Herons Landing

by JoAnn Ross

  “No. I’m trying to say, very carefully, so I don’t blow up this peace accord we have going, that sometimes it’s okay to think about what you need. What you want.”

  And wasn’t that exactly what she’d been doing this past year?

  “I didn’t want that to sound like a negative,” he said.

  “I didn’t take it as one,” she assured him. She did not add that it was exactly what she’d been needing to hear.

  “But mostly, like Anne, you carry on whatever the obstacles. She never surrendered her belief that good things would come, which is why I found her to be a more hopeful character than Elizabeth.”

  He could have been reading her class syllabus. “There’s one difference,” Sarah said. If John could be honest, she would be, as well. “Anne caused her own pain by breaking the captain’s heart when she refused to marry him. While you broke mine.” By not asking her to marry him.

  “Would you believe me if I said that was the last thing I’d wanted to do?”

  “Yes. But that doesn’t mean that I still wasn’t crushed.” Dammit. She felt the tears welling up again. What was it about John Mannion that tore down all her defenses? “You treated me to a fancy dinner that must have cost a fortune. You took me upstairs to the most beautiful room I’d ever stayed in. Have ever stayed in. And you made love to me. Three times. Obviously it turned out to be my stupid mistake, but I took all that to be the buildup for a proposal.”

  “You weren’t mistaken.”

  “What?” Sarah stared at him. “Then why...”

  “Because...oh, hell...they’re starting to flame.” He jumped up, spritzed the flames that had engulfed the steaks with a water bottle and turned them. Then took a deep breath, blew it out. Twice. Then tried again. “It’s hard to explain.”

  Sarah refilled her wineglass. She’d never been much of a drinker. Usually anything more than a glass of wine went straight to her head. But in this case, maybe that would be a good thing. “Try,” she suggested.

  “Remember when you gave me the tour of the college?”

  “You said you’d never seen anything like it before.” They’d always been in such a hurry to get to the discount motel that he’d stayed in the few other times he’d made it back east, they’d never taken the time for her to show him where she’d spent the past four years.

  She remembered walking with him past the brick and stone buildings to her favorite places over the five hundred stunning acres, the winding paths through open meadows, the groves of conifers, century-old oaks with their huge gnarled branches.

  “It was more than that.” He shook his head, looked up at the sky. He appeared about to say something, something she’d been waiting to hear for two years, when the grill flared again. He spritzed the steaks, then checked them with a fingertip. “They’re done. If we let them sit, they’ll get cold. This conversation might take a while. What would you say to going in and talking over dinner?”

  Even as she agreed, Sarah’s nerves began to spark and crackle like Honeymoon Harbor’s power lines in fog. They worked in a tense silence, him plating the food, getting out the container of sour cream and putting butter on a small plate, her filling glasses with water and ice.

  Finally, after they’d sat down and she was spooning the cream onto her potato, he spoke.

  “Remember when you took me into the greenhouses?”

  “Of course. I thought with your ag minor, you’d appreciate it.”

  “Who couldn’t appreciate seventy-two hundred feet of garden under glass? It was amazing. And then, after introducing me to some of your friends, all of whom are probably going to take over the world, by the way, you took me to the lake,” he said. “Where two white swans were swimming.”

  He surprised her by pausing to attack his meat with his steak knife. Sarah had loved the beauty of the campus and had wanted to share it with him. She’d also thought the lake would be the perfect place for him to propose. And wouldn’t that make a lovely story to tell their children and grandchildren?

  “It was all overload,” he said.

  What? Why didn’t he just take that damn knife and stab her in the heart? “I’m sorry you didn’t like it,” she said stiffly.

  “How could anyone not? It was all of it put together in that perfect idyllic place that looked like some grand English estate out of those books I’d read. It also hammered home the difference between where our lives were headed. I was coming back here to Honeymoon Harbor.”

  “As a point of accuracy, you took off to the Himalayas,” she pointed out.

  He waved away her contradiction. “My point, and I do have one, is that I knew I was eventually going to end up back here.” His eyes darkened, turning deadly serious. “While you were off to Oxford. That’s a big freaking deal, Sarah. I couldn’t join your world, and there’s no way in hell I could’ve asked you to stay stuck back here with me.”

  She’d been about to take a bite of steak, but stricken that her plan had backfired so horribly, she dropped her fork. It hit the rim of the plate and bounced onto the floor.

  “I’ll get you another.” He pushed back and stood up.

  “Don’t bother. I’m not hungry anymore.” As her wounded heart turned glacier cold, Sarah struggled not to cry and wished that, weather be damned, she’d insisted John take her home when she first realized he’d kidnapped her. “I can’t believe you thought that and never bothered to say a word to me!” She jabbed a shaky finger at him. “Do you know why I took you to the lake in the first place?”

  “No.” He got her another fork anyway, picked up the one lying on the plank wood floor and threw it with more force than necessary into the sink. “Why?”

  “Because all night long, from that fancy dinner in the restaurant, to making love in that beautiful room, I foolishly assumed you were setting the scene to propose. When you still hadn’t by the next morning, I went to plan B, which was to take you to the lake. I knew so many girls whose boyfriends had proposed there, I thought I’d try setting the scene.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Of course.” She stabbed a piece of steak as if it were his cold, cruel heart, and chewed furiously. “I always kid about proposals I never received.” Her voice dripped with acid sarcasm.

  “I had a ring in my pocket.”

  “What?” She dropped the fork again, but this time it clattered onto the plate.

  “I had every intention of proposing after dinner. But then we were having the best sex of my life rolling around on that feather-top bed, and, well, afterward, it didn’t seem right to have to tell our grandkids that Grandpa proposed to Grandma while they were both naked and sweaty.”

  “We could have edited out that part.” No way was she going to admit to the romantic proposal fantasy she’d imagined sharing with their future grandchildren.

  “True. But that didn’t occur to me at the time. Maybe because you’d just screwed my brain out.”

  “That was mutual.”

  “At least we got that part right,” he said with a faint touch of the wry humor that was as much a part of him as those beautiful blue eyes, which had gone from stormy to regretful. “I figured I’d propose over our room service breakfast in bed. But then, when you suggested showing me around the campus—”

  “None of my girlfriends had ever met you,” she said. “I suspect many thought you were someone I’d made up.”

  “Like I said, they had something, not exactly a polish, but a strength. Like Wonder Woman. And while I always knew that you were ridiculously smart and beautiful—”

  “I’m not. My eyes—”

  “Are the color of warmed brandy under a flame. That body you thought was too gangly in middle school because you believed your legs were too long for the rest of you—which, by the way, for future reference, no guy ever thinks a woman’s legs are too long—reminds me of a thoroughbred. In a
good way,” he assured her. “Not a horse way.”

  She lifted a brow as the ice that had encased her heart began to thaw. “I can’t wait to hear how you describe my too-wide mouth and overbite.”

  “Your mouth is eminently kissable, the overbite sexy, and before you move on to complaining about your wild polished-copper-colored hair, it reminds me of a Celtic warrior woman. You’ve always been beautiful to me, Sarah.

  “And what I was trying, admittedly unartfully, to say was that I realized that day what I’d been trying to overlook. That you didn’t belong married to some small-town guy. You belonged married to a president. Hell, you belong being president. So the best thing I could do was to get out of your way and let you go on to the bigger, better life that you deserved.”

  “Which is why you dumped me.”

  “No. I suggested we take a time-out while you were in England.”

  “That was just your ham-handed attempt to ease into the situation,” she guessed. “You broke up with me.”

  “Yeah.” He swiped a hand over his hair. “But only so you could enjoy a better life than I could give you.”

  How could he not have realized that the best life she could have had, the only one she’d ever wanted, was with him? “And you never thought to ask me how I felt about that?”

  “I considered it. And decided against it because I was afraid you’d accept my proposal, come back here and spend the rest of your life regretting it. Or maybe spend a few years trying to fit back in before you finally accepted that you no longer belonged in Honeymoon Harbor and escaped small-town life. And me.”

  He’d always seemed so, well, centered. And sure of himself. How could she have known that John Mannion was ever insecure about anything? Especially her love? “I see.” She took a bite of potato, chewed thoughtfully. “That lake I took you to? The one with the swans? There’s a legend about it.”

  “Okay.” He put his elbows on the table, and bracing those strong manly arms that had always made her feel so safe, so loved, linked his fingers together and eyed her cautiously over them.

  “It’s said that if a girl walks around the lake three times with her boyfriend and he doesn’t propose, she can push him into the water. My roommate, Shanteese—who, by the way, had grown up in Jamaica with six brothers and sisters in a tiny two-room house with a tin roof, not some mansion like you appear to have assumed everyone else was from—decided that she could hedge on the legend a bit and change it to simply going to the lake three times with a boy. It worked. The third time he proposed and they’re now married and both attending med school at Columbia. I’d decided I’d try for one time being the charm.”

  She took a long drink of wine, eyeing him over the rim of the glass. “I should’ve pushed you in that day.”

  “I can’t deny that you had every right to. But I really was trying to do the right thing. Even if you’d gone ahead and gone to Oxford for your MA, then married me, we’d have ended up in the same place with the same problem.”

  “Did you know at the time you were joining the Peace Corps?”

  “I’d considered it after a recruiter came to UW career day,” he admitted. “Because I had the ag education and thought I could help. But I hadn’t made up my mind until that day at the lake.”

  “You wanted to make sure you put enough space between us that I couldn’t track you down and convince you to change your mind about marrying me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were right,” she said.

  “About which part?”

  “Us needing to talk.” She shook her head. “We didn’t do enough talking back then.”

  “We never had the time.”

  “True. When we were younger, we had to sneak away, then whenever you came back east—”

  “We had better things to do.”

  The wicked gleam in his gaze heated her from the inside out. “As you pointed out, we were both young. We’d only ever been with each other,” she said.

  “I’ve still only ever been with you.”

  “Honestly?”

  “My hand to God.”

  “I had revenge sex,” Sarah admitted. “When I got to England.”

  “Of all the places I imagined you going in your life, a convent was never one of them,” he assured her.

  “It was only once and it was horrible. Because he wasn’t you.”

  “If that was meant to boost my ego, you succeeded,” he said.

  “Let’s start over,” she suggested. “You went to the trouble of setting up this do-over, so let’s pretend we’re back at the Parker House on that special date. We’ll talk, finish our dinner, then go upstairs and see if we can re-create the rest of that night.”

  “I like that idea. But I need to know that you’re sure. About the second part.”

  “I’ve been conflicted about many things over the years,” she said. “Wanting to have sex with you has never been one of them.”

  “You said it wasn’t going to happen,” he reminded her.

  Sarah felt her smile break free as her heart lifted. “I lied.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  EVEN AS THEY resumed eating, memories and sexual awareness sparked between them, growing so palpable, it was like a physical force as strong and wild as the sea crashing against the cliff outside the windows.

  “It’s funny, not in a ha-ha way, that you saw me as being like all those other girls,” Sarah said, topping off her wine as she tried to ignore the way his gaze warmed her aching heart.

  Oh, yes, she was going to regret all this wine drinking in the morning, but they hadn’t yet reached that familiar place where conversation between them flowed easily. Possibly, she admitted, because they’d been so young that discussions about long-term life issues had been easy to overlook. She’d chosen her path early, which he’d supported, but neither had given any thought to the logistics. Their breakup, along with her detour year, had caused her to question a great many things.

  “When I first arrived on campus, I felt so out of place I might as well have been wearing a sign saying Poor Fisherman’s Daughter.”

  “Your father’s more than a poor fisherman,” John pointed out. “He owns three boats. He’s created jobs that allow other families to have a good living.”

  “True. But as you said about wealth being relative, the school was a total culture shock. From the way people dressed, the way they talked, especially how they thought nothing of shopping for a hundred-dollar plain white cotton shirt, going out to expensive restaurants, or planning spring break to Europe or some white-beach Caribbean island. While other students like me couldn’t afford to go home for spring break or even Thanksgiving.

  “I struggled with everything, including how to pay for books. I’d always been the smart girl, but suddenly I was questioning my identity, embarrassed by my socioeconomic background while at the same time feeling guilty for trying to transcend it.”

  “I wish you’d told me.”

  “I wish I had, too.” Sarah didn’t know what he could have done about her situation, or even if he could have truly understood it. But John would have been a good sounding board. “At the same time, I fell in love with so much about the school. You were right about it being like some 1800s English estate. There were times when I felt as if I’d traveled back in time. Though by having to work, it was as if I were constantly bouncing back and forth between my ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ lives.

  “But going out to the lake or strolling through the meadows carried me far away from my parents’ worrying about literally keeping Dad’s boats afloat and, during short seasons, or seasons with a lot of storms, how to pay the mortgage.” The lake especially had always been a special place, much like the setting she’d imagined Mr. Darcy had chosen for his second proposal to Elizabeth.

  “Which had you feeling guilty about enjoying yourself.”
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  And didn’t that guilt still sting? Just a little? She lifted her glass to him. “You do know me well.”

  “Not well enough, apparently. I never had a clue.”

  She lifted a shoulder. “You weren’t supposed to. But by the end, when I showed you around, I’d found my own ways to fit in.”

  “It was the same in Nepal,” he said. “In the beginning, my language skills were terrible, and a tall white guy like me obviously stands out, so everywhere I went, people would look at me like I’d landed from some spaceship. Everyone watched everything I did. I felt under a microscope.

  “But there’s a solitude in those mountains, a mindfulness, that changes the way you look at life. By the end of my two years, I’d found a way to fit in by focusing more on what we had in common, that while it sounds like a cliché, people tend to be the same everywhere. They have the same hopes and dreams, especially for their children, and the desire to love one another.”

  “And speaking of love...” He held out a hand.

  She took her paper napkin from her lap, placed it on the table and stood up. “Yes.”

  * * *

  HE DIDN’T CARRY her up the stairs, like Rhett had Scarlett, in what had to be the most memorable, literal sweep-the-woman-off-her-feet moment in history. Rather, hand in hand, they walked up the stairs to his room, which on some level she noticed had been painted a deep blue and had paintings of stormy sea and tall ships she guessed had been painted by his brother. She watched as he stripped off the blue-and-white quilt, folded back a crisp top sheet that matched the walls. Then lit the kindling beneath the logs stacked in yet another of the house’s fireplaces. His movements were deliberate, as if giving her time to change her mind.

  Which she had no intention of doing.

  Finally, he went into the bathroom and returned with a strip of condoms he placed on the black bedside table before coming over to stand in front of her.

  “They’re Mike’s.” He answered her unspoken question. “In case you think I’ve been carrying them around with me the last two years in case I got lucky. I asked him to bring some.”