Sweet Caroline
by Micqui Miller
Hard Shell Word Factory
www.hardshell.com
Copyright ©2004 Micqui Miller
December 2004 Hard Shell Word Factory
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Sweet Caroline
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Sweet Caroline
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Chapter One
MAYBE IT WAS the annoying pressure on Mick's shoulder or the low, seductive voice that belied its grating message,
"Excuse me, but this is my seat..." Or the hum of the plane's engine revving up for take-off, the press of bodies, and the stale air. Maybe it was all of them, but Mick wasn't waking up pretty. He'd just drifted off after thirty-six walking-zombie hours, twenty-two of them spent exactly like this—on an airplane.
"Go 'way," he grumbled.
The voice persisted. "Excuse me, sir, you are sitting in my seat. See, here's my boarding pass."
He forced open one eyelid, expecting to see the world as red and bloodshot as his eyes. Instead he found himself eyeball to thigh with one of the longest pair of legs—
gorgeous, shapely legs—dropping down from under one of the shortest skirts, worn by one of the tallest women he'd ever seen.
Suddenly very much awake, he managed to untangle himself enough from his tray table and laptop to see if Ms. Long Legs was real or a hallucination of sleep deprivation.
"S'cuse me?"
"For the ninetieth time," she said, bending low to thrust her boarding pass in his face. "You are sitting in my seat." Just a shade under six-foot-six himself, Mick knew too well the discomfort of flying the friendly skies. This was the first time he'd seen a woman outside of the WNBA equally 4
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challenged height-wise. His gaze dropped to her slender ankles then to her shoes. Yowzah! She wore white-strapped sandals with at least four-inch heels. Now he knew he was dreaming—or he'd died and gone to heaven.
Except this dream girl was pointing to her boarding pass again, and the annoyed look on her face was anything but dreamy. "See, 14B."
Mick tried out his most charming smile. "There's an empty seat over there." He pointed to 12D. "Right on the aisle." And right next to a woman holding a fussing baby and a whiny two-year-old.
"I don't want to sit in 12D." This time she leaned so close, he caught a hint of her perfume, a summer scent of blossoms and promises. Did he dare look beyond the first button that had come undone on her white silk blouse? Hell, it was a dream. Why not?
"Don't you dare look down my shirt," she said. Too late. He'd already caught a glimpse of white lace, tanned skin, and possibilities.
"Get up—NOW!"
Mick had no intention of moving. He'd already given up his seat in first class to an elderly man making his last trip home. He wasn't moving again. "Sorry."
"Sorry?" She drew back, giving him a clear view of fiery red hair, all curls and tendrils surrounding an expressive face dotted with freckles, a delicate little nose that turned up a bit at the end, and lips that shined with orange gloss. She had the most enchanting Texas drawl he'd ever heard. But her eyes captured his full attention.
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As far back as he could remember, strangers commented on the color of his, not quite blue, not quite brown, but a rich violet, a trait his entire family shared. Amazing. The color of this stunning woman's eyes matched his.
A flight attendant stopped behind the redhead. "You'll have to take your seat now, Miss."
"How can I?" she sputtered. "He's sitting in it." Happily, Mick noted her ring finger was bare.
"The captain is ready for take-off. Please sit right there." The attendant pointed to 12D, where mother and children waited. "We'll straighten this out once we're at our cruising altitude." The attendant turned a radiant smile on Mick and shot a glance at the vacant seat beside him. The one filled to overflowing with tablets and file folders. "Sorry, Mick. You'll have to put those under the seat again."
"And close my tray table and bring my seatback to its full upright position."
She laughed. "Guess you've memorized the drill by now." He pressed his lips together to keep from smiling—not at the lovely attendant who'd already made it clear she'd be more than willing to ease his fatigue, but at this gorgeous woman who, if they'd been characters in a cartoon, would be drawn with smoke shooting out of her ears and a volcano erupting from the top of her head.
* * * *
"I DON'T NEED THIS," Caroline Spring grumbled while she yanked on her seatbelt. Barefoot, she stood five-ten. Harnessed on a plane, she felt like those seventy inches were 6
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all from her waist down. The two runny-nosed little ones squirming in the seat beside her guaranteed a perfect flight. Unfortunately, Caroline had never overcome her irrational fear of flying or the accompanying airsickness. Not good for someone who spent way too many hours flying from assignment to assignment.
Thank God for Dramamine. She'd taken a generous dose while waiting for Travis to show up this morning. Her brother had been late as usual, traffic in Dallas its normal awful, and now this. It was almost enough to take her mind off her destination and what she hoped would end the journey to find her true identity, something she'd speculated about most of her life and now faced with certainty.
"I hope my kids aren't bothering you," said the woman sitting at the window. To Caroline, she looked exhausted and helpless, as if she were being held hostage by the wriggling pair. "Franklin and Miranda. They'll fall asleep as soon as we take off."
Caroline glanced down at the kids. A thin thread of saliva dangled from Miranda's chin and Franklin mined for gold in his left nostril. "They're fine." She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the seat. Nothing would be "fine" until her feet were on solid ground again.
"It's not really his fault, you know." Grudgingly, Caroline opened one eye. "What?"
"Mick. It's not his fault."
"Mick?"
"The man you were talking to." She giggled like a teenager. "The hunk in 14B."
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Caroline narrowed her gaze. "What about him?"
"He's been on planes for almost twenty-four hours. Flying back from Saudi Arabia or one of those other oil-producing countries."
"Bully for him." No wonder he looked so scruffy. She'd noticed that he hadn't shaved in a while, and she wouldn't want to be downwind if he raised an arm. Daring a glance backward, she quickly looked away. He'd been watching her, staring straight at her, and for the briefest moment, they made eye contact.
Eye contact! She did a double take. The color of his eyes. They were the same as hers. In an instant, memories of Caroline's grammar school days rushed back. She'd been teased by her classmates for her "orange hair and purple eyes" and taunted with "Pumpkin Head." No one in her family had the same coloring, not her mom, dad, or even her little brother. They all looked alike—short, squat, brown hair and eyes. She towered over them, the ol'
Pumpkin Head, and now she'd found someone else with those same eyes and that same orange hair.
&nb
sp; "By the way, I'm Virginia."
Caroline looked at the woman beside her and forced a smile.
"Did you see the elderly couple in first class? They were in the second row on the left as you came in. The poor man was probably snuggled under a blanket."
"I didn't notice."
"Well, he—Mr. Siriani—was supposed to sit where you're sitting now, and his wife on the other side of Mick." 8
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If there was a point to this story, Caroline wished Virginia would make it.
"Without being asked, Mick gave up his seat in first class to the man and paid the upgrade so his wife could sit beside him. The poor old dear has just spent the last two weeks at Sloan-Kettering. He's going home to die." The breath whooshed out of Caroline like she'd been slammed in the back with a two-by-four. Only six weeks ago, her mother had lost her battle against "the Big C," as Adina Spring chose to call it. Colon cancer. She suffered a slow agonizing death, which she had accepted like she accepted all things in life. "It's God's will, Caroline," she'd often told her angry daughter, who'd railed against the medical establishment, science, and any other group or person who stumbled into her path.
Que sera, sera—whatever will be, will be—did not work for Caroline Spring. And not anyone—not her mother's attending physician, her brother, the hospice team, not even Luke Enright, the man Caroline had known and loved since her first day at grad school at Texas A & M, could assuage her pain and fury. Now, she'd lost them all, except for Travis. Two weeks ago, she and her brother sat cross-legged on their mom's bedroom floor, sorting through drawers full of costume jewelry, tossing out papers, saving photographs. Travis yanked on a drawer that had been stuck for months. It flew across the room, narrowly missing Caroline. Her entire life had tumbled out of that drawer taking with it her identity and what trust she had left in anyone.
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"Mick's very tall, you know," Virginia said, obviously not noticing that Caroline had stopped listening. "But then so are you. Anyway, he was sort of galloping along, two briefcases and a couple of laptops trailing behind him. You couldn't miss him."
What was she blathering about now? Caroline heard only half of what her seatmate said. Why weren't they taking off?
The flight attendant had been in such an all-fired hurry to make her take her seat. She could only hope this wasn't an omen of what the next eight weeks held in store for her.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we've closed the doors," crackled a female voice on the intercom. "We'll be just a few minutes longer."
"I need to get some rest," she said to Virginia before the woman could launch into another inane story. Caroline shifted in her seat, faced the aisle, closed her eyes, and prayed the Dramamine would kick in—soon.
* * * *
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, the captain has turned on the seat belt sign in preparation for our descent into San Francisco..."
Caroline shot up straight in her seat. Descent? How?
They'd taken off only a few minutes ago. She looked at her watch, 1:05 p.m., or a little after Noon Pacific Coast time. The Dramamine had done more than its job. She'd slept like the dead the entire trip, and now her rump was numbed hard as granite. Next to her, she saw Virginia dozing over a magazine, neither child in sight.
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Fully awake, Caroline turned in her seat and glanced up and down the aisle. Children didn't go missing in the middle of a flight, and neither had Virginia's. Mick held both of them. Franklin sat in his lap, pounding grubby little fingers on the keyboard of Mick's laptop while Miranda slept contentedly in the crook of his arm. He was whispering to Franklin, his words mesmerizing the child.
Caroline leaned forward and pulled her purse from beneath the seat in front of her. She rummaged through it until she found her compact. She could touch up her make-up and take a leisurely look at Mick as well.
She saw that his dark red hair was as curly as hers. Had he not worn it cropped so close, it would have been a mass of tangled knots. The advantage of being a man was no bad hair days. His eyebrows were far darker than hers, too, and the shadow turning into a full beard, looked brown. Dark circles of fatigue ringed his eyes yet he seemed to be enjoying himself with the little boy. In spite of his rumpled look, Caroline grudgingly admitted Mick was someone she might, in a weak moment, find attractive. Given another time and place, of course. Within the next twenty minutes, they'd land. She'd go her way and he'd go his. Just as well, too. How could you trust a man who looked that good, who obviously knew it, and still charmed the chips out of everyone? She guessed he'd enjoyed irritating her, yet he'd been compassionate enough to put aside his own discomfort so an elderly couple could sit together, and to give a tired mom a much-needed break. Dang! A veritable Saint Mick.
* * * *
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Sweet Caroline
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BEYOND WEARY, MICK squirmed in his seat. He'd spent the last two weeks working grueling twenty-hour days in a place where the temperature never dropped below oneeighteen. A place devoid of foliage, hope, or joy. Covering his mouth with the back of his hand, he yawned mightily. If the child on his lap noticed, it didn't stop him from his mission to destroy the laptop.
Mick had seen the novelty of flight wear off for the kids somewhere over Atlanta, and by their layover in Dallas, they were bored and cranky and a big handful for a mom traveling alone. Mick had seen that look of weary frustration often enough in the faces of his sisters and sister-in-law. Virginia had hesitated only a second at his offer to take Franklin and Miranda for a few minutes. Those few minutes were going on three hours.
Miranda had stopped fussing over El Paso and dropped into deep slumber. Franklin still fought the good fight. Unfortunately, "Uncle" Mick was now losing the battle. They were landing, and these two were going back to Mommy as soon as he could get a flight attendant's attention. In the meantime, what better way to take his mind off the stiffness in his back, the pain in his tailbone from sitting too long, and Franklin's reeking diaper, than to concentrate on the fabulous redhead he had to admit he'd treated rudely. He saw that she was awake now and viewing him using one of the oldest tricks in the book: a mirror.
"Very good, Franklin. Now try this." He guided the youngster's pudgy little forefinger to one of the keys that 12
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would start a new program. Over Franklin's squeals and the hum of the plane's engine, Mick dared a glance across the aisle. A few more tendrils had escaped from her topknot and curled against the back of her neck. When she raised her chin, he saw the litheness and posture of a dancer, a longlegged ballerina, who must have towered over her frou-frou partners.
He wondered if she danced as a child, and the frustration she must have known growing too tall too soon. But if she'd ever been called an ugly duckling, she'd blossomed into a swan.
She was dressed in business attire, except for the strapped sandals. Mick remembered seeing a laptop draped over her shoulder, and that she'd carried a briefcase, too. Probably flying to a meeting in San Francisco then catching a late flight back to Dallas.
What a shame. She was the first woman in a long, long time who'd piqued his interest. Creeping up on forty, he'd sometimes wondered, as his sisters suggested, if he were turning into an old curmudgeon.
Not if I can still appreciate legs like that. He almost regretted being so arbitrary about staying in her seat. They'd likely be heading in opposite directions and their paths would never cross again. "Missed opportunities"—his mother's favorite assessment of his personal life. "Mick," he could hear her saying, "good women are not like buses. If you miss one, another will not come along in ten minutes." 13
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True, but not even the venerable Sheila DeSantis understood why her eldest son
never married. Why he never would and never could.
* * * *
CAROLINE HATED LANDINGS the most. She always feared the landing gear would fail, the retro rockets refuse to fire, or that whatever could go wrong would, and the plane would slide on its belly in suds right through the control tower. Worse, the kids had returned. Miranda had woken from her nap and hadn't stopped screaming since, and Franklin smelled like something left in the sun too long.
To distract herself, Caroline slipped an envelope out of her purse and peeked under the open flap. Good. She'd remembered the postcard. She glanced over her shoulder to make certain no one watched and pulled the tip of the card out of the envelope about an inch. The same chill she felt the first time she saw it raised gooseflesh on her arms again. A computer-generated photograph of a family gathering was pasted to the front of the card. She'd counted the family members time and again—twenty-eight in all. The original photograph, she'd decided, was taken from a distance because the faces blurred under magnification. Nothing unusual about that besides the fact that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to trim a photo of her, one she never recalled posing for, and paste it over a couple of the family members. She stood out among the group like a giantsized paper doll. 14
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At first Caroline thought it was just another "tall" joke except she'd found the postcard hidden with her birth certificate and a birth certificate for "Baby Girl Smith" born four days earlier than Caroline in a town in New York state too small to pinpoint on a map. Separately these things meant nothing. Even together they meant nothing. But why had her mother taped the postcard and birth certificates to the underside of a drawer? A place to hide a secret, and Adina Spring had taken that secret to her grave.
The magnifying glass had revealed only one clue—a banner that hung between two trees with the words
"Mahoney Family Reunion" spray-painted across it. No date, location, or inscription existed, the only clue a postmark from a city in California named Sebastopol. The card had been mailed a little more than a year ago.
Neither she nor Travis knew what the card meant, but as surely as that little boy sitting beside her had a date with a hot bath and a fresh diaper, Caroline would spend the next eight weeks finding answers to the questions she could no longer ask her mother.
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