Lover's Leap

by Pamela Browning

  “I didn’t tell anyone. In fact, I ran into Jolene at the gas station yesterday and she told me that someone who works here—a clerk-typist, I think she said—ferreted out the information about the additional mobile home sites. I wanted to tell Jolene that there’s going to be no wilderness park, but I didn’t, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t do that to you, Tate.”

  “Thanks for small favors,” he said. She thought he sounded as if he might believe her, at least a little.

  “I don’t know what I can do to make you believe me, but I never told anyone. Honestly.” She was barely holding on to her composure by this time; Tate was looking at her as if she were a life form lower than plankton.

  He looked away for a long moment, then back at her. “I don’t know why, but I do believe you. Anyway, I’m through with Conso. The matter’s moot.”

  “There’s something you should know. I came here this morning to warn you that the coalition knew about those extra mobile home sites. I was going to tell you last night when you got home, but—” She stopped when she saw the forbidding expression on his face.

  “I don’t know why you bothered about me this morning. I would have thought you’d have more interesting things to do.” His expression was contemptuous, his eyes cold.

  She swallowed. “It wasn’t what you thought with Kip, Tate,” she said.

  “The man was walking out of your bedroom, Maggie, and he wasn’t wearing any more than you were.”

  “You got the wrong idea. Kip was just passing through, and—”

  “And so you thought you’d make him feel at home, right?”

  Tears stung the back of her throat. “Wrong, Tate, all wrong,” she said.

  “Something is wrong, all right. I thought our relationship had promise.”

  “It did. It does. I was sick, Kip was frying bacon and onions when I got home, and he had come to see me, thinking I’d come crawling back to him, but I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, not after what he did to me, and anyway, I don’t love him, and—” She was sobbing outright now, and she didn’t have a tissue. She wasn’t crying only for herself, but for Tate because now she felt his pam, experienced his anguish. Like the way I felt what Peg felt when I dreamed about Tsani’s being swept over the falls, she thought in a revelatory moment. Only this was so much more personal, so much more tragic in terms of their own relationship. Added to her own grief over Tate’s misunderstanding of Kip’s presence at the cabin, it was an unbearable load of sorrow.

  “Here,” Tate said, handing her his handkerchief. She blew her nose. “And if you didn’t love whatsisname, why did you go to bed with him?”

  “It wasn’t bed, he wanted to shower,” Maggie blurted before realizing she had said the wrong thing.

  Tate expelled a long breath. “Did you drop the soap, Maggie? Or have the Tsagasi decided to leave you alone? Like I have,” he added.

  “I—” she began, but he wouldn’t let her finish.

  “Go back to your lover, Maggie. I’m sure he’s waiting for you with open arms.” He started the bike, the noise of the engine drowning out anything that Maggie had to say.

  She had managed to stop sobbing. She knew that there was no point in discussion. Tate didn’t want to hear anything she had to say, and so the only thing left for her to do was to salvage some dignity from the situation. Without a word, Maggie turned her back on him and marched over to her car. She fumbled in her purse for her keys, and then she noticed the BMW’s right front tire. It was flat. She heard a chime of laughter and thought, Peg.

  And you thought all I could do was move a bird’s nest in and out of the window, Peg said.

  She opened the trunk and saw that the spare tire was also flat. Maggie sneaked a look at Tate. He was sitting on his motorcycle and staring at the flat tire. His eyes flicked over her, took in her slumped shoulders, her red nose, the tears welling in her eyes again.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he rode over to where she stood, gazing at her from behind his sunglasses. My handsome Indian-brave, riding up on his black steed to rescue me from the massacre of my own regrets, she thought.

  His face was expressionless. “Get on,” he said.

  She stared at him, unsure of herself and of him.

  “I said, get on. I can’t leave you stranded here in this parking lot.”

  Maggie, not daring to hope, hesitated only briefly before slamming the trunk closed. She hiked her skirt up and straddled the bike behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist.

  “Hang on tight,” he warned before accelerating, and she thought, You bet I will. Forever and ever, if you’ll let me.

  For once she hoped he was reading her loud and clear.

  MAGGIE HAD NO IDEA where Tate was taking her, and she didn’t care. At least he was taking her with him. That was all that mattered.

  She was surprised when he stopped the motorcycle in front of the Scot’s Cove Messenger office, a neat brick building in the middle of town.

  Slowly she got off the bike. “What are we doing here?”

  “We have a paper to get out. Come along, Maggie. We’re going to put your writing skills to work.”

  “But—” she began, but Tate only grabbed her hand and hauled her along with him.

  He seemed to know the people who worked there, and she met the receptionist, the reporter, the ad salesman, and the print shop staff all in one grand sweep of the office.

  Tate called the group around him and in short order had informed them that he was their new boss, that they were going to put out a paper that Albie Fentress could be proud of, and that they were all going to work their behinds off to do it. Furthermore, if anyone didn’t like the idea, that person could leave and not come back.

  No one left.

  Maggie had worked on a daily campus paper while she was in college, and she knew the fundamentals of a good news story. Tate assigned her to a vacant desk, and soon she had her hands full with the backlog of work.

  Tate was self-assured and knowledgeable, and, sensing how important it was to him not to let Albie down, Maggie did as she was told. She was eager to help Tate, and not only out of her own guilt. She knew after ten minutes in the Messenger office with him that there were other compelling reasons why he had quit his job at Conso. He was a newspaperman through and through, and she didn’t need a sixth sense to know it. Tate had clearly found his niche.

  Later when he called her into the office that he was using, the one with the words Managing Editor lettered on the door, and asked her to write a feature about the Kalmia Conservation Coalition, she agreed without a murmur.

  “What slant should the article about the coalition have?” she asked him.

  He spared her a shrewd look. “Write it any way you like,” he said, and Maggie sat down at the computer monitor on her desk and pounded out a hard-hitting article about the coalition and its purpose. She didn’t pull any punches, either; she made sure that she set forth the aims of the organization, its objective of changing the zoning on Breadloaf Mountain, and after a phone call to Jolene Ott, quoted her copiously. When Maggie finished, she felt drained. She took her feature to Tate, wary of his reaction.

  When Tate read what she had written, he was elated. “This is exactly what we want,” he said.

  “Top management at Conso isn’t going to like it very much.”

  “I couldn’t care less what they think,” Tate said brusquely.

  Because Albie had been out for days and because during that time, the staff of the newspaper had had no direction, it took longer than they had anticipated to finish what needed to be done for the next issue of the Messenger to be on the stands in the morning. But they did it. One by one members of the staff departed, tired but elated with the pleasure of a job well-done.

  Finally, after everyone had left, Tate called Maggie into his office. Under the bright fluorescent lights, he looked tired, and his shirt was disheveled. Several empty foam cups littered his desk; one had spilled coffee across a stack of papers.

  “Cou
ld I talk you into something to eat?” he said.

  You could talk me into anything, Maggie thought. Aloud she said, “Sure. The kiddo and I are pretty hungry.”

  He almost smiled at that, but not quite.

  The only restaurant open at that late hour was a bar that served sandwiches, and the raucous shouts coming from inside convinced them that the atmosphere there would be anything but restful. As they were deciding to leave, Jacob Pinter walked out. He beamed when he saw Maggie.

  “I sent a prospective tenant to see you yesterday,” he said. “Guess he didn’t like your place.”

  Maggie avoided looking at Tate, but she felt a flush starting in her neck and working its way upward just the same.

  “I guess he didn’t,” she said, not immune to the irony.

  “The fellow stopped by my store this morning. Asked for medicine for chigger bites. Seems he camped out in the woods up there on the mountain and picked up a few. That’s a city slicker for you. Well, guess I better be on my way. My wife don’t like me to be out this late.” He grinned at them and ambled off in the direction of the parking lot.

  Maggie avoided Tate’s eyes.

  “Chiggers, huh? Maybe the Tsagasi are on my side after all,” said Tate. Maggie cast him a sidelong look, waiting for him to crack a smile, but he didn’t. She didn’t know what to say, but at least Jacob, bless him, had confirmed that she and Kip hadn’t spent the night together.

  Whatever his thoughts on the matter, Tate wasn’t lingering on them “We’ll go to my place, heat up a can of soup. It doesn’t sound too appetizing, but it’s the best I can offer,” he said as they got back on the motorcycle.

  Maggie was beyond caring what she ate; given half a chance, she would have laid her cheek against Tate’s broad back and fallen asleep as they rode. She felt the tension in Tate’s muscles and gripped him even more tightly. Was he aware of her holding him? Did he realize that she wanted nothing so much as to hold him like this all night long? By the time Tate stopped his motorcycle in the garage of the modest apartment building where he lived when he was in town, Maggie was wondering if he was still capable of knowing her thoughts or if he had tuned her out.

  “Come on,” he said when she stood hesitantly beside the bike. He led her up a narrow inside staircase and opened the door on a large room with a view of the town spread out below.

  “What a great view,” she murmured. The building stood on a low hill, and from here she could see Flat Top Mountain. Through a door on one side of the living room, she saw a small den occupied by a desk and bookshelves filled with books and basketball trophies, and through another door, she saw a bedroom. She turned her eyes away from the kingsize bed, not wanting Tate to know that she had noticed it.

  “Do you want chicken noodle soup or beef barley?” Tate called from the kitchen.

  “I don’t care. Either is fine,” Maggie said distractedly.

  Tate appeared at the kitchen door, hands braced on the frame. “I asked you what you wanted. Don’t make me do the choosing.”

  “Chicken noodle,” she said.

  “That’s better,” he told her, and she thought he smiled before disappearing again.

  “Would you like some help?” she called after him.

  “Nope. Relax. You worked hard today.” She heard him using the can opener, dumping the soup into a pan.

  Not knowing what else to do, Maggie sat down on the couch, apprehensive about what would happen next. Tate had said some terrible things to her back in the parking lot at Conso this morning, and she still had no idea if their relationship had a future.

  When the soup was hot, Tate brought a tray and set it on the coffee table. Without a word, he handed Maggie a bowl. Instead of sitting down beside her, he pulled a floor cushion over to the couch and sat on it, leaning against the couch arm.

  Maggie didn’t know whether to start a conversation or to wait until Tate did. He looked as tired as she was; his hair was tangled, and he had deep circles under his eyes. So did she, probably. Once she had finished the soup and a few crackers that Tate also provided, she felt her eyelids growing heavier and heavier.

  “Maggie,” Tate said, and her eyes flew open. “You did a fine job helping me with the paper. Thank you.”

  “I was glad to help,” she said, forcing herself awake. She hesitated, then plunged ahead. She was curious to know what Tate planned for his future, although it had seemed obvious as they worked on the newspaper. But for him to switch from his PR job at Conso to what was sure to be an adversarial role at the Scot’s Cove Messenger was a complete about-face.

  “Do you really intend to be the managing editor of the Messenger?” she asked.

  Tate shifted his position so that he was looking at her. “Yes,” he said. “Albie offered me the job when I talked with him at the hospital, and I wanted to take it, but there was the problem of what I should do about my position at Conso. Then, when Karl was attacking me for what he perceived as my involvement with the Kalmia Conservation Coalition, it all became clear in my mind. I walked out, and I’m never going to regret it.”

  “I’m glad, Tate. No job is worth compromising your integrity.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. There was something hard in his gaze, and she had a moment of foreboding.

  “No man is worth compromising your integrity, either,” he said. “That’s why I was surprised to find Kip at the cabin.”

  She blinked rapidly. “Nothing happened. After what Jacob Pinter said, you must believe me.”

  “I always wanted to believe you, but Maggie, when I saw Kip walking out of your bedroom, all my old confused feelings came back, and it was like the many times in my childhood when I’d thought somebody loved me and then found out that their version of love amounted to a way of manipulating me so I’d do what they wanted. Can you blame me for thinking that you had used me?”

  “I can’t blame you for anything, Tate. You didn’t do anything wrong. You were programmed by your past to see things a certain way, and you’re having a hard time getting around it.”

  “You understand,” he said unbelievingly.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice a mere whisper.

  Then, without knowing quite how it happened, she was in his arms, listening to his heart beating beneath his shirt. She absorbed the reality of him, loving him, willing his heart to be open to what she had to say. She pulled away, but only far enough so that she could see his face.

  “I threw Kip out last night, Tate. I never want to see him again,” she said. Quickly she related how Kip had wanted to take a shower and how she had awakened only when she heard Tate walk in the front door.

  He gazed deep into her eyes; she felt as if he were looking into her very soul. “I do believe you. But Maggie, Kip Baker meant a lot to you for a long time. You’re pregnant with his child.”

  Maggie would have given anything if her baby had not been Kip’s. Holding Tate’s gaze with her own, she took his hands in hers and placed them gently on either side of her abdomen. “I’m carrying another man’s child. It’s true. But I think of my baby as yours, Tate, yours and mine, by virtue of the love I’ve felt for you every time we made love. I never felt this way about Kip, never had this depth of feeling for anyone in my life, and Kip certainly doesn’t love my child and never will. I wish that my child had been fathered by you, Tate Jennings, because in my heart you are the father of my baby and always will be.”

  Slowly Tate moved his hands to cup the precious lump that was the baby. A warmth spread through her, starting in her abdomen and spreading to her chest, thighs, face. She felt his tenderness; it embraced her and the baby, and his love filled her up, made her complete.

  “I wish the baby was mine, too,” he said. “Then I would have some claim on you.”

  Her eyes were wet; she blinked back the tears. “You already do,” she said.

  “I don’t want to find happiness and have it yanked away from me again. I’m afraid, Maggie.”

  “What would make you b
elieve that what we feel for each other is real, Tate?”

  “’When your soul comes into the very center of my soul, never to turn away,’” he quoted. These, as he recalled, had been Charlie’s words exactly.

  “Such a beautiful thought,” Maggie murmured.

  “It’s not original,” Tate said, and he went on to tell her how he had first heard about this mingling of souls from Tsani in his vision.

  “Tsani said that he and Peg can’t go together to the Nightland until we correct the mistakes of the past. From what I can figure out, that won’t happen until our souls blend and become one. I’m not sure how that happens,” he said wryly.

  You know, said Peg’s voice, and suddenly, she did.

  “We have to let down all the barriers,” she said, the words pouring out without her thinking about them. “We can no longer think of ourselves as separate. And we’re not, Tate. I’ve always known that you can tell what I’m thinking, and lately—lately I feel what you’re feeling. We’re thinking and feeling as one person, Tate. I know this.”

  Tate stared at her. “Maggie. Is this true?”

  She gazed at him steadily. “You know it is,” she said.

  “You learned to block my mind from your thoughts. There have been times when I couldn’t get through.”

  “Not any more. Not now that you’ve learned to feel your emotions. We’re the only ones who can keep ourselves separate and apart, no one else can do it, we have to work at coming together. Oh, Tate, I don’t want to be apart from you in any way. I used to think that if our bodies were one in making love, that was all we needed. But there’s more, so much more. Do you understand?”

  “I think I do. I certainly feel that I’m standing on the edge of something wonderful and beautiful,” Tate said.

  “So am I. And I don’t want it to pass me by.”

  “Then let’s jump into it. Together,” Tate said, cupping his hands around her face.

  She looked deep into his eyes and saw how much he loved her. All her doubts melted away; Tate was right for her and for the baby. Only moments ago, she had been so tired that all she could think about was sleep. Now she felt energized, pulsing with excitement about the future, about her life, about love.