A long, long time passed. The moon climbed above them. When she spoke, at last, her voice was very gentle.
“What have you been doing out here?”
It was, perhaps, too simple a thing for her to say, but the hard path between them could be begun only with a small step. The quiet was as intimate as if they’d been lying in bed, talking together like old lovers.
“What do you think I’ve been doing, Allie?” The tone of his voice, like hers, was soft and gentle. “I’ve been sitting like a fool in the moonlight—realizing I’m in love with you.”
Allie lifted her head, afraid to look at him, feeling a pounding in her chest. She drew the jacket more tightly around her. Now she didn’t trust herself to speak.
“It wasn’t exactly a brilliant discovery,” Zach said, still not looking at her. “I’ve known it for days. I’ve known it since that day you scared the hell out of me, trying to tie that big boat down, with the wind and the rain ready to blow you right off the dock.” Allie felt the tears rise again. Now she understood the panic that lay beneath his fury that morning.
“Hell,” Zach said, putting the glass down in the sand between his feet, “I’ve known it since the first day, when you stepped off that plane. Allie, you must know that I’m in love with you. How can you not know?” With a desperate motion, he raked his hands through his hair, the thick waves springing back, falling over his forehead. “Look at me.” He groaned. “I’m a mess!”
Allie only shook her head slowly, back and forth, unable to speak. She struggled, tongue-tied, with the turmoil of her thoughts and the churning tumult of her feelings. Zach kept his eyes away from her, still looking out over the waves. Before he spoke, he took a huge breath, as though an enormous weight was resting on his chest, keeping the words locked inside him.
“I’m in love with you, Allie, and when I think of you and Adam, I get crazy. I don’t know how else to say it, Allie. I get crazy! Yesterday, when he came into your apartment,”—Zach’s fists clenched tightly as he made a fierce effort to control his pain and anger, and his voice became even more quiet—“I wanted to kill him.” Zach’s gaze shifted from the far horizon to a spot in the sand, just beyond him. He seemed to be looking into his own soul.
At last Allie spoke, her voice even quieter than his.
“Did you want to kill me, too?”
She dreaded his response and braced herself, knowing that the doors between them were opening and that from now on they must each be prepared to speak—and to hear—only the truth.
He turned to look at her, and saw the tears glistening in her eyes, ready to fall.
“Did I want to kill you? My God, Allie!” His voice was hoarse, a rasped whisper struggling from his throat. “Nothing could ever make me want to hurt you!” At that, she turned her face quickly away from him, but not before he saw the tears slip over the edge and roll down her cheeks.
He was on his knees in an instant, the glass of Jack Daniels spilling, unheeded in the sand, his arms around her, turning her to draw her close to him. Weeping uncontrollably now, Allie buried her face against his shoulder.
“Allie. Oh, my darling.” Zach stroked her hair, his arms filled with her quivering body. He held her still more tightly. “Don’t cry. Please, please don’t cry. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand seeing you in pain.” With his fingertips, he brushed at her tears.
“I don’t want to cry, Zach.” From the depths of his strong arms, Allie had finally found her voice, and her words, like her tears, were spilling freely from her. “I’ve been crying for two days. I hate it, Zach. I hate crying, and I haven’t been able to stop. Everything’s been such a mess between us. Such stupid mistakes. I made stupid mistakes, I jumped to stupid, dumb conclusions about you. I misunderstood so many things. Please, Zach, please don’t do the same thing.”
“Then help me, Allie.” Zach’s lips were warm against the side of her hair, his words whispered close to her ear. “I know what I saw, and I know what it means. It’s been driving me insane.” Zach kissed her hair, his voice almost pleading. “Allie, a man doesn’t have a key to a woman’s apartment unless he has a very intimate relationship with her. He doesn’t let himself into her apartment unannounced, unless he knows he’s free to come and go.”
“No, Zach. You’ve got it all wrong. It was all so innocent, and you got it all wrong.” Allie struggled with her impulse, forged by years of independent self-reliance, to refuse to explain her behavior, and her desperate wish that Zach understand the truth. “Oh, Zach.” She looked pleadingly into his eyes, feeling more vulnerable and exposed than she could bear. “It was all so innocent. Adam’s had a key to my apartment for years. Zach, I was so young when Adam first knew me—eighteen years old—and I had no friends, no family. I got that apartment, and he signed all the papers and paid the deposit.” Allie smiled through her tears, remembering. “He even paid my first month’s rent. And yes, I gave him a key. I guess I thought, in an emergency or something, he should have one. Do you understand, Zach?” Her eyes searched his face, desperate for him to accept her words. “Adam was like a father to me. I had no one else, and he was like a father. So I gave him the key to my apartment. In all those years, he never even used it. Never, until yesterday morning. He came by to leave off my portfolio—you saw it—and he thought I wasn’t home, and he used that key for the first time ever, and you were there and—” Allie’s tears began to flow again and she sobbed helplessly. “—And you assumed the very worst, and it’s all been so awful, and I can’t stand this, Zach. I can’t stand your trying to drive me away.” She buried her head against his white shirt, ashamed that she was soaking it with her tears, and unable to stop.
“Drive you away? Does this feel like I’m trying to drive you away, Allie?” He held her tightly against his chest. “Don’t you know I’m not going to let you go? Haven’t you figured out by now that it wouldn’t matter what had happened between you and Adam—or anyone else, for that matter. I’m in love with you, and I’m not letting you get away from me.” His hand stroked her hair. “And you’re right. When Adam walked into that apartment, I saw red, and I assumed the very worst. I was a fool, and I made a stupid, terrible mistake.”
He held her closely, thankful to be able to fill his arms with her, thankful that he had not really driven her away. He had been so close to losing her—to losing everything—and now his heart pounded with the realization that she was really there, safely gathered up in his arms. Somehow he would find the courage to say to her everything that needed to be said. And he would help her to do the same; he would help her reveal the pain that he knew must lie behind that fiercely self-protective spirit of hers. He realized that Allie’s words had concealed important information, guiding him to the keys that would help her open up to him her own secret, most painful memories.
Gently, being careful not to frighten her with his questions, his kisses stroking her hair, he began.
“You were only eighteen years old? Just a child, really.” He held her against him, feeling her body, shaken by her sobs, pressed close within his sheltering arms. “Tell me, darling, tell me why it was that Adam was like a father to you? Why was it he, and not your own father, who paid your rent and held a key to your apartment?”
Instantly, Allie tensed in his arms, and he held her more firmly, more protectively.
“Allie, darling, tell me what happened.” Zach spoke softly, hoping to coax her gently into responding to his questions. “Where were your mother and father?”
He was not prepared for the intensity with which she burrowed her face into his shoulder. He knew his question had pierced to the depths of her soul, and his heart was wrenched with his pain for her as he felt her body being wracked by still fiercer sobs. The years of powerful self-control were falling from her and, like a little girl, Allie wept painfully, uncontrollably, while Zach held her and stroked her hair and rocked her in his arms.
And then, as she grew calmer, and the sound of her weeping was covered by the roar of t
he waves crashing on the shore, Zach whispered to her, his lips close to her ear, “Tell me, Allie, tell me what you need to. It’s going to be all right, darling. Everything’s going to be all right.”
And so, at last, Allie was able to tell him everything, about the little seaside town on the Connecticut coast, and that terrible night in its morgue, and how they didn’t tell the seventeen-year-old girl the awful truths she already knew, and she told him about the shabby little house in the Bronx, and the picture stuck into the frame of the mirror, and about how a child—only eleven when her mother died—learns to live with no mother and a despairing father.
As he listened, Zach’s heart was torn with his love for her and his anger that anything could have hurt her so. He found himself remembering Lester Pinns and that damned Ben Rankin and his wife, with their pinched, mean-spirited faces, and he thought of Allie’s golden head, bent in humiliation at that meeting, and he held her more tightly still until gradually her sobbing eased, and she was quiet in his arms.
“I’m so sorry, Zach.” She hid her face against him. “I’m so sorry to let you see me like this.” Her nerves were all exposed raw ends, and she knew she was now as vulnerable as it was possible to be. But Zach continued to stroke her hair, and slowly he could feel her relaxing in his arms.
“Allie,” he whispered, “if I had the power, I would swear to you that nothing will ever hurt you again.” He lifted his head and looked out over the crashing waves, knowing the time had come, and now he would have to tell her about Liz and the boys. He was glad she couldn’t see his face. “But darling,” he said, resting his cheek against her hair, taking strength and courage from her closeness, “I don’t have that power. No one has the power to make a perfect world. No one has the power to keep others safe from every harm. Terrible things can happen to the people we love most, and even the strongest man can be helpless to protect them.”
Allie could feel the tension growing in Zach’s powerful body, and she knew that he was confronting his own most awful memories. For a moment, she thought of telling him that she already knew about the dreadful tragedy that had taken his wife and children from him. But with that thought, she also realized that Zach needed to let the terrible story come from his own heart—that he needed her to hear it from him. So she stayed close and remained quiet, letting her presence alone encourage him to talk about that awful summer day, eight years ago.
And he did. For the first time since it had happened, Zach bared his soul to another person, letting Allie look into his heart and hear his agony of loss and guilt. For the first time he allowed his suffering to be exposed in all its raw intensity, and he was thankful that Allie couldn’t see his face.
But she could feel his chest heaving and she knew he was fighting not to weep. And then, finally, he grew more still, and he leaned back and let her look into his face, its handsome, honorable features lit by the moon.
“I had thought it would never be over,” he said. “I had thought that I would live to the end of my days with the memory of the wreck, trying helplessly, day after day, to hold Liz and the boys close to me. But then you stepped off that plane, Allie, and brought with you the first freedom from the torture I’ve known in all these years.” A gentle smile appeared on his face as he looked into her eyes, shining darkly in the moonlight, filled with tears for him and for his torment. “I’m ready now to go on, Allie. You’ve made me ready. Oh, God,”—he pulled her tightly to him again—“when I think how close I came to losing you!”
Allie felt the last of her sobs mingling with her growing joy that she and Zach had at last found their way to each other.
“You can’t lose me, Zach. I’m much too obstinate to give up so easily. And anyway,” she added, almost shyly, “didn’t you tell me you once hoped there’d be Eliot grandchildren playing around the place some day?” His arms tightened around her and she felt his tension as she spoke of children. Now it was her turn to reassure him. “It’s going to be all right, Zach. I can’t give you any guarantees, either, but I’ll do everything in my power to fill your life with love and safety.”
There was a long pause, and Allie could feel Zach’s tension drain from him. She knew that the barriers that had guarded him for so long had finally dropped, and he was going to let his future take its natural course.
With her face pressed against his chest, Allie tried, with her fingertips, to wipe away the last of her tears, and Zach smiled and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. Still holding her close to him with one arm, he dried her wet face.
Then he kissed her.
Never had there been a kiss like this one, a kiss that promised everything and took everything, a kiss that made all explanations unnecessary, that wiped away, forever, all misunderstandings. With that kiss, slowly, deeply, Zach wedded Allie to him, wedded himself to her forever, surrounding her with the promises of his love as powerfully as his arms surrounded her, and she understood, she understood, he would never let her go. The last sobs—of happiness now—escaped her throat, and Zach held her still more tightly, his mouth hot on hers, igniting a fuse that glowed, that burned, in exquisitely slow motion, toward an inevitable destination.
When at last he took his mouth from hers, he saw her beautiful face, her eyes closed, and he knew they were not going to stay there on the beach any longer.
“Allie?” She opened her eyes and he smiled at her. “I’m taking you into the house. It’s getting cold out here.” Before she could say anything, he’d gathered her into his arms and lifted her up in the air.
“Wait!” She was laughing. “I want that quilt!”
Zach laughed out loud. “Of course you do!” He leaned down so she could scoop it up from the sand, and she draped it warmly over herself as he carried her across the beach. “Of course you do,” he repeated. “I told you, all the Eliot brides get that quilt. It’s their first wedding present.”
Allie gasped and he kissed her lightly as he carried her up the steep dunes. “Even before they get the family silver.”
She clasped the quilt tightly to her and leaned her head against his shoulder, basking in the first sense of complete safety she had ever known. “You’re making me awfully happy, Zach. I do love you so much.”
“Allie, darling. I would do anything I could to make you happy. I would slay dragons for you. I would leap tall buildings. Tell me what you want.”
She thought a moment, as he reached the top of the dunes and carried her toward the house.
“There is something.”
He laughed. “Already?”
She laughed too. “Yes. I want you and Adam to make up. I can’t have you two mad at each other.”
His face became serious for a moment and he looked into her eyes. Then he smiled.
“Okay, Allie. That really is a tall building, but I’ll do it. It’s a stretch, but I’ll do it. For you, I’ll manage to forgive Adam Talmadge.” He carried her into the house and closed the door behind him. As he started up the stairs, he added, “Who knows, maybe he’ll forgive me, too. He might even send us a wedding gift.”
Allie laughed happily as Zach carried her into the bedroom.
“He already has. He’s crated up the painting of Sea Smoke for you.”
He grinned at her.
“I knew when I bought that painting, it was going to turn out to be a good investment.”
“That’s right, Zach,” she said. “You’re getting an original Allie Randall.”
Zach’s eyes were full of love as he laid her down on the bed. “No, darling.” He pulled the quilt over them both and kissed her beautiful mouth while her fingers undid the buttons of his shirt.
“No, my darling,” he repeated. “I’m getting the original, and most wonderful, Allie Randall.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joan Myra Bronston grew up in New York City, married her college sweetheart, and went with him to Germany for a year while he was in the Army where she worked as a telex operator and mail clerk. They then moved to Austria, wher
e Joan spent five years teaching at an international school. She is the mother of three wonderful girls and the grandmother of a super-wonderful grandson. Joan was also a secretary, social investigator, and psychiatric researcher before entering law school and eventually becoming a corporate attorney. In addition to her years in Europe, Joan has lived in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and for eighteen years, Salt Lake City. At last, she has closed the circle and returned to her first and most beloved—New York City. Readers can visit her website at: www.jmbronston.com.
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