Shannon raved about the country for several minutes while her mentor listened with attentive silence and a handful of encouraging comments.
Then Margaret, who was never one to avoid the heart of an issue, said, “And how is it being abroad on this grand adventure with Jake?”
Shannon paused. She’d never been quite as straightforward as her friend, but she could no longer disguise the truth. “Jake’s not the problem, Margaret.”
To his credit, Jake—though flirtatious as ever—had been a gentleman the entire time they’d been together. He let her set the pace of their friendship, which was still platonic, at least from her point of view, and he didn’t once push her into anything more.
She was the one who was struggling.
In spite of herself, she missed huge chunks of her old life. She missed the routines she’d lived with for years. She missed the natural beauty of her home state. And she missed Bram. She tried to explain all of this to Margaret.
“The problem,” Shannon said, “is that I know I should be here. I have so much to learn, and a trip like this was always my dream! How can I possibly go back home until I’ve seen something of the world? Gained some knowledge and wisdom? Experienced everything I imagined?”
“Honey, world travel can certainly give you many of those things, but there’s more than one way to ‘take a trip,’ you know.” Margaret paused. “Education is a true odyssey of the mind. And love—well, love is a journey that never ends. It sets you on a path that never stops twisting and turning. Don’t underestimate the power of those types of experiences either.”
Her friend was right, as she had been so many times. Shannon knew it and thanked her. Then, after they’d said goodbye, Shannon stood near one of the walls and admired the garden flowers until, inevitably, Jake found her there.
He nudged her arm. “Saw you talking on the phone.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Jake, I’m sorry. It’s really not you. I’m just—”
“In love with someone else,” he finished for her.
She nodded again.
He winced and swallowed a few times. “Well, damn,” he murmured. “I thought I might be able to change your mind, you know? But, hey, at least I tried. And you were worth giving it a shot, babe.”
Then he draped his arm around her and pointed to one of the Spanish tour guides—a shapely brunette dressed in a slinky black miniskirt with a smile as bright as the Granada sun.
“That’s Juliana,” he said. “She invited me out to a tapas bar tonight. Guess I can tell her yes now, huh?”
Shannon kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You may be an insatiable flirt but, deep down, you’re a really good guy, Jakey.” She paused until he chuckled, even though the laughter didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Don’t keep the pretty lady waiting…and good luck. With everything.”
He winked at her. “Yeah, you, too.”
When he finally strode away, she clicked over to the Internet. Sure, it’d taken a month since New Year’s, plus a full week into her trip, but she’d finally figured out what she wanted to do, and she had a few important details to look up online.
***
Bram was freezing his ass off in a corporate board meeting in Minneapolis when they finally got to take ten minutes off for a coffee break. He needed it—the heat of the mug for his chilled fingers as much as the caffeine boost for his tired brain. Sitting motionless for so long, even while listening to his own shareholders praise the growth of his company, still wasn’t helping his circulation any.
It’d been a year since last Valentine’s Day. A year since he’d met Shannon. And far too damn long since he’d seen or spoken with her.
He poured himself a big cup of coffee and stared with irritation at the cutesy heart-shaped cookies his secretary Miranda had ordered for the meeting. They reminded him too much of Holiday Quinn, the Queen of Hearts Singles’ Dance and Shannon in that lovely cream-colored evening gown with the gold straps…
Depressing as hell to still miss her so much. He should’ve been able to get over it. To move on. She clearly had. She was in Spain with The Prick. But, mad as he was at Jake, he was much angrier with himself. He’d let her go…and her assistant was smart enough to keep her by his side. Bram couldn’t fault the guy for that.
He sighed, thinking of the text she’d sent him just a few days ago with a picture of the Alhambra Palace attached. Yeah, a text. Not a phone call or even an e-mail. So impersonal. It had him wishing for the olden days when people sent each other snail-mail postcards from their vacations.
Miranda saw him wandering around the office and shot him a concerned look. “Are you feeling well, Mr. Hartwick?” she asked.
He shrugged. “It’s cold.”
“It’s February in Minnesota.” She smiled. “What were you expecting?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He’d given strict orders to the maintenance staff to keep the building temps as warm as possible, but the winter chill had a way of seeping in no matter what.
Bram glanced out the window and noticed it was snowing. Terrific. On top of everything else, his commute home would be punitive.
“Roads are going to be treacherous in a few hours,” he told his secretary. “Maybe we should close early today. Give everyone a chance to get to their houses safely.”
Miranda glanced at the clock and worried her bottom lip. “Hmm,” she said.
“What, you’ve got a problem with that? Think the shareholders will disapprove?”
She shook her head. “Not precisely,” she murmured, a noncommittal response that left him confused.
He was puzzling over how to respond to this when Miranda’s desk phone suddenly rang.
“Excuse me for a moment, Mr. Hartwick.”
He watched her take the call, chuckle into the receiver and instruct the person on the other end of the line to come up to the fifth floor.
“I’ll meet you by the elevators,” he heard her say.
Bram winced inwardly. Sounded like another delivery had just arrived. More Lathericious samples to sort through. More documents to sign. More of some kind of work he’d need to do before he could finally leave the office for the day and lick his wounds in private. He turned to walk back to the boardroom.
“Mr. Hartwick?” Miranda said.
He looked at her, waiting.
“Yes.” She nodded. “I definitely think you should suggest an early departure to the shareholders.” She gazed out the window with an amused expression. “Right now would be the best time, if you want my honest opinion.”
He stared at her with a niggle of suspicion. “What’s going on?”
But no sooner had the words left his mouth than the elevator in the hallway, just out of sight, dinged loudly, and his secretary dashed away from him.
“Hold that thought,” she called over her shoulder.
“Miranda—” he began, but his secretary had already disappeared.
He returned to the boardroom and dismissed his associates. A few lingered to chat with him so, maybe, another fifteen minutes had gone by before Miranda came bursting into the room with an impatient expression on her face.
“You’re needed at once in your office, Mr. Hartwick,” she informed him sternly. “It’s important.”
This was wholly uncharacteristic behavior for his secretary. This sternness. This impatience. The last time she’d acted remotely like this it’d been on the eve of his company’s anniversary, about five years ago, when his brothers surprised him with a little party at the office. They’d gotten his secretary in on their plans so she could help set it up.
Miranda wasn’t someone accustomed to keeping secrets.
He trailed after her, squinting his eyes at her fast-moving form and about to ask her yet again what the hell was going on. But she swung open the door to his private office…and the words froze on his tongue.
“Bram,” Shannon said. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
His mind was, perhaps, not functioning as efficiently as it shou
ld have been. It was as if the icy conditions on the roadways outside had extended their hazardousness into the pathways of his brain. Everything was moving perplexingly slow, and his thoughts were skidding perilously around inside his head with little control.
He got only as far as forming the word “Shannon” with his lips, but his shock at seeing her just standing there kept him from believing the messages his eyes were sending. He was incapable of speech.
Shannon, however, wasn’t nearly as tongue-tied. She raced up to him, flung her arms around him and whispered, “It’s so good to see you.”
He buried his face in the softness of her hair and neck, clinging to her as tightly as he could without cutting off her circulation.
Miranda cleared her throat. “Well, Mr. Hartwick, I’ll be heading out now. Bad driving weather and all.” There was relief in her voice and enough warmth to melt half the snow that had fallen that day in the Twin Cities. “Ms. Quinn, it was a pleasure meeting you.”
“You, too,” Shannon said with sincerity. “Thank you so much.”
Then his secretary was gone.
He was holding the woman he loved.
And they were alone.
“You’re here,” he said finally. “Why are you here? Not that I want you to leave,” he added quickly, “but I thought you were somewhere in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula.”
She pulled back just far enough to gaze deep into his eyes. “I was. But I missed you. And when I talked to Margaret, she reminded me that there was more than one kind of journey… I do want to travel the world, Bram, but I also want to learn a little more about the places I’m visiting and about a whole bunch of other subjects I’ve never had a chance to study or experience. It’s time for me to continue my education, and I hear there are a few good colleges in the area.”
She smiled and flashed a University of Minnesota course catalog at him. “You’ll have to tell me, though, if I should check out the dorm situation or if, perhaps, some alternate housing might be arranged.”
Bram stared at her, not sure he could trust his ears. All of his senses were wacked. “Wait, you want to move to Minneapolis?”
She shook her head and, immediately, his heart plummeted to his toes.
“Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Manhattan, Mozambique. The location is irrelevant, Bram. What I want is to be where you are. I want to take life’s greatest journey of all—the grand adventure of love—with you. And, if we’re lucky, if we find it’s the right path for us, then, maybe, we can continue journeying onward. To see if it leads to a life together.” She paused and looked at him with an equal mix of apprehension and hope. “Is that something you might want, too?”
“Oh, Shannon,” he murmured and, once again, he was rendered speechless for a few moments. “Yes. A thousand times, yes. Whether or not we ever go back to our favorite inn, being with you would make every day feel like a holiday.”
Then, before she could get away or change her mind, he locked his office door, snapped shut the window blinds and showed her with every part of his body, mind and soul just how much he loved being her valentine.
The room temperature spiked hotter than a night in July.
And somewhere in the distance—in the middle of yet another Midwestern blizzard—Bram Hartwick could have sworn he heard fireworks.
####
About the Author:
Marilyn Brant has been told she writes with honesty, liveliness and wit (descriptors she's grown terribly fond of) about complex, intelligent women—like her friends—and their significant personal relationships. Although her favorite pursuits undoubtedly involve books, she proves she's not just a literary snob by confessing her lifelong fascination (read: obsession) with popular music, especially from the '70s and '80s, most flavors of ice cream and a variety of sensuous body lotions/oils.
Marilyn is the award-winning women's fiction author of ACCORDING TO JANE (2009), FRIDAY MORNINGS AT NINE (2010) and A SUMMER IN EUROPE (2011), all from Kensington Books. She also writes fun and flirty romantic comedies that involve sweet treats and large doses of humor. Her novel ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAE was released on ebook in June 2011 and was a Kindle Top 100 Bestseller in Humor. DOUBLE DIPPING followed in September 2011 and was a finalist for Best Contemporary Novel in the 2012 International Digital Awards. Look for more of Marilyn’s original ebook exclusives coming soon, including HOLIDAY MAN (November 2012) and PRIDE, PREJUDICE AND THE PERFECT MATCH (January 2013).
As a former teacher, library staff member, freelance magazine writer and national book reviewer, Marilyn has spent much of her life lost in literature. Her debut novel, ACCORDING TO JANE, featuring the ghost of Jane Austen giving a young woman dating advice, won the Romance Writers of America's prestigious Golden Heart Award, and it was selected as one of the “Top 100 Romance Novels of All Time” by Buzzle.com. Her second novel, FRIDAY MORNINGS AT NINE, was a Doubleday and Book-of-the-Month Club pick. And A SUMMER IN EUROPE was featured in the Literary Guild and BOMC2, and it became a Top 20 Bestseller in “Fiction and Literature” for the Rhapsody Book Club.
She currently lives in the Chicago suburbs with her family. When she isn't reading her friends’ books or watching old movies, she's working on her next novel, eating chocolate indiscriminately and hiding from the laundry.
Below are some book details and a few excerpts from three of Marilyn’s other popular contemporary romances, which are available in multiple digital formats:
An Excerpt from ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAE (June 2011)
In this light romantic comedy involving a shy dessert cookbook writer and a former football star, Brant takes us to an ice cream parlor in small-town Wisconsin where two people who couldn’t be more different from each other find themselves falling in love...
Elizabeth rarely swore aloud but, in her mind, she was cursing not just a blue streak, but also a red, orange, yellow and green streak. She was, in fact, well on her way to a complete blasphemous rainbow, and Rob Gabinarri hadn’t even arrived yet.
Of all people. She never thought she’d have to make it through so much as a ten-minute soda pop break with him again. The boy who’d broken her heart and didn’t even know it.
Or maybe he did know it.
She couldn’t decide which was the greater tragedy.
A snazzy red Porsche convertible squealed to a stop behind her sensible blue Toyota Camry, and the town’s Golden Boy stepped out of the car and into the empty confectionary shop.
“Hey, Lizzy. Long time, no see,” he said, glancing around the shop in a frantic kind of way.
“E-Elizabeth,” she corrected automatically.
“Oh, all right. Sorry.”
She stared at him, which of course he didn’t notice because he was too busy looking at everything else in the place besides her.
He walked into the backroom then out of it again.
He peered into the washrooms.
He opened and shut a few closets.
He paced back and forth, sat down in a booth, got back up and paced some more.
The guy was as tall and muscular and breathtaking as he’d been a decade before when he used to saunter through the unremarkable halls of Wilmington Bay High School, oblivious to anyone and anything beyond the football field and his bevy of admirers. If it were possible, he seemed even more youthful and in command now than he did at age eighteen.
And she felt about as queasy as she’d felt the last time they’d been face to face.
Finally, his pacing stopped. “Where is my uncle?” he asked in a husky whisper, directing the query at a tray of chocolate-dipped sugar cookies. “Uncle?” he called out. “Uncle Pauly?”
She wanted to tell him, but the words were lodged in her esophagus and, anyway, he wasn’t talking to her.
He strode into the backroom again, as if convinced the elderly Italian man could be found hiding behind a jar of candied cherries or a vat of butterscotch syrup. The long black eyelashes blinked in confusion when he emerged into the main shop once again, his gaze and those nu
tmeg-brown eyes directed at her.
“Don’t tell me he left already.” This was more a threat than a question. He shook his head at her as though that gesture alone would discourage an affirmative reply.
She held her breath and nodded.
“Where is he?”
She pursed her lips, just as she’d learned in her special speech tutorials so long ago, formed the first letter and tried to push it out of her mouth. But she stuttered anyway.
“L-Lufthansa. F-Fl-Flight four-oh-three.”
He cocked his gorgeous head to one side and stared at her in the way she’d grown so accustomed to during her miserable school years: Poor Old Lizzy, the look said. What a geeky dweeb.
“What time is it scheduled to depart?” he asked her with an affected gentleness that made her want to rip out his vocal cords.
She tapped her watch and gathered her courage for whatever might happen next. “T-Twenty m-m-minutes a-ago.”
“Oh, bloody hellfire!” Rob shouted, adding several inventive phrases to his curse before pausing to take a breath.
Elizabeth had managed to squeeze out a few additional syllables of explanation, but Rob was quick to catch on to the full meaning, she noticed, even when words were left unspoken.
“Uncle Pauly said he’d be gone only a couple of weeks.” He rubbed his palms against his eyes. “Not a freaking month. And he never mentioned Europe.” He pounded his fist on the ice-cream-window part of the counter three times in rapid succession. “He said everything would be explained when I got up here.” He turned toward her. “Guess you were elected to supply the details.”
If she’d been capable of it, she would’ve laughed. Oh, yeah. Now that was a first. One for the record books. Elizabeth Daniels: Verbal Disseminator of Information. Hee-hee. Ha-ha.
“S-Sorry,” she said.
He paused. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just…” But words must have defied him, too because he left the sentence uncompleted.
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