by Teri Wilson
She stopped beside his chair, just barely out of reach. “Julian.”
He stood, and she looked at him with eyes wilder than he remembered, and he couldn’t help but smile. “You’re here.” He said.
Maybe he hadn’t been too late after all.
Maybe he’d been just in time.
* * *
She was supposed to be in her dressing room, removing the false eyelashes and stage makeup, shedding her glittering, diamond-encrusted tutu and stepping into a blush-pink satin dress. Ivanov would be waiting, as would Chance and the crowd of ballet patrons expecting a photo, an autograph or even just a glimpse of the deaf ballerina, the star of the show. She’d become a Cinderella story. There would be articles about her in the arts section of newspapers the next day. Probably even a full-color photograph above the fold. Come Monday, everyone in New York would know her name.
She’d done it, thanks to Julian.
He’d come. After days of silence, nights of longing for something as simple as a glimpse of his elegant hands or his lonely blue eyes, he’d been right there, in the front row. Even after that awful day in the dressing room, after everything that had gone so horribly wrong, he’d come. He’d been right there, in the front row. His had been the first face she saw when she stepped onstage.
She had to see him. Talk to him. Now, before he left and she lost her chance. The others could wait. So here they were...alone again. At last. The theater was empty. Discarded programs and empty champagne glasses littered the room.
A sob rose up Tessa’s throat. This should have been the happiest night of her life. She had everything she’d always wanted. At long last, against all odds. She shouldn’t have been dancing center stage tonight. She shouldn’t have been the one in the spotlight. She knew as much. She should probably fall to her knees in gratitude, or at the very least, smile and pose for the balletomanes and their cameras.
Somehow, though, none of it mattered without Julian.
The moment their eyes met, Tessa forgot about the obligations waiting for her in the other room. Memories flooded her senses, screaming to be heard—Julian speaking to her with his hands, the warmth of his lyrical lips and the excruciating bliss of him moving inside her. These were the things that mattered. Nothing else.
She swallowed around the lump in her throat. She loved him. More than ballet, more than the music she still wasn’t sure was real, more than the belief that she’d been caught in a wondrous, magical spell. She realized that now. She’d loved him all along.
“I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. You were perfect, Tessa.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry about my text. I was...”
“It’s okay. You’re here now,” Tessa said, breathless, wanting nothing more than to touch him, to taste him, to kiss his lips as they moved into a sly hint of a smile. “You don’t need to explain.”
“But I do.” His smile grew wider. “I played at Zander’s club tonight.”
“Oh, my God, that’s wonderful.”
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. How was this possible? Why hadn’t Zander told her?
Her brother had hinted at it, though. You should probably check in with Julian and see what he’s up to...
He’d probably thought the news wasn’t his to share. He’d also probably been trying to force them to talk to one another. Still, she was going to kill him. But first, she had something more important to take care of.
She took a deep breath and willed herself not to cry. She’d vowed that if she ever saw Julian again, she’d tell him exactly how she felt. She’d missed her chance before. She couldn’t make the same mistake again.
“I love you, Julian.” She smiled through her tears. “Ask me again. Please?”
He looked at her long and hard, much like the way he’d looked at her in the Bennington ballroom, when she’d asked him to take her to bed. Her heart felt like it was going to beat right out of her chest while she waited for him to respond. After several long, silent seconds, she convinced herself he was going to answer the same way he had then. You don’t know what you’re saying.
But she did know. She knew she was in love with him, and she knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. They could figure out the rest along the way. They could improvise. Just like a song.
When he finally answered, he didn’t use words. He used his hands...those glorious hands that Tessa loved so much. He spelled a proposal out in perfectly practiced sign language.
Will you marry me?
She made a fist with her right hand and moved it up and down. It was the sign for yes. Then she threw her arms around his neck and whispered it in his ear.
“Yes, I’ll marry you.”
For a moment, she could have sworn she heard the sound of her own voice saying yes. She was sure it was just her imagination, but maybe not. Maybe some words were simply powerful enough to make their way through the silence.
* * * * *
Be sure to check out the next
WILDE HEARTS stories:
HOW TO ROMANCE A RUNAWAY BRIDE
Available in July 2018
and
THE BACHELOR’S BABY SURPRISE
Available in August 2018
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author JoAnn Ross and HQN Books!
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Herons Landing
by JoAnn Ross
CHAPTER ONE
SETH HARPER WAS spending a Sunday spring afternoon detailing his wife’s Rallye Red Honda Civic when he learned that she’d been killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.
Despite the Pacific Northwest’s reputation for unrelenting rain, the sun was shining so brightly that the Army notification officers—a man and a woman in dark blue uniforms and black shoes spit-shined to a mirror gloss—had been wearing shades. Or maybe, Seth considered, as they’d approached the driveway in what appeared to be slow motion, they would’ve worn them anyway. Like armor, providing emotional distance from the poor bastard whose life they were about to blow to smithereens.
At the one survivor grief meeting he’d later attended (only to get his fretting mother off his back), he’d heard stories from other spouses who’d experienced a sudden, painful jolt of loss before their official notice. Seth hadn’t received any advance warning. Which was why, at first, the officers’ words had been an incomprehensible buzz in his ears. Like distant radio static.
Zoe couldn’t be dead. His wife wasn’t a combat soldier. She was an Army surgical nurse, working in a heavily protected military base hospital, who’d be returning to civilian life in two weeks. Seth still had a bunch of stuff on his homecoming punch list to do. After buffing the wax off the Civic’s hood and shining up the chrome wheels, his next project was to paint the walls white in the nursery he’d added on to their Folk Victorian cottage for the baby they’d be making.
She’d begun talking a lot about baby stuff early in her deployment. Although Seth was as clueless as the average guy about a woman’s mind, it didn’t take Dr. Phil to realize that she was using the plan to start a family as a touchstone. Something to hang on to during their separation.
In hours of Skype calls between Honeymoon Harbor and Kabul, they’d discussed the pros and cons of the various names on a list that had grown longer each time they’d talked. While the names remained up in the air, she had decided that whatever their baby’s gender, the nursery should be a bright white to counter the Olympic Peninsula’s gray skies.
She’d also sent him links that he’d dutifully followed to Pinterest pages showing bright crib bedding, mobiles and wooden name letters in primary crayon shades of blue, green, yellow and red. Even as Seth had lobbied for Seattle Seahawk navy and action green, he’d known that he’d end up giving his wife whatever she wanted.
The same as he’d been doing since the day he fell head over heels in love with her back in middle school.
Meanwhile, planning to get started on that baby making as soon as she got back to Honeymoon Harbor, he’d built the nursery as a welcome-home surprise.
Then Zoe had arrived at Sea-Tac airport in a flag-draped casket.
And two years after the worst day of his life, the room remained unpainted behind a closed door Seth had never opened since.
Mannion’s Pub & Brewery was located on the street floor of a faded redbrick building next to Honeymoon Harbor’s ferry landing. The former salmon cannery had been one of many buildings constructed after the devastating 1893 fire that had swept along the waterfront, burning down the original wood buildings. One of Seth’s ancestors, Jacob Harper, had built the replacement in 1894 for the town’s mayor and pub owner, Finn Mannion. Despite the inability of Washington authorities to keep Canadian alcohol from flooding into the state, the pub had been shuttered during Prohibition in the 1930s, effectively putting the Mannions out of the pub business until Quinn Mannion had returned home from Seattle and hired Harper Construction to reclaim the abandoned space.
Although the old Victorian seaport town wouldn’t swing into full tourist mode until Memorial Day, nearly every table was filled when Seth dropped in at the end of the day. He’d no sooner slid onto a stool at the end of the long wooden bar when Quinn, who’d been washing glasses in a sink, stuck a bottle of Shipwreck CDA in front of him.
“Double cheddar bacon or stuffed blue cheese?” he asked.
“Double cheddar bacon.” As he answered the question, it crossed Seth’s mind that his life—what little he had outside his work of restoring the town’s Victorian buildings constructed by an earlier generation of Harpers—had possibly slid downhill beyond routine to boringly predictable. “And don’t bother boxing it up. I’ll be eating it here,” he added.
Quinn lifted a dark brow. “I didn’t see that coming.”
Meaning that, by having dinner here at the pub six nights a week, the seventh being with Zoe’s parents—where they’d recount old memories, and look through scrapbooks of photos that continued to cause an ache deep in his heart—he’d undoubtedly landed in the predictable zone. So, what was wrong with that? Predictability was an underrated concept. By definition, it meant a lack of out-of-the-blue surprises that might destroy life as you knew it. Some people might like change. Seth was not one of them. Which was why he always ordered takeout with his first beer of the night.
The second beer he drank at home with his burger and fries. While other guys in his position might have escaped reality by hitting the bottle, Seth always stuck to a limit of two bottles, beginning with that long, lonely dark night after burying his wife. Because, although he’d never had a problem with alcohol, he harbored a secret fear that if he gave in to the temptation to begin seriously drinking, he might never stop.
The same way if he ever gave in to the anger, the unfairness of what the hell had happened, he’d have to patch a lot more walls in his house than he had those first few months after the notification officers’ arrival.
There’d been times when he’d decided that someone in the Army had made a mistake. That Zoe hadn’t died at all. Maybe she’d been captured during a melee and no one knew enough to go out searching for her. Or perhaps she was lying in some other hospital bed, her face all bandaged, maybe with amnesia, or even in a coma, and some lab tech had mixed up blood samples with another soldier who’d died. That could happen, right?
But as days slid into weeks, then weeks into months, he’d come to accept that his wife really was gone. Most of the time. Except when he’d see her, from behind, strolling down the street, window-shopping or walking onto the ferry, her dark curls blowing into a frothy tangle. He’d embarrassed himself a couple times by calling out her name. Now he never saw her at all. And worse yet, less and less in his memory. Zoe was fading away. Like that ghost who reputedly haunted Herons Landing, the old Victorian mansion up on the bluff overlooking the harbor.
“I’m having dinner with Mom tonight.” And had been dreading it all the damn day. Fortunately, his dad hadn’t heard about it yet. But since news traveled at the speed of sound in Honeymoon Harbor, he undoubtedly soon would.
“You sure you don’t want to wait to order until she gets here?”
“She’s not eating here. It’s a command-performance dinner,” he said. “To have dinner with her and the guy who may be her new boyfriend. Instead of eating at her new apartment, she decided that it’d be better to meet on neutral ground.”
“Meaning somewhere other than a brewpub owned and operated by a Mannion,” Quinn said. “Especially given the rumors that said new boyfriend just happens to be my uncle Mike.”
“That does make the situation stickier.” Seth took a long pull on the Cascadian Dark Ale and wished it was something stronger.
The feud between the Harpers and Mannions dated back to the early 1900s. After having experienced a boom during the end of the end of the nineteenth century, the once-bustling seaport town had fallen on hard times during a national financial depression.
Although the population declined drastically, those dreamers who’d remained were handed a stroke of luck in 1910 when the newlywed king and queen of Montacroix added the town to their honeymoon tour of America. The couple had learned of this lush green region from the king’s friend Theodore Roosevelt, who’d set aside national land for the Mount Olympus Monument.
As a way of honoring the royals, and hoping that the national and European press following them across the country might bring more attention to the town, residents had voted nearly unanimously to change the name to Honeymoon Harbor. Seth’s ancestor Nathaniel Harper had been the lone holdout, creating acrimony on both sides that continued to linger among some but not all of the citizens. Quinn’s father, after all, was a Mannion, his mother a Harper. But Ben Harper, Seth’s father, tended to nurse his grudges. Even century-old ones that had nothing to do with him. Or at least hadn’t. Until lately.
“And it gets worse,” he said.
“Okay.”
One of the things that made Quinn such a good bartender was that he listened a lot more than he talked. Which made Seth wonder how he’d managed to spend all those years as a big-bucks corporate lawyer in Seattle before returning home to open this pub and microbrewery.
“The neutral location she chose is Leaf.”
Quinn’s quick laugh caused two women who were drinking wine at a table looking out over the water to glance up with
interest. Which wasn’t surprising. Quinn’s brother Wall Street wizard Gabe Mannion might be richer, New York City pro quarterback Burke Mannion flashier, and, last time he’d seen him, which had admittedly been a while, Marine-turned-LA-cop Aiden Mannion had still carried that bad-boy vibe that had gotten him in trouble a lot while they’d been growing up together. But Quinn’s superpower had always been the ability to draw the attention of females—from bald babies in strollers to blue-haired elderly women in walkers—without seeming to do a thing.
After turning in the burger order, and helping out his waitress by delivering meals to two of the tables, Quinn returned to the bar and began hanging up the glasses.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You ordered the burger as an appetizer before you go off to a vegetarian restaurant to dine on alfalfa sprouts and pretty flowers.”
“It’s a matter of survival. I spent the entire day until I walked in here taking down a wall, adding a new reinforcing beam and framing out a bathroom. A guy needs sustenance. Not a plate of arugula and pansies.”
“Since I run a place that specializes in pub grub, you’re not going to get any argument from me on that plan. Do you still want the burger to go for the mutt?”
Bandit, a black Lab/boxer mix so named for his penchant for stealing food from Seth’s construction sites back in his stray days—including once gnawing through a canvas ice chest—usually waited patiently in the truck for his burger. Tonight Seth had dropped him off at the house on his way over here, meaning the dog would have to wait a little longer for his dinner. Not that he hadn’t mooched enough from the framers already today. If the vet hadn’t explained strays’ tendencies for overeating because they didn’t know where their next meal might be coming from, Seth might have suspected the street-scarred dog he’d rescued of having a tapeworm.
They shot the breeze while Quinn served up drinks, which in this place ran more to the craft beer he brewed in the building next door. A few minutes later, the swinging door to the kitchen opened and out came two layers of prime beef topped with melted local cheddar cheese, bacon and caramelized grilled onions, with a slice of tomato and iceberg-lettuce leaf tossed in as an apparent nod to the food pyramid, all piled between the halves of an oversize toasted kaiser bun. Taking up the rest of the heated metal platter was a mountain of spicy french fries.
