The Invitation

by Jude Deveraux

  “I don’t think we should do that again,” she said softly.

  “Me neither.” His voice was firm, as though he was telling himself that he could not again do what he had just done. When he turned back to her, he was smiling once again. The only difference she could see was that the skin around his neck seemed to be a little pinker than usual.

  With a detached air, William took a step forward and deftly, swiftly, unbuttoned her pajama top all the way down. “Now go get dressed. I’ll do the buttoning and tie your shoelaces.” His head came up and there was a look of pleading in his eyes. “But, Jackie, please try to close your own zippers.”

  She started to laugh, but the look in his eyes was too serious. “I’ll do my best,” she said solemnly, but she was bubbling with joy inside. It was lovely to feel desirable, she thought as she practically skipped to the bedroom. When you’re seventeen and men desire you, it’s frightening. You have no idea what to do with them. At that age you want to be thought of as an intelligent woman, no longer a child. At seventeen you want to prove to your mother that you are an adult, that you can get a man, just as she did, and that you are adult enough to be able to run a house and take care of that man—just as she did. It annoys you that all a man can think of is putting his hands inside your clothes. Why weren’t seventeen-year-old boys serious about life and the future? Didn’t they know what lay ahead for them? There were few things in life more serious, more earnest, more confused, than a seventeen-year-old girl.

  But at thirty-eight, you no longer had to prove yourself to your mother. By thirty-eight you knew that running a house and taking care of a man wasn’t some great challenge; it was just repetition. Over and over again, washing his socks, figuring out what to feed him, doing the same things again and again. At thirty-eight you wanted to feel desirable—and you wondered what had happened to all the seventeen-year-old boys who couldn’t keep their hands off girls. Just as a woman began to relax and want to have a little fun, she found herself married to a man whose only desire in life was to sleep until dinner, then sleep until bedtime. What happened to all that energy? All that lust?

  Sometimes it seemed to Jackie that men and women were mismatched. When she had first married Charley, she wanted to prove to him that she was worth his having married her. To her this meant cooking and keeping his clothes clean and, of course, flying. She so wanted to impress him with her flying. But Charley liked to spend afternoons in bed; Jackie wanted to spend afternoons in a plane.

  Now, many years later, Jackie felt that she was where Charley had been years ago. She’d proved herself to herself—to the world, actually—and now she wouldn’t mind…She wouldn’t mind spending an afternoon or so in bed with a man.

  Of course, she reminded herself, not this man. This man, this very young man, William Montgomery, was off limits. If she missed the company of a man she should look for someone more…appropriate. Yes, that was the right word. Appropriate meant the right age, the right social background, the right everything. It meant a man who could help her along life’s pathways. Yes, that was right. An older man would have the wisdom to help a woman. At that thought Jackie snorted. She’d had one man in her life who was as much a father as a husband. She didn’t need a third father in her life.

  Jackie shook her head to clear it. Just enjoy this, she thought. As an elementary school teacher’s students might fall in love with her, so William thought he was in love with an older woman. And she was mature enough to enjoy his attention, wasn’t she? Enjoy it and handle it.

  Smiling, feeling that she was being a mature adult, she did the best she could at getting out of her pajamas and into a pair of loose gabardine trousers, a rayon shirt with patch pockets, and a big white cardigan tied about her shoulders. She managed the zipper on her trousers, but the buttons were impossible. She took just a bit longer with her hair and face than she would have on an ordinary day, but she excused herself for that. Every woman wanted to look nice when she went out, didn’t she? Never mind that many times in the past Jackie had laughed at women who fixed their hair just so before flying an airplane. An hour in a dust storm and you were lucky to have any hair left, much less have it arranged.

  Holding her shirt together, she walked into the living room where William was occupying himself by rearranging the drawers of her desk. When she let out an exclamation, he turned and told her she looked beautiful, and there was honesty in his eyes.

  “Would you mind staying out of my drawers?” she snapped angrily.

  He was buttoning her shirt. “Is that drawers as in knickers?”

  “Most certainly not!” she said, sounding like a shocked schoolmarm in a bad novel. “Would you behave yourself?”

  “That depends on what one defines as correct behavior. From my point of view I am behaving myself.”

  “Then behave yourself from my point of view.”

  Bending over, he picked up a picnic basket, slipped the handle over his arm, then took her arm with his other hand. “Just as soon as you decide what your point of view is.” He didn’t give her a chance to reply to that nonsense. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  She knew that he was referring to her injury, but for some reason the question annoyed her. Did he think she was too old to go hiking? Was he hinting that she’d be better off in a rocking chair by the fire? “I can outclimb you, city boy, any day of the week. While you’ve been pushing a pencil, I’ve been crawling all over airplanes, pulling engines from—” She stopped because William was laughing at her. She narrowed her eyes threateningly, which just made him laugh harder.

  “Come on, Tarzan, let’s go,” he said as he slipped his arm through hers and led her toward the door.

  Who would have believed, she wondered, that little Billy Montgomery would turn out to be so much fun? Just plain old-fashioned fun. So maybe he didn’t like to ride upside down in an airplane, but there were lots of people who wouldn’t consider that activity fun. But William did enjoy other things.

  For one thing, his sense of humor was childlike and physical. Jackie enjoyed the kind of humor where people sat in a bar and exchanged bons mots, but she also enjoyed the slip-on-a-banana-peel type of humor. William all too clearly understood her outburst when he’d asked her if she felt well enough to go hiking, so he pretended to be old and tired and ill, thereby forcing her to help pull him up the hills. The pulling, then William’s collapsing against her in mock fatigue, made for a great deal of physical contact. Every few minutes he seemed to have his arms around her, his head on her shoulder, his face pressed into her neck. She told him to stop what he was doing, but there was about as much strength in her words and her gestures as there was in wet seaweed.

  When Jackie allowed herself to be honest, she enjoyed this play with William. She’d missed play as a child and as a young woman. For all that William was right when he said she did what she wanted when she was growing up, what she had really wanted was to be an adult, to be independent. When she was ten years old she wanted to be an old woman. One time her mother had said in exasperation, “Jackie, are you ever going to be a child?”

  Could a person age in reverse? Could a person get younger as she got older? When she was in high school all the kids wanted to do was play and have a good time. Jackie had been completely disdainful of them; all she thought of was her future and what she was going to do, how she was going to get out of this one-horse town and do something with her life. Other girls her age were saying they wanted to “Marry Bobby and be the best wife in the world.” Jackie’s arrogant laugh was now an embarrassment to her.

  She had missed play. She had missed a time of courtship with Charley. What honeymoon they’d had was spent inside an airplane. He was her teacher as well as her husband. She had loved it then and she was glad for it, but now she wanted to relax, to…to smell the roses.

  William made her laugh. He teased her and chased her around a tree, and in the late afternoon he spread a cloth in the sunlight, on sun-warmed rocks near the edge of a cliff, so t
hey could sit and look out at a spectacular view. From the basket he removed a banquet: wine, cheese, bread, olives, mustard, cold fried chicken, tiny portions of pâté in the shape of flowers, sliced tomatoes, cold lemonade—a feast.

  Jackie leaned against a warm rock and again allowed William to wait on her.

  “You’ve been thinking very hard all day,” he said as he poured her a glass of red wine.

  “I hate it when you know what’s going on in my head.”

  After waiting a moment in silence, he said, “You want to tell me what’s been occupying your thoughts?”

  She didn’t want to tell him anything. Always in her head was the knowledge that soon what was between them would have to end and that it wasn’t a good idea to get any closer than they were. But the truth was that she did feel close to him. “I was thinking about all the things you said yesterday.”

  “Jackie,” he began, and she sensed that he was going to follow with an apology, but she waved her hand to stop him.

  “No, don’t say anything. I deserved everything you said. When I was a kid, I felt that I had to be the best, that I had to succeed. What no one ever seemed to understand was that I wished I could be like the other kids. I tried. I wanted to be part of the groups that went to the drugstore after school and sipped sodas and flirted with boys. But for some reason I couldn’t seem to do the right things.”

  She drank her wine and looked off into the glow of the sun, low in the sky. “You know my friend Terri Pelman? Well, back then I only knew her slightly, but I used to envy her so much. In school she was so popular, always surrounded by boys. She always knew what the latest fashion was and always wore it correctly. No mistakes, nothing out of place or wrong, as I always seemed to get things. I wanted a life like hers, wanted the captain of the football team to be crazy about me, but it just didn’t happen. Can you imagine how that was?”

  “Yes,” he answered simply, and she knew that he understood. She remembered how many times she’d heard the other children teasing William because he followed Jackie around. She remembered that one of his older brothers had beaten up a couple of boys because of something they’d said to William. Although William had not reported what was said, his sister had heard it and repeated it, so his brother fought for him.

  Jackie doubted if she would have found out what was said except that she didn’t see Billy for a few days, so she wandered over to his house—not to see him, of course, but maybe to run an errand for her mother.

  William, using a rake nearly twice as tall as he was, was tackling the leaves on the entire vast lawn of the Montgomery house while his older brother, sporting a remarkable black eye, slept under a tree. Billy wouldn’t tell her what was going on, so she woke his brother and made him tell. No one, no matter what size or age, could intimidate Billy, but her age and size quickly intimidated his brother, so he told her. It seemed that some kids who were about four years older than Billy had been hanging around near the bridge with absolutely nothing to do, when one of them said, “We could always have a rock race. William against that boulder over there. My money’s on the rock.”

  When Jackie heard this, it was all she could do not to laugh; she had to wait until that afternoon when she was alone, and then she howled. Billy’s brother’s punishment for beating up the boys had been the job of raking all the leaves off the front lawn. Billy had taken on his brother’s punishment.

  Now, many years later, she looked at Billy the man and said, “Participate in any rock races lately?”

  She could almost see his mind working as he tried to understand what she was talking about. When he remembered, his face lit up, and he smiled before he turned toward her, his eyes twinkling. “You know, my brother took offense at that remark, but I never did. I thought the other kids were stupid for jumping from one thing to another. They couldn’t understand that life needs planning. Half the fun is in the planning. Maybe I didn’t say much and maybe because of that they thought I was a dullard, but I was always planning tomorrow and the next day and the next.”

  He paused a moment. “Something I’ve discovered in life that others don’t seem to know is that if you plan hard enough you can make things happen.”

  “Yes,” she said, but didn’t ask what he wanted to make happen. She didn’t want to hear. “You do understand. Just as you were different without meaning to be, so was I. I was strange and when I couldn’t fit in, I began to thumb my nose at the other kids, telling them and myself that I didn’t need them.”

  “And then you fell in love,” he said softly.

  “With Charley?” There was disbelief in her voice.

  “Something a little larger than Charley.”

  She smiled. “Ah, yes, airplanes. You know, I used to think that airplanes were male, but the older I get, the more I think that planes are female. They’re no longer something I’m trying to conquer, but they’re my very, very good friends. Someone I’ve shared a great deal with.”

  “And what about men?”

  She looked off into the horizon and didn’t answer him.

  He persisted. “What do you want to do with your life now, Jackie?”

  She didn’t look at him, but when she spoke, there was passion in her voice. “Something in me has changed. I don’t know what it is. For so many years I wanted to conquer the world. I had such a clear view of what I wanted and how I was going to get it, but I accomplished everything I set out to win, and now I don’t know where I’m going to go next. Part of me is angry that the world seems to be moving while I’m standing still, but part of me just wants to sit still and let it go by. Part of me wants to grow roses and—”

  Abruptly, she broke off and took a deep drink of her wine.

  “And have kids,” he filled in for her with amazing—and annoying—accuracy.

  “Ridiculous! Do you realize that two girls from my high school class are now grandmothers? What would I do with kids, anyway? Besides that, what man my age wants to start a family?” She stopped because she was protesting too much. A family of her own was not something she had thought too much about in her life. She’d been too busy with planes and taking care of Charley to think about a bunch of kids. Now the urge to see the world was no longer pulling at her, and yet she still wanted to participate in the world.

  “I guess what I really want is everything. Everything the world has to offer is what I want. I don’t want to give up anything, yet I want to add everything that I don’t have.”

  William was smiling and the sun on his face made him especially handsome. “I can’t give you everything, but I’d love to marry you and give you as many kids as you want.”

  Jackie knew he was serious and for a moment her mouth was dry. There was an almost overwhelming urge within her to say yes. The feeling was every bit as intense as what she’d felt the first time she saw an airplane. Then she’d known nothing about the world. She’d had no idea of the cruelty of people, how they were going to judge her and her abilities before they met her. Now she was older and she’d experienced a great deal of pain as well as joy and she knew what people were going to say. If she married William they would see nothing except the age difference.

  “Don’t answer,” he said, forcing a smile. “It was just a thought.”

  “Yes, just a thought.” She tried to compose her face so that when she turned to him he wouldn’t see what was in her eyes. “We are too serious. What we should be thinking of is who is going to clean up the kitchen. And you are going to put my kitchen back the way it was, the way I want it. And my desk, too.”

  “Ha! Do you know that you have a packet of needles and thread in your desk and a stapler in your sewing basket?”

  She didn’t know any such thing, but didn’t doubt it. Sometimes a person got busy and put things where it was handy, but that wasn’t any of his business. “It doesn’t matter where I put things. It’s my house.”

  “Only temporarily. Did I mention that I own all the houses in Eternity, as well as the land?”

 
At that Jackie laughed. Only a Montgomery could say he owned a town in that offhand tone of voice. “So, did you get the buildings for your twenty-first birthday?”

  She meant it as a joke, but from the way William’s face turned red, she knew she had guessed right, and she gave a whoop of laughter. “Every other person on earth would ask for a trip around the world or a mansion or even a diamond necklace, but what does my rock-solid, always-thinking-ahead William ask for? A ghost town! A run-down, worthless old town that people didn’t want even when it was alive. What in the world made you ask for this place?”

  When he looked at her, his eyes were intense. “I could build a landing field here.” His answer was simple, but it said so much. He’d said that he was always planning, and the town and the airfield had been a lure to her. Even though she had been married to another man and had had no intention of returning to her hometown, William had been planning to bring her back. What was it he had said? That if you plan hard enough you can make things happen. Was she here today because he had wanted her so much, planned so hard, that she had returned?

  She smiled at him. Whether things worked out between them or not, she couldn’t help being flattered. Charley had never courted her; he’d always made her feel that he was doing her a favor by taking her away from two-bit Chandler. He had let Jackie court him with work and more work and more work. But now here was a man who had spent years planning to win her.

  “You make me feel valuable,” she said softly. “You make me feel as though I am the most precious object in the world.”

  “You are.”

  There was such sincerity in his voice that Jackie didn’t know whether to be pleased or embarrassed. She was some of both. In the end, all she could say was “Thank you.”

  Chapter Eight