Sure, he’d buy her a new canoe. But there was no doubt whatsoever in his mind that as soon as she knew that he intended to do it, she’d insist that he leave. So why not make this last as long as possible?
For a moment after entering the cabin, he stood in front of the door and got his bearings. Being indoors now seemed, after five months in the woods, slightly claustrophobic. He had never realized before his stint in the outdoors how confining houses were. Walls. Roofs. Windows that kept the outside out and the inside in. It seemed unnatural to be able to look through the glass but not be able to smell or touch what was on the other side.
One thing that the cabin did, however, was give him a clue about its occupant. Letters addressed to Margaret Macintyre sat on the low table beside the door, and a pair of expensive but sturdy hiking boots seemed to have been kicked off haphazardly near the hearth, where they lay at odd angles.
Suddenly he had the distinct sense of someone near. “Maggie?” he said, whirling around, but the bedroom door was still closed. Maggie hadn’t mentioned whether anyone lived with her.
No one appeared, but he continued to feel as if someone else were in the room, especially when he heard a few random notes of music being played. The instrument was a plucked mountain dulcimer, if he wasn’t mistaken. He had attended a mountain crafts fair here shortly after moving to Scot’s Cove; there he had listened to someone strumming such an instrument, which resembled a zither and was played with a wood plectrum. Now he listened closely. The music faded, which was when he decided that he was imagining things. Or had river water sloshing around in his ears. Or something.
He saw the box of clothes that Maggie had mentioned piled high inside the open utility room door, and he thought that he might as well put on something that would make her feel more comfortable around him. He didn’t want her to ask him to leave. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d achieve an objective that hadn’t made itself completely clear to him yet, he only knew that it had something to do with his destiny. He still had no earthly idea how he was going to explain why he’d jumped into her canoe other than to say that this seemingly rash action was connected in some mysterious way to the dream he’d had last night.
After a spate of concerted digging through the clothes that Maggie had offered, Tate lit upon a pair of shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and put them on. He caught sight of himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink and grinned. The clothes made him look a bit more like his old self, but he didn’t feel like his old self, and that was good.
Tate found the teakettle sitting on the stove. When he went to fill it, water roared out of the spigot so forcefully that it splashed out of the kettle’s spout. Chagrined, he adjusted the flow, but at that moment, a faucet seemed like a particularly worthwhile gadget. Imagine turning a handle and having water spurt out! In the old days, he had taken faucets for granted.
The dishes stacked in the sink were dirty. He rummaged in the back of the kitchen cabinets until he found two clean cups, and he set them out on the kitchen counter. Then, with nothing else to do but wait for Maggie to reappear, he stuffed his damp deerskin loincloth in one pocket and prowled around the cabin.
The main section was a solid little house constructed of hickory logs and chinked with clay, probably built more than a century ago. This served as the present-day living room; one end had been partitioned off into the bedroom. Later and more modern add-ons were a dining room, the kitchen, and the half bath off the utility room. There was an indefinably warm and cheerful feeling about the cabin, a pleasant ambience at odds with Maggie’s offhand and reluctant hospitality.
He liked the way the cabin was furnished in varied textures and strong colors—it was comfortably country without being too cute. Which was more than he could say about those rambling monstrosities that his colleagues at Conso were building in the former wilderness once known as Indian Ridge and now renamed Cherokee Acres. Their interior designers tended toward quaint bent-twig furniture strewn with sunbonnet-girl quilts, which were apparently supposed to convey a rustic atmosphere. They didn’t.
Speaking of quilts, several pieced cotton squares were draped across the arm of a rocking chair in one corner. Tate bent for a closer look, and at that moment, the bedroom door opened and Maggie came out.
“Is the tea ready?” she asked, and he decided not to mention the mysterious dulcimer music. Judging from her tone of voice, she was still plenty hacked at him, and he supposed he couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t every day that a guy jumped out of the sky and scuttled a new canoe.
“I haven’t heard the teakettle whistle,” he said, forgetting about the music and the quilt pieces and zoning in on her.
“I broke the whistle on purpose when I realized that the last thing I wanted to hear when I’m ready for a little rest and relaxation was the screech of that kettle,” she said, and although he heartily agreed with Maggie’s low opinion of whistling teakettles, he didn’t reply. All he could do—all he wanted to do—was look at her.
Maggie Macintyre had transformed herself from waterlogged waif into one beautiful woman. She had changed into a long floaty skirt that swirled around her legs, sensuously outlining the contours of her hips and abdomen and revealing glimpses of slim ankles and tiny feet. Above the skirt she wore a loose-fitting sort of pullover, something light and filmy and looking as if it were made of woven cobwebs. But her clothes were the least of it; it was her hair, now only slightly damp and falling in shimmering curtains from a center part, that he liked best. However, he changed his mind about that when he looked into her eyes, which were water gray and edged in long, tangled lashes.
She spared a brief glance at the shorts and shirt he had put on before brushing past him into the kitchen. For one spellbound moment he thought that their bodies might touch, but they did not. All he felt was the silken whisper of the hem of her skirt as it brushed his leg.
There was no doubt in Tate’s mind that Maggie Macintyre was the woman of last night’s dream, in which she had come to him gently in the dark as he slept, had pressed her supple body against the hard muscled contours of his, had wound her fingertips through his flowing locks. When, in the gray light of dawn, he had turned to her for comfort, his dream woman had been gone. Margaret, he’d thought as he woke up. She is called Margaret. He hadn’t the slightest idea how he’d known her name.
Thus it had seemed no less than a miracle today when he’d spotted Maggie from the promontory as she was paddling on the river below. He’d had a sense that for an instant time stood still, ceased to exist, but he made himself pull back from the sensation and forced himself to concentrate on the woman navigating the river below. He knew this woman, knew her intimately. He had thought she wasn’t real.
But she was real, and she was supposed to be his. And so, with a sense of the rightness of it all, he had jumped. He didn’t know why, only that it was something that he was meant to do. And at the moment, he didn’t regret doing it. He didn’t regret it at all.
He was glad that Maggie wasn’t aware of his thoughts as she tossed a couple of tea bags into a pot and deftly poured boiling water over them. “Do you live here with someone?” he asked, not only because of the strange feeling he’d had that someone was watching earlier but because he wanted to get a conversation going.
“No,” she said with a withering look that invited no further questions.
Okay, so he’d bombed out. He was trying to think of something else to say when she spoke up.
“I’m starved,” she said, opening the refrigerator and peering inside. She took out a bowl of spaghetti and eyed it speculatively. “There’s enough for two here if you want some.”
Tate hadn’t expected an invitation. On top of that, he hadn’t eaten spaghetti for five months. His mouth watered at the thought of it.
“Well?” Maggie said. “Are you in the mood for spaghetti? I’ve got to eat something.”
“Sure,” he said, but it wasn’t strictly the offer of food that interested him. He wanted more than
anything to sit down across the table from her, to look deep into those remarkable eyes, to listen to her clear lilting speaking voice as it tripped up and down the scale; he truly had never heard such a lovely voice.
“I could make a salad if you’d like,” she was saying. “This is my dinnertime.” She shoved the spaghetti into the microwave oven and punched the timer.
“Whatever,” he said, not wishing to appear too eager. When she took a head of lettuce, a cucumber and a tomato out of the refrigerator, he leaned against the counter, his arms folded across his chest.
“If you think the kitchen is a mess, I’m not apologizing,” she said as she cut lettuce into a large bowl. “I haven’t felt like cleaning it up, that’s all.”
“You don’t need to apologize to me, in any case,” he pointed out.
“That’s a good point. It’s you who should be apologizing. To me.” She skewered him with a look and measured oil and vinegar into a cup.
“All right, I do apologize for what happened to your canoe. But how else were we going to—”
“Going to what?” she asked.
“Meet,” he said.
She dumped the dressing over the salad greens and very deliberately drew a deep breath. She exhaled slowly and swiveled her head to look at him. “What makes you think that I wanted to meet you or anyone else?” she said in a dangerously low tone.
“I—well, I didn’t think about that,” he admitted.
The microwave bell dinged, and Maggie whirled around to take out the spaghetti. “See if you can find a couple of forks in that drawer,” she said, gesturing toward the one on which his hip rested as she bore the spaghetti into the dining room.
He looked, but there were no clean eating utensils in that drawer or any other. He found a bottle of dishwashing detergent under the sink and washed two of the forks he found in the sink. He also washed two knives and two spoons. By that time, Maggie had returned.
“Okay, everything’s ready,” she said. He followed her into the dining room and saw that she had set two colorful plates on the oak gateleg dining table. She took the silverware from him and portioned it out.
The spaghetti steamed invitingly, and Tate’s taste buds, which were now accustomed to dinners that more often than not consisted of whatever fish he happened to catch and grilled over the coals of an open fire, perked up at the prospect of tangy, tomatoey meat sauce topped with parmesan cheese.
“Sit down,” she said, and he pulled out the chair and hesitated. “Go ahead. You’re not wearing that leather thingamajig you had on, so you don’t have to worry about splinters.”
“That leather thingamajig,” he said, “is part of my heritage.”
“So is taking scalps,” she said darkly.
Tate had grown up in the white man’s world, and digging remarks had no effect on him anymore. “Are you trying to insult me?” he said mildly. Actually, he hoped she was. It would give them something to talk about.
She looked slightly less sure of herself. “No. Of course not. I’m just curious.”
“I can imagine,” he said, sitting down.
“When you’re wearing the thingamajig—”
“Say ‘loincloth.’ Lots of famous people have worn one. Tarzan, for instance.”
“When you’re wearing it, don’t you get stung by yellow jackets? Isn’t sunburn a problem? And why don’t you have scratches from brambles?”
He relaxed and helped himself to the spaghetti, shooting her a grin calculated to put her at ease. “I’ve never had a yellow jacket sting. As for sunburn, the shade of the forest prevents that. Brambles? In the old days when we Cherokees met up with a harmful plant like poison ivy, we talked to it and made it our friend in hopes that it wouldn’t hurt us. I tried it with brambles, too. There—does that answer all your questions?”
She looked slightly taken aback. That tongue-in-cheek bit about the brambles had probably done that. “Not quite, but it’s a start,” she said, and Tate wondered what that meant.
“My turn to ask questions,” he said. She raised her eyebrows, but he plunged ahead anyway. “How long have you lived here?” he asked.
“I arrived a week ago, but I’ve summered here forever. I usually rent the place out for most of the summer now since my job more often than not keeps me busy in Atlanta. This is the ancestral home of the Macintyres, who were part of the Scotch-Irish group that settled these mountains back in the 1700s.” She pushed the saltshaker toward him.
“So, are you here on a vacation?”
“Sort of. Please pass the salad.”
He wished she’d elaborate on her answers. “I should think you’d bring someone with you for company,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment. “You might say that I have,” she said and sipped pensively from her teacup.
“But you said—”
“Let’s drop it, okay?”
He set his fork down. “Look, if my questions are too personal, I’m perfectly willing to talk about something else. Lovely rain we’ve been having, isn’t it? Have you read any good books lately? How great an effect do you think the Atlanta Olympics will have on tourism in the mountains?” He also thought for a moment of asking if she had ever sensed something strange and eerie about this ancestral home of the Macintyres, but the thought fled when the expression on her face became even more forbidding.
Maggie banged her teacup down in its saucer so hard that tea splashed over the sides. She passed a hand over her eyes and drew a deep breath. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked you to stay. I’m not fit company for anyone these days.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he said slowly, trying to get a handle on the situation. He had thought things were going well, that she was opening up to him, and now he had the sense that she was in full retreat. One thing was for sure: he didn’t feel welcome now that her face had that pinched, shuttered look. Something was bothering her, something more serious than the loss of a canoe.
He made his decision swiftly. “I’ll go,” he said. He stood up and flung his napkin down before heading for the door.
A clock ticked somewhere, and birds fluttered noisily in the rafters as they settled down for the night. A purple haze hung over the distinctive humped shape of Breadloaf Mountain. Soon it would be dark.
“Wait,” Maggie said. “Wait.”
Something in her tone of voice gave him pause. What was it? Desperation? Misery? A little of both, perhaps, and something more as well. Loneliness, he thought in a burst of insight. Maggie Macintyre was lonely and terrified of being that way. Tate knew because he had so often been lonely himself.
“I really don’t want you to leave,” she said.
Tate went back to the table and sat down. “All right,” he said evenly.
“The truth is that I came up here to think things over. To figure out what to do about my life.”
“The first thing you should probably do is eat your spaghetti,” he said. He picked up his own fork and dug in.
“By this time, you’ve probably figured out that there’s a man involved,” she said. She toyed with her food, not looking at him.
“I hadn’t,” he said, but his heart zoomed to his feet and back again.
“Well, there was. His name is Kip Baker, and he left me to go off to South America to photograph some god-awful beauty contest. He’s a photographer, that’s how he makes his living. For various reasons, I decided it was ultimatum time and said, “Listen, Kip, if you go running off to South America, it’s over,’ and he said, ‘I’m going,’ and I said, ‘Don’t bother to come back if you do.’ He went. I had three weeks of vacation coming, and I was planning to spend time at this cabin soon to get it ready to rent for the summer, so 1 came up here to get some serious thinking out of the way.” She paused as if to catch her breath.
“Care to elaborate?”
“No. I just wanted to complain about Kip. And now I feel much better.” She smiled at him, which was encouraging, and started
to eat.
He watched her for a while, wondering how any guy in his right mind could leave Maggie Macintyre to go anywhere.
“So,” he said cautiously, “are you figuring it all out?”
“A little. I’ve made a few major decisions, gotten acclimated, and remembered what I used to like about coming here when I was a kid. The nature aspect kind of grows on you, doesn’t it?” This was said between mouthfuls.
“Yes, the mountains are a good place to do serious thinking. Maybe after a couple of weeks of peace and contentment, your problems will sort themselves out.”
“Let’s hope so. Would you care for more salad?” She held the bowl out toward him, and he shook his head, trying to get a handle on what made Maggie tick. She blew hot and cold at intervals; was she always like this?
The spaghetti was delicious. He complimented her on her cooking, and she blushed. “Kip used to say—” she began but stopped talking abruptly. “I’ve got to stop thinking about Kip, don’t I?” she said.
He wanted to shout, Yes! He wanted to personally eradicate any reminder of the man from Maggie’s brain. But he merely said, “It might be a good idea.”
“Bronwyn said I should stop thinking about him. She’s my best friend and my boss at the Mickle, Martyn, Baffin and Ousley Advertising Agency where I work.” She stopped eating and frowned. “You must think I’m a raving lunatic,” she said suddenly.
“Maybe a ravenous lunatic, considering the way you’re digging into that spaghetti.”
“To stop thinking about Kip, I should stop talking about him. To stop talking about him, I’d have to forget about the Awful Predicament I’m in, and that’s impossible.” Suddenly Maggie looked as if she’d said too much and clamped her mouth shut.
“He left you in an Awful Predicament?” Tate said with mild interest. Awful Predicaments held less fascination for him than the curve of her lips as she held them so tightly shut, and he wanted to reach out and touch a finger to them, and they would open and kiss his fingertip, and—
“Forget I ever said that,” she said, and she got up from the table and took her plate into the kitchen. While she was gone and taking an inordinately long time doing whatever she was doing in there, Tate finished his meal, and when she came back he thought he detected a redness around her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
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