“Why not?” Kaitlin agreed. “And that other story you mentioned, about the two of you. What’s your current theory about it?”
“I know you want me to say it was completely a result of Hunter’s emotions. That he cares for me enough to want a happy ending. But when he read it, he despised me for it. Hated that my stories suggested control over their subjects, and he’s always rejected anything out of his control.” She took a sip of hot tea, then looked into Kaitlin’s sympathetic blue eyes. “If for no other reason than to prove he’s in charge, I figure he’s convinced himself that the opposite of what I wrote is true.”
“Did you purposely let him read the story?”
“No, but I could have guessed he’d see it.”
“And do you want its ending to come true?”
“To be with Hunter forever, happily ever after?” Shauna shook her head and gave an unladylike snort. “Talk about fairy tales.”
Kaitlin reached over the table and patted Shauna’s arm beneath the peasant blouse’s bouffant sleeves. “Honey, you may be able to convince yourself you haven’t let yourself really care again, but you can’t fool ol’ Kaitlin.”
Hunter sat back on his living room sofa and turned on the television low. And sighed. Largely from contentment, since he had just tucked Andee into her own bed for the first time in more than a week.
First, there had been his business trip, and his having to leave a job undone for the first time ever. Fortunately, his client had been very understanding after hearing of Andee’s kidnapping on the news.
Then there’d been Andee’s kidnapping. Thank heavens he had gotten her back safe and sound, Shauna’s story notwithstanding.
Shauna.
She was another reason for his sigh. She had taken off without saying goodbye. She’d just left a note in his car and—
And made him crazy. He missed her, damn it.
His cell phone rang. He checked the number before answering, and felt his muscles tense.
As if his thoughts of her had summoned her call, it was Shauna.
“Hello?” he said briskly, as if his gut wasn’t spasming inside him. The woman had driven him nuts. Still did.
“Hi, Hunter,” said the soft, familiar and much too welcome voice of the woman he wanted out of his life. Maybe.
“Did you make it home safely?” he asked, the way he would of one of his mother’s friends who’d come for a visit.
“Yes.”
He heard the hesitation in her voice. Well, the heck with it. He wouldn’t make it easier for her, even as he pictured her soft brown eyes regarding him sympathetically as he backed as far from her as he could over a telephone.
“Great. Glad to hear it. Thanks again for coming. Say hello to my mother for me.”
He started to hang up, then heard her call, “Hunter? I just wanted to let you know that I rewrote my story the way it actually happened and all the changes saved.”
“That’s good.”
“Have you learned anything about why Margo did it?”
“Revenge. And money. Our divorce wasn’t that friendly, and I only paid her child support for times when Andee was with her. She wanted more.”
“Oh,” Shauna said. “But—”
“She enlisted Aitken to help, for a cut of the ransom. Everything was to be kept quiet, no cops, no media. When reality changed, Aitken freaked, but she used it to her advantage. She played up her media interviews like the great little actress she professes to be—the frightened mother, the brave heroine. She was already approached with a couple of offers to sell book rights and do a movie.
“But she won’t be able to profit like that if she’s convicted of killing John Aitken and kidnapping Andee.”
“Right. The cops are gathering evidence as we speak. Turns out her neighbor Conrad Chiles overheard some discussions between Aitken and Margo that he hadn’t realized were about snatching Andee and extorting money from me. No one picked up on her calls warning Aitken as she’d rented a prepaid cell phone in an assumed name. BillieAnn Callahan suspected what was going on, though since she’d figured Andee actually was safe in Aitken’s hands, she hadn’t spilled it before. And who knows what Aitken would have done to Andee at the end, since she could have identified him.”
“I’m just glad she’s safe,” Shauna said. “Thanks for the update. It was nice talking with you, Hunter. Goodbye.”
“Wait!” he shouted into the phone. She wasn’t simply going to end it like that, was she?
He still needed some answers.
“Yes, Hunter?” She sounded distantly cordial, as if they were total strangers.
“You said you were tying up loose ends. Revising the story about Andee’s kidnapping.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “What about the other story?”
“What about it?”
“Isn’t it a loose end? Are you trying to tie it up?” He realized his voice had turned cool.
“That’s not a loose end,” Shauna said softly. “It’s one that’s all tied up and tossed away. Goodbye, Hunter.”
“Duke ran out of Bobby’s house barking at the kitty cat,” Shauna read aloud from the pages on her lap as she sat cross-legged on a mound of colorful pillows on the floor, her long skirt tucked under her, in the Fantasy Fare story room. “Bobby ran after Duke. And Bobby’s mommy ran after Bobby.”
Dozens of children sat on other pillows on the floor surrounding her. They laughed now, and so did Shauna. She looked up, meeting delight in one young face after another, glad she was amusing them.
Glad there were people around her who were lighthearted enough to laugh in the unrestrained way children did.
Maybe someday that would be enough to lift the heaviness from her heart.
Eleven days had passed since she had left Los Angeles. Had left Hunter and his adorable daughter Andee.
Ten days since she had last spoken with him and sworn that she had left no loose ends.
That the story she’d written about them living happily ever after hadn’t mattered to her any more than to him.
She was sure now that what she’d talked about with Kaitlin had been correct: those two stories, and all others she’d written in which Hunter was a character, had sprung from her fingertips because on some level she was so attuned to Hunter.
The man she had loved so many years ago.
The man she still loved.
His emotions had been the impetus for all the changes to the story about Andee, and her ability to save them.
Including, afterward, the ending that told the true story: Andee had been saved, restored to her loving daddy forever.
But her mommy was going far, far away.
Poor Hunter. Even more, poor Andee.
But Shauna hadn’t only left the names of suggested therapists with Hunter. She’d talked to Elayne, too.
Elayne had been a good friend before, when her son had left Oasis and walked out on Shauna and her stories and the love they’d shared. Elayne had made it clear she loved her son, understood his actions, but she’d nevertheless remained close to Shauna.
And now, though Shauna had tried not to reveal how hurt she was, Elayne had also expressed sorrow that things hadn’t worked out differently for both her son…and the woman who still cared for him so deeply.
Yet Shauna still felt blessed. She had friends like Elayne and Kaitlin.
She had Fantasy Fare, and the adoration of all the kids who piled into her story room, like now, and raptly listened to her spin tales she’d written about funny animals, including her favorite, Buster the Barker, and princes and princesses who were as strong and smart as they were beautiful, and mean ogres who got their comeuppances.
She even had a better understanding of her other stories now, and her abilities and limitations when it came to altering the realities they predicted.
“Duke didn’t know that the next-door neighbor’s sprinkler was stuck. Duke was a doggy, and doggies don’t worry about stuck sprinklers. He didn’t worry about it, either, w
hen he fell into the neighbor’s humongous mud puddle. Bobby was close behind, and he fell into the mud puddle, too. And Bobby’s mommy was close behind him, so…” She looked up to ask, “What do you think happened to her?” Only the words came out much softer than she’d intended.
For as she raised her head, she saw who was standing in the doorway: Kaitlin, of course, since she always liked to listen in on the stories when she had a spare minute.
Elayne Strahm was there, too. And she wasn’t alone.
A little girl’s voice shouted out with all the other kids’, “Bobby’s mommy fell into the mud puddle, too.” An adorable little girl with green eyes and curly hair the same shiny black as her grandmother’s…and her daddy’s.
Hunter was there, too, holding Andee in the curve of his arm.
As he caught Shauna’s eye, he put Andee down and whispered something. His daughter, dressed in matching magenta sweatpants and shirt with a purple flower embroidered on the front, picked her way around the other kids sitting on pillows on the floor. When she got to Shauna, she raised her arms to be picked up.
Shauna obliged, lifting the minimal weight of the five-year-old, snuggling the child against her, inhaling her bubble-gum sweet scent. “Hi, Andee,” she said.
“Hi, Shauna.” Andee pulled back. “My daddy and grandma said you tell the best stories in the world, so we had to come to hear you tell them.”
“You can thank your daddy and grandma for me, honey.”
“Oh. I’m supposed to thank you,” Andee said. She looked a little puzzled. “For your very special story. Is it the one about mud puddles?”
“Kind of,” Shauna said, meeting Hunter’s gaze among the crowd.
Oh, heavens. He was looking at her with eyes filled with desire. And something more.
Something deeper.
Suggesting forever.
Or was she just reading her own wishes into his smiling stare?
The children in her audience had begun to wriggle and whisper. She still had a story to finish.
“Andee, I see a pillow right over there.” She pointed a little to her left. “Would you please go sit down so we can finish the mud puddle story?”
“Okay, Shauna.” Andee straightened her legs as Shauna put her on the floor.
Somehow, Shauna managed to finish reading the tale of Duke, Bobby and the mud. She must have done okay with it, for the kids laughed in the right places and, afterward, cheered and clapped and asked for more.
“Tomorrow,” she assured them. “We’ll have another story time then.”
As they rose and scampered away, Shauna saw Elayne take her granddaughter’s hand and lead her from the room with the rest. She smiled over her shoulder at Shauna.
So did Kaitlin, after shooing all the remaining children from the story room toward the restaurant.
And then only Shauna and Hunter were left.
He came toward her, then stopped a foot away. Shauna inhaled, hoping for fortification from the air around her, but all she got was Hunter’s clean, male scent along with what felt like insufficient oxygen.
That had to be the explanation of why her equilibrium seemed off.
“Good story,” he said, his deep voice full of some emotion that Shauna didn’t even try to identify.
How would it translate into one of her stories? She didn’t know.
“Thanks.” So banal was their conversation. So full of an undercurrent that she didn’t dare to name. Or did she?
Only to herself.
Love.
“I enjoy your stories,” Hunter said. He closed the space between them, pulling her into his arms. “All of them.”
“No, you don’t,” she began, but he stopped her by a long, sweet kiss that, had her equilibrium not been affected merely by his presence, would have made her dizzy.
It did make her dizzy…with hope.
“Why are you here, Hunter?” she asked when she could force her lips far enough away to speak. Which was an effort. For all she wanted was to continue to kiss him. For now.
Maybe forever.
As long as she didn’t have to think about what it meant. What the future could be. What—
“I’m here because that’s what the last story you wrote about me said would happen. I’m here to tell you how much I love you, and to ask you to marry me so we can live happily ever after.”
Shocked, Shauna pulled away. Sure, that was what her story said. What she wanted. But it couldn’t really happen.
Not so easily.
“Do you think I wrote the story to keep you off balance and out of control?” she demanded almost angrily—the only way she could keep herself from running from the room after the kids.
Or, worse yet, crying.
“No, though maybe sometimes being a little out of control’s not a bad thing.”
“Maybe.” Shauna, shivering, couldn’t draw her gaze from his eyes. What she saw reflected there was all that she’d ever hoped to see. Caring. More.
Surely he didn’t love her. She could be misreading it all.
“Then that story about us,” he continued. “You didn’t just write it to play mind games with me?”
“Not intentionally.” Her voice was too hoarse. Her legs too weak. But she couldn’t leave.
And not just because he once more held her close.
“You wrote it because it was there, inside me, and your big, bad writing z-state sensed it, right?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “But—”
“And years ago, the stuff you wrote was possible because it affected me. Even though I refused to believe it.”
“You were a down-to-earth cop. You wrote plans based on facts and strategy. What I wrote didn’t seem real to you.”
“Stop defending my shortsighted stupidity,” he commanded, pulling back just a little. His glare was tempered by a smile, one of his genuine smiles that drove her nuts with wanting him. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’m done fighting it. Fighting you. Here’s the deal.” He didn’t have to work hard to pull her back against him, so she could feel every hard, muscled part of him. His obvious need strained against her abdomen. She wouldn’t have spoken then, even if she could.
She had to hear him out.
“I’ve told Simon he’s in charge of the L.A. office of Strahm Solutions. I’m opening a Phoenix branch here, in Oasis. Andee and I are moving here—away from L.A. and all the nasty stuff that could touch her when her mother’s put on trial for everything she pulled. It’ll help for Andee to be near her grandmother. Don’t you think, Lady Shrink?”
“Yes,” Shauna agreed, speaking against his shirt. Oh, lord. He’d be here, in the same town as her. What did that mean?
“Now, in that story you wrote about us, I asked you to marry me, and you said yes.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Shauna began. “It was—”
“It was exactly right. What was inside me, what I wanted, but refused to think about. I love you, Shauna.”
She looked up into his face, and saw what she hoped for—confirmation of what he was saying.
“I’ve always loved you,” she responded huskily.
“Then let’s make that story about us come true,” he commanded. “Marry me, Shauna. And then we’ll live happily ever after, right? It’s what you’ve written, so it’s got to be true.”
“It will be now,” Shauna said, pulling Hunter’s head down for a long kiss to seal their future.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7366-9
NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON
Copyright © 2004 by Linda O. Johnston
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Not a Moment Too Soon Page 23
