by Meg Cabot
God! Why was she such a paranoid freak?
“Oh, dear,” Eleanor said, glancing down at her bag, which was bulging again. “Alessandro’s getting over-heated. We’d better go, Frank.”
“Okay,” Lou’s father said. Then, giving her a pat on the cheek, he said, “We’ll be waiting outside when they discharge you, honey. We’ll make sure you get back to the hotel safe.”
Sure. Because Jack wasn’t around anymore to do it.
But Lou managed a smile and wave, and they left, convinced she was all right.
And she was. Or she would be. After all, she was one tough cookie. She’d survived seventy-two hours on Mount McKinley. She’d survived a mine blast. She’d survived Bruno di Blase. She could survive Jack Townsend. No problem.
It was sort of ironic that, as Lou was thinking this, Bruno di Blase himself pushed open the door to her exam room and came in, holding a bouquet of pink carnations he’d obviously bought at the hospital gift shop.
“Knock, knock,” he said, smiling so that all his capped white teeth showed. “How’s my little detective doing? You know, it’s all over the news, what you did.”
Lou just stared at him. Really, she was thinking. Really, it’s not enough that she had broken her ankle in two places, survived a murder attempt, and endured the apparent abandonment of the man she’d thought quite possibly might be Mr. Right. Now she had to be visited by her ex-boyfriend, on top of everything else?
“These are for you,” Barry said, lifting the lid from the water pitcher the nurse had left for Lou to drink from, and standing the flowers in it. “I know roses are your favorite, but the hospital gift shop doesn’t have roses. So. How does it feel?”
Lou looked down at her torn panty hose and grossly swollen ankle. “How do you think it feels, Barry?” she demanded. “It hurts like hell.”
“Oh, not that,” Barry said, looking unaccountably nervous. “I mean about…well, you know. Stopping a coldblooded murderer in his tracks.”
Lou said, drily, “Not as great as you might think.”
“Well, you should be feeling on top of the world,” Barry said while walking over to the exam table she was lying on, and sitting down on it without asking her if it was all right, of course. “You can bet you’re going to have producers crawling all over you, wanting to develop a deal. People are calling it the story of the year. Of course, you knew it was going to have to happen sometime. Jack Townsend never has been able to keep it in his pants. It was just a matter of time until he made someone mad enough to kill him.”
“Barry.” Lou had been polite to her other visitors because…well, because she liked them. She suffered no such weakness for Barry. “What do you want?”
He looked startled. “Want? I want to make sure you’re all right, of course. I mean, Lou, we’re still friends, aren’t we? I mean, ten years. You can’t just throw ten years down the drain.”
“Why not?” Lou demanded. “You did.”
“Well.” Barry looked down at his hands. She could see it coming before it even went up over his face: his contrite expression. Good God, she thought to herself. Barry is going to apologize.
“Lou,” he said. “I don’t know quite how to say this. But the fact is…well, I may have been a bit hasty when I moved out. I was confused. I hadn’t really thought things through. Things with Greta…well, to be frank, things with Greta have not been all that great.”
Lou said, “Barry. You’ve been married to her for four days. How bad can things have gotten?”
“Well,” Barry said, with his trademark quick, charming smile. “I’m here with you, and I’m supposed to be on my honeymoon. If that’s any indication.”
Lou blinked at him. That’s when she realized it was gone. Her animosity towards him, that is. It was gone, and it had been replaced by a feeling of tolerance…like what she felt for her brothers, only not quite as fond.
“You haven’t given Greta enough of a chance, Barry,” she said.
“I have, though.” Barry got up quickly, jostling Lou’s foot. She barely heard him through the haze of pain she was in as he exclaimed, “I don’t know what I was thinking, leaving you for her. She’s nothing like you, Lou. All she thinks about is herself. Everything is always Greta, Greta, Greta. She never thinks about me. You, Lou. You used to think about me. You wrote Hindenburg for me. That has got to have been the greatest gift any man has ever received from a woman. And like a fool, I took that gift, but I made the most unforgivable mistake a man could make. I threw the giver away. Lou.” Barry swept up one of her hands. “Can you ever forgive me for my stupidity?”
“Yeah,” Lou said, still cross-eyed with pain. “Whatever. Do you think you could maybe find a nurse, or something? My foot really—”
“Do you mean it?” Barry exclaimed, crushing her hand to his chest. “Oh, Lou, if you would take me back, this would truly be the greatest moment of my life. You could get to work on the Pompeii screenplay, and everything will be like it was—”
“Wait a minute,” Lou said confusedly. “What are you—?”
“I knew you’d forgive me,” Barry cried. Then he leaned down as if to kiss her—
Lou, with a reflex she never even knew she had, reached out, grabbed the water pitcher filled with carnations, and dumped it over his head.
At that very moment, the door to her examination room opened, and Jack Townsend, his arms filled with what had to have been at least four dozen pink roses, came into the room.
“Hello,” he said, his blue-eyed gaze going from Lou, lying on the exam table and still clutching the water pitcher, to Barry, looking very surprised, with carnations and water all over him. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Lou said, at the same time Barry barked, “Yes!”
Jack sauntered over to the steel table in the corner that held glass jars of gauze and tongue depressors and set the flowers down.
“Sorry I was gone for so long,” he said to Lou. “You know how hard it is to find decent roses in this town?”
Lou, looking from the pile of flowers to the man who’d brought them, felt her eyes begin to brim with tears. Oh, great. She was crying again.
“They’re beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Well,” Jack said with a shrug. “They’re your favorite, right?” He looked at Barry, who was still plucking sodden carnations from his shirt front.
“Uh, Barry,” he said. “Do you think you could give Lou and me a couple minutes alone?”
Only then did Barry seem to register the meaning behind Jack’s presence, the roses, and the happy flush on Lou’s face. He himself turned an unattractive shade of red as he blurted, “Oh, great. That’s just great, Lou. You’re taking up with him? Are you insane? He’s broken the heart of every woman in Hollywood. I mean, just ask Greta.”
Lou did not even have to reply. Jack did so for her.
“You,” Jack said, lifting a hand and pointing at Barry, the wounds on his knuckles from where he’d hit Tim Lord still raw and undressed. “Get out.”
Barry took a quick step backwards. Then, with a hasty glance at Lou, he said, “Fine. Fine, I’m leaving. But Lou, you’re making a big mistake.”
Then, with one last frightened glance in Jack’s direction, Barry hightailed it from the room.
When the door closed behind him, Jack looked down at Lou and said, “He’s right.”
She picked up his hand and studied the cuts on his knuckles. “You should have someone look at these,” she said.
“I mean it,” Jack said, pulling a nearby examination stool towards Lou’s bed and perching on it. “I haven’t exactly ever been…well, in a long-term relationship before.”
Lou looked up at his face. Someone had tried to clean it up—maybe Jack himself—but there was still a layer of soot around his hairline that didn’t look as if it would ever come out.
“They aren’t necessarily all they’re cracked up to be. Long-term relationships, I mean,” she said. “Believe me.”
“But I don’t think that would be true for us,” he said, simply and sincerely. “It’s different with you, Lou. I never…I mean, with Vicky, and Greta, and Melanie…I didn’t love any of them. But you…It’s different with you.”
She stared at him, forgetting her ankle, forgetting his hand, forgetting even to breathe, forgetting everything except the fact that suddenly, the happy ending she’d once thought would never be hers seemed to be almost within reach.
“Because I love you,” he went on, his gaze on her face. “So about this moving in together thing. I know you’ve tried it before and it didn’t work out. So I was thinking, maybe we should try it a different way. I was thinking we should get married first. Because neither of us have tried that before, and I don’t know, I’m thinking that it might work out better—”
Lou had to blink back another wave of tears. It was not the proposal that she’d have written for him.
But the fact that he had come up with it all on his own and that it had clearly come from the heart was good enough for her.
She said, in a choked voice, “Okay. That sounds good. But just one thing.”
A look of anxiety replaced the wave of radiant joy that had been on his face a second before.
“What?” he asked cautiously.
“No more movies,” Lou said.
“You got that right,” he said and bent down to kiss her so deeply, so passionately, that when the head nurse entered the examination room a minute later, they did not even hear her approach, much less her embarrassed departure.
That kiss, though Jack and Lou never knew it, was the talk of the nursing staff for weeks.
34
Academy Award-winning director Tim Lord was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. He is currently serving ten to twenty in an Alaskan federal prison. His final film, Copkiller IV, was released one month after his trial and was one of the highest grossing movies ever released, despite the fact that environmentalists worldwide boycotted it.
Seven natives of Myra, Alaska, were likewise convicted in criminal court on charges of manslaughter, attempted murder, illegal weapons possession, and menacing. The children of Samuel Kowalski successfully sued them, as well as Tim Lord, in civil court for the murder of their father, and won a settlement sizable enough for them to pay off the mortgage on their family home, and to pay for beauty and technical college for them all.
Vicky Lord quietly divorced her husband and has since disappeared from Hollywood and the film business. Her wedding to Sheriff Walter O’Malley was a private affair, attended only by Deputy Lippincott and Walter O’Malley’s four daughters, all of whom were very grateful to Vicky for taking their widowed father off their hands.
Elijah Lord and his brothers and sisters elected not to return to their respective mothers after their father’s conviction, but to continue residing in Tim Lord’s house under the parental supervision of the only stable influence they had ever known, their housekeeper, Lupe.
Donald R. Williams, owner of the hunting cabin in which Jack Townsend and Lou Calabrese sought safety from the cold, was quite astonished to find their check upon his return to his cabin in the spring. Nevertheless, he cashed it and used the money to put a down payment on an all-terrain vehicle he’d had his eye on for some time.
Bruno di Blase and Greta Woolston divorced six weeks after their elopement, citing irreconcilable differences. Greta is currently in Australia filming a movie based on the life of Eva Braun. Bruno di Blase has yet to find a studio willing to option his first screenplay, entitled Pompeii!
Frank Calabrese returned to Long Island after his Alaskan adventure, where his sons greeted him with a six-foot-long “big” sandwich and a brand-new power mower. Frank enjoyed the sandwich very much, but he told them he wasn’t going to have much use for the lawnmower. He was, he explained, moving to Manhattan.
Eleanor Townsend did not particularly care what any of her friends had to say about the fact that a retired New York City police sergeant was moving in with her, though she did worry what her butler and son would think. Richards, however, only expressed his hope that Mrs. Townsend would find joy, while Jack merely suggested that the pair might be happier if they married one another. Neither Eleanor nor Frank are ready to rush into anything that permanent, however.
Jack Townsend, true to his word, gave up his film career, as well as his ranch in Salinas and home in the Hollywood Hills, opting instead for a farmhouse in Vermont, where he moved with his wife shortly after their quiet wedding in the bride’s hometown. Jack restored an old movie theater and reopened it under the name of the Dakota Playhouse, which has become quite well known for its annual Shakespeare festival, all productions of which are directed by former action-adventure star Jack Townsend, who’s been found, to the surprise of theater critics everywhere, to have a real genius for stage direction.
Lou Calabrese Townsend sold her bungalow in Sherman Oaks and relocated with her husband and his horses to New England, where she quit writing screenplays. Soon after the birth of their first daughter, Sara, Lou’s first novel was published. The novel, She Went All the Way, describes a woman’s realization that, to find happiness, she had to risk her heart in order to gain what she treasured most.
Though the book has enjoyed considerable popular success, the author refuses to relinquish the screen rights to the story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank the following people for their help and support: Beth Ader, Jennifer Brown, SWAT officer Matt Cabot, Bill Contardi, Carrie Feron, Michele Jaffe, Laura Langlie, and David Walton.
About the Author
MEGGIN CABOT is the author of the phenomenally successful Princess Diaries series and has written several historical romances as Patricia Cabot. This is her debut contemporary romance. She lives with her husband in New York City. Visit Meggin at her website at www.megcabot.com.
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This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
SHE WENT ALL THE WAY. Copyright © 2002 by Meggin Cabot. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition December 2004 ISBN 9780061751769
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