Keepsake for Eagle Cove

by M. L. Buchman

  “No, mother.”

  He waited a beat and then she burst out laughing.

  “You’re still thinking about the pudding?”

  “Well, that and how amazing you looked as you walked naked through the moonlight to bring it back to bed.”

  “Your mind is a very strange place, Devin Robison.”

  “And yours isn’t, Tiffany Mills?”

  She closed her eyes for a long moment and when she opened them the earlier sadness had returned.

  He kept his hands firmly on her waist in case she tried to flee.

  “My name isn’t Tiffany Mills.”

  “Your name could be Lizzie Borden and I wouldn’t care. Though I might hide all the axes.”

  “My name isn’t Lizzie either.” No tease. Ms. Forthright once again.

  “Sooo…” he prompted her.

  “Oh. My name is Tiffany Lamont.”

  “Well at least I had it half right. Tiffany—wait a sec. Lamont? Like Gina Lamont?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she your mother? She doesn’t act like she knows. Are you some long-lost adopted child or—” Devin finally shut up, having learned that Tiffany often needed the room of enough silence to speak.

  “No. She’s not my mother, my sister, nor my aunt. What matters is my mother—who isn’t Gina. I think I have to call her.”

  “Well, Lamont sounds safer than Borden with her axe. Though if that makes you a relative of Natalya, maybe I’ll just lay low.” He took a hand from her waist and held it out until she finally clasped it tentatively with her own. “Hello, Tiffany Lamont. I’m Devin Robison and I’m still in love with you. Wow! That does feel cool to say. Wait a sec—Tiffany…Lamont?”

  She froze, her fingers somehow going cold though he still held onto them.

  “San Francisco. You said you were from there. Some banker used to handle some of CMC’s investments. He—” And Devin remembered. His father had told him the story one night over a bottle of Scotch about some brat stepkid destroying one of the best bankers ever, who had been put away then stabbed to death by another prisoner.

  He was married to some high society shrew who got all his money in the bargain, his father had groaned at the injustice and freshened their Scotch glasses.

  “You said your stepfather was killed,” Devin was reaching for the rest of the memory.

  Tiffany still didn’t move. Her head remained bowed and her hair covered her face just as it had that first day when she was playing the harp.

  Slowly, carefully, he brushed it back until he could see her face. “The San Francisco Lamonts as in Lamont Construction Supply and Shipping?”

  Again no response. There simply weren’t that many firms of the scale of CMC and LCSS in the country.

  “Wow!”

  And finally Tiffany flinched. Then she yanked her hand free of his. When he kept her in place, she began to struggle. He almost let her go, but then he remembered the haunted look on her face each time her family was mentioned—so he held on. It was time they got to the bottom of this.

  She made fists, pounded them against his chest, and he wrapped his arms about her until she couldn’t move. He’d never held a woman against her will. But this once, he knew it was the best choice.

  “If you struggle any harder, you’ll fall off my lap. It’s a long way from a tractor seat to the ground.”

  “Let me go!”

  So he did.

  Caught by surprise, she remained on his lap though he knew it wouldn’t last. So he confronted anger with anger.

  “Do you think I give a rat’s tush about who you were before I met you?”

  She squinted at him. The mistrust lay clear upon her features—and it hurt deeply. But he knew that look. That fear. It was the same look he’d seen on his own face when he had realized why Rebecca Monica Monash had come after him. It was why he had never mentioned his father’s name or CMC in Eagle Cove. Not in the interview with Gina and Cal, and not with Tiffany.

  It all came down to money. And if she was from the LCSS lineage, she had plenty of it, too.

  “Okay,” Devin closed his eyes for a long moment. You didn’t tell a woman you loved her and then keep secrets from her. And he’d done the first, so it was time to fix the second. “Tiffany.”

  It was strange to address her formally while she sat in his lap but in most ways was being very careful not to touch him. He forged on.

  “You already know I’m about as smoothly romantic as a kumquat. So I’ll say this straight. Next time you’re on the Internet, look up the name of the CEO of Chicago Master Constructors.”

  Tiffany wondered if this was how the inside of Devin’s head felt all the time. Hers felt as if it was going to explode as things shifted so rapidly and emotions slammed about so hard.

  Trapped! She’d been so trapped. The feeling had been a slick, greasy shroud of horror.

  Then he’d freed her the moment she asked and not struck. Not slapped. Not taken.

  He had—kept her from her instinct to flee. No more. It didn’t make the awful feeling go away, but he didn’t repel her either.

  Keeping a careful eye on him, she reached into her small backpack. She’d been out of the yurt and away before she’d discovered the satellite phone was still clenched in her hand. Now she pulled it out and hit last number redial.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Joel. Could you do me a favor and look up the last name of the CEO of CMC in Chicago?”

  “Easy, Robison. It has been in the family for generations.”

  “And the son’s name?”

  “Heh!” It was the first time she’d ever heard anything close to a laugh from Joel Masterson. “Devin or Mikal? The former posted a nudie of his fiancée doing the latter almost at the altar. It went completely viral on the Internet. If you’re talking about Mikal, he’s harmless but a waste of time. Devin, though, is the heir apparent to the empire, though I hear he skipped town. He wrote something funny with the picture, but I can’t remember what.”

  “ ‘I guess the wedding is off.’ ”

  “That was it. Kid became a meme,” Joel laughed aloud this time. “Supposed to be the merger of two empires, which the Monashs needed badly and the Robisons not so much. Are you okay?”

  “I think so. I’ll call you back and let you know.”

  “By end of day, Ms. Mills,” Joel’s voice was suddenly dead serious, “or I’m calling out the police.”

  “No need to bother him. It’s a small town and Martin goes to bed early.” And she hung up the phone.

  Devin was still waiting for her reaction. Stone-faced, she could no longer see her lover in this careful man she was seated upon. She slipped off his lap but didn’t climb down to the hay field.

  “Did you say ‘Wow!’ because of my money?”

  “No,” Devin bit off the words as he spoke them. “I said that because Mills was so much easier to spell than Lamont. Did you take me to your bed because of mine?”

  Tiffany could only blink at him. This was all so messed up.

  “Day one,” he snapped out as if putting pieces together that didn’t belong. “Chicago, contractor, and my name—my real name. Wouldn’t have been hard to figure out with a quick search.”

  “I didn’t. I swear, Devin, I didn’t.” She knew about the paranoia of money—knew how it attracted all the wrong type of attention. False friendship, insincere lovers, and worse. But there was no way that she could ever prove that wasn’t her.

  Defeated, she climbed down the tractor’s ladder.

  He jumped down and landed in front of her just as she reached the ground.

  “Why did you change your name?” Again that unreadable, neutral voice that felt like a cold San Francisco fog. Or, a better analogy for him, a chilly wind off Lake Michigan.

  “Do you know what rich boys do?” She practically shouted it out. She raised her hand to place it on his chest in apology, but instead let it drop. “Some rich boys?” She barely managed a whisper.

 
He waited in careful silence.

  “They think they’re entitled by money,” Tiffany explained. “And they think that once you’ve been abused that you must have wanted it. Then they—”

  She could feel the chill of her shattering world as the shards of ice drove into her chest. How she—

  And her face was crushed against Devin’s chest before she even knew what happened.

  “Aw, Tiffany! I didn’t know.”

  How would he? He was a good man.

  “I hope you got them all back but good.”

  “Most of them,” she managed. Her nose was once again pressed into the same spot on his shoulder. This time, instead of muddy with plaster, he was going to make her sneeze with hay dust. She didn’t care and managed to fight off the sneeze to stay in place. The tears were harder to fight, though she succeeded there as well.

  But now what would he say? They both came from rich families, for all the good it had done them. Devin’s parents weren’t cruel, at least not intentionally like her stepfather. Would he speak first of wealth or of—

  “Tell me why we’re going to have to call your mother,” he whispered in her ear.

  Her heart was so smart; it had chosen to fall in love with a very good man. She pushed her face harder against his shoulder and breathed him in. Man, honest sweat, and—

  Tiffany jerked back and unleashed a monstrous sneeze. Unable to raise her hands because he still held her so tightly, she splattered his shirt.

  “Thorry,” she managed with a sniffle. “You thmell like hay.”

  Then Devin laughed, which was the best sound in the world.

  Chapter 9

  Flameagle Days were in full swing and Tiffany was glad they had come, as long as Devin kept holding her hand when the crowds pressed too close. She and Devin had somehow managed to avoid being recruited for the weekend, perhaps because he’d done so much work leading up to the event.

  They had tagged along on a bird watching tour, and Devin had made the whole crowd laugh when they’d oohed and aahed over seeing a bald eagle and Devin had called out, “His name is Jake.”

  Town smelled of strawberries. It seemed that every car had a couple flats of fresh-picked berries. Cal Jr. and Sr.’s Blackbird Bakery was selling strawberry-rhubarb pie and strawberry-custard tarts with a side of fresh-made vanilla ice cream as fast as they could dish it up.

  She and Devin washed it down with a shared pint of Becky’s Flameagle Stout.

  And everywhere about town were the flameagles.

  Jessica must have bought out the entire Oregon State supply of plastic flamingos. They had been painted brown, with white heads. The metal sticks of their legs and their beaks had been painted yellow. Every eye was yellow with a black dot for the pupil, even the smallest ones. Some nested in planters of geraniums that decorated the main drag of Beach Way. Some had tiny knitted hats. Other, larger ones, cropped up in the strangest of places: in the trees, out on the beach, and especially out at the airport among the kajillion small planes that had flown in and filled the newly-hayed field.

  “What’s a flameagle’s call?” Devin asked.

  “Thock!” Tiffany declared.

  “Thock?”

  “They started life as plastic flamingos. Drop one on the floor. They go, ‘Thock! Thock! Thock!’ Each repeated call gets softer as they bounce.”

  “Okay, Ms. Know-it-all, what kind of eggs do they lay?”

  “Very rare. They look just like Ping Pong balls.”

  He nodded, “That must be why they’re endangered. Ping Pong players have been unwittingly harvesting them for years.”

  “Except in Eagle Cove,” Tiffany corrected, for they were everywhere. And each had a number, as if they’d been tagged by a wildlife plasticologist. There were scavenger hunts for the most flameagles found, for finding the most that were a prime number, for finding the most that were still molting—identified by their speckled heads. Devin had spooked an enterprising group of teens who were going about with brown paint and a fine brush, speckling flameagle heads as they went.

  She and Devin had finally wandered out to the airport, neither minding the long walk—which was good because driving was crazy in the packed small town.

  There was an entire plane show going on in the field, like an antique car show. On the runway there were precision landing contests, hitting all wheels between two white lines just fifty feet apart—no bounces allowed.

  “Flour-bombing,” Devin observed and she followed where he was pointing. “Now that’s a noble sport handed down from the times when men were men.”

  Devin was certainly a man. He was fun and funny, yet so male that she still was having trouble believing he was real.

  Pilots flew over the field at five-hundred feet up and dropped tiny bags of flour, trying to “bomb” a giant tractor tire painted bright yellow and lying on the ground. Little splats of flour seemed to be everywhere about the field—except near the tire.

  “Looks like fun,” Devin was watching the planes avidly. “Care to be my bombardier next year?” It took one person to fly the plane safely and one to drop the flour bomb.

  Tiffany was sure he wasn’t aware of what he’d just said. He was leaving in three more months, at the end of the summer. His contract would be up when the lightkeeper’s cottage was done and he’d be gone.

  “Do you know how to fly?”

  “I’ll take lessons.”

  He still didn’t get it and she did her best to ignore the pain. She couldn’t follow him to Chicago. She had her farm, and deep connections to Eagle Cove—ones that she still hadn’t told to anybody.

  Then something happened. Planes scattered and it didn’t take Tiffany long to see why. The ones they’d been watching were all propeller-driven planes. Some faster, some slower, and a few that looked to be plodding they moved so slowly, but they all used propellers.

  Now a sleek business jet sliced through the sky, entered something Devin had called “the pattern,” and dove for the field. She recognized the LCSS plane even before she saw the sailing ship logo. The Dassault Falcon 7x hit clean between the spot-landing contest stripes and decelerated with a massive roar of its triple jet engines, drowning then silencing all else on the field.

  Devin could feel Tiffany’s hand trembling in his and he squeezed it tightly.

  The phone call had made this moment inevitable though it was still early on Sunday afternoon. The last events of the festival were still on-going and her mother wasn’t supposed to arrive until after it was over. But it was too late to be helped.

  He led her over to stand by the hangar as the private jet taxied up and stopped on the front apron—the paved area in front of the hangar. He didn’t know what to expect when the ladder folded down, but still it was a shock.

  An older version of Tiffany walked down the short set of stairs. She wore a designer dress more appropriate for a yachting party than an Eagle Cove fly-in and her hair was an elegant cut of the latest style. At least he imagined it was, because he could easily imagine it on his mother or Rebecca. The face was the same, the body shape, and oddly—the smile.

  He’d expected it to be fake or studied or somehow plastic. But she looked actively happy to see her long-lost daughter.

  “Oh, Lillian. This place? Really? After five generations you had to come back to Eagle Cove?” But Vivian Lamont’s hug looked genuine and she held onto her daughter hard enough that it was clear that her daughter was more important than the neat-pressed lines of her designer sportswear.

  Tiffany’s face was to his side of her mother and he couldn’t resist.

  “You’re Lillian now?” He whispered the question.

  Tiffany sighed and nodded, still trapped in the hug. “I’m Lillian Tiffany Lamont.”

  “Why, of course you are.” Her mother stepped back and did straighten out her dress.

  The crowd that had gathered upon the jet’s arrival slowly dispersed. Some to admire the jet, others to return their attention to the flour-bombing contest reg
aining its momentum.

  “Of course she is,” he agreed amiably. “Lillian,” he couldn’t resist the tease.

  Tiffany started to wince at her name being different again, first Mills to Lamont and now…then he could see her catch on to his humor and shake her head ruefully at being caught again.

  “Of course I am,” she agreed with a smile.

  “And who is this?” Tiffany’s mother turned a discerning eye on him. He’d dressed in clean jeans and a nondescript button-down denim work shirt, Eagle Cove formal.

  “This is Devin, Mother,” and he could see Tiffany was trying to protect him by not even including his last name.

  He looked at Vivian Lamont. He’d been prepared to hate her. He had reason to. How could she not have known that her husband was abusing her daughter? And wouldn’t she have the same alley cat morals of his parents…and Rebecca’s? And Rebecca.

  But rather than being condescending, or attacking as if he was a gold-digger after Tiffany’s money, he could see that she was putting the best face she could on a bundle of nerves.

  Her daughter had rejected her a decade before in a desperate grab for self-preservation. But time had passed and now their future was dependent only on these two women—and Vivian feared her strong daughter’s possible rejection, right down to her designer shoes. The media frenzy was gone, the jerk was dead, and life had moved on. Maybe, with a little help, they had a chance at finding at least friendship after all this time.

  Devin took a careful breath, reassuring himself that there was no time like the present, and held out a hand.

  “Devin Robison, Mrs. Lamont, of the Chicago Master Constructor Robisons. And I’m the one who is going to be marrying your daughter.”

  “You are?” The two of them said it in unison.

  “Oh man!” Devin turned to Tiffany. “I told you I was going to blow the proposal.”

  She stepped forward into his arms and looked up at him. “No. You did it just great.” Then she kissed him.

  “Thank you all for coming to meet my mother,” Tiffany was more than a little overwhelmed that they had.