Scribbling Women & the Real-Life Romance Heroes Who Love Them

by Hope Tarr

  That is not a sexy word. But after eleven years together and two beautiful children (who try my patience daily), dependable is everything. It is the person you call when you are so afraid you don’t know your next step. Dependable is the person who will catch you when you fall, always and forever, when you need saving the most.

  My white knight still brings me flowers for no reason. He whisks me away for surprise nights away from the kids. The romance is present in our lives. And I’m grateful for that. I cherish his efforts to make me feel special and hope I’m able to do the same for him.

  But when asked how we love, I do not think about the flowers and nights spent alone in a hotel. I think about how my husband was there for me when I needed him most. When I was scared. When I was falling.

  When I think about how we love, I think about the Christmas tree waiting, undecorated, because he knew that spending the time to hang the ornaments together meant something to me. I think about the man who told me to sing to my newborn, knowing that it would help us both.

  How do we love now? As a family. One I can depend on always and forever.

  Sara Jane Stone currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, with her very supportive real-life hero, two lively young children, and a lazy Burmese cat. Her first book, Command Performance, released in 2013. In summer 2014, she will release Command Control (published by Harlequin Blaze) and Full Exposure (published by Avon Impulse). Visit Sara Jane online at www.sarajanestone.com.

  Real Life & Real Love

  By Katharine Ashe

  He was tall, dark and handsome, and everybody said so. Women would stop me on the street, lean into my shoulder and whisper to me how gorgeous he was. Men did it, too, but they didn’t whisper. They looked slightly askance, as if they couldn’t quite handle it, squared their shoulders defensively and said things like, “That’s a really good-looking guy.”

  Admittedly, I was proud. I liked this adulation-by-association. As a bedraggled graduate student with too many bills to pay, too much work to do, never enough sleep, and bags perpetually beneath my eyes, I enjoyed being partnered with a specimen of perfect masculine beauty.

  The only one who wasn’t impressed was my husband. For my Tall Dark and Handsome was not, after all, him.

  My husband—who was in fact tall, dark and very good-looking, to the extent that on our second date I dubbed him “Dreamboat”—never wanted a dog. But I did. I’d been longing for a dog pretty much since I’d been alive. Now, for the first time in my nomadic life, I anticipated several unbroken years of residence in the US, and I knew this was the moment to go for it. When one night out by a lake in Michigan in a house overrun by puppies we met the beautiful creature that I later named Atlas, my husband would not, however, commit. Faced with this intransigence, I picked up that ebony satin pup with floppy ears and long legs, put him in the car and said, “We’re keeping him.”

  Atlas grew up to be a stunner: ninety-five pounds, a cross between a Lab and Dane, all legs and deep chest and noble face and expressive golden eyes. Since everybody in our posh neighborhood (in which we lived in a tiny attic apartment) had purebred dogs and always asked us about his breed, we invented one just for the silliness of it. He was a Danish Short-Haired Viborg Hound, we would say, impossible to get unless you had a personal connection with the breeder in Europe. Then we would giggle as we told the truth: that Atlas was actually a true American, i.e. a mutt.

  Tall Dark and Handsome was a handful. Much more than a handful, in fact. He was excessively energetic, rambunctious, ferociously loving, devoted, squirrel-crazy, constantly hungry, exhaustingly emotionally needy, and smart enough to want to explore the world but apparently not smart enough not to try to jump out a third-story window.

  It was Atlas’s high-maintenance character and my tendency to indulge it that my husband found a tad difficult to bear. We had been together for seven years, and some of those years we’d spent across oceans from each other. Now we were finally living together in the same place and commuting seventy miles to teach at a university where my husband had been offered a full-time job while I finished up my degree. He didn’t want to have to worry about a troublesome puppy. He didn’t want to hear from our landlord about how Atlas barked for an hour after we drove away in the morning. He didn’t want to not go on a whim to the beach for a weekend or fly to Europe for a few weeks, because Atlas—with his nervous disposition—would inevitably lose five pounds for every day spent in a kennel. My husband didn’t want to have to walk the dog in the freezing rain when I couldn’t be home in the evening. And, on our junior professor salaries, he wasn’t fond of the vet bills either.

  A superlatively responsible man in many ways, my husband just didn’t want the particular responsibility of a dog.

  But I did. Atlas loved me. Completely. All I did was feed and walk and play with him, and in return he gave me unconditional love at any time I needed it and even when I didn’t think I needed it but actually did. This, my friends, is a very good arrangement.

  So I did my best to take care of my big beautiful pup on my own. I tried not to depend on my husband for Atlas’s care, and I worked hard to find suitable arrangements for him when we wanted to travel. I did a pretty good job of it. I loved both of my boys, and I didn’t want to give up either.

  Wait, you say, isn’t this a book about real-life heroes? Shouldn’t you be writing about your husband instead of your devotion to your dog?

  Oh, but I am. Because, you see, though my husband didn’t want a dog, he nevertheless loved it simply because I did.

  When Atlas was three, my husband told me he was ready to have a baby. I wasn’t. At least not entirely. I definitely wanted a baby, and I had prayed long and sincerely about it. But contemplating the moment when I would actually make this giant life leap was another thing altogether.

  Because I loved my husband and because I wasn’t getting any younger, we had a baby.

  Miracle. Gift. Blessing. Another perfect male creature to lose my heart to completely, irrevocably, forever and ever. I thanked heaven and my husband and the whole world for this precious person who now graced our lives.

  Embarking upon this new and thrilling adventure, I swiftly realized that I had learned a lot about raising a child from raising a high-maintenance dog. I had learned how to put aside my needs and devote myself to another being entirely. I had learned that life is messy and little critters are even messier. I had learned that the ideals in advice books are rarely achieved in reality, but that it didn’t matter, because where there was love there was joy.

  I also learned that, whereas you cannot easily take a ninety-five-pound dog on a transatlantic flight, you can take a small child on that flight, which made the man in my life very happy. I learned that, while an indifferent dog person, that man was a wonderful father. And I learned that negotiating a trio of males who rarely shared the same needs took patience, care and hard work.

  One of my responses to this challenge was to look for a companion for Atlas. I found Idaho on a farm: a tiny ball of brown fur with a tail like a rat, who waddled around like a piglet. We fell in love instantly.

  Unsurprisingly, my husband said, “Are you insane? We have a baby, two jobs and the highest-maintenance dog in America, and you want another dog?”

  I said, “Yes. We need her.”

  He said, “No. We don’t.”

  So I brought her home. She fell in love with my boys, and now we were five.

  Fast-forward, if you will, through a decade during which my husband thrived at work, my publishing career took off, and our son grew from a miracle into an even bigger miracle.

  Then one deceptively bright day beneath a brilliant blue sky—one horrible day—I held Atlas in my arms as his noble soul traveled on to another place. Shortly after that, both my husband and I experienced health problems. Two months later, my father-in-law passed away. Three months later, my mother got sick.

  It was a dark year, the worst time of my adult life.

  Then, just as my
husband and I were crawling out of the devastation of that year and beginning to see the sun again, something else happened in our family. Something worse. And this time it affected our son, too.

  I cannot specify the details of it here, but at that time I saw that nothing had prepared me—or us—for this. None of the parenting we had practiced, none of the lessons we had learned, none of the challenges we had faced could help us weather this new storm. It was a new, cruel kind of time for us, not a time of quiet grief and coping, but a time of tearing apart, of pain and confusion and even fear. It was a time in which we were tested beyond anything we had known before or imagined, a time in which on the outside we held it together, because that’s what you do when you have jobs and responsibilities and people who depend on you, while on the inside we crumbled.

  Not very long ago—so recently in fact that I can still sense the edge of shadows as I write this now—our situation altered significantly for the better, and the sun finally peeked out from behind the clouds. We could see the light again. We could feel it on our hesitantly upturned faces. I began to suspect that we might, in fact, weather this storm. That perhaps, in fact, we already had. For it seemed that while my husband and I hadn’t been paying close attention to our relationship, love had enabled us to endure, indeed to triumph.

  When I say that love enabled us to triumph, I don’t refer to the heady love that once inspired the nickname “Dreamboat.” Nor do I mean the true love that had led to the birth of our precious child. Nor was it the generous love that had expanded our family to include four-footed friends. This love was different, I realized. This love was deep, rooted in years, in friendship, in shared suffering, and in hope.

  The other day I mentioned to my two boys that, for the first time since Atlas’s death, I was considering getting a puppy for me and Idaho. My husband turned to me with a gentle, kind smile and said, “That sounds like a really great idea.”

  Katharine Ashe is the award-winning author of twelve lush, sweeping historical romances set in the British Empire, including How to Be a Proper Lady, an Amazon.com Editors’ Choice for the Ten Best Books of 2012. A professor of European history, she lives in the wonderfully warm southeast with her husband, son, dog and a garden she likes to call romantic rather than unkempt. Please visit her at www.katharineashe.com.

  When You Come Home

  By Carlene Love Flores

  When I was a little girl, Grandma and I would sit at her living room window, waiting and watching. She’d sing me the old folk song “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” over and over until I’d see them—Mom’s headlights pulling into the court late at night after making her way back to me from Vegas. They were always the first things I’d recognize. My parents were divorced, and monthly visits to my dad in San Diego were part of their arrangement. I guess you could say my whole life I’ve been waiting for someone to come home.

  The beauty of being a child was that life to me was a great adventure. The beauty of being an adult is that I now am also grateful, because those back-and-forth trips between Mom and Dad taught me the importance of loving from afar and sharing.

  Little did I know how valuable growing up in that way would be.

  The day I met my husband, we were outside practicing for an earthquake drill, as is normal in Southern California. I was a freshman, and he was a junior, although we are only one year apart in age. The day of that drill, I knew of Adrian Flores, but that was about it. As I stood on the field, waiting for the okay to go back to class, someone tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned, Adrian waved, smiled and then walked away. It was my first close-up glimpse of the black-haired, green-eyed young man who would soon become my hero.

  There was no way either of us at the tender ages of fifteen and sixteen could have known this manner of our first meeting would be the hallmark of the way we loved for the next twenty-three years.

  When Adrian left for the Army on the heels of graduating high school, I was sad but not devastated. After all, I had junior year to think about, and it was kind of cool having a boyfriend in the military. That was the gift I’d been given of youth: the inability to see the big picture. It didn’t dawn on me at the time just how much my sweetheart would be missed in the year to come.

  Senior year made its debut, and that was when I truly felt like Cinderella without her prince. Another life lesson I learned that year: When you’re loving from afar, learn to accept the kindness of those around you even if you’re a natural-born hermit like me. I’ll always look back at prom and cherish my stand-in date, Jessica.

  Separations are tough, but homecomings are the chocolate and chicken soup our hearts and souls need. What a goofy grin a girl will get when she sees her one and only coming through the airport arrival gate. Mine were always pretty darn goofy.

  That first year Adrian was gone, I shared him with Oklahoma, Texas and Turkey. No wonder he slept straight through the part of the flight home where he was supposed to de-board in San Diego and run into my arms. Back then, security was more relaxed, and Adrian ended up continuing a little too far north. He tells me his brief stint in San Francisco, where he passed his time at the USO, was memorable for a young soldier. He still remembers the Persian Gulf, Vietnam and World War II vets killing time before their flights alongside him. I don’t remember being a very happy nineteen-year-old young woman that night, but now all I can do is smile. Now I’ve lived enough to know the difference between disappointment and true heartache.

  As I learned and experienced and, therefore, became a less-selfish person, always playing catch-up to my husband in that department, it seems sometimes we were tested more because we could handle more.

  This time it was me saying goodbye to Mom as I prepared to leave the country. At twenty, landing at Germany’s Frankfurt airport was scary. I’d always been good with languages, but my Spanish may well have been Greek as sign after incomprehensible sign made me want to cry. The worst was knowing that Adrian was somewhere in that airport waiting for me—if I could only find the right set of doors to pass through. Desperate, I finally decided to tag along behind a random family who looked like they were as eager as I was to leave the airport. Thankfully, they led me in the right direction.

  He was there. So handsome. My husband of four months. God, we were just babies.

  And although we’d run off to Vegas four months earlier, our married life started that day. For better or worse, it was him and me, on our own in a foreign country.

  Life was like a honeymoon.

  When we weren’t working and studying, we saw castles and ruins, churches and rivers. We learned what really old was, comparing the thousands of years of European history to the hundreds of years of U.S. history. We drove ridiculously fast on the autobahn in a gold Opel Ascona we’d bought off a man named Ty, who I’m sure sold hoopties to many a newbie couple. We parked our car like the locals did—two wheels on the sidewalk and two on the narrow street, except for the first time I attempted to do it and landed the entire car on the sidewalk. It was one of the first times I’d truly heard Adrian crack up laughing. The embarrassment was worth it. My turn to snicker came the first time we ordered from a German restaurant counter, and Adrian came away with a plate full of potatoes, potatoes and potatoes. That’s what he got for ordering by picture. Of course, he had to play it off like that was the best darn meal of his life.

  Life was fun. We saw our first snowfall together.

  We learned that we were going to have a baby.

  Months passed, and one night while we were home watching 90210 reruns on AFN, I knew something was very wrong. In the second trimester, my water shouldn’t be breaking, but that’s exactly what it felt like. Bewildered, Adrian drove me—five months pregnant—to the military hospital in Landstuhl. I was surprised to learn later that it was only twenty miles away. As you can imagine, it felt much farther from our rural Army post. That night I delivered a tiny, sweet baby boy who had unfortunately already passed on.

  This was one of those time
s I thanked God Adrian was home, because it wasn’t always that way when he was a young field artillery soldier. They trained relentlessly as the horrible conflict in Bosnia raged on.

  We healed. We tried to move on and believe it was just a fluke thing that had happened.

  Pregnant with our second child, while Adrian was away this time on a training mission, I knew something again was not right. I called his unit, but he was unable to make it back. Preferring to wish this all away, I at least had the sense to begrudgingly knock on the door of the woman who lived across the hall and ask for help.

  Sandy, a wonderful and kind neighbor I barely knew, drove me to the hospital—six months pregnant. By a miracle, Adrian somehow made it back from the field and to my side just before I gave birth to our second baby boy. The little one weighed nearly two pounds and fit in the palms of our hands. For twelve hours, he fought the bravest of fights, but in the end was just too tiny and passed on.

  Sometimes I wonder how long it took Adrian not to fear coming home. Depending on the day, I was either holding it all in or begging to leave the country. I think he wondered on a daily basis when I might lose it. But he kept coming home, being the strong one, and we got through those last two months overseas together. We were twenty-one and twenty but didn’t feel it.

  The blessing was that we were together, and we were on our way home.

  It seems like so long ago now.

  The beautiful thing about mine and Adrian’s life together then was that for the next few years, it was just us.

  We needed that.

  I couldn’t recount all the adventures we went on as a couple, because there were so many. Adrian has always been a planner, and I believe now that all those hiking expeditions, visits to Disneyland and road trips were his way, as a very young man, of keeping us busy and moving us forward. He was taking care of the situation, like any loving hero would do.