The Invitation

by Jude Deveraux

  He had the fire going now, and he smiled at her over it. “I like that story. What did Charley say when he got no turkey?”

  She shrugged. “Charley was happy if he had turkey and happy if he had beans. When it came to food, Charley was into quantity, not quality.” She looked up at him. “What’s the worst thing that’s happened to you?”

  William answered without thinking. “Being born rich.”

  Jackie gave a low whistle. “You’d think that was the best thing that had happened to you.”

  “It is. It’s the best and the worst.”

  “I think I can see that.” She was thinking about this as William poured water from a canteen onto a handkerchief and, with his hand cupping her chin, began to clean the wound on the side of her head.

  “What’s your deepest, darkest secret, something that you’ve never told anyone?” he asked.

  “It wouldn’t be a secret if I told.”

  “Do you think I’d tell anyone?”

  She turned her head and looked up at him, at the shadows the firelight cast across his handsome face: dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, that long Montgomery nose. Maybe it was the unusual circumstances, the dark night surrounding them, the fire at the center, but she felt close to him. “I kissed another man while I was married to Charley,” she whispered.

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s pretty bad in my book. What about you?”

  “I backed out on a contract.”

  “Was that really bad? If you changed your mind…”

  “It was a breach of promise, and she thought it was very bad.”

  “Ah, I see,” Jackie said, smiling as she wrapped her arms around her knees. “What’s your favorite food?”

  “Ice cream.”

  She laughed. “Mine too. Favorite color.”

  “Blue. Yours?”

  She looked up at him. “Blue.”

  He came to sit by her, dusting off his hands. When Jackie shivered in the cool mountain air, he put his arm around her shoulders, as naturally as breathing, and pulled her head to his chest. “Do you mind?”

  Jackie couldn’t even speak. It felt so good to touch another human being. Charley had always been cuddly and affectionate, and she had often sat on his lap, snuggling in his arms, while he read some airplane magazine aloud to her.

  She didn’t realize she was drifting off to sleep until his voice jolted her awake.

  “What’s the biggest regret in your life?” he asked sharply.

  “That I wasn’t born with a few Mae West curves,” she answered quickly. She used to whine to Charley that the guys treated her like one of them because she looked like them: an angular face, with a square jaw, broad shoulders, straight hips, and long legs.

  “You are joking, aren’t you?” William said, his voice full of disbelief. “You’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stopped dead in my tracks as I watched you walk down the streets of Chandler.”

  “Really?” she said, now wide awake. “Are you sure you know who I am?”

  “You are the great Jacqueline O’Neill. You’ve won nearly every flying award that is given. You’ve been everywhere in the world. You once were lost for three days in the snow of Montana, but you managed to walk out.”

  “Actually, I rolled down a mountain. It was only by luck that I landed at some cowboys’ camp.”

  He knew she was lying, for he’d read everything written about her at that time. After crashing in a snowstorm, she had made her way out, climbing down the side of a steep mountain by using dead reckoning, by navigating with the faint sunlight during the day and the stars at night. She’d kept her head, often leaving huge arrows made from tree branches in the snow so airplanes looking for her could find her. Smiling, he tightened his arm around her shoulders and was pleased when she moved closer to him.

  “Ah, how do I walk?” she asked tentatively, not wanting to sound as though she were asking for a compliment, which was just what she was doing.

  “With long strides that eat up the earth. Grown men stop what they’re doing just to watch you walk, your shoulders back, your head held high, your beautiful thick hair catching the breeze, your—”

  Jackie started to laugh. “Where have you been all my life?”

  “Right here in Chandler, waiting for the day you would come back.”

  “You might have had to wait forever, because I never thought I would return. I was so restless back then. All I wanted was to get out of this tiny, isolated town. I wanted to move, to go places and see things.”

  “And you got to do that. Was it as good as you thought it would be?”

  “At first it was, but after seven or eight years I began wanting things, like a flower box. I wanted to plant seeds and watch them grow. I wanted to know for sure that where I went to sleep was going to be the place where I woke up.”

  “So after Charley died, you came back to dreary old Chandler.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling against his chest. “Boring old Chandler where nothing changes and everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

  “Are you happy now?”

  “I—Hey! why am I doing all the answering? What about you? Why haven’t I met you before? But that’s right, it was not a ‘significant meeting.’ I don’t think we have met before, because I would have remembered you.”

  “Thank you. I take that as a compliment.” He moved away from her to throw more wood on the fire. “How about something to eat? A sandwich? Pickles?”

  “Sounds delicious.” She could tell that he didn’t want to discuss their original meeting, and she figured it was because she’d probably snubbed him. She used to do that to men; it saved her pride. She’d tell a boy she wouldn’t be caught dead at a dance with a bullfrog like him rather than tell the truth—that she couldn’t afford a new dress.

  She’d grown up in Chandler. After her father died when she was twelve, her mother, who considered herself a southern belle, had prostrated herself on a fainting couch and spent the next six years there. They had insurance money, and her mother’s brother sent them money, but it was barely enough. It had been left up to Jackie to see that the decaying old house at the edge of town didn’t fall down on top of their heads. While other girls were learning to wear lipstick, Jackie was spending her weekends hammering the roof back on. She chopped wood, built a fence, repaired the porch, built new steps when the first set wore out. She knew how to use a hand saw, but had no idea how to use a nail file.

  One day when Jackie was eighteen an airplane flew overhead, a long banner tied to its tail announcing an air show the next day. Jackie’s mother, who was as healthy as a dandelion in a manicured lawn, decided to have a fainting fit on that day because she didn’t want Jackie to leave her. But Jackie did go, and that was where she met Charley. When he pulled out of town three days later, Jackie was with him. They were married the next week.

  Her mother had gone back to Georgia where her brother refused to put up with her hypochondria and put her to work helping with his six children. Judging from the letters Jackie received until her mother’s death a few years ago, that had been the best thing for her. She had been very happy after she’d left Chandler and gone back to her own people.

  “Twenty years,” Jackie whispered.

  “What?”

  “It was twenty years ago when I left with Charley. Sometimes it seems like yesterday and sometimes it seems like three lifetimes ago.” She looked up at him. “Did we meet back then, before I left with Charley?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling. “We met then. I adored you, but you never even looked at me.”

  She laughed. “I can believe that. I was so full of youthful pride.”

  “You still are.”

  “Pride maybe, but no longer am I youthful.”

  At that, William looked at her across the fire, and for a moment Jackie thought he was angry at her. She was about to ask him what was wrong when he briskly stepped around the fire,
pulled her up into his arms and kissed her firmly on the mouth.

  Jackie had kissed only two men in her life: her husband, Charley, and a pilot who was just taking off and might not come back. Neither of those kisses had been like this one. This kiss said, I’d like to make love to you, like to spend nights with you, like to touch you and hold you.

  When he released her, Jackie fell back against the ground with a thud.

  “I think there’s still a little youth left in you,” William said sarcastically as he pushed a stick back into the fire.

  Jackie was speechless, but her eyes never left him. How in the world could she not remember him? There were at least half a dozen Montgomerys in her high school class, but she couldn’t remember one named William. Of course the Montgomerys all seemed to have five or six last names on the front of their family name. Maybe he’d been called something else, like Flash or Rex, or maybe the girls just called him Wonderful.

  After William kissed her, there was an awkward silence between them, which he broke. “Okay,” he said enthusiastically, “you get three wishes, what are they?”

  She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again, looking up at him sheepishly.

  “Come on,” he said, “it couldn’t be that bad. What is it?”

  “It isn’t really a bad wish at all. It’s just that it’s so…so boring.”

  “Jackie O’Neill, the greatest female pilot who ever lived, has a thought that’s boring? Not possible.”

  Right away she realized that she didn’t want to tell him her wish because she didn’t want to disappoint him. He seemed to know all about her—if one can know anything about another from records broken and set, from inflated newspaper accounts that dramatized happenings that were in truth actually rather ordinary.

  “I want to put down roots, stay somewhere, and Chandler is familiar to me,” she said. “Now that I’ve seen the rest of the world, I know Chandler is a nice place. But I can’t live anywhere if I don’t have a way to make money.” She put up her hand when he started to speak. “I know, I know, your family and the Taggerts pay me well when they want me to fly somewhere, but I’ll never make any money in a one-man operation. I want to hire a few young pilots, run a little business. I’d like to delegate some of the work. I’d like to run passengers and freight, maybe some mail, between here and Denver, but I’ll need a healthy nest egg to be able to set up an operation like that.”

  “But…” He couldn’t think how to word his thoughts so he wouldn’t be offensive.

  But Jackie knew what he was thinking. “Jackie O’Neill, the greatest female pilot of this century reduced to flying mail from Colorado to the East Coast. Queen of the snap roll reduced to hauling picture post cards. Oh, the horror of it. Oh, the great tragedy of it. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  William ducked his head, but she could see that his face was as red as the fire. A man who blushes, she thought.

  “All that daredevil stuff is for kids. I’ve had my fill of it.”

  He came to sit by her again and looked at her earnestly. “I’m sure you could get your business established if you wanted it. There are ways to make that kind of thing happen.”

  If you have as much money as the Montgomerys do, she thought, but of course she didn’t say that. “Even the very, very best pilot has to have an airplane, and the last time I saw mine, its nose was pressed against a three-ton boulder.” There was a patronizing tone to her voice.

  “I see your point.” As he put his arm around her, he kept his eyes lowered. “Wish number two.”

  “Nope. I want your wish number one.”

  “I have only one wish. I wish I could accomplish something on my own, something that Montgomery money couldn’t buy for me.” He looked at her. “Your turn. Second wish.”

  “Curly hair?” she asked, making him smile.

  “Tell me the truth. There must be things in life you want besides a business.” He made it sound as though she had disappointed him by not wishing for a magic carpet or perhaps world peace. “What about another husband?”

  There was so much hope in his voice that she laughed. “Are you volunteering?”

  “Think you’d accept my offer?”

  At the eager, almost-serious tone in his voice, she tried to pull away from him, but he held her fast. “All right, I’ll behave.”

  “What’s your second wish?” she asked.

  “Probably to be as good a man as my dad.”

  “With your lying you’re not as good as the Beasley girls.”

  He laughed, and the tension between them was gone. “So you won’t tell me your other wishes, your other wants out of life?”

  “If I told you, you’d think I was ridiculous.”

  “Try me.”

  There was something earnest about him that made her want to tell the truth. If she’d been with some of Charley’s friends, she’d have made up something entertaining, like winning the Taggie, but now she just wanted to say what she really wanted. “All right, what I want most is normalcy. For the first twelve years of my life I had an ailing father and a hypochondriac mother. After my father’s death, I had an invalid mother. I longed to go to school dances and such, but I didn’t get to. One of my parents always needed me. For the last twenty years I have traveled and flown and had an enormously exciting life. Sometimes it seemed that every day brought some new and thrilling event. Charley was as unsettled, as fidgety, as my mother was unmovable. I’ve had lunch at the White House, been to about half the countries of the world, met an enormous number of famous people. After the…” She barely glanced at him. A few years ago she had performed a service that had to be done at the time, and afterward America had made a fuss about it. “I’ve had my photo in the newspapers,” she finished.

  “An American heroine,” he said, his eyes glowing.

  “Perhaps. Whatever I was, I loved it all.”

  “But then Charley died and you changed,” he said, sounding almost jealous.

  “No, it was before that. Somewhere in there I realized that people wanted my autograph for themselves, not for me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it all. But one day after Charley and I, in separate planes, had spent three days with no sleep, on harrowing flights through a raging forest fire, I was told the president was calling to congratulate me. I sat there on a stiff chair in some dingy little office and thought, Not again.”

  She smiled. “I think that when you get to the point where a call from the president of the United States elicits nothing but boredom, it’s time to do something else.”

  William was silent for a moment. “Normal. You said you wanted normal. What is normal?”

  She grinned at him. “How would I know? I’ve never even seen it, much less lived it. But I don’t think calls from the president, champagne in hot air balloons, living in hotels, and being rich one day and poor the next is normal. It’s exciting, but it’s also very tiring.”

  He chuckled. “It’s true that we all want what we don’t have. I have had the most normal life in the world. I went to the right schools, studied business administration, and after college I came back to Chandler to help run the family businesses. The most exciting thing I ever did was spend three days in Mexico with one of my brothers.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes what?”

  “And what did you do in Mexico during those three days?”

  “Ate. Saw the sights. Fished a little.” He stopped. “Why are you laughing?”

  “Two handsome young men alone in a place as decadent as Mexico and you went to see the sights! Didn’t you even get drunk?”

  “No.” William was smiling. “What is the most exciting thing you’ve done?”

  “It would be difficult to choose from the list. Dippy twist loops are rather exciting.” Her head came up. “Once I had a Venetian count try to tear my clothes off.”

  “You found that exciting?” William asked coldly.

  “It was, when you consider that we were flying at about ten thousand feet and he
was crawling across the plane toward me. A few sideslips and he got back in his seat. But he was crying that an airplane was the only place where he hadn’t yet made love to a woman.”

  William laughed. “Tell me more. I like hearing about your life. It beats mine.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true. I once made a dead-stick landing—that’s with a dead engine—in a plane with no wheels and only one and a half wings. That was more excitement than I wanted.”

  “Which countries did you like best?”

  “All of them. No, I’m serious. Each country has something to recommend it, and I try to overlook the bad parts.”

  William was silent for a few minutes, staring into the fire. “Charley was a very lucky man to share so many years with you. I envy him.”

  She turned her head up to look at him, frowning in concentration. “You sound as though you’ve been carrying a torch.”

  “For you? Yes, I have. I used to adore you from afar.”

  “How flattering. But back then you could have told me you loved me and offered me a few Montgomery millions and I still wouldn’t have stayed in Chandler.”

  They sat together, his arm slipping about her shoulders as they watched the fire. “What do you need to open your freight business?” he asked.

  “Seriously?”

  “Very seriously.”

  She took a moment before she answered. She may have just had a bump on the head, but her brains were still intact. Charley had drummed into her that a pilot without any money must always be on the lookout for an airplane-lover who did have money. “Now, that’s a marriage made in heaven,” he used to say. She wouldn’t want to take advantage of this man, but if he was bored and had pots of money, maybe they could find something that would help him occupy his time.

  She took a deep breath, trying to banish her feelings of guilt. If he wanted to do something for her, it was because he believed her to be an American heroine. But if Jackie took money from him, it would have to do with something much less altruistic, something much more primitive, such as putting bread on the table and maybe a few really nice dresses on her back. “A couple of good, light planes. A full-time mechanic, hangars, a few old planes I can cannibalize for parts, money for salaries until I can pay the pilots.”