by Sally Mason
His gleaming tassled loafers were bought at Darcy’s urging on a trip to London.
Porter spots her and smiles, even more handsome now than when she met him a lifetime ago.
When he strolls into the coffee shop (only Darcy able to detect the very slight limp that comes from his bad knee, the injury that ended any dreams of a pro-football career) Carlotta McCourt tugs at his sleeve.
“Porter, how wonderful to see you.”
“Always a pleasure, Lottie,” he says, but he doesn’t linger and comes on over to where Darcy waits.
She stands and he plants a kiss on her cheek, that Porter scent—musky, spicy and very masculine—triggering far too many old memories.
“Let’s get out of here, Port,” she says.
“Why?”
“I feel like a walk on the beach,” she says, but she wants to get away from the toxic presence of Carlotta.
“Hell, Darce, I’m not dressed for the beach.”
“You can take your shoes off, Porter. A little beach sand won’t kill you.”
She leaves money on the table, waves to Billy and heads for the door.
Porter has no option but to follow her.
They cross the road and slip past Peggy’s Diner and then they’re on Long Beach, the sky turning from blue to orange.
Darcy steps out of her flip-flops and leaves them lying on the sand.
Porter, looking less than pleased, slips off his shoes and socks and follows Darcy onto the endless stretch of beach, empty but for a couple of surfers.
60
Carlotta McCourt is crestfallen when that little bitch Darcy leads the gorgeous Porter Pringle out of the coffee shop, toward the beach.
How cunning of Darcy to take him out there.
Carlotta is not a beach person.
She loathes the sand, finding it itchy and abrasive to her feet, and the ocean is greasy and polluted.
The only water she can tolerate is in her bathtub, after it has been treated with her many potions.
So, she is left marooned in the coffee shop, while the most gossipworthy event in the last while is taking place tantalizingly close by.
She raises her hand and clicks her fingers at the dopey Billy Bigelow.
“Another coffee, Billy. Black as night.”
Carlotta sits staring out the window and as she watches the usual small town parade she’s struck, suddenly, by how empty and useless her life is.
Her fat, ugly, husband will get fatter and uglier.
And older.
Her gruesome twins will clump off into their stolid, boring lives and—no doubt—produce gruesome children.
The thought that she will, at some point in the very foreseeable future, be a grandmother gets Carlotta’s heart racing, and she feels a panicky sweat on her forehead.
A grandmother!
When Billy arrives with her coffee she seriously considers asking him for something alcoholic.
But, no.
She has an image to preserve.
It would not do for the town to whisper about Carlotta McCourt driven to hard liquor after seeing Darcy and Porter Pringle stroll off into the sunset.
So she sips her coffee and tries to recalibrate her attitude.
And then, just like that—as if a magic wand has been waved—all her worries disappear when she sees a tall, gorgeous hunk of manflesh stride into the coffee shop, and she understands that the gossip gods are orchestrating everything perfectly.
She stands. “Mr. Forbes,” she says. “How nice to see you again.”
The man blinks at her, no recognition in his eyes.
She extends her hand.
“Carlotta McCourt. We met at the Ball.”
“Ah, yes.” He gives her hand a rather perfunctory shake. “I’m looking for Darcy Pringle. You haven’t perhaps seen her, have you?”
“Oh, I have, I have,” she says, relishing the sweetness of this moment.
“Was she here?”
“She was, until but a minute ago,” she says in her best Blanche du Bois purr.
The man barely manages his impatience.
“And where is she now?”
Carlotta wags her talons in the direction of the ocean.
“I do believe she is taking a walk on the beach.”
Without bothering to thank her Forrest Forbes hurries out of the coffee shop and jogs across the road, ignoring a couple of irate horns, and disappears in the direction Darcy and Porter were last seen heading.
Carlotta sets off in pursuit.
Scratchy sand and dirty ocean be damned, this is not something she is going to miss.
61
When Porter slips his arm through hers as they stroll along the beach, Darcy doesn’t pull away, allowing herself to feel the familiar warmth of his body.
God how she has missed him.
Get it together, girl, she tells herself, and she frees her arm from his.
“So, Port, what is it that you want to discuss?”
“I really just wanted to see you, Darce?”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I miss you.”
She laughs. “Aren’t you far too occupied to miss little old me?”
“You don’t just erase twenty years, Darce.”
She stops, looking up at him.
“Oh, but that’s exactly what you did.”
“I never meant to hurt you.”
“Come on Port, you’re not a fool. Didn’t you think that bedding your bimbo assistant and then dumping me for her would hurt just a teensy-weensy bit?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Of course you are,” she says, walking away from him.
He catches up with her and when he tries to take her arm she pushes his hand away.
“Darcy,” Porter says, “I never realized how tough my life would be without you.”
She shakes her head at his audacity.
“What, doesn’t Paige organize your closets and keep the shoe trees in your loafers?”
“Darce . . .”
The breeze picks up and she brushes a strand of hair from her face.
“Why are you doing this, Porter? Coming up here today to open wounds that have just started to heal?”
“Maybe I still have feelings for you.”
“Really?”
She injects as much scorn as she can into her voice, but her traitorous heart yearns for him, and she feels tears welling in her eyes.
He shrugs. “I do. For years you completed me.”
“You’ve really got to watch some newer movies, Port.”
“I mean it.”
She walks again, trying distance herself from the weakness within as much as from Porter, blinking away those tears.
He is beside her again.
“I did things I regret, Darcy.”
Porter puts his hands on her shoulders.
Darcy doesn’t shrug them off, and the late sun shows her his green eyes and his easy smile, and when he draws her toward him she doesn’t resist, and before she knows it she feels his lips on hers.
Her eyes close and she returns the kiss and Darcy forgets everything that has happened in this last, awful year.
62
When Forrest ducks past the diner and sees the blue water stretching out toward the horizon, seagulls wheeling in the darkening sky, he is reminded of Emily Yates, of the moment she had emerged Botticelli-like from the waves.
Why is the memory of that painful summer haunting him today like a portent?
He pushes the recollection from his mind and heads toward the beach, anxious now to find Darcy Pringle, to end this silly, messy, humiliating—and positively adolescent—love sickness.
When he found himself stranded outside her house, the garage door yawning on an empty interior, he felt both foolish and agitated, and realized the absurdity of what he was doing.
He’d jumped on a train without thinking, driven by this crazy desire to be with Darcy.
That’s what cell phones are for, bozo, he reminded himself.
But he was thwarted, again, when he dialed her number and was left listening to her voice mail.
Forrest considered banging on the door of Eric Royce’s house to see if he knew where Darcy was, but he couldn’t bear subjecting himself to the TV hack’s smug condescension.
Then he remembered Darcy telling him that each day she frequented a coffee shop in the main road of Santa Sofia.
So Forrest walked back toward town, sweating in the late afternoon sun, his shirt sticking to his back by the time he arrived at the Book & Bean—even in his disheveled and confused state he still found time to cringe at the name.
He thought all hope was lost when the coffee shop was empty save for a woman as over-painted as a Reeperbahn street walker.
It took Forrest a few moments to recognize her as Darcy’s nemesis, and when Carlotta sent him off in the direction of the beach, he wondered if this was a lie, part of some ruse to keep him and Darcy apart.
Stop being paranoid, for God’s sake.
Get a grip, man.
Forrest trudges over a low dune, sinking to his ankles in the sand, and sees the beach spread out below, washed in the rosy hues of sunset.
And he sees the unmistakable form of Darcy Pringle walking alone on the sand, her hair blowing in the wind.
“Darcy, hello!” he shouts, but the breeze throws his words back at him, and Darcy doesn’t hear.
Forrest, once again feeling that he has stumbled into an absurd romantic comedy, fights his way down the dune, scuffing and sliding, still calling Darcy’s name.
Then he sees that she is not alone, that a man has caught up with her.
A broad-shouldered man in a suit.
Porter Pringle.
And as Darcy falls into Porter’s arms and kisses him, Forrest relives the heartache and humiliation he felt in that boathouse on the Hamptons all those years ago.
63
For once Poor Billy Bigelow is utterly blameless.
He’s standing on the sidewalk outside the florist holding a bunch of flowers, waiting for a gap in Santa Sofia’s modest version of rush hour, when a man comes hurtling around the corner and collides with him, sending the blooms flying into the gutter.
When the man pauses long enough to mutter an apology, Billy knows he has seen him before, but can’t remember where.
It is only when Poor Billy kneels to gather the flowers—the florist’s neat arrangement destroyed—and shove them back in their cellophane wrapping, that he realizes that the disheveled sprinter (his hair almost as untidy as Billy’s, his shirt glued to his body by sweat) is the debonair man he saw at Darcy’s house the night before the Spring Ball.
The man who’d flashed a pitying smirk at Billy in his moment of abject humiliation.
Billy spends little time pondering the circumstances that have left the man in a state of such disarray, all his concentration is on trying to make the little bouquet look as presentable as possible, then he hurries across the road and thunders up the stairs to Brontë’s room.
He hesitates a moment at the closed door, clears his throat, runs a hand through his hair, and then, at last, raises his hand to knock.
When his knuckles strike the door is creaks open.
“Brontë?” he says.
There is no reply and he slowly pushes the door until he is presented with a view of the entire room.
The bed has been stripped, the bedding neatly folded on the mattress.
The one closet stands open, empty but for a few hangers.
Even though he understands that Brontë has gone, Billy still says her name again as he steps into the room.
And, of course, there is nobody there to answer.
Deflated, he lets the mangled arrangement of flowers fall to the floor.
How could she have left without even telling him?
Poor Billy sighs and is about to withdraw from the room when he spies something poking out from behind the dresser.
He kneels and snags the edge of a small book—a Moleskin journal—and as he stands he (naturally) bumps his head on the dresser and the book tumbles to the stripped mattress, falling open on a page of cramped, spidery, handwriting.
Billy Bigelow is the last man to invade anybody’s privacy and he’s about to close the book and take it down to the store for safekeeping in case Brontë contacts him and asks him to forward it to her, when he sees his own name, written too many times for him to ignore.
And when he lifts the journal and reads the page he understands everything.
Understands that Darcy was right about Brontë Baines’s feelings for him.
Understands that when the poor girl saw that dance in the headlights of Darcy’s car she’d—quite understandably—assumed that Billy Bigelow and Darcy Pringle were romantically involved.
Billy’s heart contracts in anguish.
How crushing it must have been for her.
He snaps the journal closed and stows it safely in the closet before hurrying from the room.
He has to find Brontë Baines.
He has to stop the only woman who has ever loved him from disappearing from his life.
64
Still dazed from that kiss—a kiss that unleashed a torrent of emotions—Darcy sits on the warm sand, gazing out at the deep azure of the ocean.
When she looks up at her ex-husband his face is inscrutable in the gathering gloom.
“What just happened, Porter?”
“We kissed.”
“I know that, but why? Why did you kiss me?”
“Because I wanted to.”
She taps the sand beside her.
“Sit, Port, let’s talk.”
He hesitates, then hitches up his suit pants and crouches.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
He shrugs. “You know . . .”
“Now don’t get all alpha male and incommunicative on me, Port. Not after what just happened.”
He sighs and shrugs his shoulders.
“Okay, there are some issues that I’m having to deal with.”
“Issues?”
“Yes.” He looks off over the ocean. “I accessed your MasterCard account on-line.”
“Okay . . .”
“And I saw that you’d spent a night at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“So?”
“Were you with Forrest Forbes?”
“I don’t see that’s any of your business.”
“Oh, I think it is when I’m the joker picking up the tab.”
“I’m confused, Porter. Is this all about money?”
“No, not entirely.”
“Okay, then spell it out for me.”
“Look, I’ve had some reversals lately. In my business.”
“Really?”
“Yes, it’s a tricky climate. A couple of deals have gone south and put a crimp in my cash flow.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Darcy says, but she’s feeling something unusual coursing through her veins.
Rage.
“Yeah, it’s been tough for me and Paige,” Porter says, “what with the baby coming.”
“I can imagine.”
Darcy clenches her fists to keep a lid on that rage.
“So, when I saw the card account, I realized we needed to make some adjustments.”
“By we I’m assuming you mean me and you?”
“Correct.”
“And what adjustments do you have in mind?”
“Well, I may have been a little overgenerous in our divorce settlement.”
“Really? My attorney told me I’d been too lenient.”
“Well, let’s not get into a fencing match here, Darce.”
“No, let’s not.”
“What I’m thinking is we scale back on the monthly alimony, just to ease me through this tough time.”
“I see.”
“And maybe we sell the house.”
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“There’s no we when it comes to the house, Porter. You signed it over to me.”
“I did. As I said, perhaps I was overgenerous.”
“And if I were to sell the house, what are you proposing?”
“That we split the profits, fifty-fifty.”
Perhaps even a man as self-obsessed as Porter Pringle hasn’t entirely lost the ability to read non-verbal signals, because he stands and takes half a step back from Darcy as he says, “I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”
Breathe girl, breathe.
Darcy breathes and when she speaks her voice is ominously calm.
“So you softened me up with the whole I miss you thing? And figured if you put your tongue in my mouth I’d just turn to mush and be the good girl I always was and say, oh of course, Porter, anything for you and your little baby mama?”
“Now hold on, Darcy, Paige isn’t my baby mama. We’re married.”
The rage is finally uncorked and—amplified by the glasses of wine—it drives Darcy to her feet.
“You selfish, manipulative bastard!”
Porter shakes his head.
“Darcy, come on, don’t be unreasonable.”
“This,” she says slapping him through the face, “is me being unreasonable.”
Porter lifts a hand to his cheek, staring at her in shock.
“And this is me being downright contrary!”
Before Darcy knows what she’s doing she has swung back her leg and planted her foot fairly and squarely in Porter’s groin.
He sucks air and folds slowly to the sand.
When he tries to speak, only a soft mewl escapes his lips.
“You stay away from me, Porter. You stay very far away from me.”
Darcy hurries off into the dusk, rage still boiling so hot in her blood that she doesn’t see Carlotta McCourt standing like a scarecrow on a sand dune, her mouth fallen open in astonishment.
65
Brontë Baines has a talent for misery.
Just as other people can sing or dance or play the flugelhorn, she has a unique ability to extract the maximum unpleasantness from any given situation.
She comes to this conclusion as she sits at the dingy bus station, her battered suitcase at her feet.