The waltz was nearly over and they hadn't exchanged a word. Quinta wondered whether Alan was always this way—so concentrated, so intense. Maybe that was how America's Cup skippers were. But no: she'd seen him murmuring pleasantly with Mavis Moran as he danced with her, and with the young woman in the receiving line from the something-Industrial Corporation. So it must be Quinta's fault: he was assuming she couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time.
Well, she thought happily, he's right. She wanted the moment to stay perfect, and who knew where chit-chat might lead them.
When the dance was over he gave her a light and courtly bow, a replica of the one he'd bestowed on her three years earlier. Was he making fun of the article she'd written about him? She muttered, in some confusion, "What's new with you, Alan? Has the pizza man struck again?"
He looked surprised. "Yesterday, as a matter of fact. If you don't mind my saying so, you sound like an obvious suspect." He was smiling as he said it, but his blue eyes looked puzzled.
"I'm innocent, honest," she said quickly. "I must have practical jokers on the brain; we've had one hard on our trail lately." She added, "I didn't mean to pry."
The orchestra struck up another dance, a tango this time. The ballroom floor began immediately to empty. Alan said, "This isn't my cup of tea. Do you mind if we sit this one out?"
She was about to ask, Together? but stopped herself in time.
He led her through French doors which opened out onto a modest terrace, not so small that it would be considered intimate, not so large that it invited curious onlookers. The night was deeply starry; a breeze lifted the folds of her long skirt and ruffled the jeweled sleeves of her top, sending pinpoints of starlight shimmering from her neckline. The setting was impossibly romantic. Quinta took it all in, the mathematician in her calculating the odds of something like this ever happening to her again.
Alan Seton, like the rest of the Pegasus sailing crew, wore cream-colored flannels and a blue blazer, the more easily to stand out from the black-tie guests. The night was warm. He took off his jacket and threw it on the stone balustrade, then loosened his tie.
"I suppose I should be grateful that I don't have to wear a monkey suit," he said with a sigh. "You look extremely fetching, by the way. I found myself staring at you before I knew who you were."
"And after you found out?" she asked, not at all coyly.
"I did a double-take."
"Because?"
"Because you're a kid, or supposed to be, and you're not anymore, that's all." He laughed softly, more to himself than to her. "I don't think you understand how deeply ingrained a certain picture of you is in my mind. In my mind you'll always be wearing ratty jeans and have your hair in ... in bangs, I think," he said, struggling to translate his vision of her into words. "You symbolized something to me that night of the accident, something very special—a kind of life-must-go-on-attitude that carried me through some hard decisions. I think you still have whatever it was I saw in you, except that the wrapping is fancier now."
He reached up and with the lightest possible touch lifted a strand of her hair and let it fall over her forehead, the way she let it do years ago. "There. You wore it something like that, he said softly. "Not so pulled back."
"I was a child," she whispered, faint with pleasure.
"And now you're not. I know." He swept her face with a searching look, as if he were making sure of it; and then he lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her on her lips, in a gentle, almost melancholy acknowledgment of her womanliness.
To be kissed on a starry balcony at a ball is not the same as being kissed on the steps of your front porch. She held her breath, afraid to move, afraid to think. If God were in His heaven, Alan Seton would never let go.
Instead, he drew from her and said murmured, "Why did I do that?" He was as much amazed as she was. "What a dumb thing to do."
"It wasn't that bad," she whispered, suddenly crestfallen.
"Ah, Quinta ... this isn't the time; certainly not the place." He looked around quickly. "I have no right to take your life out of your hands and pass it on to the media. Forgive me."
"I passed a piece of your life on to the media," she reminded him promptly. "And I'm not sorry."
"My life's fair game," he said with a crooked smile. "But yours—yours is precious to me."
"If it's so precious, why didn't you ever call or write?" she blurted out.
"I did write."
"To my father."
He laughed a short, bemused, frustrated laugh. "What was my relationship to you then? Friendly Dutch uncle?"
"Friend. Period," she shot back.
He repeated the word after her: "'Friend.' I don't think I have any of those."
"You mean you don't have time for any of those."
He grinned. "What a little scold you are."
She colored, then replied, "It comes from living with my father." It was her greatest fear: that she'd live out her years as an unmarried nag.
"I think you're the best thing that could happen to your father. He'd be crazy to ease you out," Alan added, lifting his hand and tracing her lips with a feather-light touch of his forefinger.
"Who says he's—?"
"Darling," came a voice behind Quinta. "People are beginning to grumble. I hate to tear you away, but the dog-and-pony show really must go on."
Quinta turned guiltily away from Alan and to see Mavis Moran, an iceberg on fire, smiling at them. There was no question in Quinta's mind that her father's gossipy speculations about the two were right on the money. So: she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Feeling very much like Cinderella at 11:59 P.M., she mumbled a flustered good night and left them on the terrace.
An Excerpt from A CHARMED PLACE
Antoinette Stockenberg
"Buy this book! A truly fantastic read!"
--Suzanne Barr, Gulf Coast Woman
USA TODAY bestselling author Antoinette Stockenberg delivers an original and wonderfully romantic story of two people -- college lovers separated for twenty years -- who have the chance to be happy together at last. But family, friends, an ex-husband, a teenaged daughter and an unsolved murder seem destined to keep the lovers star-crossed, until Dan takes up residence in the Cape Cod lighthouse, with Maddie's rose-covered cottage just a short walk away ...
****
"Oh, pooh," said Joan in a disappointed voice. "He has a woman with him."
"What? Let me have those," said Norah, snatching the binoculars back from Joan with such vigor that she knocked Joan off balance.
"Watch it!" Joan snapped. The edge in her usually soft-pitched voice was a clear sign, at least to Maddie, that Norah had gone over the line again.
He has a woman with him.
Norah stared intently through the binoculars. After a thoughtful silence she said, "Hard to say. If she's his lover, she's not a recent one. They seem too used to one another. She's leaning against the mud shed with her hands in the pockets of her sundress, mostly listening to him—the wind just blew her dress up; great legs—and nodding once in a while. I get the sense that she's just soaking him up. As if they go back together."
Norah looked up for a moment. "I'm right that he never married?"
Joan said, "Not as far as I know. He made People's most-eligible list a few years ago—after the War—but then he kind of faded. So it's possible he went off and did something stupid, but I doubt it. We would've read about a wedding, in People if not in Newsweek. I imagine he was just living with someone. Probably her."
Joan rose up on tiptoe, trying for the same vantage over the café curtains that Norah had. In heels, Joan was able to manage an inch or two over five feet, but today she was wearing sandals. She was short. Her two best friends were tall. It made her peppery sometimes.
"Norah, would you mind?" Joan asked in a dangerously mild voice. "They're my binoculars, after all."
She reached for them but Norah shooed her away with her elbow, the way she might a pesky terrier. Maddie stepped
in, as she always did, to keep the peace. She took the binoculars.
"All right, you two clowns. Have a little dignity."
With Norah, dignity was always in short supply. She proved it now by nodding slyly toward the lighthouse. "Check it out—if you're not too prim."
Probably she'd used the exact same line on half the men she'd dated; Norah had no reason to be shy. With her knockout figure, creamy skin, red, red hair and full red lips, she was the kind of woman who made men take off their wedding rings and hide them in their hip pockets.
But Maddie was not, and never would be, Norah.
"Why are you being such a pain, Nor?"
"You're abnormal, you know that? Anyone else would look. Prim, prim, prim."
With an angry, heavy sigh, Maddie accepted the binoculars and aimed them in the general direction of the lighthouse. Her sense of dread ran deep. She did not want to gape at the man and did not want, most of all, to gape at the woman. What was the point? It would be like staring into her own grave.
"Yes. I see him. Yes. He looks like on TV." She held the binoculars out to Norah. "Happy now?"
"What about the woman? What do you think?"
"I didn't see any woman," said Maddie, grateful that a billowing bed sheet hid all but a pair of slender ankles from view.
"No, she's there, Maddie. I can see her now, even without the binoculars. Look again," Joan urged.
It was going to be so much worse than Maddie thought. She sighed and tried to seem bored, then took the glasses back for another look. This time she was spared nothing. A slender woman of medium height was facing squarely in their direction, laughing. The wind was lifting her blunt-cut hair away from her face and plastering her pale blue sundress against her lithe body. She was the picture of vitality and high spirits. And the sight of her filled Maddie with relief.
"It's obviously his sister," she said.
"Ah, his sister. Wait—how would you know?" Norah demanded.
She walks the way he does... throws her head back when she laughs the way he does... does that jingle-change thing in her pocket the way he does. Who else could she be?
Maddie spun a plausible lie. "I overheard it in the post office yesterday. I remember now."
"I don't believe it. She's half his age."
"I doubt it."
The two were five years apart. But the sister looked young for her years, and the brother carried thoughts of war and savagery with him everywhere he went. Joan was right: he looked burned out. Maddie could see it in the apathetic lift of his shoulders after the woman said something. It was such a tired-looking shrug.
Norah was watching Maddie more carefully now. She folded her forearms across her implanted breasts and splayed her red-tipped fingers on her upper arms. "What else did you manage to ... overhear, in the post office?" The question dripped with skepticism.
Maddie met her friend's steady gaze with one almost as good. "That was pretty much it. It was crowded. You know how little the lobby is. They took the conversation outside."
"Who were they? Man? Woman? Did you recognize them from town?"
"Two women, as I recall. I didn't bother turning around to see who. As I've said, I'm not really interested."
Norah cocked her head. Her lined lips curled into a faint smile. Her eyes, the color of water found nowhere in New England, narrowed. "Really."
"Okay, they're getting into the Jeep!" Joan cried. "Now what?"
"We follow 'em. Let's go!"
Maddie stared agape as the two made a dash for the half-open Dutch door that led to the seashelled drive of the Cape Cod cottage. "Are you out of your minds? What do you hope to accomplish?"
Norah slapped the enormous glove-soft carryall she'd slung over her shoulder. "I have a camera," she said on her way out.
"You're going to photograph them?"
"If we don't, the paparazzi will!"
She had her Mercedes in gear before Joan was able to snap her seat belt shut. The top of the convertible was down, of course, the better for Norah to be seen. Maddie watched, boggled, as the two took off in a cloud of dust, Norah pumping her fist in a war whoop the whole time.
The episode bordered on the surreal: an educated, beautiful forty-year-old woman and an even more educated thirty- eight-year-old one, tracking down a media celebrity like two hound dogs after some felon in the bayou. All they needed was Maddie in the rumble seat and there they'd be: Three perfect Stooges.
She closed the lower half of the Dutch door, and then, because she felt a sudden and entirely irrational chill, closed the upper half. June meant nothing on the Cape. June could go from warm and wonderful to bone-chilling cold in the blink of an eye.
June had done just that.
By The Sea, Book Three: Laura Page 18