“I got that dream. The dream that a poor, desperate, cokehead girl had held up as a light to find her way out of the tunnel. But I missed the most important part.”
“What’s that?” Sam held himself very tightly. Even daring to hope hurt like a knife.
“You.”
“Me? Just that simply. Me?”
She nodded again, her arms wrapped tightly around her as if she was freezing to death sitting right next to the fire.
“I’m just a dumb chef. You’d better explain it to me. Because last time I checked you’re the one who—” He bit off the words. Clamped down on the recriminations that he wanted to spew all over her…because he didn’t want to spew them any more.
For better or worse, he knew one truth absolutely.
He loved Luisa Valenti.
Heaven help him.
He took a deep breath and spoke slowly so that he could choose his words carefully.
“We get back together and you’re just going to wish you were back with Wolfgang’s restaurants. And I don’t want to leave Angelo’s. He’s perhaps the best Italian chef working today and he’s given me his Number One restaurant to run. No way to solve that.”
“There is. At least I hope there is.”
“I’m listening,” Sam hoped there was too. He’d never wanted anything in his life as much as he wanted Luisa, but giving up the restaurant dream would only make him bitter. Just as if she gave up hers.
“Oh, Sam. You’re the best man there ever was. I can’t believe you’re even listening to me. I didn’t deserve you.”
Sam waited for her to continue, unable to do more.
Impossibly she clenched her arms even tighter until her frame was shaking.
“I had the wrong dream.”
“Say what?” That wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He’d expected some plea for him to go with her. Or that she’d give up her own dreams, which he’d never allow. That’s why he’d written the message he had even if he hadn’t been able to bring himself to sign it.
“Angelo’s was an amazing experience,” he could hear the truth of it in her voice. “I never had so much fun. Angelo, Manuel, Marlys, Graziella, all of them. And that was before I noticed you. Then it just kept getting better. I asked to be busy, I asked to be challenged.”
“And Wolfgang’s organization does that for you.”
“It did, past tense. He offered me consulting at Spago and Cut; flew in himself to do so. I thanked him and then I quit. I gave my two weeks’ notice three weeks ago. I’ve been back for a week trying to find the bravery to come and see you.”
“You quit?” Sam knew something was wrong here. “Because of me? No! That doesn’t work. I won’t let you—”
“It wasn’t because of you, doofus. It was because of me,” she shouted him down just as she so often did on the cook line.
“Because of you?” He still wasn’t getting it.
“Because of me,” she said more calmly and unwound her arms, finally resting her hands in her lap as if too weary to do more. “I was too young and stupid to understand the most important dream of all, even if you knew it from the very first day.”
“I did?”
She smiled at him; that smile she gave right before she was going to unleash mayhem on his cook line just to tease him. That smile that also spilled forth when she’d woken in his arms to find him watching her.
“Yes,” she continued. “I forgot to dream about being happy. I was happy with you, so happy that I scared the daylights out of myself and ran away. I’m hoping you’ll give me a chance to try out that dream again.”
“And I’m supposed to trust that?”
She nodded, but the fear was back and she hung her head to study her hands once more. Luisa wasn’t afraid of anything.
“How? Please tell me how I can.” Because Sam had no idea—no matter how much he wanted to.
And when she looked up at him, the tears had returned. “Because I learned something new by leaving you that I never would have learned while we were together.”
“What was that?”
“How much I love you, Sam Walsh.”
And there it was. How could he possibly deny such a statement, especially when it was so clear in his own heart? Had some part of him hoped that she’d be back? Was that why he’d never filled the aboyeur spot no matter how badly they needed it? Apparently so.
But he couldn’t let her off the hook that easily no matter how much he was planning to.
Sam crossed his arms over his chest and struggled for a disdainful voice when he really wanted to scoop her into his arms and cry for joy.
“So, you think you can just come back, pick up where you left off at Angelo’s. As if we’d take you.”
Her face fell, so he went for a slightly lighter tone.
“Then you figure you can just slide back into my bed.”
“Well,” she was too sharp, and caught on from just that tiniest hint, “I did let go of my apartment, so I do kinda need a bed to slide into.”
He kept his arms crossed, but backed it up with the smile he was feeling building deep inside him. “You’re probably going to want the ring I had in my pocket that night.”
She looked at him aghast, “You bought me a ring?”
“Uh-huh.”
She covered her mouth in horror, “That same night? Oh no, I’m so sorry. I never thought anyone would ever do something like that for me.”
“I did. Doofus that I am. And even worse?”
“What’s worse than that?”
Sam rose and circled around the table, then knelt and took Luisa’s hands.
She looked into his eyes and he knew he was lost. Happily lost.
“Even worse,” he confirmed. “I love you so much that I can’t imagine life without you.”
The smile that broke out on her face was accompanied by a different type of tears. Then she giggled. A bright merry laugh that he’d missed more than anything about her.
“What?” he asked softly.
She leaned down and gave him a kiss seasoned with pure joy.
“I was just thinking, what with you being the best man I’ve ever met and all…”
“What?”
“I bet you kept the ring.”
He had. He’d felt pathetic doing so, but now he knew why he hadn’t returned it. Because some part of him had known that something so right could never be denied for long.
Sam lifted her hands to his lips and kissed her—right where he’d be slipping the ring on later tonight.
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Return to Eagle Cove (excerpt)
a small town Oregon romance
“Almost home, sweetie.”
“Oh joy,” Jessica Baxter tried to clamp down on her sarcasm. It was a bad habit that worked fine in her social set back in Chicago, but sounded more petty with each mile they drove toward the Oregon Coast. She slumped down in the passenger seat of her mom’s baby-blue Toyota hybrid. It still had that new car smell. As much as she’d dreamed of owning a hot sports car some day, she knew that she was enough her mother’s daughter that this was probably the exact sort of eminently sensible car she would buy when her VW Beetle finally gave up the ghost.
Just like her mom.
Maybe she’d get it in red to be at least a little different.
Jessica sighed again, keeping it to herself so that she wasn’t being overly offensive. Her mother was one of the many reasons that she’d gone as far away as possible for college and did her best to rarely return—she didn’t want to turn into her mother and it was too easy to imagine doing so if she’d stayed in the small town of Eagle Cove, Oregon.
They were like twins separated by twenty-two years. The two of them had been able to trade clothes since Jessica hit puberty and had shot up to match her mother’s slender five-foot-ten. Other than a very brief mistake of dying her hair black as part of a tenth-grade dare, which had turned her fair complexion past goth and into bloodless vam
pire, they were both light blond.
The one part of twin-dom that she couldn’t seem to pull off even though she wanted to was Mom’s casual-chic. Monica Baxter was always dressed one step above the world around her; not fancy, just really well put together. The closest Jessica ever managed was Bohemian-chic which wasn’t really the same thing, but she’d learned to make it her own. Of course, Bohemian was easier on the budget and often available in consignment stores which had only reinforced her chosen style.
Jessica did her best to not regress as they drove up into the Coast Range that separated the beach towns from the rest of Oregon…and failed miserably at that as well. She felt as if she was rapidly descending back toward being a pouty, pre-pubescent twelve from her present urban and worldly thirty-two.
Why did crossing the Oregon state line always take twenty years off her intelligence?
Maybe it was only Coast County. Because of the landscape the Oregon Coast felt incredibly far from anywhere. The Coast Range topped out at a mere four thousand feet high, but only a half dozen passes made it through the three hundred mile range of rugged hills that separated the beaches from the broad farming and industrial realm of the Willamette Valley. The interior of the state might as well be in a whole other country for how little it had in common with where she’d grown up.
“It’s so strange being back here,” Jessica rolled down the window and sniffed at the air. The scents were so rich and varied that they tickled. Bright with pine. Musty with undergrowth. Damp. A first hint of the sea.
“Well, it has been four years, honey. That’s bound to make it seem a bit odd. But I’m so glad that you came.”
“Me too, Mom.” Better. She managed to say it as if she meant it, however unlikely that might be. Chicago fit her like a…but it didn’t. The city was…something she was not going to give a single thought to for the next eight days. If she didn’t fit there and she didn’t want to fit in Eagle Cove, Oregon, then where did she belong?
Jessica breathed in deeply this time, trying to clear her thoughts with the fresh air of the Coast Range and nearly choked herself on how green everything smelled. The harsh slap of the mountains was almost an affront. The two-lane road dove and twisted along narrow corridors sliced through towering spruce and Douglas fir trees. The babies were sixty feet high along the shoulder as the car twisted up toward the pass; the mother trees behind them were much, much bigger.
And it wasn’t just the trees that were lush. As they wound deeper into the Coast Range, each branch became covered with mosses and lichens. It soothed her eyes, so used to towering concrete and glass, with a living tapestry of greens, golds, and silvers. Beneath the trees grew an impenetrable tangle of salal and scrub alder. Old barns on the roadside didn’t have shingle roofs, they had moss ones; some of them were covered inches thick. Many RVs, left unattended in front yards for too long, had a sheen of green growth on their north side.
“I really want to hate this,” the Coast Range had three times the rainfall of Chicago, often surpassing a hundred inches a year. She expected to feel the weight of all that biomass crashing down on her shoulders, but instead she noticed the start of a disconcerting lightness as if coming home was a good thing. Jessica did not like that encroachment of pending appreciation, perhaps even enjoyment, upon her true feelings. “But it smells so good. Like sunshine and new growth.”
Her mother’s laugh was amused as they twisted along the two-lane road slowly climbing up a narrow valley.
“I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“But you said it anyway.”
“Not helping, Mom.”
Thankfully her mother’s laugh said that she had understood Jessica’s response as a tease. Which it mostly was, partly.
Jessica didn’t want to like coming back to the coast. She didn’t have small-town dreams. That was the main reason she’d left Eagle Cove. She had big city dreams…which weren’t exactly coming together for her despite her efforts over the last fourteen years. But scurrying home wasn’t going to fix those. And the selection of men in such a tiny town was, to put it kindly, pitiful. Puffin High—
Why they hadn’t called it Eagle High in Eagle Cove was a subject of heated debate by every single class.
Puffin High’s problem was that she knew every male her age all too well. The only reason the town had its own high school was that it was too far away from everywhere else for busing to make sense. Her senior class had just thirty-four students. Grades seven through twelve numbered under two hundred. And she knew far too much about every single one of them.
Even more obnoxiously invasive on her sense of right and wrong, instead of dumping rain, it was a perfect day. The sun sparkled down revealing a thousand shades of green in the living walls that lined the road. The air coming through the open window was thick with pine sap and the gentle tang of rotting undergrowth. There was so much oxygen in the air that it made her feel a little giddy.
Yes, a perfect day, if she’d been alone…and still in Chicago.
“I could have rented a car and saved you the drive, Mom.” Actually, her budget had been thrilled when her mother had offered to come and fetch her. Also, once in Eagle Cove there wasn’t a lot of use for a car, except when the rain poured down. The whole town was only a few miles long and she could walk most places she’d want to go. As if there were any old haunts that she’d care to revisit. She’d made good her escape to Northwestern University’s School of Journalism at eighteen but every now and then the town still sucked her back.
“Nonsense, honey. I’m always glad to drive up and get you. Besides, I needed a few things for the wedding.”
“How many is this?” As if she didn’t know. It took much of her journalistic skill to keep “that judgmental tone” out of her voice. Something her early teachers had dinged her on until she’d learned to eradicate it. But since she was regressing as they neared the coast, it was trying to make a comeback.
“Number four.”
“Why, Mom?”
“Because I love the man.” Her mother actually glanced away from the road to offer her a scowl. “I’d have thought that was obvious.”
“It is. But you’ve divorced him three times.”
“Because your father can drive a woman crazy without even trying.” They giggled together because that was an absolute truth about Ralph Baxter.
“I meant, why marry him again? You’re both legal age, your daughter lives in Chicago,” and wouldn’t complain if she lived on another planet entirely. “Just shack up together. Then you can lock the door whenever Daddy becomes too much like himself.”
Ralph Baxter was always getting caught up in monster projects. Without a word of warning he would suddenly rip out the entire kitchen, once on the morning before a dinner party, because he’d thought of a better way to design it. Or he’d start building a new boat from scratch in the middle of the driveway, rather than in the generous side yard, which blocked parking near the house for months.
“Oh, honey. I’m too old fashioned a girl to ‘just shack up’.”
Which was almost believable, even in the twenty-first century. To hear Aunt Gina—who despite her name was as not-Italian as a pastrami sandwich—tell it, Monica Lamont had chosen Ralph Baxter as her sweet sixteen love. She’d never even shopped around. How 1950s was that for a woman who hadn’t even been born then?
Jessica had shopped plenty, or at least window-shopped. She’d found only a few men worth the cost of trying on for size. Definitely not a one worth taking home to keep. She might look like her mom, all blond, tall, and waiflike—which she kind of hated though the men seemed to like it—but inside she wanted to be like Aunt Gina.
Luigina Lamont looked nothing like her twin sister…or Grandpop…or much like Grandma for that matter. She was a statuesque redhead, in every voluptuous sense of the word and completely lived up to her name: Luigina meant “Famous Warrior.” Her merry laugh slapped up against you at the most unexpected moments and constantly poked at your tickli
sh spot until you were curled up on the couch begging her to stop. Unlike Mom and her serial marriages to the same man, Gina brought home plenty yet had only tried to keep one.
That “unholy disaster” (as the family tales described it) had produced Natalya Daphne Lamont—Jessica’s three-hour-older (and Natalya never let her forget it) first cousin and best friend. Just like Gina, Natalya didn’t look like either her mom or Gina’s brief husband. Maybe that was hereditary on that side of the family to balance out how much Jessica resembled her own mom and their shared grandma. Jessica had a sudden flash of her own future daughter looking just like her…and felt the world spin just a little at thinking about children at all.
“If I hadn’t seen her come out between my legs myself,” Aunt Gina would announce loudly, “I’d have thought I adopted the kid. Maybe I signed up to be a surrogate then forgot all about it.”
Mom blushed every time Aunt Gina let that one loose in public, without understanding that if she didn’t, Aunt Gina would have stopped long ago.
“Such an exotic offspring deserves an exotic name. Natalya for the Russian Bond girl in GoldenEye and Daphne for du Maurier the romance writer, not the nymph who had to turn into a tree to escape that lusty jerk Apollo.” The fact that GoldenEye hadn’t come out until Natalya had already been in grade school hadn’t changed Aunt Gina’s story one bit.
Maybe Jessica’s own child would be lucky and take after Cousin Natalya who was slender like Jessica, but had all of the curves Jessica had prayed for throughout her teenage years but never been granted. Natya was also dusky skinned like a permanent tan and leggy like some French model. Jessica’s and her mom’s fairy light hair and Aunt Gina’s mass of red curls had been transformed to a smooth cascade of dark chestnut on her cousin. Yet she and Jessica felt like twins from different mothers: one light, one dark, but much the same on the inside.
Jessica smiled at the sign as they cleared Maxine Pass: eight-hundred and three feet according to the sign. The “three” always made her laugh. It was like Becky, her other best friend from Eagle Cove, firmly insisting that she as five-four “and a quarter” as if it made a difference.
The Complete Where Dreams Page 110
