"Maura, men expect more now. It's not like it was in our parochial high school. I'm afraid he'll want more than you can give."
But Maura was shaking her head. Clearly she wasn't going to believe Kathleen's theory that Xan had cold-bloodedly sat down and thought out exactly what would put him in a good light as far as Maura was concerned, and then had done it. He'd sent Golden to her, and Maura, in her rush of gratitude, had softened toward him.
Unaware of the cynical thoughts running through her sister's head, Maura put a reassuring hand on Kathleen's arm. "Don't worry, I can handle Xan. Really." Even while she was trying to communicate her confidence, Maura saw that she had failed abysmally.
Kathleen was more worried than ever, wishing she'd been more explicit about her opinion of Xan's intentions but knowing it wouldn't have done one bit of good. Maura was accustomed to seeking out the best in people, and she would do the same with Xan Copeland.
In the meantime, Maura tossed her comb, brush, and wallet into a purse and burrowed into the depths of the vanity cabinet to find a small packet of tissues, humming to herself in a way that she hoped would set Kathleen's mind at rest.
As Maura waited for Xan to arrive, Kathleen hovered over her almost like an anxious mother seeing her young teenager off on her first date. Maura wished Kathleen would stop following her around the house, all but clucking like a mother hen, and most of all she wished Xan would hurry up. Finally she even wished that she had told Xan she'd walk to his villa, just to spare herself from Kathleen's cloying over-protectiveness.
And then suddenly he was there, striding toward the door looking sleekly handsome in an open-throated white shirt that contrasted boldly with his tan. Maura had to catch her breath at the beauty of him.
In that instant, confronted by the reality of Xan and not just the idea of him, Maura understood a glimmering of what Kathleen had been saying. She realized all at once how utterly protected she had always been, first by her home life, then by the convent. Man-woman relationships, up until now, had been somebody else's fantasy.
It was a lot to flash through her mind in those few moments as Xan strode between his car and the front door, but she shot Kathleen a mute look, and in that look Kathleen saw at least some part of the understanding that she'd tried to impart. She fervently hoped it would be enough.
* * *
"Mmm, you look wonderful," Xan told Maura as he held the door of his gleaming Lexus. He drove the short distance to his villa on the ocean and came around to open the door for her after he pulled into his garage. He smelled of aftershave, a light outdoorsy scent redolent with woodsy overtones. Too late, Maura wished that she'd borrowed some of Kathleen's cologne.
Xan's house was a two-story structure of cedar siding silvered like a piece of driftwood washed up from the sea. It was a light, open, airy place, with windows angled toward the ocean to take advantage of the view, and with sweeping decks cooled by the salty breeze from the sea. The deck outside the living room overlooked the dunes, and this was where Xan grilled their steaks.
"Sit down here beside me while I keep an eye on our dinner," he suggested, pulling a pair of deck chairs close. He went back into the house, whistling, and emerged with a wine bottle and two cut-crystal glasses.
"Wine with dinner is all right with you, I presume?" he asked, slanting a questioning look in her direction. She nodded. He popped the cork and poured with practiced aplomb. Maura found herself holding her stemmed wineglass between thumb and forefinger and swirling its ruby contents as though she drank wine with dinner every evening.
And then he lit candles on a nearby table, and they sat and ate their dinner with the song of the sea for background music. She felt herself relaxing and unwinding, perhaps from the wine, perhaps from the delightful ambience of candle glow on weathered wood, the tang of sea air, and a handsome male face expressing pleasure in her company.
"So tell me, how does a registered nurse learn midwifery?" he asked when they'd eaten and were watching the candles build up odd windswept runnels of wax as they burned low in their holders.
"I thought we weren't going to talk about things like that," she objected. It was too pleasant an evening to ruin with arguments.
"Can't we talk about them if we don't snap at each other? I'm on my best behavior tonight," and he smiled at her appealingly, the cleft in his chin deepening in the flickering candlelight.
"I was working as a nurse," she said, remembering. She left out the part about being a nun, which she couldn't talk about without telling about leaving the convent. That was a subject too painful to explore.
"I worked in the hospital delivery room, and I admired the courage of women who were about to give birth. They drew on a strength they never knew they had, most of them, and there was something noble about them in my eyes. I found myself forging a bond with those women, and yet when it was time for the baby to be born, the responsibility was shifted to someone else—the attending doctor." She stopped, thinking that perhaps she had gone too far.
But an understanding light flared in his eyes, and he said, "Go on."
"For a long time I wanted to expand on my relationships with these new mothers, but I didn't know how. Then a woman who was a midwife came into the delivery room as a coach for a mother who had been going to have a home birth but had to come to the hospital because of a complication. That's when I knew that it wasn't enough just to be the nurse in the delivery room anymore. I wanted to be a midwife. And so I did, and I've never been sorry."
"And then you decided to start your own practice?"
Maura nodded. There had been more to it. She'd lobbied within the convent to institute an outreach program so that her patients could give birth in the comfort and privacy of their homes. Her fellow sisters in the convent had been delighted when Maura's outreach program became a huge success. But she didn't want to go into all that now. Her outreach practice in midwifery had ultimately culminated in failure. Unfortunately, the failure dominated her thoughts whenever she allowed herself to think about it.
"It seems to me," Xan said, looking thoughtful, "that you might have done better to stay where midwives are more accepted."
She stiffened. She dropped her eyes so that her straight lashes cast spiked shadows on her high cheekbones. If she wanted to tell him the whole story, this was the perfect time.
"I—I couldn't stay there, Xan," she said painfully. Wind chimes in the background filled an uneasy silence.
Xan knitted his brows. It was clear that he had said the wrong thing. He gave her time to elaborate, but she seemed to be undergoing a mental struggle, and then the light dawned. She had no doubt left California because of a broken love affair. Why else would her face have undergone such a transformation? She looked miserable, her whole expression twisted with inner pain. He wanted to comfort her.
"If you'd like to talk about it, it's all right," he said gently. If the table hadn't been between them, he would have gathered her into his arms and let her pour her heart out. Instead, he reached across the table and covered her hand with his.
The action seemed to distract her. "Not right now," she said quickly, trying to disguise her lapse of control. It wasn't that he lacked caring or understanding, but her leaving of the convent was personal and infinitely profound in its effect on her life.
He thought he saw a glaze of tears in her eyes before she blinked them away, and he wanted to kill the bastard, whoever he was. In a surge of protectiveness, he determined to know the whole story someday, and then he would hold her close and reassure her that she was beautiful and desirable and loved, no matter what the guy had done to her.
"It's all right," he said thickly. "I'm glad you're here, not there."
Maura swallowed and lifted her eyes to him, surprised at the solicitude she saw there. Why, it really did matter to him that she had been through this trouble, even though he didn't know what it was! She hadn't expected this empathy from Xan Copeland, but it warmed her heart to him in a way that nothing else could have.
She turned her palm up and squeezed his hand in a gesture that meant more to him than a hundred superficial confidences or a thousand whispered love words. He was deeply touched by her silence, which because of the interplay of their hands was more eloquent than words.
"Let's go for a walk on the beach," he said quietly. "Sometimes I see deer running along the shore. It's a sight I'd like to share with you."
The moon cast a shimmering silver path on the ocean as they walked along the hard-packed sand past neighboring villas, each lit from within so that they looked like a string of lanterns at the edge of the sea.
"Last time we walked on the beach," said Maura, "we talked about me. What about your childhood?"
Xan's hand captured hers, his fingers lacing through her fingers as they walked. "My parents died in a freak ski-lift accident when I was a baby, so I had only Aunt Lucy—my great-aunt, really. We lived in Aunt Lucy's big old house on Broad Street in the historic section of Charleston."
"Kathleen took me on a tour of the historic section when I first arrived here. Those gracious old homes are beautiful. I can't believe you actually were fortunate enough to live in one!" Pictures of a young Xan sprang into mind: Xan sliding down great swooping curved banisters; Xan peering over pierced brick walls through loops of lavender wisteria blossoms; Xan barefoot and swinging on heavy wrought-iron gates.
Xan grimaced. Clearly his mental pictures of his childhood were not the same as Maura's. "We were genteel, but not wealthy. The windows were draped in musty worn velvet that crumbled into dust if I ran my fingers along its nap, and Aunt Lucy served our meals on sterling-silver pieces that had to be polished and polished to the point of utter boredom."
"I take it that polishing the silver was your job?"
He chuckled. "I'm afraid so. The meals we ate off that family silver were inelegant in the extreme. For a long time I thought everyone ate hot dogs off ornate silver salvers and ladled watery soup from bone china tureens."
"Don't they?" Maura asked innocently.
"Maybe in Truman Capote novels. Anyway, Aunt Lucy died in my last year of medical school, leaving an assortment of debts that took me years to pay off."
"I'm sorry," Maura murmured.
"I'd always planned to start an ob-gyn practice in Shuffletown. When I found out that she'd mortgaged the house for living expenses and my education, I almost had to give up on the idea. The real estate market had tanked, and the house was mortgaged for more than it was worth."
"You could have made more money practicing obstetrics somewhere else," Maura pointed out.
"Yeah, I was tops in my class, and I was offered jobs with established medical practices in Atlanta, New York, and various cities east and west. I turned them all down. I was in a financial bind for a long time, but I paid off all the creditors."
"Why didn't you go to work for someone else for a little while? Until you paid off the money? You probably could have paid those debts a lot faster, and then you would have been free to start your practice in Shuffletown." Maura looked up at him. His chin was firm, and there was a determined spark in his eyes.
"That's what my fiancée said," he said.
"Your fiancée?" The word was difficult to say.
"Well, Celia was my fiancée at the time. She couldn't bear the idea of living quite that frugally, so when I told her I was going to open my practice in Shuffletown, she decamped."
"Oh. That's too bad." It was all Maura could think of to say.
"It was the best thing for both of us, I'm sure. She eventually married a wealthy man, and they have three well-behaved children, four status-symbol cars, and six homes, one to suit her every whim. For her, it's a far cry from Shuffletown. And I—well, there's never really been room for a woman in my life since then. I'm married to my practice, I suppose."
They walked on until they reached the jetty, where Xan suggested they turn back.
"Why is your practice so important to you?" Maura asked after a while. She looked up at him curiously.
"Most doctors don't want to work in Shuffletown. Medicine isn't about making money, although I'm doing well now. Medicine is for helping people."
"Oh, Xan, that's exactly how I feel! If only..." but her sentence died before she could utter it. She had been about to say, "If only we could work together." But with their different viewpoints, that was impossible.
Instead, she asked him more about his childhood. Xan found her easy to talk to and was forthcoming about his childhood dream of becoming a doctor. "It was what I wanted from the time I was about six," he said. "I never told anyone because there wasn't anyone to tell. Aunt Lucy was busy with her church groups and bridge club. She did her best, but she wasn't much company for a young boy."
He'd spoken of his boyhood loneliness many times before, to many different women, but this time he felt like cutting the story short. He had always been well aware that his orphaned state made him the object of much sympathy, and that worked well in his favor. By talking about it now, he knew that Maura, as kind and nurturing as she was, would be over-influenced by it. And he wanted her to care for him on his own merits, not because of some overblown story of his life that he had used too many times for its emotional effect. The old games and gimmicks didn't work with her. He wasn't sure if this was good or bad.
As Xan spoke, Maura was once more very much aware of her attraction to him. She found herself wanting to feel his arms around her, and her skin prickled with the electricity of being near him. With embarrassment, she remembered the naiveté of her earlier assurances to Kathleen.
But how, she wondered in sheer desperation, was she supposed to learn all the things that most other women learned by osmosis and by living day by day? Her contemporaries were either married or single, many of them divorced and veterans of various love affairs ranging from the casual one-night stand to the liaison with a married man to the long-term commitment. Where did Maura fit into this complicated world? How was she going to catch up?
She hadn't thought she'd be confronted with this issue so early. She had planned to sidestep all of it for as long as she could. What she hadn't counted on was the entry of a handsome eligible man into her life.
Just then Xan stopped walking, and his hand slipped from hers and slid around her shoulders. "Look," he said, pointing with his free hand toward the beach ahead of them.
A solitary white-tailed deer stood at the edge of the sea, its head raised. It was utterly beautiful in its innocence as it stood before the path of the moon spread out over the gently undulating water. Maura had to catch her breath at the sight. As they watched, the deer wheeled and trotted along the shore, then turned and walked gracefully toward the dunes where it disappeared, after one last look toward them, into a thicket of wax myrtle.
Xan said, "Often when I come home late at night, I'll sit out on the deck, especially if it's been a difficult delivery. It's so peaceful and quiet, and drinking in the beauty of this place helps me to relax. Deer slip in and out of the dunes like moonlit phantoms. Sometimes in the morning I'll find their footprints leading right up to my house."
They were approaching his house now. His arm remained around her shoulders, comfortable there. "What an enchanting house it is," said Maura, admiring the set of it from where they walked.
"I designed it myself," he said. "I wanted something that would display the sea to its best advantage and where I could include the natural beauty of this island as part of the decor."
Maura thought about the furnishings she'd seen inside. There was old mixed with new, grass cloth on the walls, dark wood tones interspersed with light. "You've succeeded," she told him. "It suits you."
They mounted the stairs to the deck, and Xan opened the sliding glass door. She entered, not really knowing what was expected of her. Xan probably entertained women here all the time—women who knew much more than she did about talking to a man. She wondered what those other women were like. Sophisticated, probably, and wearing stylish clothes instead of hand-me-do
wns from a sister. They'd be trailing expensive fragrances as they walked, such as Chanel No. 5 or—well, she didn't know the names of any other expensive perfumes.
Waiting for some clue from him, watching him covertly as he slid the door closed behind them, she wandered awkwardly to the lighted curio cabinet, its open shelves displaying unusually crafted pottery jugs.
"What are these?" she asked, picking one up and turning it to observe it better. It felt cool and smooth against her hands. The small stoneware jug wasn't much larger than a coffee mug and modeled with a face on the side opposite the handle.
"It's a face vessel. I collect African-American art of the type made by South Carolina slaves. Do you like it?" Xan had moved close behind her.
"Yes," she said. She liked the drollness of the face, which seemed an expression of the artist's sense of humor. She probably would never have thought of this simple pottery as art, although of course it was. She didn't really understand most art. But this, a piece she could put her hands on, she did understand.
"Let me show you some more of the things I've collected," Xan said, replacing the jug on its shelf. He took her hand and led her up a flight of stairs to a landing where overhead spotlights shone on a quilt whose colorfully appliquéd blocks told the story of slave life.
"Here are a man and woman jumping over a broom," Xan said, pointing to one square. "That's how slaves used to get married. In the days when slaves were often ignored by the church, jumping over a broom was a tradition left over from Africa and the only ceremony many of them had." He pointed to another square. "Here's a cotton field, and the workers with their long sacks are picking cotton. This is a very old quilt, made by a slave in 1859."
Up the next flight of stairs, a collection of interesting baskets hung on the wall. Maura followed Xan as he led the way. "These are baskets woven by the women in Shuffletown. They sell them to tourists in Charleston, but I received them as a fee for delivering babies. The parents were too poor to pay me, but I was happy to get these instead of money."
Cherished Beginnings Page 10