It Happened One Night

by Lisa Dale

  “I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE,” HE SAID.

  He leaned so close the frosty white of his breath met her face. “I can’t stand one more minute of my life thinking that any day now some other man will scoop you up and have the life with you that I want. I want to wake up with you in the morning. I want to hand you your bathrobe when you get out of the shower. I want to find your favorite place to be kissed and I want to exploit it. Whether we sleep together or not, we can never go back to being just friends.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself as he came to stand in front of her once again. She wanted the same things he wanted. But desire wasn’t the problem—they had enough of that. The problem was everything else between them that desire put at stake. “I’m asking you to forget this. I’m begging you. Don’t do this right now.”

  “And I’m telling you I can’t forget. I need to know what we are,” he said, the words caught between clenched teeth.

  “But why do we have to name it?”

  “Because. I’m in love with you. I’ve always been in love with you. And I’m done living a lie.”

  MORE PRAISE FOR SIMPLE WISHES

  “FOUR STARS! Simplicity delves deep in this tale… Dale’s modern characters and complex situations read well, and the conflicts between characters highlight the fact that some heartbreaks last longer than a lifetime.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews Magazine

  “Refreshing… touches the heart.”

  — RoundtableReviews.com

  “An impressive debut… believable characters… poignant conflicts… a character-rich and involving story.”

  — BookLoons.com

  “A powerful and driven story.”

  — RomRevToday.com

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Dale

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Forever

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

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  Forever is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The Forever name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55947-8

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Epilogue: April

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  THE DISH

  For Pop and Gram, with love and thanks

  Prologue

  Lana Biel had always believed that the most significant experiences of life would most likely occur somewhere equally significant—like mountaintops, cathedrals, or under majestic skies. But instead, her whole future hung in the balance here—a place that until now had no significance whatsoever—the tiny cinderblock bathroom of the Wildflower Barn.

  “Are you okay in there?” Eli asked through the door.

  She stared with desperate focus at her Birkenstocks. She counted the number of forget-me-nots painted on the mirror’s edge, and she thought of all the countless women who had done this before her. In ancient times, she’d learned, a woman who suspected she was pregnant would have urinated on fistfuls of barley or wheat, and then she would have watched to see if the seeds grew faster than normal. Lana had once found this idea to be beautiful—that pregnancy and plants could be so entwined. But it was hard to get in touch with her inner earth mother when her pregnancy test was a sterile plastic stick and directions ten pages long.

  She leaned her forehead on the wall. “Has it been three minutes?”

  “Four.”

  “I’m afraid to look.”

  “Either way,” Eli said. “We’ll get through it.”

  “I can’t drag you into this,” she said so softly she thought he wouldn’t hear.

  “I’m right here with you. I want to be. I wouldn’t let you go through this alone.”

  She touched the center of the door, glad he was just on the other side. The test was little more than a formality at this point. And yet, she still clung to some small but entirely unfounded hope that the result would be negative. Her future hinged on nothing but the presence or absence of a pretty pink line. A big red STOP sign would have been more apt.

  “Lana.” She heard Eli’s voice through the door. “Come on. It’s time.”

  She sighed and wiggled her toes, stalling. She thought: A million women have done this before—this worrying. A trillion women. Some woman just like her was probably doing it right now. But did every woman feel like she was the first? And entirely alone?

  Her friend Charlotte once told her that in the Middle Ages an anxious woman could learn if she was pregnant by paying a prophet to squint into a bowl of her pee. In the last century, a woman’s doctor would inject a rabbit with her urine’s hormones, then check the animal’s ovaries for change. Today Lana had squatted over a small stick.

  Why is it always about the pee? she thought.

  Ages of nervous women alone in bathrooms, stalling the inevitable.

  The moment had come; she raised her head and looked.

  Two Months Earlier…

  May

  Dandelion: Taking its name from the French dent de lion (tooth of the lion), the dandelion is a survivor that can withstand even the worst treatment from fickle springtime weather. Folklore says that if a maiden attempted to blow the seeds off the dandelion, the number of seeds that remained foretold the number of children she would have.

  May 9

  Lana stood in the low field that sloped gently behind the Wildflower Barn, her face turned up toward the incredible, storm-mangled sky. There was work to be done in the barn—a new shipment of seeds to catalog, price, and display—but Lana couldn’t bear the thought of staying cooped up inside. The first thunderstorm of the spring had swept across the outskirts of Burlington, and it left in its wake a sky that was wholly spectacular—thick purple clouds torn apart and edged in gold.

  When she heard Karin’s footsteps treading softly behind her, she smiled to herself, glad for her sister’s company. “There might be a rainbow,” she said, twirling the white head of a dandelion in her fingers.

  “I hope you’re not planning on blowing those seeds near my newly tilled field,” Karin said.

  Lana let her arm drop to her side. “Of course not.” The flower slipped from her fingers to the ground.

  “You left these in the stockroom.” She handed Lana a thin stack of glossy colorful brochures. Lana recognized them—a tender white orchid, a misty cloud forest, a gauzy waterfall, and a smiling guide. Last week she’d been daydreaming over the photographs on a slow day at work, and she must have left them where Karin could see.

  She should have been more careful.

  For their entire lives, she and her sister had been a team. Despite their differences, hardship had forced them to move together like a single unit, soldiers who fought back-to-back. But when Lana was just a first-year student in college ten years ago, she’d realized that living in their mother’s hometown near Burlington, Vermont, had been Karin’s dream—not hers. Before Lana
settled down for good, she wanted to travel. To have an adventure. Costa Rica had always held a mysterious allure.

  The problem was, she loved her sister far too much to leave anytime soon. She and Karin were each other’s only family. Karin was rooted in Vermont, her heels dug in. And so Lana had made a promise to herself: Once Karin had a family of her own, then she could see the world. In the meantime, brochures and library books had to suffice.

  Lana opened a pamphlet; one page showed a white boat on open water, its sail translucent in the apricot sun. The opposite page offered the orange-pink burst of a blooming hibiscus, its long magenta stamen unfurled like an alien tongue. She closed it and sighed. “Don’t look so worried, Kari. I’m not going anywhere just yet. I was only looking.”

  “I hope you’re not sticking around because of me.”

  “Not at all,” Lana said lightly. And she hoped Karin believed her. She stayed in Vermont out of love, and she had no interest in making her sister feel bad.

  Overhead, the clouds were twisting and roiling in blue, violet, and gold. Lana was convinced there would be a rainbow—a good sign. Come on, she thought. Come on.

  “When’s Eli getting back?” Karin asked.

  “His flight comes in tomorrow afternoon at 3:12. You know this is the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other in ten years?”

  “I know,” Karin said, as if holding back a laugh. “You’ve said.”

  “Oh, did I? Sorry.” Lana tapped her fingers against the side of her leg, twitching with pent-up energy. For the last eight months, her best friend had been traveling to various conferences, conventions, and universities—though the bulk of his time had been spent in Australia, where he was working on a large field study. Sometimes they’d been able to talk, but often they’d been forced to go for weeks using e-mail alone.

  “And look at you,” Karin went on. “You’re a mess. Where are the shoes we’d decided you’d wear to dinner?”

  Lana looked down at her clunky brown sandals. “I like these better.”

  “But where are the heels?”

  “On the floor in my closet. Where they belong.”

  Karin shook her head.

  “What? My sandals are more comfortable,” Lana said. There was no sense in going into the truth: She didn’t like to get overly dressed up when she had a date. It made her feel uncomfortable, as if she were masquerading in some way when she put on heels and mascara. She knew she looked a little quirky and not entirely put-together, but she liked that about herself. She wanted to be seen for who she was—translucent blonde eyelashes and all.

  Karin sighed loudly, gazing at the churning sky, and Lana waited for the inevitable nagging to start. Why bother wearing such a pretty white sundress if you’re going to ruin it with ugly shoes? Or, How is he supposed to take you seriously if you don’t take yourself that way? But apparently Karin had bigger things on her mind than fussing over Lana’s love life. She grew quiet, withdrawing into herself.

  Lana wished there was something she could do. Karin had been so unhappy for the last year. Everything that Karin wanted from life was the opposite of what Lana wanted. They were so different it was hard to believe they were from the same womb. Karin was short with their mother’s Abenaki coloring—a red-brown tinge to her hair, a warm glow to her skin, a strength in her wide shoulders and limbs. But Lana had taken after their father’s side of the family; she was tall and willowy—almost always the tallest woman in the room—with Nordic blond hair and the slightly prominent family nose. A person looking at a photograph of them together would be likely to identify them not as sisters, but strangers.

  “Well, I have work to do. I’m going back in.” Karin trudged up the wet hill toward the Barn, and Lana turned to watch her go.

  Suddenly a glimmer of color caught Lana’s eye, and there, high over the mountains, was a rainbow, the brightest Lana had ever seen. It rocketed skyward before arcing gently and falling back down toward the earth. Heavens, she thought. No wonder God was so often depicted in clouds. “Look! Karin! Look!”

  Karin stopped, turned.

  “See it? Over those trees? Over there?”

  “Yeah. Sure. It’s really great.”

  Lana stopped pointing. Eli had told her about rainbows once—that a trick of optics meant that technically no two people saw the same exact rainbow at the same time. Karin turned her back and started once again to walk away.

  Sisters or strangers. She took a deep breath. Today was her twenty-ninth birthday. She had a date tonight. And Eli was coming home tomorrow. She felt so much promise in the moment, as if she were fast on the heels of a breathtaking future, that it blazed before her, distant but in plain sight.

  She ran her fingers over the image of a white orchid in her hand, imagining the fleshy texture of a petal under her thumb. Then she glanced once more at the rainbow, its brilliance spreading and diluting like watercolors in a rainstorm, and she followed her sister back inside the Barn.

  The woman smelled of tiger lilies, sweet but musky. He curled around her, pressed his face into the hollow of her shoulder. Sheets slid along sheets. Skin along skin. Her hair floated like moonlight through his fingers, and he kissed her: throat, sternum, navel, and down.

  Of course Eli knew he was dreaming.

  He was dozing lightly, awake enough to know he was asleep. This woman—he knew her. How many times had he dreamed of the turn of her wrist, the cinch of her waist, the sweet, hot secrets of her body? When he woke from her, he never sighed and stretched and told himself God, what a great dream. Instead, she’d always left him twisted up and sweating and a little disoriented, as if he’d gone to sleep on one side of the room but woke up on the other.

  A faint click in the darkness pricked his consciousness.

  He turned his face into the couch pillow, not ready to wake. The woman, she was making little sounds in the back of her throat, driving him mad.

  The door opened and shut—slammed—and his eyes blinked open. Gray flickering light from the television pooled in the dark room. His body felt tight and gnarled. Where was he? Oh, right. Lana’s living room. Her birthday. He was waiting for her to come home.

  He could feel that his cheeks were crimson, that the hair at the nape of his neck was damp with sweat, and he hoped his overheated body would go back to normal by the time Lana got around to turning on the light. He took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts and strength.

  Over the last eight months, he’d imagined a hundred different ways that he could tell her his life-changing news. Sometimes he would hold her hand and say, “I have something to tell you.” Sometimes he would confront her, take her by the shoulders and say, “Enough is enough.” Sometimes he would tell her without saying anything at all—just by reaching out to her with his gaze, by touching her face, by calling on the language that men and women had been using to say I love you since before civilization invented words.

  But now, struck by how normal—how unromantic and entirely typical—it was for him to be dozing off on her couch, he felt suddenly nervous. In eight months away from her, the longing that he’d thought was merely homesickness had turned out to be nothing less astonishing than love—knotted up, terrifying, low-down, miraculous love.

  And now the emotion choked him. He didn’t want to complicate their friendship and he didn’t want to risk being humiliated if she rejected him—again. But there was no choice. He loved her. He had to tell her. All of his hope for the future dangled from the fragile possibility that perhaps, deep down, she loved him too.

  He took a deep breath, trying to shake the dream of her body from his waking mind. He waited for her to turn on the light. Which would happen any second now…

  Any second…

  He waited. But no light came.

  Only breathing. Then more. The metallic thump of car keys hitting the floor. A dropped purse. A zipper. And that—Eli knew that sound too—a faint whimper, choked by a kiss.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Lana had come home. But not
alone.

  Not alone.

  He heard a low chuckle, a man’s. He dropped his head back down on the pillow, too stunned to think. The man gave a low carnal growl. And rage made Eli’s head throb and spin, a wire pulling tighter and tighter between his temples.

  At last, after they’d stayed in the living room so long that he worried they wouldn’t leave, he heard Lana’s bedroom door swing closed. The sound was a nail driven into his heart. He had a quick vision of himself kicking down the door and ordering the man to get out. But he had no interest in histrionics that might make him look like an ass. He was already enough of a fool—to regress into misplaced love.

  Slowly, quietly, he got to his feet, groping in the semidarkness for his jeans, sliding them over his hips and buttoning the fly, and then searching cautiously for his messenger bag. He didn’t bother putting on his shoes; his feet would make less noise without them. His only saving grace was that no one would see him like this, sneaking out of his best friend’s house. That was an embarrassment he could easily live without.

  He was searching for the button on the remote that would turn off the television when he heard a door open and footsteps growing near.

  “Lana,” he said softly. Even before he could see her, he knew the sound of her bare feet in the hallway and the whisper of her fingertips as she dragged them along the wall.

  She jumped when she saw him. In the flickering light from the television, he saw her spine go steel-straight, and he heard the sharp intake of her breath. “It’s me,” he said quickly, holding out his hands. “It’s Eli.”

  She pressed her palm to her chest. “Eli! What are you doing here?”

  “What am I…?” He was taken aback by the need to make an excuse to see her. “I got back to town early. I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Of course I’m pleased. I’m thrilled! The timing’s a little… uh…” Her voice trailed off. He could feel her looking at him. His heart was breaking, and he was glad she couldn’t see him in the dark. “How was the trip?”

  “Good,” he said casually. “Yesterday I went to a kegger at the Museum of Natural History. Some undergrad showed Neil deGrasse Tyson her butt.”