His relief was great when Sally answered the door herself. Her eyes grew huge with surprise and, he hoped, with happiness when she saw who it was.
“John? What are you doing here?”
He thrust the flowers into her hand, grateful to be rid of them. “I’ve come to talk to your father,” he told her.
“My dad?” she asked, clearly puzzled. “Why?”
“That’s between him and me.” He found it difficult not to stare at her, seeing she was as pretty as a model for one of those fashion magazines. They’d made love only that once, and although he cursed himself for his lack of self-control, he couldn’t regret loving Sally. He looked forward to making love to her again. Only this time it would be when his ring was around her finger and they’d said their I do’s.
“John?” She closed the door and stepped onto the small porch steps, hugging herself with both arms. Her eyes questioned his. “What’s this all about?”
“I need to talk to your father,” he repeated.
“You already said that. Is it because I’ve decided not to return to Hard Luck? Who told you? Not Mariah, she wouldn’t do that, I know she wouldn’t.”
John felt as if someone had punched him. For one shocking moment, he thought he might be sick. “You…you didn’t plan on coming back after Christmas?”
“No.” She lowered her gaze, avoiding his.
“But I thought…I hoped—” He snapped his mouth shut before he acted like an even bigger fool. He was about to humble himself before her father and request Sally’s hand in marriage. Yet she’d walked out of his life without so much as a word of farewell.
“You mean you didn’t know?”
He shook his head. “You weren’t planning on telling me?”
“No.” She tucked her chin against her chest. “I…I couldn’t see the point. You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he shouted. Standing outside her family home yelling probably wasn’t the best way to introduce himself to her father, but John couldn’t help it. He was angry, and with good reason.
“You know exactly what I mean,” she replied in a furious whisper.
“Are you referring to the night we made love?”
Mortified, Sally closed her eyes. “Do you have to shout it to the entire neighborhood?”
“Yes!”
Sally glared at him. “I think we’ve said everything there is to say.”
“Not by a long shot, we haven’t,” John countered. “Okay, so we made love. Big deal. I’m not perfect, and neither are you. It happened, but we haven’t gone to bed since then, have we?”
“John, please, not so loud.” Sally glanced uneasily over her shoulder.
His next words surprised him, springing out despite himself. “I wasn’t the first, so I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal of it. Too late now, anyway.” He would never have said this if he hadn’t felt so angry, so betrayed.
Tears leapt instantly into her eyes and John would’ve given his right arm to take back the hurtful words. He’d rather suffer untold agonies than say anything to distress Sally, yet he’d done exactly that.
The door behind her opened and a burly lumberjack of a man walked out onto the porch. “What’s going on here?”
Sally gestured weakly toward John. “Daddy, this is John Henderson. He—he’s a friend from Hard Luck.”
Finding his daughter sniffling back tears wasn’t much of an endorsement, John thought gloomily. He squared his shoulders and offered the other man his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. McDonald.”
“The name’s Jack. I don’t understand why my daughter hasn’t seen fit to invite you into the house, young man.” He cast an accusatory frown in Sally’s direction. “Seems you’ve come a long way to visit her.”
“It doesn’t look like I was as welcome as I thought I’d be,” John muttered.
“Nonsense. It’s Christmas Day. Since you’ve traveled all this distance, the least we can do is ask you to join us and give you a warm drink.”
John didn’t need anything to warm him. Spending time with the McDonald family would only add to his frustration and misery, but Jack McDonald gave him no option. Sally’s father quickly ushered him inside.
Swallowing his pride, John followed the brawny man up a short flight of stairs and into the living room. The festivities ceased when he appeared. Sally’s father introduced him around, and her mother poured him a cup of wassail that tasted like hot apple cider.
“I don’t believe Sally’s mentioned you in her letters home,” Mrs. McDonald said conversationally as a chair was brought out for John.
He felt his heart grow cold and heavy with pain. Forcing himself to observe basic good manners, he thanked Sally’s brother for the chair. All those months while he was pining over Sally, he hadn’t rated a single line in one of her letters home. Although he’d told her their making love had been no big deal, it had been. For him. He loved her. But apparently their relationship wasn’t important enough for Sally to even mention his name.
“I told you about John,” Sally said.
John wondered if that was true, or if she was attempting to cover her tracks.
“John’s the bush pilot I wrote you about.” Sally sat across the room from him and tucked her hands awkwardly between her knees as if she wasn’t sure what to do with them.
“Oh yes, now I remember. Don’t think you said his name, though.” Her father nodded slowly. And her mother sent him a bright smile.
John drank the cider as fast as he could. It burned going down, but he didn’t care. He drained the cup, stood and abruptly handed it to Sally’s mother.
“Thank you for the drink and the hospitality, but I should be on my way.”
Jack bent down to the carpet and retrieved something. “I believe you dropped this, son,” he said.
To John’s mortification, Sally’s father held out the engagement ring.
He checked his pocket, praying all the while that there were two such rings in this world, and that the second just happened to be in Sally’s home. On the floor. Naturally, the diamond Jack held was the one he’d bought for Sally. Without a word, he slipped it back inside his suit pocket.
“It was a pleasure meeting everyone,” he said, anxiously eyeing the front door. He’d never been so eager to leave a place. Leave and find somewhere to be by himself.
Well, he told himself bitterly, he’d learned his lesson when it came to women. He was better off living his life alone. To think he’d been one of the men eager to have the O’Hallorans bring women north!
One thing was certain; he didn’t need this kind of rejection, this kind of pain.
“John?” Sally gazed at him with those beautiful blue eyes of hers. Only this time he wasn’t about to be taken in by her sweetness.
He ignored her and hurried down the stairs to the front door. He’d already grasped the door handle when he realized that Sally had followed him. “You can leave without explaining that ring, but I swear if you do I’ll never speak to you again.”
“I don’t see that it’d matter,” he told her, boldly meeting her eyes. “You weren’t planning on speaking to me anyway.”
He gave her ample time to answer, and when she didn’t, he made a show of turning the knob.
“Don’t go,” Sally cried in a choked whisper. “I thought…that you’d gotten what you wanted and so you—”
“I know what you thought,” he snapped.
“Maybe we could talk about this?” It sounded like she was struggling not to break into tears. He dug inside his back pocket, pulled out a fresh handkerchief and handed it to her.
“Could we talk, John?” she asked and walked down the second flight of stairs to the lower portion of the house. “Please?”
John guessed he was supposed to accompany her. He looked up to find her mother, father, brother and a few cousins whose names he’d forgotten leaning over the railing staring at him.
“
You’d better go with her,” Sally’s younger brother advised. “It’s best to do what she wants when she’s in one of these moods.”
“Do you love her, son?” Jack McDonald demanded.
John looked at Sally, thinking a response now would be premature, but he couldn’t very well deny it, carrying an engagement ring in his pocket. “Yes, sir. I meant to ask Sally to marry me, but I wanted everything to be right with us. So I thought I’d introduce myself and ask your permission first.”
“It’s a good man who speaks to the father first,” Sally’s mother said, nodding tearfully.
“Marry her with my blessing, son.”
John relaxed and grinned. “Thank you, sir.” Then he figured he should give himself some room in case things didn’t go the way he hoped. “In light of what’s happened, I’m not sure Sally will say yes. She wasn’t planning on returning to Hard Luck—I’m not sure why, but she hadn’t said a word about it to me.”
“I believe my daughter’s about to clear away any doubts you have, young man. She’ll give you plenty of reasons not to change your mind.”
“Daddy!” This drifted up from the bottom of the stairwell.
John winked at his future in-laws. “That’s what I was hoping she’d do,” he said and hurried down the stairs, his steps jubilant. “Oh, and Merry Christmas, everyone!”
Chapter
9
January 1996
It shouldn’t upset her. If anything, Bethany thought, she should be pleased that Randy Kincade was getting married. The invitation for the March wedding arrived the second week of January, when winter howled outside her window and the promise of spring was buried beneath the frozen ground.
Bethany wasn’t generally prone to bouts of the blues. But the darkness and the constant cold nibbled away at her optimism. Cabin fever—she’d never experienced it before, but she recognized the symptoms.
Her hair needed a trim, and she longed to see a movie in a real theater that sold hot, buttered popcorn. It was the middle of January, and she’d have killed for a thick-crust pizza smothered in melted cheese and spicy Italian sausage.
The craving for a pizza brought on a deluge of other sudden, unanticipated wants. She yearned for the opportunity to shop in a mall, in stores with fitting rooms, and to stroll past kiosks that sold delights like dangling earrings and glittery T-shirts. Not that she’d buy a lot of those things. She just wanted to see them.
To make everything even worse, her relationship with Mitch had apparently come to a standstill. As each week passed, it became more and more obvious that her feelings for him were far stronger than his were for her.
Whimsically she wondered if this was because God wanted her to know how Randy must’ve felt all those years ago when she didn’t return the fervor of his love.
So now she knew, and it hurt.
Not that Mitch had said anything. Not directly at least. It was his manner, his new reserve, the way he kissed her—as if even then he felt the need to protect himself.
That reserve of his frustrated Bethany. It angered her, but mostly it hurt. In some ways, she felt their relationship had become more honest and open, yet in others—the important ones—he still seemed to be holding back. He seemed to fear that loving her would mean surrendering a piece of his soul, and she’d begun to wonder if he’d always keep his past hidden from her.
On another front, she increasingly felt the urge to let Ben know she was his biological daughter. Perhaps this was because she missed her family so much. Or maybe it was because she’d come to terms with Ben’s place in her life. Then again, maybe it was because she felt frustrated in her relationship with Mitch. She didn’t know.
This wasn’t to say the soulful kisses they shared weren’t wonderful. They were. Yet they often left her hungering, not for a deeper physical relationship, but for a more profound emotional one. She longed for Mitch to trust her with his past, and clearly he wasn’t willing to do that.
Their times alone, she noted, seemed to dwindle instead of increase. It almost seemed as though Mitch encouraged Chrissie’s presence to avoid being alone with Bethany. It almost seemed as though dating Bethany satisfied his daughter’s needs, but not his own.
On this January Saturday evening, when Bethany joined Mitch and Chrissie for their weekly video night, she couldn’t disguise her melancholy. She tried, she honestly tried, to be upbeat, but it had been a long, drawn-out week. And now Randy was engaged, while her own love life had stalled.
Mitch must have noticed she hadn’t touched the popcorn he’d supplied. “Is something wrong?” he asked, shifting beside her on the couch.
“No,” she whispered, fighting to hold back the emotion that bubbled up inside her, seeking escape. Tears burned for release. She was about to weep and could think of no explanation that would appease him. No explanation, in fact, that would even make sense.
Mitch and Chrissie glanced at each other, then at her. Mitch stopped the movie. “You look like you’re going to cry. I understand this movie’s a tearjerker, but I didn’t expect you to start crying during the previews.”
She smiled shakily at his joke. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her throat closed up, and when she tried to speak again, her voice came out in a high-pitched squeak. “I—”
“Bethany, what’s wrong?”
She got to her feet, then didn’t know why she had. She certainly didn’t have anything to say.
“I—I need a haircut,” she croaked.
Mitch looked at Chrissie, as if his daughter should be able to translate that. Chrissie regarded Bethany seriously, then shrugged.
“And a pizza—not the frozen kind, but one that’s delivered, and the delivery boy should stand around until he gets a tip and act insulted by how little it is.” She attempted a laugh that failed miserably.
“Pizza? Insulted?” Her explanation, such as it was, seemed to confuse Mitch even more.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, gesturing forlornly with her hands. “I really am.” She tucked her fingers against her palms and studied her hands. “Look at my nails. Just look. They used to be long and pretty—now they’re broken and chipped.”
“Bethany—”
“I’m not finished,” she said, brushing the tears from her face. Now that they’d started, she couldn’t seem to stop them. “I feel claustrophobic. I need more than a couple of hours’ light a day. I’m sick and tired of watching the sun set two hours after dawn. I need more light than this.” Even though she knew she wasn’t being logical, Bethany couldn’t stop the words any more than she could the tears. “I want to buy a new bra without ordering it out of a catalog.”
“What you’re feeling is cabin fever,” Mitch explained calmly.
“I know that, but…”
“We all experience it in one way or another. It’s not uncommon in winter. Even those of us who’ve lived here for years go through this,” he said. “What you need is a weekend jaunt to Fairbanks. Two days away will make you feel like a new woman.”
Men always seemed to have a simple solution to everything. For no reason she could explain—after all, she wanted to visit a big city—Mitch’s answer only irritated her.
“Is a weekend trip going to change the fact that Randy’s getting married?” she muttered. Her hands were clenched and her arms hung stiffly at her sides.
It took Mitch a moment or so to ask, “Who’s Randy?”
“Bethany was engaged to him a long time ago,” Chrissie said in a whisper.
“Do you love him?” Mitch asked in a gentle tone.
His tenderness, his complete lack of jealousy, infuriated her beyond reason. “No,” she cried, “I love you, you idiot! Not that you care or notice or anything.” Bethany went to retrieve her coat and hat.
“Bethany—”
“You don’t understand any of what I’m feeling, do you? Please, just leave me alone.”
To add insult to injury, Mitch stepped back and did precisely as she asked.
By the time Bethan
y had walked home—having refused Mitch’s offer of a ride—she was sobbing openly. Tears had frozen to her face. The worst part was that she knew how ridiculous she was being. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to matter.
She was weeping uncontrollably—because she couldn’t have a pizza delivered. Mitch seemed to think all she needed was a weekend in Fairbanks. Except that he didn’t suggest the two of them fly in together.
“Fairbanks,” she said under her breath. “How’s that going to help?”
Restless and discontented, Bethany found she couldn’t bear to sit around the house and do nothing. She was lonely and heartbroken. This type of misery preyed on itself; what she needed was some kind of distraction. And some sympathy…
On impulse, she phoned Mariah Douglas, who was living in Catherine Fletcher’s house now. She hoped she could talk Mariah into inviting her over. Mariah sounded pleased to hear from her and even said she had a bottle of wine in the fridge.
Before long, the two of them sat in the living room, clutching large glasses of zinfandel and bemoaning their sorry fate. It seemed that Mariah shared Bethany’s melancholy mood. Not long afterward, Sally McDonald and Angie Hughes, Mariah’s housemates, showed up and willingly raided their own stashes of wine and potato chips.
Bethany acknowledged that it felt good to talk with female friends, to divulge her woes to others who appreciated their seriousness. Soon it wasn’t the lack of a decent pizza they were complaining about, but a bigger problem: the men in their lives.
“He wants me gone, you know,” Mariah said, staring into her wineglass with a woebegone look. “He takes every opportunity to urge me to leave Hard Luck. I don’t think August will come soon enough for him. I’ve…tried to be a good secretary, but he always flusters me.”
Bethany knew Mariah was referring to Christian O’Halloran and wondered what prompted the secretary to stay when her employer had made his views so plain.
Then Bethany understood. Mariah was staying for the same reasons she was.
Midnight Sons Volume 2 Page 13
