A familiar green Volvo rolled up to a pump. The window on the driver’s side was down. Perry Decatur, dressed in a slouchy jacket and dark glasses, sat behind the wheel. His head swiveled toward the car.
The audience continued to swell. It was definitely time to leave. He tossed the gas money at Sandy. “Here you go. Keep the change. See you later.” He reached for the door handle.
But escape eluded him. A battered white pickup pulled up to the pump just ahead of the Porsche, and a burly man dressed in denim jeans held up by a belt fastened below his belly got out. He adjusted the billed cap that covered his thinning hair.
“Rafe Madison.” The big man’s eyes crinkled with genuine pleasure. “Long time no see.”
“Hello, Pete.”
Pete Levare hitched up his jeans and screwed his features into a good-natured expression of avid curiosity. “Heard you and the Harte girl each got a chunk of Dreamscape. What the hey’s going on out there, anyway? Is it true the two of you are—”
He never got to finish the sentence. The passenger door of Rafe’s car flew open.
“That does it.” Hannah erupted, Mount St. Helens fashion, from the Porsche’s cockpit. Sensing an exciting new game, Winston leaped to follow her.
Together dog and woman whipped around the front of the car and started toward the hapless Pete. A sense of impending disaster settled on Rafe. It was like watching a film in which events are spinning out of control. All he could do was stand there and wonder how bad it would get.
“Whoa.” Pete held up both hands, palms out, and backpedaled furiously toward the safety of his pickup. “Calm down, Hannah. What did I say? What did I say?”
“It’s not what you said, it’s what you were about to say,” Hannah yelled as she charged toward him. “You think Rafe and I are shacking up together, don’t you?”
“Shacking up? No, no, I never said that. Did I say that, Rafe?” Pete cast a helpless, beseeching glance at Rafe.
Rafe ignored him. He was too busy admiring the sight of Hannah in a full-blown temper. Invisible waves of energy shimmered in the air around her. The stylish acid-green scarf she wore around her throat snapped in the breeze. Who would have thought a Harte would demonstrate so much passion in public?
Winston pranced at her heels, his little legs moving so rapidly that all that could be seen in the vicinity of his paws was a silvery blur.
It was a thrilling sight, but one that he knew would have some repercussions.
Rafe cleared his throat. “Uh, Hannah—”
She paid him no heed. He groaned, folded his arms, and lounged against the car door. He’d tried. Later, when she was pissed at him for having caused this scene, he would remind her of that singular fact. Whatever was about to happen here was definitely not his fault.
“Pay attention, Pete.” Hannah came to a halt in front of the big man and planted her hands on her hips. “Rafe and I are not—repeat, not—shacking up together at Dreamscape. Is that clear?”
“Sure, you bet,” Pete said quickly. “Right. Not shacking up.”
Mrs. Seaton looked fascinated. “I heard the two of you are planning to get married.”
“What?” Hannah whirled around to stare at her. “Where did you hear that?”
“At the post office this morning,” Mrs. Seaton said brightly. “Ran into Mitchell collecting his mail. He said he thought you and Rafe made a wonderful couple. Said you’d probably have something to announce any day. Is that true?”
“No!” Hannah’s voice rose. “There will be no announcements.”
Rafe kept his mouth shut.
Everyone looked expectant.
“Are you sure?” Mrs. Seaton asked.
“I am absolutely positive,” Hannah ground out between set teeth. “Rafe and I have never discussed marriage.”
From out of nowhere a lightning bolt of anger sizzled through Rafe. He stirred against the side of the car. “Strictly speaking, that’s not true.”
Hannah swiveled to pin him with a dangerous look. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m just saying that subject has come up between us.”
“The hell it has,” she shouted.
“I’ll agree that we haven’t come to any definitive conclusions yet, but you can’t say that we haven’t talked about it.”
“Don’t you dare get cute on me here, Rafe Madison.” She took a step toward him. “You have never once asked me to marry you.”
“You know what Mitchell said about my phobia.”
“Don’t give me that stupid excuse about having a phobia. You’re the one who said the best way to deal with a phobia was to confront it head-on. I haven’t noticed you trying that approach.”
“Okay.” He felt his stomach clench. “I’m asking.”
For a second or two he didn’t think he would get an answer. He heard Mrs. Seaton catch her breath. The others gazed with rapt attention. Even Perry Decatur was staring, transfixed by the scene.
Hannah pulled herself together with a visible effort. She glanced hurriedly around, as though finally coming to her senses. Rafe saw the gathering dismay and anger in her eyes.
“That was not a real proposal.” There was a strange edge to her voice now. “That was a joke. At my expense. I don’t appreciate it, Rafe.”
“No joke,” he said softly. “The proposal was real to me.” He held her complete attention. “Do I get an answer?”
She stared at him, her face frozen. And then, to his horror, he saw the glint of moisture in her eyes. Her lips parted, trembled ever so slightly.
“Oh, shit.” He knew instinctively that if she burst into tears in front of all these people she would never forgive him.
He pushed away from the car door and wrapped one arm around her waist. “Sorry, folks. We’ve got an appointment.”
He got her around the hood of the car and into the passenger seat before anyone had quite realized what was happening.
“Winston,” he said firmly.
Winston scrambled nimbly into the car. Rafe closed the door behind him, circled back around the front of the Porsche, and got behind the wheel. He twisted the key in the ignition, wrapped one hand around the gearshift, and pulled out of the station onto Bay Street before the crowd could react.
When he checked the rearview mirror, he saw a row of excited faces. He knew only too well that the news about his gas station proposal would be all over town by five o’clock that evening.
He glanced uneasily at Hannah. She was blinking rapidly and dabbing at her eyes with a hankie, but she appeared to have the potential flood of tears under control. Winston rested his muzzle on her shoulder.
“Sorry about that,” Rafe said eventually.
“Oh, shut up.”
He tried to look on the positive side. At least she hadn’t said no.
chapter 22
The letdown was far worse than the anger or the tears. It bordered on outright depression, Hannah thought. She retreated to the upstairs veranda as soon as she was inside the house. Rafe did not try to stop her.
Half an hour later, stretched out in a wicker lounger, with Winston hovering loyally beside her, she tried to sort out her mangled emotions and jumbled thoughts. She gazed at the restless surface of the bay and told herself that she had overreacted. She had, in fact, come unglued in a way that was most unusual for her.
Obviously she had been under more stress lately than she had realized.
She had every right to be furious with Rafe for that scene at the Eclipse Bay Gas and Go, she decided. But why had she let events get to her like that? She had been screaming at Pete Levare. She had nearly burst into tears in front of all those people.
What was the matter with her?
The answer was out there, but she knew she did not want to deal with it. She almost welcomed the sound of Rafe’s footsteps behind her. Anything was better than looking at the hard facts of her situation.
“You okay?” he asked.
She took some satisfaction from the f
act that he sounded worried.
“I’m pissed,” she said.
“Yeah. I know.” He handed her a glass of iced tea. After a second’s hesitation she took it from him. He seemed relieved. He lowered himself onto a wicker chair and rested his elbows on his knees. “It was my fault.”
“We’ve already established that.” She examined the glass in her hand. The tea was not ordinary black tea over ice. It was a luscious green-gold in color. There was a sprig of mint draped artistically over the rim and tiny little mint leaves frozen inside each ice cube. A crisp straw poked over the edge of the glass. An impossibly thin slice of lemon floated in the crystal-clear depths. “There’s no little paper umbrella,” she said.
He examined the glass critically and then shook his head once, decisively. “An umbrella would have been over the top.”
“Just like that scene at the gas station.” She sipped the tea through the straw. It was perfect. Cold, strong, and invigorating. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Ask me to marry you in that dumb, tacky way.”
“You sure you want to reopen that conversation?”
“I want an answer.”
He looked out at the silver surface of the bay. “All right. I wanted to marry you the day you got out of the car here at Dreamscape, but I knew you wouldn’t take a chance on me. At least, not right away.”
Tea sloshed over the side of her glass. She sputtered wildly, “You what . . . ?”
He did not respond to her interruption. Instead he plowed ahead with a sort of dogged determination. She got the feeling that having launched himself on this venture, he was bound to see it through to the conclusion, even if that conclusion was ill-fated.
“During the past few days I thought maybe we were getting closer. Making progress.”
“Having sex, you mean.”
He nodded agreeably. “That, too. But I didn’t want to push it.”
“The sex?”
“The relationship.”
“Oh, that.” She scowled. “Why not?”
“Mostly because I figured you’d get nervous and back off.”
“Me? You’re the one who claims to have a deep-seated fear of having inherited a genetic tendency to screw up relationships.”
“I had every right to play my cards close to the chest. I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with. After all, you told me you’d drawn up a new list of qualifications for a husband. Hell, you wouldn’t even tell me what was on the revised version.”
She dropped her head against the back of the lounger. “That stupid list.”
“Yeah. That stupid list. Worrying about it has been a real source of stress for me, Hannah.”
Her hand stilled on Winston’s head. “It has?”
“That damned list has driven me nuts. At any rate, this afternoon at the gas station when you started to tell everyone that the subject of marriage had never even come up between us, I guess I got a little irritated. Hell, I lost my temper.” He paused. “And whatever common sense I’ve got.”
She slowly lowered the glass. “Are you serious?”
He turned his head back to look at her. “Dead serious.”
“You’ve been thinking about marriage since I first got here?”
“Before that, if you want the truth.” He looked down at his loosely clasped hands for a moment. When he raised his head again his eyes were bleak. “Maybe since I got the news about Dreamscape from Isabel’s lawyer and realized that you were still single.”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “What put the notion of marriage into your head? Did you have some crazy idea that it would be the simplest way to deal with our inheritance?”
“Hell, no. Marriage is not a simple way of handling anything. I know that better than anyone.”
“Then why?” Her voice was rising again. She’d have to watch that. She was a Harte, after all.
Rafe’s jaw tightened. “It’s hard to explain. It just seemed right somehow. When I got the letter from the lawyer things started to fall into place. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I wanted. It was as if I’d been groping my way through a fog bank for years and suddenly the fog evaporated.”
“What, precisely, do you want?”
He spread his hands. “Nothing too bizarre. You. The inn and the restaurant. A future.”
She waited for him to add undying love and mutual devotion to the list. But he didn’t. “I see. Some people would say that a marriage between a Harte and a Madison would definitely qualify as bizarre.”
He watched her intently. “Look, I don’t know what’s on this new list of yours, but I’ve done some changing during the past eight years. I still don’t meet all the requirements you gave me when you were nineteen—”
“I was twenty that night, not nineteen.”
“Whatever. The thing is, I do meet at least some of those specifications, and I’m willing to work on the rest.”
“Why?” she asked bluntly.
He leaned forward, intense and earnest. “You’re a Harte. You ought to see the logic in us getting married. Hey, we’d be going into this deal with our eyes wide open. We know a hell of a lot more about each other than most people know about their potential spouses. We’ve got some history together. Three generations of it. We’d have Dreamscape to work on together. Sharing a business enterprise is a very bonding experience.”
“You think so?”
“Sure.” He was warming to his theme now. “For my part, I can guarantee that this wouldn’t be another typical Madison marriage.”
She sipped her tea, reluctantly fascinated. “In what way?”
“I just told you.” He spread his hands in a gesture of exasperation. “It won’t be based on some wild, romantic fantasy of endless lust.”
“No lust at all?” she asked around the straw.
His jaw locked. “I’m not saying I don’t find you attractive. You know I do. We’re sexually compatible. That’s important in a marriage.”
“Sexual compatibility is nice,” she agreed.
“Right. Real important.”
“But what you’re proposing here is a marriage of convenience.”
“What I’m proposing,” he said, his voice tightening, “is a marriage based on the sort of things that are supposed to appeal to a Harte, the kind of crap that was on that original list of yours: Mutual goals. Shared interests, et cetera, et cetera.”
The edge in his voice made her look at him quickly, but his face was an unreadable mask.
“Right.” She jiggled the straw among the ice cubes. “Crap.”
He drew a breath. “Okay, ‘crap’ was not a great word. Look, what I’m trying to say here is that I think we’ve got a shot at making a marriage work. Hannah, you told me once that I didn’t have to repeat the same mistakes my father and my grandfather made. I haven’t been one hundred percent successful, but I have managed to avoid some of the larger disasters. And I did meet the goal I set for myself eight years ago.”
“You didn’t end up in jail.”
“Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Huh.”
“It’s taken me a while to find out what I want in life, but I’ve got it straight now. I need to know if you can stretch your new list of requirements in a husband to accommodate me.”
“Depends.” She steeled herself. “You see, the new edition of my list is extremely short, at least compared to the old one. Only one requirement is on it.”
He watched her the way Winston watched seagulls. Hope and determination burned in his eyes, but so did the knowledge of potential defeat.
The roar of a sturdy truck engine rumbled in the drive on the opposite side of the house. Winston removed his head from under Hannah’s hand and hurried off around the corner to investigate. Rafe frowned, clearly annoyed by the interruption. Then he realized who it was and surged to his feet.
“That will be A.Z. ,” he said. He started after Winston.
Hannah
glared at his back. “So much for declaring undying love and devotion.” But she said it very softly so that he would not hear her because it was entirely possible that he did not have either to declare.
Who would have guessed that a Madison would have ever settled for a marriage based on mutual interests and shared goals?
Who would have guessed that a Harte would have hungered for a little wild passion and romantic love?
The noise of the truck engine ceased abruptly. Hannah got up from the lounger and followed Rafe and Winston around the corner.
“This here’s the log for that night.” Arizona opened the black leather-bound volume on the kitchen table and swiveled it around so that Rafe and Hannah could look at the entries. “That first Thornley reception was a big event. Lots of folks there, including some from Portland.”
“We’re looking for a record of a car that left the parking lot and returned between midnight and two.” Rafe slid the log closer to get a better look at the tiny, meticulously made notations. “I assume you stayed until the reception ended, A.Z. ?”
“Until the last car pulled out of the lot,” she assured him. “No point keeping a half-assed record, I say.”
Hannah flipped pages. “There are a lot of entries here. It’s going to take a while to go through them.”
“Take your time.” Arizona shoved herself to her feet. “Reckon I’ll go out into the sunroom and relax while you two conduct your little investigation. Mind if I pour myself some more of your coffee, Rafe?”
“Help yourself.” He reached for a pen and the lined tablet he had set out on the table.
“Thanks.” Arizona reached for the pot. “Been a while since I sat in Isabel’s sunroom. Miss those visits. Isabel always had something interesting to say.”
The sad, faintly wistful note in Arizona’s voice caught Hannah off guard. She looked up quickly.
Arizona headed for the kitchen door, chunky mug in hand. “I could talk to her, you know? She understood when I told her about the goings-on up at the institute. Didn’t laugh the way some folks do.”
Arizona ambled out into the hall and disappeared in the direction of the solarium. Hannah gazed after her for a moment, aware of a glimmer of curiosity.
Eclipse Bay Page 26
