Today, Tomorrow, Always

by Peggy Jaeger

  He went silent again. In all truth, I was happy he wasn’t railing at me for suggesting another legal maneuver.

  I tried to figure out a way to get him to open up a little more, share more of himself, and decided on a topic that might get him to do so.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, my grandmother is a talker,” I said. “She can drone on for hours on end, barely drawing breath, and she’s a big believer in talking about people we’ve lost. Sharing happy memories, she feels, can lessen the pain of their absence by keeping them fresh in our minds. I know she’s right because when my sister died, talking about her helped us all get through the grieving period. So…” I took a breath, reached over for another cheese stick, and said, “Why don’t you tell me about your daughter?”

  Surprise drifted across his face. “Mabel?”

  I grinned and nodded. “Can I just tell you how much I love that name? It’s so old-fashioned and…girly.”

  My smile pulled a small one from him.

  “That describes her perfectly.” He mimicked my actions and pulled a cheese stick onto his own plate. “Mabel was an old soul wrapped in a five-year-old’s body. Wise beyond her years. And”—he shifted his gaze to me—“extremely girly.”

  His whole expression changed while he talked of his daughter. I got him to tell me of her love of reading, and her desire to be a writer like her father while we finished off the appetizer. The shadows in his eyes flew while he spoke, the hard lines from the corners of his mouth to his jaw softening as he remembered her. He’d loved his daughter deeply.

  “Was your wife a writer, too?” I asked as Gina brought our pizza to the table. With a quick nod and a query if she could get us anything else, she left us to eat.

  “No.” Frayne shook his head and laid his fork down next his plate. He took a deep breath and said, “Cheyanne was a graphic designer. We actually met when she was in charge of my first book cover.”

  “So a writer and an artist. Was Mabel talented as well?”

  He nodded. “Our apartment walls are filled with pictures she drew. I can’t—won’t—take them down.”

  “That’s just lovely.” My voice went a little wistful. Frayne must have heard the change.

  “You and your husband never had any children, did you?”

  “Just George. And he was more mine than Danny’s.”

  “Did you want kids?”

  “Always. We talked about it all the time when we were first married. We’d planned on it as soon as I was all done with school.”

  “You said he was career army?”

  I nodded.

  “But you live here, in your home town. I always thought families of career soldiers lived on a base or in a military community. Am I wrong?”

  “No. The answer is simple. I never wanted to leave Heaven. I love it here and couldn’t envision living anywhere else. In my opinion, this is the perfect place to raise a family. Danny accepted that.”

  “And yet you never had kids.”

  “Unfortunately, we didn’t.”

  I didn’t bother revealing the reason we hadn’t. Especially since I hadn’t known the real one until the day Danny walked out for his last tour. Up until then, I’d thought he wanted them as much as I did. I was wrong. More wrong than I’ve ever been before about something.

  “If you like pizza, you’re gonna love this,” I said, tugging a slice from the platter and quickly changing the subject. “Sal does something ridiculous to the dough. It makes all the taste buds in your mouth stand up at attention and beg. It’s a top-secret recipe, and no one, not even Nanny, who’s an excellent interrogator, has been able to wrangle it from him. Gina claims even she doesn’t know what he does to it.”

  I practically inhaled my first bite, not caring a whit when the roof of my mouth protested against the piping hot sauce. My eyes automatically closed, and all my other senses went dormant, shutting off everything but my taste awareness.

  I moaned the moment the sweet sauce and tangy cheese dissolved in my mouth. When Frayne’s quick hiss split the air around me, I figured he’d burned the roof of his mouth as well. When I opened my eyes, the thought proved true. He was burning all right, but he hadn’t taken a bite of the hot pizza.

  My brain shut down and left me paralyzed, unable to do anything but stare at him. Those pale eyes were almost obliterated by his dilated pupils and were laser focused on my mouth. One hand rose in slow motion and inched toward my face.

  That paralysis? Yeah, it was a real thing. I couldn’t have moved if someone had screamed “Fire!”

  He dragged his index finger across my bottom lip in a slow, torpid slide from one corner to the other.

  Then he slid it back again.

  The burning sensation on the roof of my mouth was nothing compared to the cauldron of heat in his eyes.

  His finger was still on my bottom lip and with a tiny bit of pressure he pushed my lips apart. For a hot second, I almost sucked his finger into my mouth to…feast on him.

  Good Lord.

  Where the thought came from, I don’t have the foggiest, but the only reason I didn’t pull Mac’s finger into my mouth and give in to the erotic fantasy spinning in my mind was because the front door opened, setting the bells above it off, the noise jarring me back to reality.

  My immobility flew, and I pulled back until I was plastered against the booth cushion. I shook my head like a dog shucking water from its fur. Frayne’s hand stayed outstretched for a second, then, he too, pulled back and slammed into the seatback. With his eyes scrunching in the corners, he looked first at his index finger and then lifted it for me to see.

  “Sorry.” He shook his head as I had. “You had…sauce…on your mouth.”

  “You kids doing okay?” Gina’s sudden appearance startled me. “Want anything more to drink? More water? Another soda, Cath?”

  I mumbled a yes. Frayne shook his head.

  He cleared his throat as if he were going to say something, and my phone pinged at the same time. Olivia Joyner’s name crossed my screen.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve got to take this.”

  While the matchmaker reminded me of tomorrow’s event, I snuck a peek at my dinner companion. He lifted his shoulders and bobbed his head right and left as if working out a kink in his neck.

  “You have an appointment tomorrow?” he asked after I ended the call.

  I cleared my throat, as he was wont to do, and said a silent prayer my voice would sound controlled and mature. “A morning wedding at the inn and then tomorrow evening I have an…event, I promised I’d go to.”

  No way was I sharing what the event was. Forget awkward. I would have felt sixteen levels of mortified saying it aloud.

  “Will you have any free time for me to come over and go through some of Robert’s things? There are still three boxes I haven’t gotten to.”

  I nodded. “The wedding starts at ten. I should be home by eleven thirty. I can text you when I’m free.”

  “Since you’ll be at the inn, I’ll know when you’re done.”

  “You’re not going to the museum tomorrow, then?”

  “No. I’ve gotten as much as I can from the public files. But I’d really like to delve back into the stuff at your house.”

  Talking about his project and the reason he was in Heaven went a long way in dissipating the tension that had blossomed between us. His face was calm again, his features relaxed, his voice animated as he began telling me about the entries he’d already read in Robert’s journals.

  We finished our pizza without any further interruptions or uncomfortable moments.

  Back in my car with the heat jacked up to ward off the arctic chill in the air, Frayne said, “You were right about the pizza. It was amazing.”

  Since it was, I smiled.

  We were silent on the ride back to the inn, but it wasn’t a strained silence like it could have been.

  “I’m not going in because I’ve got to get home and prepare for tomorrow’s vows,” I told him when
I pulled up to the front on the inn. “If you see Maureen, could you tell her Nanny says thanks for the scones?”

  The quickness and power of his grin made me gasp. In the darkened cab of my car, the brightness of it lit the entire space up as if he’d turned on a spotlight.

  “I will,” he said, adding, “and I’m requesting a batch to keep in my room for when I’m working. Think she’ll let me keep some there?”

  “All you have to do is ask. It’s a guarantee.”

  The grooves at the corners of his mouth deepened as his grin widened. I couldn’t help but smile back at him. It was the little things in life, Nanny commented often, like the taste of Maureen’s scones, that gave us all the most pleasure. She wasn’t wrong. I was going to add Mac Frayne’s smile to my list of simple pleasures.

  For a moment we sat there, silently grinning. The thought he might kiss me bloomed when his gaze slid down to my mouth and lingered for a moment. It wasn’t my imagination or wishful thinking either when he moved a little closer to me from his seat. His gaze came back up to my eyes and dawdled for a few seconds before a sigh pushed from him and he said, “I’d better let you get home. You’ve got things to do.”

  What would he have done if I’d admitted I wanted to do him?

  He alighted from the car, then dipped his head to look at me again. “Thanks for dinner. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Because I didn’t trust my voice right then to scream for him to stop, get back in the car and kiss me, I took the safe way out and gave him a quick head bob.

  After he’d closed the front door of the inn behind him, I let out the breath I’d been keeping prisoner and shook my head a few times before driving home to my cold, empty house.

  Chapter 11

  “These are the three you haven’t gone through?” I asked Frayne, pointing.

  “Yeah. I’ve got detailed notes about the items in the others, including the clothing boxes. It should be easy to start cataloging them for the historical society.” One corner of his mouth lifted a bit in a charming smirk. “I’m assuming you want everything out of here as soon as possible. It can’t be pleasant to have your house so…invaded.”

  I waved my hand as I slid open one of the boxes.

  “It’s fine. It’s not like I have company coming or people trampling through this place every day and I’m embarrassed about the clutter. I’ll take this box.”

  I ripped off the tape, pulled back one of the corners, and was overcome in a sneezing fit.

  Frayne watched me as I sneezed five times in rapid succession before I came to shattering stop.

  “God bless you.”

  “I hate torpedo sneezes. And I could shoot Nanny for being such a hoarder.” I swiped my sleeve under my nose. “But if she weren’t, I guess we’d never have these items for the museum.”

  I’d started my morning by officiating at a wedding Colleen was in charge of at Inn Heaven. Since it was a second marriage for both parties, they’d opted for a small ceremony and brunch overseen by Maureen. During my reading of the vows, I happened to look up and I spotted Frayne leaning against the doorjamb of the Morning Room. For a moment, I lost track of what I was saying. He looked so damn hot and manly, all I could think about was crossing the room, clamping my lips onto his, and finally getting to know what he tasted like.

  After dropping him off the night before, I’d climbed into bed with the memory of his confession in Shelby’s office. He’d wanted to kiss me in the historical society basement but hadn’t because he’d thought I was married. Well, now he knew I wasn’t, and yet he still hadn’t put action behind that desire.

  When my part of the ceremony was done, I made a quick stop by the kitchen where Maureen handed me a shopping bag filled with food for the weekend. Thank God for my baby sister, because I still hadn’t had a moment to get any groceries in the house, and now with Frayne coming over, I at least had something I could offer him if he got hungry.

  The fleeting thought I could offer myself up to be devoured flitted through my brain. Despite sensing that he was attracted to me, I didn’t know if I should make the first move. And let’s be real here: I didn’t even know how to begin. This was an issue of marrying the first boy I’d ever kissed and loved forever. Because Danny’d been my everything for most of my life I didn’t know how to flirt, date, or let a man know I was attracted to him without coming across as aggressive.

  Or…pathetic.

  The box I’d chosen was easy to go through because it held nothing more interesting than Robert’s yearbooks from grammar school up to college.

  “You’ll probably have more fun going through these than I will,” I told Frayne, shoving the box across the table to him. “Historically speaking.”

  He glanced up from the leather-bound journal in his hands to peer at me over the tops of his glasses, which were covered with dust. I reached out my hand and said, “Give me those.”

  Without questioning why, he did.

  In the kitchen, I doused them in glass cleaner and then rubbed them spotless with a paper towel.

  “I’m beginning to think we really should be wearing masks while we go through all this,” I said when I returned them to him. “We could be exposing ourselves to mold spores. Or worse.”

  “What do you think is worse?” he asked, holding the glasses in one hand.

  I shrugged. “Some dormant bacteria, maybe? Plague? Aspergillis niger? Isn’t that what killed the King Tut archeologist who opened his tomb?” I rubbed my nose again because it had started twitching.

  “That’s actually a myth,” he told me. “And it wasn’t Howard Carter, the archeologist, who died. It was George Herbert, the Earl of Carnarvon and the one paying for the dig, who did.”

  I pointed my finger at him. “See? He probably caught some airborne killer fungus unleashed when the tomb was opened.”

  “I think it was from an infected mosquito bite.” He glanced down at the journal. From the way he’d dipped his chin almost to his chest, I got the impression he was trying to hide the fact he was stifling a laugh.

  “Why am I not surprised you know that,” I mumbled and lifted the remaining box onto the table. This time when I pulled back one of the flaps I turned my head and held my breath.

  “More journals.” I pulled one out. “These look old. Like, old old.”

  The pages were held together between two pieces of thin, shaved wood with a string knotted across the middle.

  He stuck his glasses back on and reached a hand out. I gave him the book. “There are five more in this box,” I told him.

  “I can’t undo this knot.”

  “Here.” I handed him a box cutter.

  Gingerly, he tugged on the cord and cut it with one swift slice. Holding the paper securely between the two pieces of shaved wood, Frayne put the book down on the table and folded back the front cover. I moved next to him to see what, if anything, was legible.

  “The handwriting’s pretty faded,” he said. “The paper’s fragile, too. I don’t want to rip it if I lift it up.”

  “Can you make out the date?” I asked, peering over his shoulder.

  He leaned in closer and adjusted his glasses. “I can’t make it out for sure; the ink is so faded.”

  “Hold on a sec.”

  I ran into my office and grabbed a magnifying glass.

  “Here.”

  Frayne held it over the page while I shone the flashlight from my cell phone across the page.

  “Seventeen eighty-nine,” he said, his eyes huge as he peered at me through his glasses. It was impossible to miss the excitement in his voice.

  “Try to turn the page.”

  Again, with infinite care, he fingered a corner of the page and ran it under the paper, lifting it from the one underneath it. The paper was dry and brittle, and a crackling sound, like when you crumble paper to use for kindling, pushed through the air around us.

  “I don’t want to damage it,” he mumbled.

  Slowly, he flattened his palm, face dow
n, under the page and with his other hand, lifted it back.

  “Good Lord,” he whispered when the underneath page was revealed.

  I echoed his sentiments, but I said, “Holy crap!”

  Written and clearly legible on the second page were the words Josiah Heaven, the year of our Lord 1789. The town begins.

  “Is this what I think it is?” I asked.

  Frayne’s attention stayed glued to the page in his hand. He didn’t speak, but his breathing got a little faster, and I swear the air around us turned electric.

  He folded the page in his hand on top of the cover and slipped under the next one. The paper was unlined, but the author had written in a clear, fastidious way across the page so the lines themselves were even and straight.

  “Can you move the light closer?” he asked me.

  I did, and we were able to read the first line of text clearly.

  The fifth day of April in the year of our Lord 1789. The first structure began today, the Moody brothers, along with the Johannsen men, in charge.

  “Holy Christmas.” I turned my gaze to Frayne.

  A shiver slipped down my spine when his gaze shot down to my lips, lingered, and then took its time coming back to my eyes.

  “Cathy.” His voice was a whisper, filled with reverence and awe. “These are Josiah Heaven’s journals. Do you know what a find this is?”

  I had a pretty good idea.

  “There are five more in the box,” I repeated.

  With extreme care, he closed the journal we’d opened and then peeked into the box.

  “Josiah supposedly showed up around 1787. That’s two years before that”—I nodded to the now-closed journal—“was written. Maybe the others are from before then. That one was on the top.”

  “The only way to find out is to look.”

  I stepped back, letting him take the lead. Since this was his project, it felt like the right thing to do.

  Frayne reached into the box and pulled out five more identically wrapped journals. “He must have handmade each of these.” He laid them out on the table, one next to the other.