The Lion's Surprise Baby

by Jade White

  Soon she would be on her way back home, to whatever might await her there. Perhaps after a while the time would be right to let herself be more than tempted by someone. After a while—but not now. Her journeys were ending and it was time for whatever came next.

  That was when she heard the voice of the waiter over her shoulder with an ahem: “Excuse me, ma’am…?”

  She turned back around and looked up at the tall, pleasant-looking young man holding up another screwdriver. “Um…yes?” Tara responded.

  The waiter said, “The gentleman in the corner over there asked me to bring you another of whatever you were drinking. I remembered it was a screwdriver.”

  Tara’s eyes widened. “The gentleman…?” The waiter stepped slightly aside, giving Tara a better vantage of the cafe. She looked over and thought, No, it couldn’t be…

  But there, where she had found him, sat the utterly stunning man with the long golden-straw hair, flashing her that same smile and holding up his own glass in a toast. Tara stopped breathing for a second. Oh my God, it is.

  Without question, the vision of long-haired male perfection was more beautiful than any other man she had seen on two continents. And now he was sending her another drink.

  Seeing no reason not to accept the gesture, Tara said to the waiter, “Tell the gentleman I said thank you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the waiter. He handed her the drink and then pulled something from the pocket of his vest to give to her. With drink in one hand, Tara took and had a look at the other thing: the business card of a real estate company, Herald Real Estate Development. Their logo was a shield with a profile of a lion’s head. Well, the card befitted the man who carried it, who had quite a luxurious-looking mane.

  The waiter said, “Mr. Morgan said to make sure you looked at the other side of the card.”

  Shrugging with her face, Tara turned over the card. On the blank side was written, Mind if I join you? —Brenton Morgan.

  She looked over again at the hunk with the mane. Again across the cafe came his solar smile. Tara straightened up in her seat and looked back up at the waiter. “Hold on a minute,” she told him. She reached into her little clutch purse and took out her own business card holder, which she had gotten into the habit of carrying when she and Felicia opened the agency. Taking out one of her own cards and a pen, she wrote on the back of it, All right. Just that, nothing else. She handed her card to the waiter and said, “Give him this.”

  The waiter nodded and walked across the cafe to give Brenton Morgan her card. As the waiter left to tend to other customers, Tara watched Brenton read her answer. Then he looked back up at her and fixed that smile on her one more time. Tara kept her perfect posture, though her heart was fluttering, and watched him get up from his table and walk over to her side of the cafe. She noted the confidence in his long, fluid strides, and her heart fluttered a little more.

  And then, there he was, as big as life and as beautifully male as any dream, pulling up a seat on the other side of her table and sitting down. He absolutely radiated gorgeousness. He offered her his hand and she took it. She found it as smooth and strong as she could possibly have imagined. “So which one are you?” Brenton asked. “Felicia Mackey or…?”

  “Tara Phillips,” she replied. “You saw…”

  “…the two names on your card, yes,” Brenton replied. “You didn’t write which one you were. It’s nice to meet you, Tara.”

  “Nice to meet you too,” Tara said back, not believing how casual she was being in the face of this incredible specimen of a man. She felt somehow as if she should not be so casual at the moment, sitting with this impossibly perfect creature. She had been a little nervous at first with all the other men she had met over the last year, but with this man of all men, she felt as if she should be completely intimidated by the way he looked and the total confidence with which he carried himself.

  Somehow, she was not. Perhaps traveling alone all this time had broadened her horizons, made her feel more sure of herself deep down inside. Perhaps that surety, which she had not known was there, was coming to the surface right now, just when she needed it. For whatever reason, Tara felt an almost unnatural calm in the presence of this Brenton Morgan. She wondered how long it would last.

  Spontaneously, surprising herself as much as Brenton, Tara began to chuckle softly. Brenton found he liked the sound of that. He looked forward to hearing her make other sounds later in the evening. But first things first…

  “Did I say something funny?” he wondered aloud.

  “No, it’s not that,” Tara replied, chuckling on and waving off the question. “It’s just, swapping business cards gets the first question that people always ask out of the way…”

  Instinctively, knowingly, Brenton joined her in voicing, “What do you do?”

  Now they both laughed, out loud this time. Brenton definitely liked the sound of it.

  Composing herself, Tara continued, “I thought it was funny because I’ve been away for the last year, traveling—Canada, Europe. There are places where that’s not the automatic first question. In some places they ask you about your family first, or where you live, not what you do for a living. I feel right back at home now. I guess I’m a natural born American.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” said Brenton. “My family’s fine, by the way.”

  Tara smiled, her laugh having subsided but the warmth of it lingering. She remembered a time, a year or more ago, when she wondered if she would ever laugh again, and other times since then when she wondered if the sound of her own laughter would ever be a common thing in her life. Somehow it felt all right, it felt good, to laugh with Brenton Morgan, whom she had known for only a few minutes and likely would never see again after tonight. And she felt good about it. It was good to feel good with someone, even like this.

  “So,” she said, “real estate, then.”

  “Yes, real estate,” replied Brenton. “It’s the family business. We’re all in it. We’re developers, mostly—buying land, building things on it, selling it or renting it out. Or buying properties, fixing them up, reselling them—you know, flipping.”

  “And your whole family does this?”

  “Yep, all of us. And it’s done well for us. Really well. We own properties up and down the coast. That’s what I was doing here in L.A., looking for new properties.”

  “You must be doing really well if you can afford to buy property here,” Tara observed.

  “Always looking to do better,” Brenton said.

  “So you’re visiting here, then, like me,” Tara observed. “But you’re really from…” She looked down at his card, which she had put down on the table next to her glass. She read it again and looked back up at him. “Napa? Really?”

  “We go back a long way in the Napa Valley. It’s not just wine up there, you know. People do a few other things too,” he said with a charming grin and a twinkle in his eyes.

  From the look of you I can just imagine, thought Tara. But aloud, she said, “I’ll bet you’ve bought and sold a few vineyards up there, though.”

  “The vineyards tend to run in families, like our own business,” replied Brenton. “And they go back for generations. But yes, we’ve done a little vineyard business. We’ve traded all kinds of properties. We’re really good at it.”

  You must be, Tara thought. Again aloud, she said, “That must be nice, having a family tradition. It must make you feel secure, in a way, knowing there's something you share with your family that gives you a good living that you can pass on. My family…let’s just say we’re not that entrepreneurial. We’ve always been employees, always worked for other people.

  To my family, that’s just the way you live. You sign over your life to other people, work for them—live for them, practically. Your life isn’t really your own ‘til you get to be a certain age and you’ve traded it all for a pension and a retirement package; then whatever’s left is yours.”

  “You sound like you never appreciated tha
t,” Brenton observed.

  “I appreciated some things about it,” said Tara. “There is something stable and secure about it; you always know where the money is coming from and how you’re going to live, at least at a certain level. And that’s attractive for most people. But…”

  “But…” he encouraged her.

  “But you don’t really own your life,” Tara said. “Someone else does. And your whole life is about what they want and what they need, and your time belongs to them. It’s never about you, not until most of your life is behind you. I mean, don’t get me wrong; it’s a living. You keep yourself fed, you keep a roof over you, you know what the future is, unless you’re laid off or fired, of course. But…”

  “But it’s not a life,” said Brenton. “It’s a living, but it’s not a life.”

  Tara sighed, pleased that he seemed to understand. “To my family it’s a life. To them it’s what life is about. That’s the way you’re supposed to live, or so they see it.”

  Brenton nodded. “What did they say when you wanted to go into business for yourself?” He could already guess the answer, but he wanted to hear it.

  “They said everything to talk me out of it. They had every argument in the book: how often small businesses fail, and all the competition out there, and how hard it is to get another job and get back on your feet once you’re out of business. They talked about retirement and safety nets and health insurance, everything that people warn you about when you try to do something different from them.

  They were scared for me, I know. But I think deep down they were also scared for themselves, because they knew they’d never take a chance like that; they’d never try to live any other way from the way they’d always lived. They didn’t want me to do anything they’d be too afraid to try.”

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “I did it anyway. And I was scared, because they’d taught me to be scared; because they’d drummed it into me that there was one way to live and nothing else was safe, and what you needed most was to be safe and secure. I was scared, but my friend Felicia and I, we still did it, scared as we were. And we worked long hours and gave up a lot of things.”

  “And you got to be successful travel agents.”

  Tara sighed again, but this time through a smile. “We did. We got customers, and we got more customers, and we got repeat customers, and we made it work.”

  “Good for you,” he said warmly.

  Brenton’s approval and appreciation made Tara feel good—as good as she felt when she first took off on her year of excursions, as good as she felt when the plane touched down at LAX and she knew she was at least back on the soil of home.

  “You like real estate, I guess,” Tara said. “You like the life you were born into, I can tell. You’d never want to strike out from your own family, like I did from mine.”

  At this, Brenton leaned back in his seat with an expression that Tara could not quite read. It made her curious to see him this way.“What is it?” she asked. “What did I say?”

  “About ‘striking out from my family’—don’t be so sure.”

  “What do you mean? Are you saying you’d consider leaving real estate? Do you mean you’ve been thinking about trying something else?”

  “I’ve been giving something else a bit of thought. I wouldn’t leave the family business completely, not necessarily. But there’s…something else that’s been on my mind, yes. Something else I might want to try.”

  Now Tara was really curious. “What?”

  Brenton paused, considered, giving her the most thoughtful look he had yet given her in the very short time of their acquaintance. “I don’t know if I should tell you.”

  Tara arched her eyebrows intently. “Oh, now I have to know. Tell me.”

  “Promise you won’t laugh.”

  She straightened up in her seat, guessing. “Modeling, that’s it. You want to try modeling. And I can totally see it. You’ve absolutely got the look. You could be on the posters and brochures on my walls. I can see a picture of you on the beach with a surfboard…”

  He shook his head. “Not modeling,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes, then returned with, “Acting, then. This is L.A.; you’re not just here to scout properties. You’re looking for auditions, agents, that kind of thing. Or acting classes. You want to be an actor.”

  Brenton chuckled, shaking his mane of hair. “Acting, that’s good, but no. Acting is kind of close—but no, not acting, not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  “You promised you wouldn’t laugh.”

  Tara held up a hand, half-solemnly. “I promised, I won’t laugh. Just tell me.”

  He frowned slightly, a look that Tara was not accustomed to seeing on him in the few moments of their acquaintance. The frown relaxed, but his expression remained just as serious. Finally, he put the word out there: “Politics.”

  Tara jerked her head back a bit, thoroughly surprised. Of all the things he could have said, that was one of the things she had least expected. As if to make sure she heard him correctly, she returned: “Politics?”

  He nodded, confirming. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about going into politics. I know a lot of people in a lot of places with a lot of money. And I’ve been thinking about ways I could maybe make a difference. I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at politics. Local office at first, but then…well, I’d start locally, anyway.”

  From his look and his tone Tara could see he was serious. He meant it. And this put him in a completely new light from her first impression of him. Now she was ever more curious. “You talked about making a difference. In what way t would you want to make a difference?”

  Brenton cast his eyes away, out to the ocean. “Look around, Tara,” he said. “This is a beautiful place, isn’t it? Southern California. Los Angeles. People all over the country wish they were where you and I are right now. It’s almost always warm, almost always sunny, it’s right on the ocean. It’s full of the most beautiful people in the world. It’s full of people’s dreams. And it’s in trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Trouble. The same trouble that every place is in. Trouble from the changing climate that a lot of people don’t seem to want to admit people are responsible for, or don’t even want to believe is really happening. Trouble from what people are doing to the ocean and the air and the land, and what they're doing to animals, to wildlife. In the future, this beautiful place where everyone wants to be—it might not be like this. It might be totally different. It might not be so nice anymore.

  This place and every place else, People started the trouble; people caused it. And only people can stop it.” He looked back at her, deadpan serious. “That’s why I’ve been thinking about doing something besides my family business. We all have to be a part of stopping the trouble somehow, or it’ll never end. And there won’t be any more Californias. There won’t be anyplace good and beautiful at all. People will use them all up without thinking or caring until it’s too late and it’s all gone. And that’s why I’m thinking about running for office.”

  Tara took all this in and weighed it silently. Brenton was a completely different person from who she first took him to be. Traveling across half the civilized world as she had done had given her an appreciation of how things and people can be very different from what one thinks they are, but even so, to hear such a profound and moving speech from a man who had caught her attention with his pure physical beauty was a surprise. A deeply fascinating, intriguing surprise.

  “What are you thinking?” Brenton asked.

  “I’m just thinking about everything you said, and how I wasn’t expecting to hear you say it. It’s true, isn’t it? I’ve thought about it too, all the beauty in the world, and how people think we can just take from the world and take more and more and think there’ll always be more to take. And all the species of life dying off… You know, Felicia and I have kind of a sub-specialty in our business: ecology tours. You know, like tours
of nature preserves, or tours of places where the forest or the animals are threatened, things like that.

  A lot of good people go on those; a lot of people who are out there trying to learn about it, or trying to do something about it. Or trying to see something before it’s gone. I just never talked to anyone about this outside of business. And I certainly never met anyone who’s running for office about it. You really want to do that?”

  “Yes,” said Brenton meaningfully. “I do.”