning to open your Christmas presents.”

  He walked away from her, put his foot on the rail of the bar, his elbow on the counter, and his head on his hand. Now all he needed was a shot of red-eye and a six-gun at his hip and he’d look like a gunslinger, Jackie thought. Out, she thought. She definitely had to get him out of Eternity and as far away from her as possible.

  After a while he turned back to her, his face serious, and she remembered the solemn little boy he had been. “No,” he said, then held out his hand to her as though to help her up.

  Jackie didn’t feel quite old enough yet to need help getting out of a chair. “What does that mean? No?”

  “It means that I will live in Eternity for as long as it takes. I have decided.”

  “You have—” she said, nearly sputtering. For a moment she felt as though she were again his baby-sitter and he were disobeying her, but when she stood in front of him, she had to look up, and she was looking into the eyes of a man, not the eyes of a child. Turning on her heel, she left the saloon, her anger evident with every step she took.

  She walked for some time, walked far out into the desert that surrounded Eternity and tried to think about what she was doing. It embarrassed her greatly that she had felt such…such strong feelings for this young man that first night. Why hadn’t some sixth sense told her that she knew more about life than he did? Why hadn’t she picked up on the clues that she was dealing not with a grown-up but with a large child? And of course there must have been clues. There was…And, well, there was…Think as hard as she might, she couldn’t remember anything that would have been a clue that he was a great deal younger than she was.

  Except maybe that he was a lot of fun that night. Why was it that the older people got, the less they wanted
to laugh? It would seem that the opposite would be true. Age needed laughter to help it along. Where once you bounced out of bed in the morning, as a person got older there wasn’t much bouncing. Laughter might help a person through all the aches and pains, the muscles that no longer stretched but seemed to catch in place. But the older people got, the less they laughed. Maybe that was a way to guess their age. If they laugh fifty times a day, they’re kids. Twenty times a day means they’re in their twenties. Ten times a day and they’re mid-thirties. By the time they reach their forties nothing seems to make them laugh.

  About a year ago Jackie had gone out with a very nice man to dinner where they had met three other couples. Throughout the dinner there had not been one scrap of laughter. It had been all talk of money and mortgages and where the best steak bargains could be had. Later, her date had asked Jackie if she’d had a good time, and she had replied that the people seemed…well, a little old. To this the man had stiffly replied that his friends were younger than she was. “In years only,” she had snapped, and that was the last time she’d heard from him.

  So now her problem was one young man, one very young man by the name of William Montgomery. She needed to get rid of him, needed to get him away from her. She didn’t trust herself around him. She had felt a pull toward him the night he had taken her from the plane, and she’d felt it again this morning. Maybe it was just the absence of male company for so many months, especially when she had spent so many years almost exclusively with men, but she didn’t think so. There was something about Billy’s solemnity, something about the way he did what he said he was going to do, that appealed to her. Hell, she thought, after years of Charley, she might fall in love with a blue-faced monkey if the creature followed through on his ideas, if he did what he said he was going to do.

  Chapter Four

  As Jackie drove into the ghost town that had become home to her, she couldn’t seem to keep her heart from leaping a bit. The light on the porch glowed warmly, and more lights shone from inside the house. Someone was waiting inside for her. It wasn’t an empty house but one warm with the life of another person.