“So she fired you. For…what?” Mom sipped her hot wassail, her legs curled up beneath her on the couch. I did the same trick with my own legs over on the recliner. There was a crackling fire in the grate, and the room smelled like everything good and home. “I thought you were the only person who cared about her child. Why give that up?”
I didn’t exactly want to admit that Mo-No had fired me for trying to make her a better person by means of a prank and then kissing the man Mo-No had intended to ensnare next into yet another loveless marriage, but I came up with a plausible explanation.
“I guess mostly she let me go because she gave her daughter to her soon-to-be ex-husband. She was done being a mother.” Probably for the best. “Rich people do weird things, Mom. Things we can’t understand.”
“You can say that again. I can’t imagine ever losing you.”
Those words poured through me like warm, spiced honey. My mother cared for me like I cared for Sylvie. Or more, maybe. The thought of that magnitude of love being directed at me ensconced me, warm like a homemade crocheted afghan of the softest yarn.
She wanted the best life for me like I wanted for Sylvie. And dad probably did, too. The thought of a world of heartache in my future made my mother and dad ache, like I did for Sylvie’s.
No wonder they were so concerned about my life choices. They wanted…my happiness. And with their distance and vision and love, they could see that working toward that Ph.D. hadn’t been the sure path to a life of fulfillment.
They were right. And it made my eyes sting a little and my nose need to sniff.
I got up and refilled my mug with the apple cinnamon orange drink, feeling more at ease and comforted than I’d felt in six months on San Nouveau combined. It was good to be home. Henry was right—again. Home for Christmas is good.
Dad walked in, his boots clunking on the pine floors.
“Dad? Do you know someone called Dr. David Smith?”
“Sure. He’s our ranch geneticist. You’ve met him once or twice. Stark white hair, even though he’s only in his forties.”
I bobbled my mug of hot cider and about fell back onto the rocking chair. I knew that guy; I’d met him quite a few times back in the day. One description would have had me realizing who he was in a second. All this past couple of weeks, I could have just called my dad. Dad would have known exactly what to do for Henry—and for me.
Questions. I needed to ask more questions—and listen when answers came. Not brush them aside like they were babblings of a delusional person.
Lesson learned. Point taken. New woman—here I came.
“Dr. David Smith is pretty much the world’s living expert on cattle breeding, but he chooses to live out here.” Dad eyed me. “That seems like a random leap of conversation topics. What’s going on?”
Holy cats.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I just met someone who knew him.” Or should I say, I’d just kissed an Australian cattle baron who I’d assumed was a hobo and coerced him into play-acting to fool the residents of a privately owned secret island of insanely rich people as he duped my boss into falling in love with him so she’d supposedly become a nice person, but it didn’t work?
Yeah, I couldn’t add that part.
“He’s a good guy. You’re not interested in suddenly changing careers, are you?”
“Oh, honey.” Mom’s voice was laced with worry. “You’re not thinking about another career change, are you? Because your undergraduate degree and master’s didn’t have many of the prerequisite classes for genetics. You’d have to start all over.”
“No, Mom. I promise. Don’t worry, please.” Then again, I should offer them full disclosure. “I’m making some big changes, yes. I’m not thinking of genetics.”
“Whew.” Mom’s relief came out like a shot.
“But after the week, month, and year I’ve had, I’m pretty sure linguistics isn’t for me.”
I closed my eyes and sipped my drink for a second, thinking back on the email I’d read this morning from my dissertation approval committee, and the snarky, accusatory response I’d sent, telling them they were shallow, heartless jerks for not approving my first three research proposals—involving language acquisition for hearing impaired children who get cochlear implants (that was a no), or speech development methods for children with cleft palates (they hated that too), or even the proposal to record and save the dying spoken language of a native American tribe in the Sierras.
Yeah, they’d hated all those.
So I told them they could take their ‘sexy’ topic of how a perv or a predatory guy could fake an Aussie accent to more easily dupe a lonely woman into doing what he wanted, and put it where the sun didn’t shine.
I shouldn’t have hit send on that email, but I had, and now it was too late. Merry Christmas from Eliza Galatea.
“I’m a little slow figuring out that I’d been barking up the wrong career tree. Sorry.”
Mom frown-smiled, like she pitied me but understood and loved me anyway. I waited to get the life-choice lecture, that I now recognized was rooted in love, but instead she just asked me a gentle question.
“Did you have something else in mind?”
“Not yet.”
I did, but nothing I could tell them.
“You’ll consider this cheesy, Eliza,” Mom said, “but I’m going to quote a movie musical and tell you to ‘climb every mountain’ and find a dream that will need all the love you can give.”
I knew the Sound of Music reference all too well, and told myself I really ought to stay away from 1960s blockbuster movie musicals from here on out. However, that advice did sound solid. My mom did possess wisdom much like the Reverend Mother of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.
“I’ll just miss Sylvie, you know?”
I’d contacted her dad yesterday, talked with Sylvie a little on video chat, as much as it was possible to communicate with a toddler over the phone; she’d practiced saying Merry Christmas. It sounded a lot more like mm—cahs. I nearly choked up when MacDowell Bainbridge told me he and Sylvie and the other nanny would be going overseas for a few months, so I shouldn’t expect to contact her anymore for a while. I’d stemmed my tears while I was still on the phone with him, but it was hard.
“You’ll find someone or somewhere else to spend your love,” he’d said, dismissing me from Sylvie’s life, and now, hearing my mother say almost the same thing verbatim, it sank into my bones.
I knew the someone on whom I wanted to spend that love.
The times on the cliffs watching the breakers with Henry came flashing back into my mind: our mind-blowing first kiss, the one that had brewed between us for the full week of his stay, and then later our tender, passionate goodbye.
Now, with the passing days, I missed him like an amputee missed a limb. It seemed like I’d watched the helicopter lift him into the sky a million years and a million miles ago. If he was anywhere, he was home with that fatted calf and Jonno and his brother Frank, the names he’d mentioned, for Christmas. Home at Cherrington Downs Station.
Not the bus station.
A realization thundered over me, the sonic force of which broke my heart into pieces, because the career I wanted more than anything else in the whole history of my wanting a career was the one my mother had—rancher’s wife.
And I’d pretty much watched that possibility fly away in a helicopter to the other side of the planet. Henry was gone forever.
ACT II: Scene 15
Without You
LAGUNA BEACH, OUTSIDE LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Wherein our heroine reflects and mourns and wishes and finally comes to her senses.
The walls of the white silk tent billowed around us, and I never would have known I was on the beach if it weren’t for the sound of the waves over the orchestra. A false floor kept sand out of my high heeled sandals, and the tent protected the whole party from the ocean breeze.
Polly’s wedding was gorgeous.
In fact, I would never g
uess it had been thrown together at the last minute for Valentine’s Day after all her mother’s original meticulous planning that had set for a month later. However, when Geordie had come ashore last week, Polly declared to her mother she wasn’t waiting another second, and so everything shifted to now instead of later. At that point, her mother had relented and let me lend a hand.
I couldn’t blame Polly’s hurry. While Geordie was shipped out, Polly had been a wreck. Let’s just say Wrecked Polly put a sinking hulk of an ocean liner to shame. Nobody wanted that going on for an extra month.
Today, though, she’d resumed all her default sunshine and energy and turned back into a radiant, gushing bride.
Beautiful.
After the ceremony, she came rushing over to me with mincing steps against the mermaid-tight cut of her gown at her ankles.
“You’re the best maid of honor ever!” Polly threw her arms around my neck. “The bridal shower, the matching dresses for all the bridesmaids, the invitations, the flowers and boutonnières, all of it. You did it, Eliza.”
“Well, I had time on my hands.” Plenty of it, since I’d been unemployed and out of school for the past six weeks. There’s not as much to do on a ranch in the wintertime, at least not much my parents would let me help with for now. They supposedly wanted me to rest up. For what, I had no idea. So to channel my nervous energy, I’d helped with Polly’s wedding.
The orchestra struck up a traditional naval tune, and couples took the dance floor, including Admiral and Mrs. Pickering and my parents, who loved Polly, even when they thought of her as a life choice. She was too good to me for them to hold a true grudge.
The bride and I stood behind the punch bowl so I could hide from the best man, who had been shooting toothy smiles at me all afternoon. Polly must have told him my weakness.
“But you’re doing ranch work, too. I was sorry to hear your dissertation committee changed their mind.”
“Their jolly holiday mood must have worn off when they came back from their Christmas break,” and read my scathing email telling them they were shallow jerks. “I’m not too sad, though.”
Polly raised an accusatory eyebrow at me.
“What? I’m not sad. Seriously.”
“Then why are you mopiness incarnate?”
“Mopiness! Please.”
Okay, I knew I was mopey, but it had nothing to do with school.
“I’m in a sparkly dress on a beach on Valentine’s Day for the wedding of my best friend in my whole life. How can I be mopey?”
“I’ll give myself one guess.”
Polly had been just as shocked as I was when she found out that the tabloid articles and reporters hounding her had been right—Henry Lyon of the Hollywood premiere of Frogs in the Sand had been one and the same as a missing Australian hiker lost in the Grand Canyon the week before.
We pieced together that he’d hitchhiked from Arizona to L.A. Brilliantly, I’d googled the word Lori, to discover a lorry was a truck, although it was used in England, not Australia. Either way, Henry had been picked up by a lorry, not a Lori. We’d also deduced that if he was declared missing, he might have thought it was perfectly reasonable to hail a helicopter overhead, since search and rescue really was looking for him.
I was such an idiot.
“You weren’t an idiot.”
Had I said that aloud? I really needed to quit that habit.
“Yes, I was.” For so many reasons—letting him get away without telling him any of my feelings most of all.
“No, Eliza. I was the idiot,” Polly insisted. “I shouldn’t have put him up to it. I should have been like you—kind. And offered to loan him a phone to make his ‘international’ call—which was obviously to Australia. You were nice. I was using him to get revenge on the woman who’d been torturing my best friend for half a year.”
“I could have stopped it at any point, but I’m the one who kept the ruse going.” And going, until the one getting hurt most of all was yours truly. “Worst of all, it didn’t even work.”
“It did expose Monique-Noelle for the woman she really was, though.”
Fat lot of good that did. Except, on an upside, I’d heard from Sylvie’s dad that he’d remarried—that nanny. I’d taken a minute and talked with the new Mrs. Bainbridge when he let me video chat with Sylvie when they came back from the Ukraine. She seemed like she really did love the little girl, and MacDowell Bainbridge. That, at least, turned out well—not that anything Polly and I had done had affected the trajectory of that situation; we’d accelerated it by a few weeks, maybe, but that was all.
“I can’t blame you for being mopey, though. Henry Lyon was the hottest, coolest guy ever.” She sipped punch from a cup and sighed. “Is that possible to be both?”
“Yep.” I sighed, too. “I never really got to finish asking him things.” Now my mopey tone did take over. Polly was right: I was definitely moping. I missed Henry. Sure, I’d only had him in my little sphere of life for a week or so, but he’d made such an impact that I could never really see things the same. It was like I’d tasted chocolate, and now no other flavor would ever matter again.
“Like why he agreed to do it? I wondered that too. Why’d he play along with it—besides for a free meal? He could have told us who he really was at any time.”
“I think he tried.”
“Oh, yeah.” Now Polly seemed a touch mopey. And this was her wedding day. “Well, call him up.”
“Uh…” I faltered. It wasn’t like I hadn’t considered this possibility a few times over the past six weeks since I last saw Henry. Okay, obsessed over it would be more the appropriate term. But when I weighed what I might say, I realized everything was stacked against me. I was a jerk who’d used him to exact revenge on a boss, and it hadn’t worked, and now I was fired and the man I loved was as far away from me as possible and still on the same earth.
Loved? Did I just think the word loved?
“Seriously. I’m the one who set up that phone for him. I probably have that phone number in some paperwork somewhere.” She got all bright at this recollection, and then she dropped again. “Oh, yeah. It was only prepaid a month.”
“Oh.” There went that little balloon of possibility. I watched it float off into the atmosphere. “I mean, I’m pretty happy working on the ranch. It’s calving season soon. The calves are so cute. And it’s good to be outside. I like having time with Black Jack again. Dad had me ride out and check on the heifers getting ready to calve later in the spring.”
Polly put her hands on her sequined hips. “Don’t go changing the subject. You’ve got to contact him. Look him up on social media. He’s out there. Quit wasting time. You’re letting him slip away from you.”
This pushed me over the edge.
“You think I don’t know that?” I had to press my voice to keep it at a normal volume, and to keep it from squeaking as I pushed the tears back down into their ducts. “I have looked up and down and everywhere. He’s got no online footprint. Basically, internet-wise, he’s a ghost.” I’d looked up Cherrington Downs Station, and all I got was a photo of a mountaintop, some trees, a bunkhouse and his grandfather’s name.
It must be remote, away from the madding crowd.
It sounded like heaven.
“How can he be a ghost? This is the twenty-first century. People are online.”
Most people, sure, but not everyone. Not my parents.
“He’s a rancher. He’s outside half the year, camping under the stars and working in the high country like my dad. He’s not tweeting. He’s not giving cute status updates or posting cat memes. He’s living his life. He’s chipping golf balls over the roof of his barn and working with the horses.” He’s flying his plane. “He’s got things to do better than worry about a ditzy, drippy girl who lived next door to him for a week while he dated a cheating wife at that girl’s behest.” It sounded so shameful when I said it aloud, dirty, splashing heat through my soul.
“Eliza.” Polly reached out
a comforting hand, but it didn’t relieve the burning sorrow.
“He’s not thinking about me. He’s not.” The tears spilled hot down my cheek, and my throat closed up. “He’s not.”
Polly pulled me into a fierce hug.
“The tabloids couldn’t find him either. And they’re experts. Don’t feel inadequate.”
Inadequacy wasn’t my lead emotion here. Despair, loss, grief. Yeah, those.
Polly let me go, but she still pressed a reassuring hand to my arm.
“You’ll find a way. And I guarantee, he’s thinking of you.”
I wished I could believe her.
“May I have this dance, Eliza?” The best man walked up beside us, dressed in his dress-naval whites, a sword at his side. Yeah, despite the fact I wasn’t interested in him at all, the sword was pretty cool. “The maid of honor and the best man should share at least one trip around the dance floor.”
I shot a glance at Polly, and she gave me an apologetic grimace. I swiped at my cheeks, hoping for no telltale mascara skid-marks.
“Yes, thanks.” I followed him into the center of the room, and he held out his hand for me to join him. In all his uniformed splendor and good manners, he wasn’t bad. “You’re Liam, right?”
“Liam Hodges, Lieutenant, U.S. Navy, at your service.”
He spun me, and I dodged the tip of his sword as I went under his arm.
“I have a question for you, Lieutenant Liam.”
“Ready, aim, fire away.” He was kind of cute, and I took a steadying breath, calming myself after my little crying fit.
“If there was some girl who you kissed, like in a port of call, and that you liked in the moment enough to kiss her and hang out for a few days; but, say you left her when it was time to ship out, would you still be thinking about her a few months later?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On how good the kiss was.”
“Say it was mind-blowing. On a windswept cliff, with the ocean crashing below. And there were unanswered questions.”
“Man, I wish I could say that was my life.”
My Fair Aussie: A Standalone Clean Romance (Millionaire Makeover Romance Book 3) Page 20
