by JoAnn Ross
Donovan didn’t think so. He decided that for some inexplicable reason, Lani was still afraid to commit herself. And as much as he wanted to demand that she stay with him at least long enough to watch their grandchildren feeding frozen peas to Moby Dick’s progeny, he also didn’t want to push her into doing something she’d later regret.
He toyed with the ends of her hair. “You’d like Portland.”
“I always have,” she agreed. “How long would I be away?”
“I was hoping you’d want to move in with me. Indefinitely.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you were aiming for an FBI appointment.”
“I was. And maybe still will, down the road. But this is an equally good opportunity. And you’re the one who pointed out that I wanted to help people. Being a police chief is a good way to do that.”
“I’ve no doubt you’ll make a dandy chief,” she said. “Of course you’ll have to buy cases of those antacids you were popping steadily when you first arrived here, but the raise in pay should cover the increased medical bills.”
“I was under a lot of stress. That’s what this vacation was all about.”
“And you really don’t believe the stress will be worse when you get back to the city and take over the entire department?”
“It’ll be rough in the beginning,” he admitted. “But things will eventually calm down.”
“Will they?” she asked quietly.
His fingers tightened. “Okay, so maybe they won’t. But the pressure-cooker atmosphere comes with the territory, Lani. It’s a package deal.”
“If it’s so terrible, why do you want the job at all?”
“Because it’s a terrific opportunity.”
“Will it make you happy?”
Her words put him on the defensive by causing him to recall the conversation he’d had with Thomas. “Dammit, I’m not your father!”
“I didn’t think you were,” she said mildly.
“Yet you’re comparing me with him.”
“No. I’m only comparing your situations. My father was a highly respected surgeon, an important man—”
“Who didn’t exactly chuck it all to live out a Gauguin fantasy, Lani,” Donovan pointed out. He knew he was handling this badly but couldn’t seem to figure out an exit plan. “He didn’t stop being a doctor.”
“And there’s no need for you to stop being a policeman,” she insisted. “Just why do you have to be chief?”
How could she not understand? “For us!” he shouted. “Okay, sure, it’s a great offer and I’m proud to have been the one chosen. But it’ll be good for you. For us.”
Lani could only stare at him. “But I don’t want you to be a police chief, Donovan. Oh, I might feel differently if I thought it would really make you happy. But I don’t believe it will.”
“I suppose you’d be contented living with a mere cop?”
Lani wondered what was behind his acid tone. “Of course. If he loved me, I’d also be happy living with a beachcomber. As long as he was a happy beachcomber.”
“That’s easy for you to say when you live down here in Lotusland, talking to fish, reading fairy tales to kids, collecting seashells, and wishing on rainbows.”
That stung. Lani rubbed her throbbing temple with trembling fingertips even as she felt a painful fissure open up in her heart. “I certainly understand how it is to be driven, Donovan,” she said quietly. “Believe it or not, I used to be a workaholic myself.”
“You’re kidding.” He would have been no more surprised if Lani had suddenly told him that she was a Soviet spy.
She took a deep breath, wanting her voice to be strong. “No, I’m not. Six years ago, I was making quite a name for myself in television.”
“I know. Nate told me about your show. I watched it once. It was a lot better than I’d expected.”
“Damned with faint praise,” she murmured. “Believe it or not, in my world, I was nearly as important as you are in yours.”
He sat down on the arm of the chair and took her hand in his. “What happened?”
“Since you saw Beauty Tames the Beast , you understand the concept. It wasn’t like The Bachelor franchise, where the end result is a proposal, but if some romances came out of the season, ratings went up, so they were always encouraged. Which is why every contestant had to sign a contract that he or she wasn’t in a relationship.”
“Okay. That sounds reasonable.”
“The only problem was, one of the Beauties had broken up with her boyfriend and auditioned for the program as a way to get past the breakup. Which probably wasn’t the best idea, but hey, it wasn’t my job to judge. Just to be a producer, which was essentially wrangling the contestants—”
“Sounds like herding cats.”
“You’re close.” She liked that he got it. Maybe there was a chance for them, after all. “Anyway, a few weeks in, she realized she was pregnant. Which I’d already suspected, and when I asked her straight out, she told me the truth. But we were getting close to the end, and she was definitely an audience favorite. So both the senior producer, who, I suppose I should mention, I was sort of romantically involved with for a short time, and the owner of the show insisted I just let things play out. Which might have worked out.
“But the contestants themselves were living in a sort of Beverly Hills prison. They had their phones taken away, they didn’t get to watch any TV but movie DVDs, and they were totally cut off from the real world.”
“Which doesn’t exactly define ‘reality.’”
“Believe me, there’s very little reality about the concept. While, on our show, the drama wasn’t planned, it’s not that difficult, after everyone’s been forced together into such an environment, to play on various distrusts and paranoia. This particular woman was getting more and more stressed out because not only was she dealing with a first trimester of pregnancy, with all the morning sickness and hormone swings that entails, she couldn’t even tell her former boyfriend, he was going to be a father.
“She told me privately that she wanted to give their relationship a second try. But contractually, she couldn’t leave without the risk of the show suing her. My job was to keep her as steady as possible and get her to the end.”
“Which didn’t happen,” he guessed.
“Wow. You really didn’t watch much TV. Or YouTube.”
“I was a bit busy tracking down a serial killer,” he reminded her. “That didn’t leave much time for entertainment.”
“Touché,” Lani said with a long sigh. “Anyway, I thought we were going to make it. Then she miscarried.”
“Hell.”
“That’s putting it mildly. I argued that now we had to let her go home to her family. And maybe the baby’s father. But the producer—”
“Who you had the sort-of thing with,” he said.
“Yes. And I could add that it was nothing like our thing, but it’s a moot point. So, moving on, that’s when the show’s attorneys stated that since she’d lied on her contract about how long she’d been out of any relationship, she wasn’t owed anything. Her medical bills weren’t even going to be paid. That was bad enough, but when I went to the hospital to try to break the news to her, I walked in the room and found a camera crew.”
“Jesus.”
“Different team,” she corrected with a shake of her head. “That’s when I lost it and blew up, and all my pent-up frustration and anger came boiling out. Unfortunately, the camera was still rolling, which risked ruining her life and any chance she might have had of reconciling with her boyfriend, who wasn’t at all happy that she’d been keeping that secret to stay on a TV show, never mind that she was contractually obligated. Also, she’d told me that she’d gone on partly because she needed the money after the breakup since she’d been living in a house that her boyfriend had bought, and was suddenly in a financial bind.”
“That’s tough.”
“Isn’t it? Although the video of my tantrum was edited from the program, someone sold the outtake to one of those horrid Hollywood gossip blogging sites, and I became a viral sensation. I was even a popular Internet meme and Twitter GIF. Then fortunately, for me, at least, two weeks later, a paparazzi cameraman caught a big-name pop star naked on a beach with one of his bandmate’s wives, and I became yesterday’s gossip news.”
“Do you know what happened to her? The contestant?”
“I do, actually. She emailed me. She married the boyfriend, and they have a nine-month-old daughter they did not name Beauty.”
“So, all’s well that ends well. Do you ever think that you could be happy doing something else, like working in a library, back on the mainland?”
Lani shook her head. “I belong here on Orchid Island.”
“You’re hiding from reality here,” he insisted.
“I understand why you’d think that. And maybe I am. But I like the person I’ve become, Donovan. I thought you did, too.”
“Of course I do, but you can be that person in Portland just as well,” he insisted, almost shouting.
Lani had been considering that from the beginning. From the day she had first started falling in love with a man from the mainland. She shook her head decisively.
“No, I couldn’t. If I moved there, I couldn’t just sit around waiting for you to come home. Pretty soon I’d be back in my old routine of losing myself in a job, and you’d either be spending all your time trying to soothe the commissioner and wheedle money out of the city council for the police department, and there we’d be, two workaholics who’d be lucky if they saw each other for five minutes a week.”
She was close to tears. “We’d destroy everything we have together, Donovan. And that would break my heart.” Her eyes filled and she forced herself to look out over the sparkling turquoise water.
“But you’re tossing it away by not coming with me,” he argued.
She rubbed away the free-falling tears with her knuckles. “I don’t have any choice.”
“We’re going to have to talk about this some more,” he insisted. “You can’t just drop all this on me out of the blue when I have a plane to catch.”
“There’s nothing left to say.”
He reached out and cupped her downcast chin in his hand, lifting her tear-stained face to his. “We’re not finished yet, Lani, not by a long shot.”
As his mouth covered hers, a treacherous sob escaped her lips.
As he began walking down the beach, back to Nate’s house, with plans to turn the rental in to Kenny at the ferry dock, Donovan felt his own eyes burning.
25
Two weeks after leaving Orchid Island, and Lani, Donovan sat in the dark, nursing a tall glass of Scotch, which had, until his trip to the island always been his drink of choice. Now he found himself wishing he’d stopped at the liquor store on the way home and picked up a bottle of rum.
The apartment building was located on the river, the scene from every window spectacular. As the purple shadows of dusk gave way to night, the moon created mysterious shadows in the mist that hung over the icy waters of the river.
The city lights were wrapped in a soft blanket of fog that dulled their brightness, and down on the darkened streets, the car lights looked like fallen stars. The magnificent view had never failed to lift his spirits. That night was an exception.
He wasn’t a special agent. But he was chief of police. After years of climbing the ladder, the mist-draped city was his. So why did he feel so fucking rotten? The answer was simple: Lani wasn’t here to share it with him.
Before the appointment had been announced that afternoon, he’d had lunch with a furious Nate. Over thick steak sandwiches, Lani’s brother had accused him of being at best a damned fool. Or at worst, a bastard. Donovan had readily agreed on both counts.
“So go to her,” Nate had insisted.
“And lose my job? I’m not the kind of man to let my wife support me.”
Nate had muttered a pungent oath that Donovan, in years of police work, had never heard. “So you get a damned job on Orchid Island,” he said. “What’s so hard about that?”
“Doing what? Tending bar at The Blue Parrot?”
Nate had tossed back his head and polished off his beer. “You’re supposed to be an intelligent man,” he growled as he got up from the table. “You fucking figure something out.” With that, he had marched out of the restaurant.
* * *
Lani was aware of him the moment he entered the beach house. First there was the slight squeak of the screen door being opened, then the soft swish of her bedroom door, followed by his footsteps as he made his way toward the bed. All these sounds drifting into her subconscious mind as she slept told Lani that Donovan had returned.
But it was something far more elemental, emanating from the very essence of the man, that roused her to instant awareness. She sat up, pushing her tumbled hair out of her eyes.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” she whispered.
The mattress sagged as he sat on the edge of the bed. “You don’t sound very surprised,” he said, his lips caressing her scented hair.
Lani traced his face with her fingertips, as if to reassure herself that this was not a dream. “I wished for you. And here you are.”
Nuzzling against the soft, fragrant cloud of her hair, Donovan nodded. “And here I am.”
He drew her into his arms, running his hands up and down her back. The satin of her sleep shirt was cool against his palms, but Donovan knew that her skin would be warm.
He kissed her then because they had been much too long apart. Although by the calendar it had been two weeks and two days since they’d been together, since he had held her in his arms, Donovan felt as if it had been a lifetime ago.
“You didn’t lock your door.”
“This is Orchid Island, remember?”
“How could I forget… I’ve come to a decision,” he said, fighting to remain calm while his stomach went on a roller coaster ride.
His lips, as they lingered at her throat, were more intoxicating than champagne. Her blood hummed under their touch.
“A decision?” Lani asked.
He reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, flooding the room with light.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, staring at him as a glimmer of hope made her dizzy.
“What?” Donovan demanded, feeling unreasonably nervous. He followed her gaze to his vivid aloha shirt. “Oh, this. I bought it at the airport when I got in.”
His casual white cotton slacks that Lani had talked him into buying for the luau were rumpled from all those hours on the plane, his eyes were bleary and red-rimmed from lack of sleep, and he needed a shave. Lani thought he looked wonderful.
“It looks very good on you,” she said.
“Think so?” Donovan had felt a little foolish buying the red-and-orange flowered shirt, but the saleswoman had assured him he looked just like a true kamaaina . “I have to admit it’s comfortable.”
“You look very sexy,” Lani assured him. “Even better than Tom Selleck. Why, you’ll have to fight the women off with a stick.”
“I don’t want any other women. I only want you, Lani.” His expression suddenly became sober as he handed her a small box tied with gold cord. “I brought you a present.”
“I absolutely adore presents,” she said with a warm smile that reminded Donovan of a tropical sunrise.
“It isn’t emeralds,” he apologized uneasily. “Or diamonds or any of the expensive things you deserve.”
“Donovan—”
“But,” he said gruffly, “it reminded me of you.”
His rough, serious tone almost proved her undoing. With fingers that trembled slightly, Lani slipped the gilt cord from the white box. She lifted the lid, giving a
small sigh of pleasure at the piece of stained glass that nestled on a bed of white tissue paper.
“It’s lovely. Thank you.” She lifted the rainbow suncatcher up to the light. Her walls, her ceiling, the floor were all suddenly covered with rainbows.
“There’s a card.”
So there was. Lani was nervous as she plucked the small card from the tissue. There’s a lifetime of rainbows out there , Donovan had written in his bold, precise hand. Let’s wish on them all together .
“Oh, Donovan.”
His stomach was twisted into knots as he took both her hands in his. “I know we had an agreement,” he began seriously.
“That doesn’t—”
He immediately cut her off with an impatient wave of his hand. “An agreement that made a great deal of sense at the time. You were happy here living on the island; you had your family, your work, your snorkeling. Horatio. Moby Dick.
“I was fighting off a case of professional burnout and planning on getting on an even faster track than the one that had killed my partner. Neither of us had the time or the inclination to get involved. It would have been highly impractical.”
“Highly,” Lani agreed quietly.
“Well, I don’t care about practicalities any longer. I don’t give a damn about what’s sensible and what isn’t, what’s prudent or not. I know I swore I wasn’t looking for a wife, but that was before I met you. Before I knew how good things could be between us. So I’m revoking that agreement here and now.”
Frustrated by the clumsy way he was handling this, Donovan had to stop. Nervously, he jammed his hands into his pockets and began pacing the bedroom.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said. You’re right, I wasn’t very happy anymore as a detective and I would have been miserable as chief. I became a cop to help people, to try to make a difference. Not to spend all my time playing political football.”
“When did you come to that conclusion?” she asked.