Herons Landing

by JoAnn Ross

  “Some people just have more open hearts,” Brianna said. “Plus, having been in an internment camp while her young groom was off fighting in Europe undoubtedly taught her a lot about the dangers of hate and the importance of love.”

  “‘And to live every moment with positivity,’ is the way Mai’s grandmother put it to me,” Kylee said. “Mai told me that when she was standing at her husband’s grave, instead of saying how wrong it was that he’d been killed so young, all she could concentrate on was her gratitude that his final resting place was so beautiful and peaceful, and that he was surrounded by five thousand other Americans.”

  Brianna remembered the day Kylee had called her from France, telling her that she’d fallen in love. Mai had taken her grandmother on a pilgrimage to the American Cemetery in Epinal, France, to the grave of her grandfather, who’d been killed in action after volunteering to join the famed Japanese American Go For Broke 442/100th. With one third of the Hawaiian population being Japanese, the government had decided that it would be devastating economically to put them all into camps.

  Still, those considered of higher community standing, or who “posed a threat against America,” had been interned behind barbed wire. Having attended school for a year in Japan, which was where he’d met Mai’s grandmother, although he was an American citizen, he, she and his parents were among those imprisoned. He, like so many others of his peers on the island and mainland, had enlisted in the Army to prove that they and their families were loyal to their country.

  As opposed to how they’d been treated at home, those who’d made the ultimate sacrifice had been “adopted” by the French civilians who took care of the graves and continued to bring flowers and flags on special occasions. Brianna had seen the photos taken by both Mai and Kylee, who’d serendipitously been there that day on a trip through Europe, documenting World War II American cemeteries.

  “She never remarried?”

  “No.” Kylee shook her head. “She says no other man could ever live up to her beloved Masato.”

  “That’s both wonderful and sad.” It also had Brianna thinking of Seth and wondering if he’d end up a ninety-one-year-old widower, still emotionally tied to his one and only love.

  Which was too depressing a thought to consider on such an exciting day. Shaking off the negativity, Brianna smiled as Mai came out of the room, her grin as wide as the moon. “She’s dilated to three centimeters. We now officially have an active labor situation.”

  “Oh, God.” Kylee collapsed on the hard sofa next to Brianna. “What if we made a mistake? What do we know about taking care of a child?”

  “We’ll learn,” Mai soothed her. “After all, we survived to adulthood. As did Brianna, all her brothers and millions of other children. We’re smart, we’ve studied up and we’ve got an entire library from birth to dealing with an empty nest. Take a deep breath and let’s go downstairs and have something to eat. The doctor says we’ve still got a lot of hours ahead of us.”

  “I want to go see her,” Kylee said. “Let her know we’re supporting her.”

  “You’ve told her that. She knows it. Right now what she needs is to get some rest between contractions, and your energy, bouncing off the walls like it is right now, isn’t going to help.”

  “You’re undoubtedly right, dammit. I could use some cake.”

  “Protein,” Mai corrected her. “Sugar overload is the last thing you need. And no coffee. Tea. Herbal.”

  Kylee stuck out her bottom lip. “You’re no fun.”

  “You’ll thank me later.”

  “Besides, I need you calm so you can give me some advice,” Brianna said.

  “About the house?”

  “No. Seth.” She decided if anything would get her friend’s mind off the birthing, her news would. “I kissed him. And he kissed me back.”

  “I knew it!” Kylee headed toward the door just as another waiting family entered. This was not a conversation to have in front of others, although Brianna suspected by tomorrow, somehow the story might even be replacing Honeymoon Harbor’s Harper/Mannion love triangle.

  * * *

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, huddled together at the table in the far corner of the cafeteria, digging into pieces of three-layer chocolate cake—which Kylee insisted she desperately needed because chocolate was a far better cure for anxiety than an egg salad sandwich or Cobb salad that had probably been packed into the plastic box hours ago—Brianna was being drilled about that impulsive kiss.

  “I shouldn’t have brought the subject up. Today’s about you two,” she said. “Not me.”

  “We need something to take our minds off what’s happening,” Mai surprised her by saying. “While Kylee’s pacing around like a wet cat in a thunderstorm, inside, I’m curled up beneath this table in a fetal position. Since we can’t do anything to hurry up labor, talking about your love life is the next best thing. Maybe after chocolate,” she admitted as she stabbed the mile-high piece of cake with a plastic fork. The hospital had obviously outsourced since the label on the plastic box it had come in read Ovenly.

  “I don’t have a love life.” Brianna took a drink of the mocha caramel latte. Which just might admittedly be sugar/chocolate overload, but the moms-to-be weren’t the only ones with tangled nerves. She pointed her fork toward Mai. “That’s the point.”

  “Who initiated the kiss?” Kylee asked.

  “I did.”

  “You go, girl.”

  “The first time. But it was totally an impulse.”

  “The word first implies a second time,” Mai pointed out.

  “That was him.”

  “Ha! I’ll bet you’re the first woman he’s kissed since Zoe went off to the Army. Not that other women haven’t tried,” Kylee said.

  “He sort of brought that up. But not in any bragging way.” Brianna was quick to defend him, even feeling as if he’d stabbed her in her heart with one of those screwdrivers he carried around in his tool belt. Because friends stuck up for friends, in good times and bad. “He said he hadn’t had sex for three years.”

  “Then he’s way overdue,” Mai said. “Lucky you. I’d only gone eighteen months when I met Kylee.” She nodded toward her fiancée, who was scraping at least two inches of frosting off the top of the cake. “The next day, during my grandmother’s afternoon nap, I felt like Kilauea Volcano erupting.”

  “She was hot,” Kylee seconded that description. “You’d better be stocking up on condoms. Any he has lying around are probably long past their sell date.”

  “We’re not going to have sex,” Brianna said. Memo to unruly naughty bits: the original “behave yourself” plan is back on.

  “You kissed him. He kissed you back. Was it a hot kiss?”

  “On a scale of one to ten, for me it was a twenty.” But then again, she’d been fantasizing about it since the days when she’d practice kissing the back of her hand in front of her bedroom mirror, so perhaps she was exaggerating. No. She wasn’t. At all. “But there was no inappropriate touching.”

  Kylee frowned. “None?”

  Brianna took another drink. Chocolate courage could be just as good as alcohol, right? Maybe even better, because all she’d be left with was a caffeine sugar buzz. Not a head-splitting, stomach-churning hangover, like the one she woke up with the morning after Seth and Zoe’s wedding.

  “Well...I may have sort of wrapped my leg around his.”

  “And bumped privates,” Kylee guessed.

  Brianna felt the heat rise in her cheeks. “Maybe a bit more than bumped.” She would have climbed inside him if she could have.

  “That’s a start,” Mai decided.

  “You’ve got his engine revved,” Kylee agreed. “Now Seth just needs to step on the gas and go for the checkered flag.”

  “She’s become addicted to NASCAR.” Mai rolled her expressive dark eyes.

 
“I had to find something new to latch onto after you and Seth banned me from Pinterest.”

  “We didn’t ban you. Exactly. We merely pointed out that if you kept making changes, we might finally be moving into the house in time for our daughter’s backyard wedding.”

  When Kylee didn’t attempt to argue that point, Brianna laughed, feeling a release of the tension that had wrapped its tight hands around her insides as she’d walked away from temptation.

  “You two remind me of my parents,” she said. “You’re like my dad,” she told Mai. “Calm, steady and seemingly always in balance.”

  “Not always,” Kylee said with a wicked grin and suggestive wiggling of her bright brows.

  “She gets that we have sex,” Mai told her fiancée dryly. “And, although I admire both your parents, Brianna, being compared to your father is a serious compliment. Thank you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being compared to your mom,” Kylee pouted. Just a bit, which again made Brianna laugh.

  “You’re so much alike, you could be her natural-born daughter.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

  “No. It’s true. You both have Wonder Woman energy that can be exhausting at times. She practically wore me out racing around from wholesalers to designers while we were in Seattle. But my point is that you and Mai are total opposites, which seems to make for a good relationship. Zoe and Seth were like that. While he and I are more alike.”

  “Opposite attraction works well for us,” Mai allowed. “But that’s because, beneath the surface, our core values and ideas are the same. Studies have shown that long-term compatibility is more likely to be with someone like yourself.”

  “And the way you and Seth rhapsodized about Herons Landing showed you thought a lot alike,” Kylee said. “Plus, I always suspected that despite all that big-city talk, you’d eventually end up back home. The same way I did.”

  “We might have thought alike. But Seth and Zoe were a couple from that first day they met.”

  “True. But you’ve always loved him, and as tragic as Zoe’s death was, it’s your time. You’d be a fool not to go for it.”

  “He said they were soul mates. That he’s never going to marry again.”

  “He actually told you that? After kissing your socks off?”

  “Yes.” It was depressingly definitive. But no way had she wanted him to see that his declaration had sent an arrow straight into her unsteady, and distressingly still yearning, heart.

  “But he didn’t fight you off when you went in for that kiss.”

  “No, he definitely didn’t.” He’d enjoyed that kiss as much as she had. Been rocked by it. But maybe he’d felt guilty? As if he’d been cheating on his dead wife? While Brianna had never really believed Herons Landing was haunted, now she was forced to worry that Zoe’s ghost might be hovering between them the entire time they were working together on the house.

  “Kylee told me about your grandmother, Mai. What if he ends up like her?”

  “Unlikely. Those were different times. Women, especially conservative Japanese women like my grandmother, didn’t get divorced, so there weren’t that many second marriages. And there’s always the possibility that she discovered she liked living her own life.”

  “He’s a guy.” Kylee polished off the rest of her cake, wadded up the paper napkin and, like the former basketball player she was, made a three-point shot into the wastebasket several feet away. “Unless he decides to become a monk, he’s going to have sex and you’re the obvious candidate.

  “Also, he’s proven that he’s husband material by having married Zoe. So, my guess is that deep down, he’s going to realize that he misses that intimate connection with another person. So if you’re the one he’s with when that happens, the scales will fall from his scrumptious brown eyes, and he’ll see that the woman he wants has been there all along. Admittedly it might take some time, but I have not a single doubt that you’ll change his mind. Because you deserve to be as happy as we are.”

  When she linked hands across the table with Mai, two engagement rings, similar but individual, caught the light.

  Brianna was about to tell them how fortunate they were, when both their phones chimed texts in unison.

  “Madison’s awake and up to five centimeters,” Mai read.

  “Time to start walking again,” Kylee said.

  “You or her?” Brianna asked.

  “Both,” they said together.

  “All the books say the old belief that women in labor should stay in bed is uncomfortable and prolongs labor,” Mai explained. “So, we’ve been walking a lot with her. It seems to help.”

  “I still love the idea of adoption because we’re providing a home for a child who needs it and helping a young woman make a better life for herself,” Kylee said. “But I think, for the next one, I might like to be the birth mom.”

  Mai’s expression was both indulgent and overbrimming with love. Brianna thought if any man ever looked at her like that, she’d marry him in a minute. “Let’s just get through this one,” she said as she stood up from the table. “Then, once we recover from sleep deprivation and survive her toddler stage, we’ll talk about a little sister or brother for our daughter.”

  “You’re so sensible.” Kylee, who’d jumped up when the phones had dinged, leaned down and brushed a kiss against her fiancée’s lips. “That’s only one of the things I love about you.”

  There was no way Brianna could envy her friend for having found her life mate. But as they left the cafeteria to go down the hall to the birthing center, she found herself wondering if Kylee and Mai were right about her fighting for what, or technically whom, she wanted. Or if just continuing to hope that someday Seth could love her the way she still loved him might just be a losing cause.

  But you’ll never know if you don’t try. She heard all the voices—her mother’s, grandparents’, Kylee’s and Mai’s—tumbling around in her head.

  She’d never been a quitter. She’d chosen a goal and stuck with it, and although, sure, maybe she’d moved on, it wasn’t as if she’d given up, but simply returned to her earlier first goal. Who was to say she couldn’t have both Herons Landing and Seth Harper?

  Or, to put it another way, she thought as she tossed her paper plate and utensils into the recycling bin, have her cake and eat it, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WHILE TAKING APART the nursery might have been one of the hardest things Seth had ever done, short of getting through Zoe’s death and funeral, watching Kylee’s and Mai’s faces as they saw the nursery for the daughter they’d brought home three days after her birth was definitely worth the pain. Kylee carried the newborn around, showing her all the wonderful things, telling her that they were just for her, and going over to the bookshelf, she literally teared up when she saw Goodnight Moon, which apparently her mother had read every night to her. The happiness literally radiating from both women caused an unexpected tug in his own heart.

  It should have been Zoe showing their child the quilt and the dresser their grandparents had made, but life hadn’t turned out that way. All around him, people he’d grown up with, had gone to school with, were coupling up, settling down and reproducing. All except for Brianna, though even she was nesting in her own way, bringing Herons Landing back to life.

  Meanwhile, his already limited social life had become a blightscape.

  But he had done this. He’d made a connection with the new mothers and would now be involved in their daughter’s life. That was something, right? He hoped if Zoe was somewhere watching, she’d approve.

  “You did good,” Brianna, who was standing beside him in the doorway, murmured, as if sensing his need for validation. “It couldn’t have been easy.”

  “I thought it would be hell,” he admitted. “And you’re right, it wasn’t at all easy. But watching them now,
seeing them so happy, I realize that it was exactly the right thing to do. Thanks for putting the idea in my head. I should’ve thought of it while the three of us were working on the layout of the cottage and made room for the nursery.”

  She reached out and took his hand, linking their fingers together. Not as lovers, he reassured himself. But as friends. The same way they had when they’d jumped off the pier together into the bay when he’d been eleven and one of them—he’d forgotten which—had gotten the insane idea to join the crazy-ass Polar Bear Club, which, for some reason he still hadn’t figured out, thought it would be a good idea to celebrate the first day of the year by freezing their balls off.

  At the time, having recently become aware of his own, as he’d hit the icy water, he’d worried that he might have shriveled them beyond recovery. And wouldn’t that have killed off any of his chances for sex with anyone but Mr. Hand, which even at his age he’d figured out wasn’t anywhere near as good as having sex with a girl.

  “You’re a good man, Seth Harper,” she said.

  “You’re prejudiced.”

  “You bet I am.” Her smile was quick and easy. As if he’d only imagined that earthshaking kiss. Maybe it hadn’t affected her nearly as much as it had him.

  After all, she probably had lots of guys after her. Guys in Brooks Brothers suits, or Armani, or whatever the hell overpriced designer was in fashion these days, slicked-back Wall Street hairstyles and money to burn. It only made sense that while she might have come home to Honeymoon Harbor, she couldn’t have been working all the time. She’d undoubtedly spent some of those years kissing more than a few of those one-percenters who stayed at five-star hotels.

  “I have another favor to ask,” she said.