by JoAnn Ross
“That’s it.” She could tell by the way his brow lifted that surprised him. “What, were you expecting a flotilla of alligator bags with fancy designer logos?”
“I hadn’t exactly narrowed it down to those details. Especially since I don’t think I own two pieces of luggage that match. But, although, as a biologist, I’m grateful anytime someone opts for cloth instead of gator, yeah, I figured you’d have more.”
“You learn to travel light on book tours,” she said. “If it were summer, I’d have a smaller bag. And I usually carry on, but this time they were stopping everyone at the gate and checking everyone’s bags.”
“My mom used to take a separate case just for shoes if we were going away for a weekend,” he said.
“I’m not your mother.” For this trip to rainy Oregon, she’d opted for a practical pair of low-heeled black rain boots that ended at mid calf.
“Thank God,” she thought she heard him mutter, but the loud announcement of an arriving flight kept her from being sure.
This past August Caro had taken a suitcase nearly the size of a steamer trunk to spend a weekend at the Hamptons. Which was totally alien behavior to Meghann. Although she could describe with detail what every character in any of Jane Austen’s books wore and always kept up with teenage fashions in order to dress her characters, when it came to buying her own clothes, she was as clueless as she’d been back when she’d been forced to shop at thrift stores.
Finally they were in the car, headed toward the coast. As if to fill the silence stretching between them, he hit a button on the SUV’s steering wheel, turning on the radio.
“Sorry,” he said as Trisha Yearwood’s “Never Let You Go Again” started playing. He reached over to change stations. “You probably don’t like this stuff anymore.”
“I write stories,” she said mildly. “Country songs tell stories.” And didn’t this particular one hit home? Another thing she hadn’t told Adam was that his email had gotten her wondering about second chances. “Why wouldn’t I like still like them?”
“You’ve been away a long time.”
“True. As were you. Before you came back.”
“I wasn’t in New York City.”
“Again, true. But believe it or not, New York isn’t on a different planet. Not only does it have barbecue, it also has a country music station.” Okay, maybe only one these days, but still…
This conversation, coming right after his suitcase remarks, had her wondering if he believed she could have actually changed so much. Which in turn made her wonder if he’d known her at all back then.
Which was beyond depressing.
“It’s really great of you to come,” he said.
“I’m happy to. As I said, you’re saving me from spending the next few days binge watching A Wonderful Life, Love Actually, The Holiday, While You Were Sleeping, and Die Hard.
“That last one is a surprise for someone who used to be a romantic.”
“I still am.” Unfortunately. “And Die Hard is romantic. Really,” she insisted as he shot her a skeptical look. “It’s obvious John McClane still loves his wife and wants to reconcile, but being a stereotypical tough, silent alpha guy, he can’t come up with the words to tell her. But then Alan Rickman arrives with his bad guys and takes her hostage, which gives him a chance to prove his love by saving her.”
“With a lot of gunfire and explosions.”
“Which could have been meant metaphorically but were probably thrown in to get guys into the seats.”
Adam couldn’t argue with that. Especially since even in nerdland he couldn’t imagine many guys who would blast love songs on a boom box outside a girl’s bedroom window or sing to her from the bleachers like those DVDs he remembered Meghann watching in the counselor’s lounge at Camp Rainbow. Just because Cusak and Ledger had been able to pull off those stunts, didn’t mean an average guy could.
“A lot of guys probably fantasize, at least sometime in their lives, winning the girl in some kind of battle,” he said. Another reason for the popularity of the Star Wars franchise. Unfortunately, most of the guys he’d hung with back in high school had been like him—unlikely to ever be mistaken for Han Solo.
“Which is why the Willis character works for both genders.” Meghann was proving as earnest as back when she’d been trying to explain the romantic appeal of Heathcliff and Mr. Darcy. Who, for the record, didn’t, in any way Adam could see, share any traits with Willis’s John McClane. Proving yet again the mysterious dichotomy of female minds. “He doesn’t back down and he never gives up. He just keeps killing the bad guys.”
“The guy in The Notebook wrote three hundred and sixty-five letters. McClane writes notes on the sweatshirts of dead terrorists and throws them out the window. That’s how he communicates love?”
“It’s not exactly like The Notebook, where Noah wrote all those letters to Allie,” Meghann allowed. “But love is situational. In New York a man might show feelings for a woman by snagging a taxi for her at rush hour. And I’ll admit to being surprised you watched that movie.”
“Jill insisted on downloading it the last time she visited with the kids from Portland. Despite all the years of social work, somehow she still looks at the world through rose-colored glasses.”
“I think that’s a wonderful attitude for the people she’s helping. There were times a caring social worker made a big difference in my life.”
Although Meghann hadn’t shared all the details of her life with him, given that she was constantly moving from home to home, life hadn’t been easy. Which, he suspected, contributed to her success. He’d read her books—at first out of curiosity and later because he recognized so much of his own high school life in the stories—and had been impressed by how she’d managed to inject serious topics with such a deft and light touch.
His phone buzzed. Adam hit the little icon on the steering wheel. “Hey.”
“You’ve got a floatplane,” the familiar voice of his research’s benefactor coming out of the dashboard speaker informed him. “The pilot’s waiting for you at the harbor. The rain’s stopped off the coast so you should have clear skies this afternoon.”
Damn. The good news was that the floatplane would help expand his search for the supposedly lost Orca. The bad news was that he’d been hoping to spend some personal time alone with Meghann before having to share her with the rest of Shelter Bay.
“Tell the pilot to go have himself some lunch, and I’ll be there in a couple hours,” he said.
“Roger that.”
“You’re leaving town?” Meghann asked as Adam ended the call. Was that disappointment he heard in her voice?
“No. I’m just looking for a migrating Orca who might have gotten himself separated from his pod. I’ve been out the past couple of nights on my boat, but the fog hangs low to the water at night, so I couldn’t see anything. I was hoping a plane would expand the search.”
“What will you do if you do find it?”
“Good question… Want to come with me?”
“Seriously? You’d let me tag along?”
“Sure. Unless you’d rather spend the afternoon settling into your hotel room.”
“Let’s see.” She tapped her unpainted lip with a fingertip as if seriously pondering the question. “I could spend the day raiding the minibar and watching talk shows about women who sleep with their husband’s best friend and end up pregnant, only to discover the results of their pregnancy test on national television. Or I could be flying over the ocean looking for whales with you…
“Uh, that’s no choice. I’d love to come with you.”
“Terrific. I’ll let the pilot know that there’ll be one more passenger.” Once in a blue moon, Adam thought as he turned onto the twisting highway leading down the coast, despite the calendar date to the contrary, Christmas really did come early.
5
Because she knew Adam would want to get in the air as soon as possible, while the sky over the coast was still clear, M
eghann assured him that she wouldn’t mind putting off going to the hotel until after they’d landed back in Shelter Bay. There was also the salient point that she wanted to spend as much time as possible with him, and being in the air offered far more privacy than staying in town.
A town that was all decked out for the holidays. As they drove down Harborview, beneath the tinseled garlands, wreaths with huge red bows hung on lampposts, and the colorful shops with seasonal windsocks flying and windows painted with holiday scenes, Meghann felt an internal click.
Although the sun was still shining, fairy lights were blinking all over town, as if welcoming her home. Despite her years of a forced gypsy lifestyle, for some reason, whenever she thought of home, she’d think of Shelter Bay.
“It looks like a Christmas card,” she murmured as Adam stopped at a crosswalk to let an elderly couple cross from Take the Cake Bakery to a car parked by the seawall. Although they were bundled up beyond immediate recognition, the fact that they were holding hands gave them away.
“Oh, it’s the Douchetts,” she said, pleased that they still seemed well and happy.
“In their eighties and still holding hands,” Adam confirmed. “They’re one of the reasons, along with my work, that I’ve stayed single. As far as I’m concerned, they set the gold standard for what a marriage should be. A standard their grandsons have definitely carried on.”
He told her about Sax and Kara. And Cole and Kelli. And how the youngest Douchett brother, J.T., who was the closest to their age, had married the Irish actress and filmmaker Mary Joyce, which Meghann remembered reading about. If she’d been writing contemporary romance, she probably couldn’t have resisted a fictional take on the Marine and the movie star.
“So, you’ve never married?” Adam’s Wikipedia entry hadn’t mentioned a wife, but everyone knew those things were sketchy at best. And all the other articles Google had kicked up concentrated on his career achievements.
“Nope. I came close a couple times, but things just didn’t work out.” He glanced over at her as he pulled into the parking lot of the harbor at the south end of the bay. “How about you?”
“I was married for a short time. It didn’t work out either.” She didn’t add that her only excuse for having made such a major life mistake was that at the time she’d been homesick and lonely and being with someone who might not be the perfect mate had seemed better than being alone.
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was a few years ago. Now those days seem more like a story I wrote rather than real life. At least we didn’t have any children.”
The red-and-white Cessna floatplane was waiting at the dock. As they pulled into a nearby parking space, the pilot came out of the Sea Mist Restaurant next door to the yacht club.
“Hey,” he greeted them. “I figured you guys could use a lunch, so I had a couple fried seafood samplers boxed up for you—cod, shrimp, calamari, and crab bits with spicy French fries. I hope that’s okay, ma’am,” he said, as if realizing she might not be up for an entire meal of fried food.
“That sounds perfect.” Just the smell wafting from the brown paper bag nearly had her mouth watering. “I had a way overpriced package of sunflower seeds on the flight.” And her layover in Denver hadn’t been long enough to grab as much as a salad from one of the kiosks by the gate.
“Air travel isn’t what it used to be,” he agreed cheerfully. “Which is why I’m happy to have my own wings.”
After spending so many hours on commercial flights today, Meghann envied him.
Five minutes later, they were flying over the sea. A sea that opened up with vast spaciousness that wasn’t visible from the beach, or even from the top of the cliffs.
“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” she said from her back seat. Adam was sitting shotgun upfront, high-powered binoculars pointed out the window. Below them were windswept gray swells, splotched with flecks of white and black. How on earth were they supposed to find one misplaced whale in water that seemed to stretch to infinity?
“Even more difficult since there’s so much that could be a whale,” he agreed when she mentioned that problem. “The plane beats the hell out of the boat, but even from the air lots of things, like sailboats and kayaks can look like dorsal fins. And a wave’s shadow can look like a whale. Which is partly why Orcas are colored the way they are. From above the black blends in with the dark water and from below, their white bellies blend in with the whitecaps and clouds. It’s the perfect camouflage.”
“Which isn’t helpful,” she said. Her eyes were feeling the strain from moving back and forth as the plane flew over the water. “What’s that?” she asked, suddenly seeing something that could have been a whale. Or not.
“Where?”
“Three o’clock.” She pointed. “Just to the right of that sea stack.” Which meant what she saw might merely be a shadow from the towering, jagged spike of tree-topped rock that had once been part of the continent.
“It’s a possibility,” Adam decided. “Let’s take her down a bit,” he instructed the pilot.
Sea spray spotted the windshield as the floatplane nearly skimmed the breaking crests of the waves. The change in viewpoint had the form she’d seen disappear from their vision for a moment, then Adam spotted it.
“Damn,” he said. “Good try, Meggie. But it’s a cormorant.”
Unfortunately, he was right. Perched on a log, the bird’s tail had appeared to be a fin. As disappointed as she was to have been proven wrong about the whale/bird, Meghann felt a flush of pleasure at his seemingly unconscious use of her old nickname. Which only he had ever called her.
The first time had been after their Heathcliff argument. They’d been sitting cross-legged, face-to-face on his bed, and for one suspended moment, she’d seen something dangerous, like heat lightning on the horizon before a sea storm, flash in his gray eyes.
She’d drawn in a sharp breath and waited…
He’d bent his head toward her. As if connected by an invisible cord, she’d leaned toward him.
Her vision had blurred and her lips had parted instinctively, as they were now only a breath away. But then the grinding sound of the garage door opening as his mother had returned from the Cut Loose Salon, broke the suspended spell.
Unnerved, shaken, and needy in a way she’d never before felt, Meghann had dragged her hand through her hair and had returned to trying, unsucessfully it turned out, to explain the concept of the tortured, ill-behaved Byronic hero who’d been a literary fixture during the Romantic era.
“If that’s truly the case, people back then had a really screwed up idea about romance,” Adam had stated firmly. “I’ve always thought love should make someone feel better, Meggie. Not worse.”
Having had no strong argument for that, and unsettled by the way he’d used a nickname no one else ever had called her before, which added yet more intimacy to their tutor-student relationship, Meghann had picked up the composition book and suggested he write down what he’d said, as if it had been an essay question on an SAT or his Cal-Poly early admission-application. And yes, she’d assured him, even as he’d grumbled, punctuation counted.
And when he was finished, although she wasn’t entirely prepared to give in, she hadn’t been able to deny that he had a point. Because he’d always managed to make her feel better. Which was why, somehow, when she hadn’t been paying attention, she’d fallen in love with him.
They stayed out over the water for an hour, during which time their quest seemed to feel more and more quixotic. The wind had picked up, blowing in from the north, bringing with it storm clouds pregnant with rain. Just ahead of them, the sun was lowering in the sky, sending blinding gold light into the windshield and glinting off the whitecaps in a way that cast more deceptive shadows.
“Let’s go along the coast one last time,” Adam instructed the pilot. “One report had him off Castaway Cove.”
“If he swims into there, he’ll be in trouble,” Meghann said
. “It’s so shallow.”
“Yeah. Then we could be looking at a beaching situation. But if he’s out there, we’ll find him.”
Her mood, which had been sinking as fast as the winter sun, lifted a bit at his confidence. She also liked the fact that he’d included her in the search party. It made them seem like a team.
She had to fight back the laugh as a book title flashed through her mind: Nerds in Love.
Not that she was still in love with Adam Wayne. After all these years apart, that would be ridiculously illogical.
And while she might have been a book nerd who’d struggled to memorize the periodic table and he’d been a science geek who treated punctuation rules like mere suggestion, the one thing they’d definitely had in common was they were both nothing if not logical.
So why, she asked herself as the plane drifted over the Shelter Bay drawbridge, headed toward the dock, did she suddenly feel like that love-struck teenage girl she’d once been?
6
“I feel bad we didn’t find your missing whale,” Meghann said as they drove from the harbor up the hill to the Whale Song Inn.
“I don’t even know if there is a whale. Pacific Northwest Orcas are either coastal fish eaters, marine ocean mammal eaters, or offshores, whose diets and behaviors are a mystery,” he told her. “The pod groups remain as separate as the houses in Harry Potter or lunch tables in a high school cafeteria. While Southern Orcas usually winter up in Puget Sound, in recent years smaller sub-clans have been spotted as far south as Monterey.”
“So, what you’re saying is that if a whale did get separated during migration, he could be anywhere?”
“That’s about it.”
“How long will you keep looking?”
“Good question.” And one he hadn’t figured out for himself. “Orcas can swim a hundred nautical miles in a day. So, if a family group did for some reason decide to bypass their usual feeding grounds in Puget Sound, it wouldn’t take them long to get down here. Once they go too much farther south, if he or she doesn’t connect with them soon, then we’re pretty much out of luck.”
