Snowflakes on the Sea

by Linda Lael Miller

  12

  The villa overlooking Angel Cove was almost as imposing in the darkness as it was in the light of day. Mallory’s heart caught in her throat at the sight of it, just as it had when she had first seen the place during childhood explorations of the island. It had been a place of wonder and mystery then, standing empty for so many years, and Trish and Mallory had worked up any number of fascinating fantasies concerning its past. Then, seeking refuge from the insane pace of his life-style, the famous Nathan McKendrick had bought the property and brought in an army of carpenters and decorators to refurbish it.

  Mallory had met Nathan that summer at an island picnic and fallen in love with a soul-jarring thump that still vibrated within her whenever she even glanced at Nathan. Before winter, they had been married.

  Now, standing forlornly on the sweeping front porch, Mallory wedged her hands into the pockets of her coat and swallowed hard, trying to work up the courage to knock. Oh, it would be so easy just to dash back to her car and drive away—

  But no. She was through running.

  Suddenly, one of the heavy front doors opened with a soft creak, and Mallory could feel Nathan’s dark gaze upon her, even though her own eyes were clenched tightly shut in preparation for harsh rejection.

  But the rejection didn’t come. “Open your eyes, Mallory,” Nathan ordered, not unkindly, but not warmly, either.

  She obeyed but could only stare at him.

  “It always helps if you knock,” Nathan commented, taking her arm in a gentle grip and drawing her into the dimly lit entry hall with its black-and-white marble floor and tastefully papered walls.

  She looked up at him and her throat constricted painfully, but she still could not manage so much as an offhand “hello.”

  Nathan clearly suffered from no such problem, but he wasn’t inclined to make things easier for her, it seemed. He simply watched Mallory, his arms folded across his chest.

  Mallory bit her lip. Get on with it, say something! she told herself.

  “Is my dog here?” she choked out after several torturous seconds.

  A tender smirk curved one side of Nathan’s mouth upward. “Is that why you’re here, Mrs. McKendrick? You’re looking for your dog?”

  Mallory squeezed her eyes shut for a second, and then opened them again. “If you’re trying to make this difficult, it’s certainly working.”

  He laughed and took her hand in a warm grasp. “I’m sorry,” he said, leading her along the darkened hallway and into the brightly lit kitchen at the back of the house. There the fickle Cinnamon was gnawing at an enormous soup bone.

  Nathan gestured grandly toward the beast. “Your dog, madame.”

  “That animal has no scruples!” Mallory complained, only half in jest.

  “None,” Nathan agreed in a low tone that seemed to reach inside Mallory and caress her weary heart.

  Mallory turned to face her husband squarely and lifted her chin. “I love you very much, Nathan McKendrick,” she announced in an unsteady voice.

  Deftly, Nathan reached out and drew her close. The pale blue cashmere of his sweater made her nose itch.

  With one finger, he caught the underside of her chin and lifted it so that she was looking at him again. She saw the words in his dark eyes even before he voiced them. “And I love you.”

  Compelled by forces older than creation, Mallory pressed close to him, comforted by the hard strength of his body, but disturbed by it, too.

  Nathan moaned low in his throat. “Talk about no scruples. Lady, do you know what it does to me when you hold me like this?”

  Mallory knew that her eyes were bright with mischief. “I have an idea,” she confessed.

  He tilted his head to one side and studied her with cautious, weary eyes. “Far be it from me to rock a very promising boat, sweet thing, but if you came over here to do me some kind of retaliatory number, I’ll tell you right now that I can’t handle it.”

  Mallory frowned. “Number? Nathan, what are you talking about?”

  “This. It’s going to wipe me out if we spend the night loving and then you leave again.”

  She lifted a gentle finger to softly trace the outline of his lips. “You really think I like to hurt you!” she accused.

  Nathan shrugged, an action that belied the fierce and sudden pain darkening his eyes. “Nobody does it quite like you, lover. If revenge is what you want, kindly get it through your lawyers.”

  Mallory drew back at the sharp impact of his words; if he’d slapped her, he couldn’t have caused her more anguish. “My lawyers?” she echoed. “Nathan, what—?”

  His embrace tightened, and it was no longer tender. “Listen to me,” he said in harsh, measured tones. “I love you. I need you. But I’m through playing stupid games, Mallory—either you’re my wife and you live with me and share my bed or you’re just somebody I used to know. The choice is yours. If you decide to stay, remember this—I’ve never made love to Diane—I’ve never been unfaithful to you at all—and I don’t intend to be tortured for some imagined transgression from now till the crack of doom. Do we understand each other?”

  Mallory’s lips moved, but not a sound came out of her mouth.

  Nathan’s hands were moving in sensuous, compelling circles on the small of her back. “Go or stay, babe,” he went on, “but if you walk out of here tonight, don’t ever come back.”

  The hardness of his words chafed Mallory’s proud spirit, but she knew he was right. A final decision had to be made and then abided by. Her voice trembled when she spoke.

  “Aren’t you being just a bit arbitrary, Mr. McKendrick?”

  Nathan sighed, and his hands moved down to cup her firm, rounded bottom and draw her closer still. “Umm,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment. “Stop stalling, woman. Do I take you back to Seattle or do I just take you?”

  Mallory’s cheeks brightened to a deep pink. The hard evidence of his desire for her was pressed against her abdomen, making it difficult indeed to think clearly. “This is coercion,” she accused in a whisper.

  Nathan’s lips coursed warmly over her temple to nuzzle the soft, vulnerable place beneath her ear. “I didn’t say I was going to fight fair,” he reminded her, his voice gruff with need.

  Mallory trembled; in truth, her decision had been made before he had opened the front door, before she’d left Seattle. What was the use in pretending, playing childish games? She swallowed hard.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said softly, “I’ll stay.”

  Trish and Mallory watched with comically serious faces as Pat modeled one of several wedding gowns she was considering.

  “Too many ruffles,” Mallory commented.

  “Too few,” Trish countered.

  Pat paused, a vision bathed in spring sunlight, to glare at the spectators lounging on the living room sofa. “You two are no help at all!”

  Mallory and Trish exchanged a look and then burst into a simultaneous fit of giggles.

  Mallory, her stomach well rounded with the cherished weight of her child, Nathan’s child, sat cross-legged, like a small, plump Indian. Beaming, she reinspected Pat’s beautiful gown. “You look lovely. Yes, indeed, I think that is definitely The Dress.”

  “Me, too,” Trish admitted. “Of course, I looked much better in mine, you know. Some of us just have better bodies than others.”

  Mallory and Pat both laughed, and Mallory glanced eloquently down at the dome of her stomach. Though it was only April, she was big enough that she couldn’t join in the good-natured teasing by claiming any superiority for her own figure. “No comment from this quarter!”

  “I should say not, fatso,” Pat answered.

  Trish rolled her eyes and sighed theatrically. “And it’s April, for heaven’s sake. By August, they’re going to be transporting El Tubbo here with a block and tackle!”

  Mallory gave her friend a good-natured shove and pretended to pout. “Nathan thinks I’m beautiful!”

  “What does he know?” Trish counte
red.

  Pat laughed. “Maybe we should ask Weight Watchers to send over their emergency squad.”

  Eyes twinkling, Mallory shot to her feet in dramatic indignation and summoned up her most imperious glare. “When are you two going to let up on the fat jokes?” she cried. “You’ll destroy my ego!”

  Pat lifted her chin and grinned. “If you run out of ego, sis, just borrow some from Nathan—he has plenty. As for the fat jokes, we’ll let up when you can see your feet again, McKendrick. You remember—those things south of your knees?”

  Mallory laughed and the child moved within her and she thought, in that moment, that she had never been happier in all her life.

  Pat and Trish exchanged a look and giggled. A moment later, Pat was off to an upstairs bedroom to change out of the wedding gown and back into jeans.

  Trish patted Mallory’s hand with affection. “All jokes aside, old friend, you look wonderful. I know it’s corny, but you actually glow.”

  “Thanks,” Mallory replied, sitting down on the sofa again and resting her hands lightly on the protrusion beneath her blouse.

  Trish frowned, looking briefly in the direction of the distant room where Nathan was locked away. “What’s that man of yours up to these days? Rumor has it that you clubbed him over the head with a package of frozen shrimp and stuffed the body under the cellar stairs.”

  Mallory smiled at Trish’s remark and turned the simple wedding band on her finger, so that it caught the invading spring sunshine and transformed it to golden fire. “He has been something of a hermit lately, hasn’t he?” She lowered her voice to a whisper, unable, in her pride, to keep the secret to herself. “Trish, he’s writing a soundtrack for a movie, and it’s wonderful.”

  Trish made a funny face. “What else would it dare be but wonderful? But what about you, Mall? Do you miss all that glamor?”

  Decisively Mallory shook her head. “I taught the fourth grade yesterday,” she confided, beaming at the memory. “The regular teacher was sick and they called me. It was so much fun, Trish!”

  Trish grinned. “You are easily entertained, my friend. Since when is a raging horde of preadolescents considered fun?”

  “Trish, they’re darling,” Mallory protested as the residual joy of the experience came back to her, full force. “It was show-and-tell day, and this one little boy brought a sandwich bag full of hermit crabs—”

  Trish was shaking her head slowly in amused, affectionate wonder. “You are something else, McKendrick,” she broke in. “My God, you don’t even miss the soap one little bit, do you?”

  “It wasn’t the way selling real estate is for you, Trish—I never enjoyed it. I never got excited about it, like I do about teaching.”

  Just then Pat returned, clad in battered blue jeans and an old sweatshirt, her potential wedding dress in a box under her arm. “Could I catch that ride back to the ferry terminal now, Mall?”

  Trish rose quickly from her seat on the sofa. “I’ll take you over. I’m late for the office, anyway.”

  “Great,” Pat answered, the prospect of another evening with Roger shining clear in her eyes. Quickly, she bent and planted a kiss on Mallory’s forehead. “See you around, sis. And don’t let that brother of mine write himself into collapse, okay?”

  It was May, and the weather was glorious. Sitting at the very end of the boat dock in front of the villa, her feet dangling between water and wharf, Mallory reveled in the singular splendor of Puget Sound. The clear sky cast its cobalt blue reflection onto the receiving waters, and the Olympic mountains were like snow-clad giants in the tree-lined distance, their peaks craggy and traced with jagged purple streaks. And everywhere, gulls sang their contentious songs, swooping and circling against the pearlescent sky.

  Mallory laid gentle hands on the folds of her well-filled madras maternity blouse and smiled to know that her baby would grow up in this marvelous place. She glanced toward the duplex where Diane had lived until a month or so before, when she’d suddenly given up her writing aspirations and gone off to do press work for a punk rock group.

  “Is this a private daydream or can anybody join in?” Nathan asked softly from just behind her.

  Mallory hadn’t heard his approach. She turned to look up at him; he was framed in a dazzling, silver aura of sunlight.

  When she said nothing, Nathan sat down beside her, Indian-style, on the creaking, spray-dampened wooden wharf. He sighed, shoved his hands into the pockets of his worn blue running jacket and turned his dark eyes to the panorama of trees, sky, sea and mountains.

  “If you could paint a picture of God’s soul,” he said quietly, “it would probably look just like this.”

  Mallory nodded, loving the man beside her even more than she had before he spoke. “How’s the movie score going?” she asked, sliding her arm through the crook of his and resting her cheek against the warm rounding of his strong shoulder.

  Nathan laughed wearily. “Who can work in that place? Every time I try to set a note to paper, some caterer shows up, flanked by two legions of florists.”

  Mallory smiled and kissed his rough, fragrant cheek warmly. “I’m glad the wedding is tomorrow,” she confided. “Pat is hysterical.”

  Nathan grinned and draped an arm around Mallory’s ample waist, drawing her close. “Pat is hysterical?” he teased. “I’m hysterical. What if I blow my lines?”

  Mallory laughed. “All you have to do is walk your sister to the front of the church and say ‘I do’ when the minister asks—”

  “Who giveth this woman in marriage?” Nathan boomed, in a comically ponderous, clerical voice.

  “Right. Considering that you’ve dazzled the crowned heads of Europe with command performances, you shouldn’t have all that much trouble with two words.”

  Nathan’s eyes were suddenly serious, almost brooding. They rose to a distance well beyond Mallory’s reach. “Do you think Pat will be happy?” he asked.

  Mallory gave him an affectionate shove. “Stop worrying. Pat isn’t some besotted teenager, you know—she’s a grown woman, perfectly capable of recognizing the right man for her.”

  He brought his gaze back from the unreachable hinterlands to sweep Mallory’s face with tenderness and hope. “How about you, Mrs. McKendrick? Are you happy? Did you choose the right man?”

  Mallory pretended to search the shoreline behind them. “Sure did. He’s around here somewhere—”

  Nathan caught her chin in his hand. “Mallory, I’m serious,” he said, and the anxiety in his features bore witness to his words.

  Something ached in Mallory’s throat. “I’ve never been happier,” she vowed. And it was true—she hadn’t thought it possible to feel the wondrous things she felt, not only during their now-cautious lovemaking, but at mundane times, too, like when they walked the island’s beaches or ate breakfast on the sun porch or watched the old movies they both loved.

  He bent his head to brush her lips tenderly with his own. “You weren’t always happy, were you?” he asked.

  Mallory sighed and searched the sun-dappled waters dancing before them. “No. I remember thinking, one winter day, that we were like snowflakes on the sea, you and I. Our love was so beautiful, so special, but, like the snowflakes, when it touched something bigger, it dissolved.”

  Poetry was an integral part of Nathan’s nature, and he smiled, somewhat sadly, at the imagery in her statement. “Snowflakes on the sea,” he repeated thoughtfully, his eyes locked now with hers. “Did it ever occur to you that that snow didn’t really cease to exist at all? Mallory, it became a permanent part of that ‘something bigger’—a part of something eternal and elemental and very, very beautiful.”

  A smile trembled on Mallory’s lips, and sudden tears made the whole world sparkle before her like a moving gem. “I love you,” she said.

  Nathan bounded to his feet and drew his wife with him, pretending that the task was monumental. And Mallory’s laughter rang out over the whispering salt waters like the toll of a crystal bell.
<
br />   Mallory stood on tiptoe in the pastor’s study, trying to straighten Nathan’s tie. Beyond, in the main part of the small, historical building, the voices of guests and a few intrepid reporters hummed in expectation.

  “Stop wiggling!” Mallory scolded, as Nathan fidgeted before her, impatient with the doing and redoing of his tie. “It’s Roger’s job to be nervous, not yours.”

  He glared at her enormous flower-bedecked picture hat. “Does that thing have a sprinkler system?” he scowled.

  Mallory laughed and then pirouetted to show off the rest of the outfit—a flowing pink organdy dress, strappy shoes and a bouquet of mountain violets.

  Nathan was still uncomfortable. “Everything has to be right,” he grumbled. “What if—?”

  Mallory caught his face in both hands. “Nathan, relax. Just relax!”

  He laughed suddenly and shook his head. “I can’t.”

  With a sigh, Mallory gave his tie one final rearrangement. “Think of it as a performance,” she suggested.

  Just then the door leading into the main sanctuary opened with a creak, and Roger came in, flanked by the pastor. The groom shot a terrified look in Nathan’s direction and swallowed hard.

  Seeing his own discomfort mirrored in Roger’s face seemed to ease Nathan. Mallory felt his broad shoulders relax under her hands, and saw a sudden mischief dance in his eyes.

  “Don’t you dare tease that poor man!” she whispered tersely, giving her husband a slight shake.

  Nathan smiled down at her wickedly. “Would I do a thing like that?”

  “Absolutely,” Mallory replied.

  The pastor, himself an aged and revered institution on the island—he’d married Mallory and Nathan, too, in that same small church—cleared his throat in an eloquent signal that the time was nigh.

  “Be nice!” Mallory admonished her husband in a fierce whisper before leaving the room to join Pat in the tiny adjoining social hall.

  At the sight of her sister-in-law, Mallory drew in a sharp breath and fought back tears of admiration and love. The other bridesmaids quietly slipped out, to wait in the sunny churchyard.

  “Oh, Pat, you look wonderful!”