Summer on the Cape

by J. M. Bronston

  “My God, woman,” he said. “You don’t know how much I want you!”

  And Allie put her arms around Zach’s neck and laughed all the way as he carried her naked up the stairs to the bedroom, where he laid her down on the bed, on top of the beautiful, wonderful old quilt.

  Chapter Twelve

  “My God.” He was breathing deeply, the pounding in his chest not yet subsided. “Allie, you don’t know—” He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hair hanging damp and curly over his forehead, his naked body glistening in the moonlight that filled the room. “I think you’ve bewitched me.”

  She lay there in a state of sweet exhaustion, letting the fingers of one languid hand trace the muscled planes and curves of his back.

  “And I was thinking you’re the one with secret powers. Never before. . .” She paused. There was no way to say how magical it had been. “I didn’t know—it’s never been like that—”

  This was Allie’s first experience of such deep satisfaction and she was now content to rest and savor the delicious, sensuous fatigue that played like soft music all through her.

  The quilt was bunched up somewhere near her feet, the pillows were on the floor, and some improbably modest impulse had led her to drag the sheet up over herself, covering part of her body but leaving one leg and her arms exposed. Her bare knee was raised, and Zach reached around and ran his hand from her knee down to her foot, stroking with his fingertips back and forth along her instep. He remembered fondly how he had first admired her feet in her shoes, and he bent his head low to run his tongue along the inside of the curving arch. She jerked her foot away involuntarily.

  “You’re tickling me!” She giggled.

  “The better to dominate and control you, my dear,” he said, pretending to menace her.

  “Is that what you were trying to do, was it? Dominate and control me?” She pretended to be outraged.

  “Allie, if you didn’t know what I was trying to do,” Zach said, laughing, “I must have been doing it wrong.”

  Allie stretched her arms luxuriously across the bed, and then again ran her hand down his marvelous back, letting her fingertips feel the steely hardness under the smooth skin. “No, Zach, You weren’t doing it wrong. You got it just right.”

  “I thought so, too,” he said playfully. “Seemed right to me.” He kissed her lips lightly. “But you, Allie, I don’t think you’d be easy to control.” There flashed before him the memory of her tearing out of the school’s parking lot, leaving him roaring helplessly, like a fool, in the pouring rain. Had it been only last night?

  He sat up straight, looking down at this lovely woman, bathed in moonlight, stretched out so lusciously in the bed. He maintained his playful expression but there was an edge of seriousness to his words as he explored her eyes.

  “No, I don’t think you’d be easy to control.”

  “Is that what you’d like to do, Zach? Control me?” Now her expression, too, became serious, and she felt herself grow wary.

  “Not at all, Allie.” Zach laughed, trying to restore her easy mood, hoping to erase that disturbing cloud of defensiveness that he had seen come over her beautiful face. “Anyway, it couldn’t be done. You’re too obstinate.” He intended his words to be light, but he saw her small jaw set, the tiniest compression of her lips telling him he’d touched a nerve. He suddenly realized that independent spirit of hers had been won at a price. A powerful need to protect her swept over him. He remembered Lester Pinns, browbeating her last night, humiliating her in front of the whole town, and he had wanted to go out and find Pinns and deck him.

  But not right now. Right now, he and Allie had better spend some time getting to know each other.

  “I’m not obstinate,” she was saying. “It’s just that I really can’t stand being pushed around. And I can’t stand being treated as though I don’t belong. Like last night, at that meeting. And today, I went into the Lobster Pot, and they acted as though I was a hostile alien from outer space. Take this development project, for example. No one’s ever asked me what side I’m on, or if I’m even on any side, and still they treat me like an enemy.”

  Zach stood up and picked his pants up from the floor. He stepped into them and buttoned them up.

  “This is a small community, Allie. People know who you are, they know you’re associated with Adam Talmadge, and they know which side Adam is on.” He sat down again on the bed next to her and ran his fingers through her hair, smoothing her bangs away from her forehead. “We should talk about this, Allie. In fact, there’s a lot we should talk about. It’s hard to believe, after the last couple of hours,”—he grinned wickedly at her—“but we hardly know each other. Why don’t I fix us a drink, and we can spend some time talking? We have the whole night ahead of us.”

  “I like that idea,” Allie said. “There’s some white wine in the fridge. I’ll have some of that. Do you know where the corkscrew is?” she called after him as he headed down the stairs.

  “I know where everything in this house is,” he called back.

  She wondered about that while she waited for him. Adam had told her Zach owned the house, but there must be more to it than that. He certainly had known the way to the bedroom she remembered, smiling happily.

  She stretched one arm way out to the side, and looked at her hand, wiggling her fingers in the moonlight. Making love sure is better than fighting, she thought, and making love with Zach had been the best she’d ever known, better than she’d ever dreamed it could be. He had been a remarkable lover, with an extraordinary combination of power and patience, of sensitivity and almost mindless passion, and in his arms she had experienced her own flowering not only of exquisite sensuality but also of a kind of trust, a sense of safety unlike anything she had ever dared to imagine.

  But he was right. As intimately as he had just known her, he really knew very little about her. She had so many unhappy memories and she had buried them so deeply for so long. Just how much, she wondered, was she willing to tell him? He’d been wonderful here in bed, but old, deep fears don’t disappear quickly, and Allie was still not wholly ready to trust him with the most painful details of her personal history. According to Adam, Zach was a man of wealth and family background. What could he understand of the life of Allie Randall, daughter of a bargeman?

  And she wondered how much of himself he’d be willing to reveal to her. If Adam hadn’t told her otherwise, she’d have thought only that Zach ran a small boat rental business, and she’d have known nothing more about him than that. Would he be willing to disclose the truth about his background? And what about this theme park project? Would he be willing to let her know about his real interest in the plan?

  Zach returned to the moonlit room juggling an ice-filled silver wine bucket with a nice California Chardonnay from the fridge stuck into it, a corkscrew, a wineglass, a highball glass, and a bottle of whiskey and he set them all down on the floor next to the bed. He sat down on the bed beside her.

  “I see you found the Jack Daniels,” Allie said, as she hauled the pillows up from the floor and plumped them against the headboard behind her, getting herself comfortably settled into them and pulling the sheet up demurely around herself.

  “Sure,” Zach said. He was uncorking the wine. “I told you. I know where everything in this house is. That’s part of what we need to talk about.” He poured the wine for her, handed her the glass, and poured some of the whiskey for himself. He stood up, gestured with his glass toward her, as though toasting her, swallowed some of his whiskey and said, “But I’m not going to sit here on the bed. The way you look in this moonlight, I’d forget to talk. I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you.”

  Taking the bottle with him, he crossed the room to the window and opened it wide, letting the salt-scented breeze from the ocean fill the room, lifting his head to the moon, half full but bright enough to light the surface of the water. He sat down on the broad windowsill, bending one knee to brace himself up against the frame, smiled a
t her and said, “I’ll stay over here. Keep some distance between us.”

  “I want to talk, too,” Allie said. She reached for the lamp next to the bed and turned it on. “There, that should help us both.”

  * * *

  “You said you’ve been treated like an enemy,” Zach began. “I guess I’m as much to blame as anyone. Many of us up here feel we have a lot to protect and we don’t like it when folks come in from the big cities and trample on our history and our way of life.”

  “That’s not fair, Zach,” Allie said. “I’m not trampling on anything. I don’t think painting pictures is ‘trampling.’ ”

  “No, of course not. Artists have been a part of this place for a long time. It’s not that, Allie, and you know what I mean.” Zach drank off some more of the whiskey. “It’s this theme park, this Pilgrims thing. Most of the Cape Cod people aren’t happy about that.” He looked out the window for a while, sipping at his drink. With his face still turned to the window, he said, “Families go back a long way around here, Allie. Some of us even as far back as those original Mayflower folks. We’ve been born here and lived and buried our loved ones here . . .”

  He paused for a long time, still staring out the window. With his face turned away from her, Allie was unable to see the inner torment that was reflected there, but her sensitivities were as heightened and refined as only the lovemaking of these last hours could make them, and she couldn’t help realizing that there were secrets Zach was not yet ready to reveal to her.

  At last, with his self-control restored and his face once more impassive, he finished his drink and filled his glass again, ready to return to what he’d been telling her.

  “People are afraid this theme park will make a mockery of the real thing,” he continued. “For example, the developers are talking about having boats going out in the bay to play at diving for sunken treasure. Now, everyone knows the Pilgrims had nothing to do with sunken treasure, and there’s certainly no treasure from Spanish galleons and pirate ships and that kind of thing around here—not in the bay, anyway. But there are lobster beds and clam beds and oysters in the bay. The fishermen make their living out of these waters.” Zach’s expression grew more serious with each word. “And I’ll tell you something else, Allie. Over the years, a lot of plain old working boats have gone down in these waters around the Cape. Maybe to the tourists, the dead who lie down there are an amusing attraction. To the families around here, they are fathers and sons and brothers.”

  Again, he turned his face away from her and looked out over the water. Somehow, some time, he was going to have to tell her—

  His heart clutched as he thought about it, and he swallowed the rest of his drink. Some things were too hard to talk about. He turned and looked across the room at Allie, the lamplight soft on her golden hair, her beautiful eyes glowing as she listened to him. It would have to be in the dark, he thought. With not even moonlight around them. He would not be able to let her see his face then. For now, he would speak only of those others.

  “Go look in the cemeteries, Allie. You’ll see the markers for those who were lost at sea. And every year, new ones are added.”

  Allie was silent for several long moments, struggling with her own painful thoughts. How was she to tell Zach that she knew all too well about losing a loved one at sea? Her sorrows had been locked up too long and now she needed help to open that door. But Zach was sitting across the room, his beautiful body framed by the window, drinking his whiskey. And she was alone in the bed, alone with the old weight of her own losses. Maybe some other time, maybe later tonight, with his arms around her, holding her close—

  “But Zach,” she said, finding a way to shift the direction of their talk. “How can you speak of ‘outsiders’? I know from Adam that you own property around here, that’s true, but he told me your family is from Boston.”

  Zach snorted derisively. “Well, that’s what you get for relying on Adam for your information.” Zach filled his glass one more time from the bottle on the floor at his feet. The intense, pained expression faded from his face, and he smiled, leaning his head back against the window frame. He took a small sip from his glass.

  “Look around you, Allie. Look at this place. Remember, I told you I know where everything is in this house?” He gestured with his glass around the room. “I practically grew up in this house. Summers anyway, when I was a kid. My mother’s family owned it then, and when school was out, we used to come up here to visit Gramma Bradshaw. The place was still a farm in those days.” He raised one hand, pointing southeast. “The farm was lower down in the valley back there, but the house and the barn were up here.”

  “So the things here, the furniture and everything, are really your family’s?”

  Zach laughed. “Well, not the Jack Daniels. Or the corkscrew. It was the Talmadges brought in all those fancy big-city items. If I remember correctly, Gramma allowed a little elderberry wine, and Papa Bradshaw—my mother’s father—served a pretty good claret occasionally. But yes, the rest of the things, the furniture and the paintings and all of that, that has been here for generations.”

  “How did the Talmadges wind up renting it?”

  “Well, my mother inherited the place after Gramma and Papa Bradshaw died. We Eliots had the place up on the hill, so my mother decided to rent out this one rather than sell it off or leave it empty. It was kind of hard for her, because she’d grown up here and she really loved everything in it. But I guess the Talmadges were the sort of people who appreciated good things, and they kept it up well all these years. After my mother got used to other people using the tables and chairs that had been her parents’, she even agreed to let them convert the barn into a studio. I guess Adam had been an aspiring artist in his youth.”

  “I didn’t know that. I guess that explains a lot of things.”

  “Yes. I remember, when I was a kid, seeing him slogging around the beaches with his easel and his paint box, painting up a storm. He must have been nineteen, maybe twenty years old then. I guess he found he didn’t have what it takes.”

  “So he became an agent instead. Maybe that explains why he’s so sensitive to artists.” Allie wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her raised knees. “So it was the Bradshaws that were the old Cape family, your mother’s people. How did your father and mother get together?”

  “The Eliots were based in Boston, but the place up on the hill, where I’m living now, that had been in the family for generations, and when my dad was a boy, he always spent his vacations there. The way he told it, he was down from school one summer, and he’d been walking along the beach, and there was this girl coming out of the water. And just as he turned and saw her, he said it seemed as though the sun got turned on really bright, as though a switch had been flipped, just lighting her up all golden. And he said to himself, ‘There she is! That’s the one!’ And the rest, as they say, is history. He wooed the lovely young girl from the farm down the road, and she tamed the wild young Eliot boy. And believe it or not, they really did live happily ever after.”

  “That’s a very romantic story.”

  “Isn’t it?” Zach smiled broadly at Allie, remembering how she had looked the first day he saw her at the airport.

  “And even though they had that big place on the hill, they kept this old farmhouse?”

  “Yes. And when my parents died, it came to me.” Zach’s expression became abstracted, but Allie was bending over the side of the bed, twisting down to get the wine bottle out of the silver ice bucket, so she couldn’t see his face. She didn’t know what a sore place she touched with her question. He stared blankly, unseeing, for a moment. “I used to think that someday there’d be Eliot grandchildren playing around this place the way I used to when I was a kid.”

  As soon as Zach spoke the words, he knew he needed to change the subject. He left his perch in the window and sat down next to Allie on the bed. “Here, let me pour that for you,” he said, taking the bottle from her and filling her
glass.

  “So that explains all the beautiful antique pieces here,” she said, sitting back against the pillows.

  “I guess the Talmadges may have brought in a few pieces, but mostly it’s old Bradshaw stuff. Some of it’s hundreds of years old.” He reached out and lifted strands of Allie’s hair, enjoying the play of the light through the golden coils as he let them fall back into place, enjoying the way touching her made him feel better.

  “Tell me about the quilt here on the bed.” Allie stretched down to the end of the bed to retrieve the quilt, still grasping the sheet modestly to her breasts, but thoughtlessly exposing her rear. Zach smiled at the lovely sight and ran his hand along her back and down the length of her leg as she went by him. She sat back against the pillows, pulling the quilt up over her as she did. “I imagined some white-haired old lady stitching away on this during those cold Yankee nights long, long ago.”

  “Funny you should mention that old quilt.”

  “Why?” said Allie. “What’s funny about it?”

  “Not funny, ha, ha,” Zach said. “There’s an old legend goes along with that quilt. It has special powers.”

  “Special powers?”

  “That’s right.” Zach was still playing with Allie’s hair. “They say that seven generations of Eliots were conceived under this quilt.”

  “Sounds like a powerful piece of bedding.”

  “That’s not even the half of it. Believe it or not, that quilt has the power to protect women from wicked Eliot men.”

  “That sounds fascinating. How does it work?”

  “Well, the story is, way back, maybe a couple of hundred years, there was this young Eliot boy who was really wild. Handsome devil he was, but really wild.”