Island Interlude

by Anne McAllister

  From Backcover…

  Was she free from the past?

  That's what Libby expected to discover when she returned to the Bahamian island where she'd had a brief summer affair with actor Alec Blanchard.

  Not that she regretted her son Sam's birth, but it was time to move forward. And kind, dependable Michael was waiting.

  When she realized that Alec had also returned to the island, Libby was faced with his steely determination to get to know Sam. His question, "When are you going to tell Sam that I'm his father?" required an answer that would upset all her plans.

  Excerpt…

  "Libby, he's my son also"

  Libby felt a wave of despair flow over her. "For how long would you play father? As long as it suits you?"

  "It will always suit me. You think I'd walk out on him?"

  Libby shook her head. "You walked out on me."

  For a moment he just stared at her, a muscle working in his jaw. Then he raked savage fingers through his hair. "I'm back. I had a child with you, and I have the right to be his father."

  "What are you going to do then, Alec? Try to take him from me?" She flung it at him as a challenge, then she looked at him, horrified. "You can't take him from me." She sounded desperate, and she knew it.

  Alec sighed, a fire flickering in his eyes. "I don't know what I can do yet. But I'm going to do something."

  Island Interlude

  by

  Anne McAllister

  CHAPTER ONE

  'I GOT somethin' to tell you.'

  'And I've got tons to tell you, too, Maddy.' Libby flung her arms around the older woman who had come hurrying down the broad cement dock to welcome her.

  Libby's eyes were bright as she scanned Dunmore Town once more. She hugged her friend tightly, hardly able to believe that she was back on Harbour Island after all this time. It had been so long since she'd been in the Bahamas. Eight whole years.

  Too long. Much too long.

  She'd realised that the moment she'd set foot on the dock by the pastel pink Custom House. Her month of misgivings had vanished. Her weeks of worrying fled. All her 'what if's' disappeared.

  She hadn't wanted to come at all. When her mentor Professor Dietrich had announced her destination, she had balked.

  'I've been there already,' she'd said stubbornly.

  But he had just smiled. 'All the better, then. You'll have contacts.'

  No amount of protesting could sway him, either. And now, for the first time, Libby was glad. She felt calm, sensible, adult. She realised now that she should have come back to this tiny Bahamian island years ago.

  It would have been expensive, yes. But its cost in other than monetary terms had been dear as well. She should have faced the past, vanquished it, and moved on.

  Well, better late than never, she told herself as she gave Maddy one last hug, then stepped back and turned to nod at the dark-haired boy of seven who was lying on his stomach behind her peering down into the water.

  'I have someone I want you to meet, Maddy.' She beckoned to the boy who sprang to his feet and came to stand beside her. Libby laid her hand on his shoulder. 'I'd like you to meet my son, Maddy. This is Sam.'

  If it had been possible for the ebony-skinned Maddy to have turned ashen, Libby thought she would have. The older woman's eyes grew wide and round, her jaw sagged. She looked for one long moment at the bony little boy and then her eyes turned to Libby; they spoke volumes.

  Libby smiled ruefully, her hand tightened momen­tarily on Sam's shoulder and he wiggled away. 'I'm sorry,' she said to Maddy. 'I should've warned you. When I said I needed a house for two people, you probably thought I meant another researcher.'

  'Don't know what I thought,' Maddy murmured, shaking Sam's hand, still looking as if she'd seen a ghost, 'but it weren't this. How you doin', honey?'

  'I'm fine,' Sam said promptly and gave her a devas­tating, gap-toothed grin. 'I saw a crab down there. A big un.' He pointed to the clear turquoise water lapping the dock. 'Right out in the open.'

  'You'll see lotsa 'em 'fore you go home, sweetie,' Maddy said. 'Oh, gracious,' she murmured. She took another long look, then gave him a smile, patted him on the head, and drew a shaky breath before she turned back to Libby. She shook her head and the look she gave Libby was sympathetic. 'Oh, my, oh, my.'

  Libby felt a faint defensive bristling. She knew Maddy had guessed at once who Sam's father was. How could she not, after all?

  Sam was a miniature Alec. They shared the same dark hair, the same strong features, the same intensity. In the boy one found a whirlwind. In the man, an elemental force.

  Libby had long since come to terms with it. She saw Sam for himself now, not as Alec's son. But she knew what Maddy saw and what Maddy was thinking, and it irritated her. She didn't want anyone's pity. She had what she wanted—an education, a future, and Sam.

  Once, years ago, it was true—she'd wanted Alec. But he hadn't wanted her. No, that wasn't quite true. He'd wanted her. He just hadn't loved her. And the moment that the beautiful Margo Hesse had come back into his life Libby had ceased to exist.

  In less than two weeks, he had made Margo his wife.

  At the time Libby had been devastated. She hadn't been able to understand how a man could make love to one woman and turn around and marry another.

  But she was twenty-six years old now, no longer starry-eyed, and she had stopped wondering.

  And, once she'd exorcised Alec's ghost this summer, she was getting married, too.

  Michael had been asking her for almost a year. Until last month she'd said she wasn't ready, had too much to do, couldn't commit herself to any more.

  'You take on new projects all the time,' Michael had argued.

  'Not the same thing,' Libby replied.

  But Michael was persistent. 'I love you.'

  And she knew he did. He supported her desire to finish her master's. He took care of Sam when she had a class and her parents couldn't watch him. He was steady, reliable, dependable, and, Libby thought, he deserved a woman far better than she.

  Michael disagreed. 'I love you,' he said again. 'Marry me.'

  'I have to go to Harbour Island this summer,' Libby protested.

  Michael smiled. 'Marry me when you get back.'

  Libby paused, considering. It wasn't fair to Michael to keep him hanging on. Nor was it fair to Sam, or even to herself. She had to grow up, take charge of her life, make a decision. And there could be no better decision than Michael. He was everything that Alec was not.

  'All right,' Libby said finally. 'Yes.'

  And the minute she'd set foot on Bahamian soil again, she was sure she'd made the right choice. Looking around Dunmore Town, she saw it as she had seen it as a young woman of eighteen. She recognised it for the seductively tantalising place it was.

  A small-town Iowa girl whose horizons, until then, had been Des Moines, Chicago, St Louis and St Paul, she'd been taken in by palm trees and turquoise seas, by the fragrance of pineapple and the sound of the waves. She'd been enchanted. By all that, and by Alec.

  It was a fantasy world to a girl born and bred in the American midwest. What she and Alec had shared here was no more than that—a passing fancy, an infatuation.

  He had been the hot-shot young actor-director, dis­traught and needing solace. She'd been the impression­able young nanny, ready to provide balm for his wounds.

  She should have known it wouldn't last.

  In turning away from her and going back to Margo, Alec was simply reverting to his true self. Eight years had gone by, and, unless Libby wanted the next eight or eighteen to be as barren as them, it was time she got on with her life.

  Her summer on Harbour Island would do the trick, Libby thought. She looked forward to goin
g home to Michael with a whole heart.

  She smiled at Maddy now. 'It's so good to be back. I can hardly wait to see everyone. Is Lyman still fishing? Where's Sarah? Did Andrew go away to school in Nassau?'

  Helping to stow two months' worth of luggage in the back of the Mitsubishi sedan, Maddy answered Libby's questions. 'Lyman goes out mos' days. He carries tourists along sometimes, gets fish for restaurants, too. Sarah, she got married to the Cash boy. Got a baby of her own now. And Andrew, he went to Nassau. But now he's gone to Florida State, you know.' Maddy beamed with pride at the accomplishments of her eldest son. 'Goin' to be a teacher, he says.'

  Libby grinned, remembering the determined thirteen-year-old Andrew had been when she had been here last. 'It's good to have goals,' she said quietly. 'Sometimes they're all you've got.'

  They were certainly all she'd had after Alec. They were all that had kept her going for the last eight years—her goals. And Sam.

  She glanced at her son who was clambering into the back seat of Maddy's car. His dark eyes were wide, taking in everything. He'd been like a sponge since they'd got on the plane yesterday in Des Moines.

  It had been his first trip on an aeroplane. He'd plied her with questions. More questions had come when they'd arrived last night in Nassau. Even more at the crack of dawn this morning when he'd insisted on walking on the beach and jumping into the ocean that, until yesterday, he'd never seen.

  He wanted to see everything, do everything, under­stand everything. He was, indeed, Alec's son.

  She got into the front seat next to Maddy. 'Where's the place you found for us?'

  'Muellers' house. It's in town, not on the beach. Not so fancy as Bradens', you know.' Maddy gave a smiling shrug.

  'I didn't expect it would be.' The Bradens were the family Libby had been nanny for that summer eight years before. Theirs had been a cedar and glass palace on the ocean side of the island.

  A number of wealthy Americans and Europeans had holiday homes scattered about the hills above the three miles of almost deserted pink sand beach. Alec's parents had had a place there, too.

  'Just two bedrooms,' Maddy told her, putting the car in gear. 'Small, small.'

  'It'll be fine. Sam will be outside most of the time anyway. And I've got lots of work to do. I need to ask you the best people to talk to.'

  'You jus' come to talk to people?' Maddy was amazed.

  Libby nodded. That was the idea. She was to preserve as much of the oral history of the island as she could manage in eight weeks. At least that was her legitimate reason.

  She looked around the palm-studded, pastel-painted hillside as Maddy's car bounced up the street from the dock. It was still beautiful, yes. Exotic. Tantalising.

  But now she saw that the paint on the clapboard houses was peeling. The streets had pot-holes in them. Chickens ran loose on the roads.

  She wasn't a starry-eyed child this time, an innocent fool. She would never again be taken in by a handsome man and a tinsel moon.

  'I got to tell you somethin',' Maddy repeated as she turned the corner and pulled to a stop in front of a yellow frame house just visible behind a high board fence. She glanced over her shoulder at Sam who was asking,

  'Is this it? Is this it?'

  'Yes,' Libby said at Maddy's nod, and Sam shot out of the car to get a closer look. Maddy gave a grunt of satisfaction as he went.

  Libby looked at her oddly.

  Maddy sighed. 'Libby, you got to know.'

  'So tell me, then,' Libby said, smiling. She opened the door and got out, impatient, too, wanting, as Sam did, to get on with settling in.

  'Mr Alec…' Maddy said. 'He's back, too.'

  Finding out she was pregnant had been no bigger shock. Libby stared, disbelieving. 'Alec? Here?'

  No. He couldn't be.

  'I was goin' to tell you anyways. I remembered 'bout you an' him, you see. But I didn't know 'bout…'bout the boy.'

  No, she wouldn't have. Libby had left before she even knew it herself. She'd only sent Christmas cards to Maddy ever since—and she'd never said. What would have been the point?

  She had tried to tell Alec. She'd written to him as soon as she'd found out. He was married already, of course, and that had made her hesitate. But in the end she'd tried because she thought he had a right to know.

  He hadn't wanted to.

  Her phone calls had met dead ends, and her letter had come back unopened in a larger envelope with a note attached in Alec's black scrawl. 'I'm married, Libby,' he had written. 'Forget me. You can be sure I'll forget you.'

  You can be sure I'll forget you. Libby had shut her eyes against the pain of it. Well, you couldn't get much clearer than that. Face it, girl, she had told herself, you were a three-week stand. Margo was the real love of his life.

  A few months later when she was standing in line in the supermarket, leafing through a gossip magazine, she had read that hot new film director Alec Blanchard and his actress wife, Margo Hesse, had a brand new daughter.

  Hugely pregnant herself by this time, she had given a bitter laugh.

  'Some stud, that Blanchard,' the woman standing in line behind her had commented.

  'Too right,' Libby had muttered.

  She had a fleeting moment's hope that that was why he'd married Margo, because he'd got her pregnant, too. Had he simply done the right thing? Libby wondered.

  Who knew? Who cared? Even if he knew she was pregnant, he couldn't have married her, too.

  He'd been dating Margo Hesse even before he'd come to Harbour Island. Libby had heard her name linked with his again and again. Margo had co-starred with him in the film he'd been making right before Libby had met him. Probably if she'd been there with him afterwards he'd never have turned to eighteen-year-old Libby for consolation when his stand-in had died.

  But Margo hadn't been there. She hadn't come until later. And when she had, everything had changed.

  Libby slapped the magazine back into the rack and said under her breath, 'You can be sure I'll forget you, too.'

  The trouble was, she hadn't. Not completely. In some perverse way, every man she met, every man she dated— few though they were—she measured against those brief weeks of joy and love she'd shared with Alec.

  Only with months and months of persistent wooing had Michael surmounted those memories, fitted himself in, become a necessary part of her life.

  God bless Michael, Libby thought now.

  'What you goin' to do?' Maddy asked her now, hoisting one of the suitcases and leading the way through the tall gate into the small overgrown yard.

  There was nothing to do—not with regard to Alec anyway. With luck she could simply stay out of his way.

  'What I've come here to do—work,' Libby said flatly, grabbing the other case and following. 'Alec doesn't matter. He has no part in my life.'

  Maddy unlocked the door, then paused and looked back at Sam who was testing the strength of the bougainvillaea trellis. 'Does Mr Alec…know about…?'

  'No.'

  'He will.'

  'That's his problem. He's married. He has a child of his own. More than one for all I know.'

  He could have had a dozen for all she knew. She'd deliberately ignored anything else she might have seen or heard of Alec Blanchard over the years. It hadn't been easy. He was a household word now. Hollywood's main man.

  'No, he jus' got the one.' Maddy carried the suitcase upstairs and into the larger of the two bedrooms and dropped it on the bed. 'She's here with him. Jus' him an' the little girl.'

  'No Margo?'

  Maddy stared at her. 'Margo, she's dead.'

  'What?'

  Maddy spread her hands. 'Car accident out in California. She an' some reporter fella goin' down to th'airport t'meet Mr Alec. Missed a curve, they say.' Maddy shook her head. 'Pity. Broke him up pretty bad, I reckon. You didn't hear?'

  No, Libby hadn't heard. The beautiful, vibrant Margo Hesse dead? She sat down abruptly, her fingers clenching in her lap.

  'Not surpr
ised you ain't heard really,' Maddy went on. 'Mr Alec don't go for lots of publicity. He ain't one for stories in the papers, if he can help it.'

  'Mmm.'

  Maybe that was why Libby had been so successful at missing stories about him, she thought now. Maybe there had been little written. His films were, of course, legendary and well-reviewed. But his personal life seemed off limits. Little ever appeared about him and Margo and their daughter.

  Margo, Libby remembered, had been an up-and-coming actress at the time he'd married her, a sultry blonde with a Marilyn Monroe pout. She didn't think, however, now that she reflected on it, that she remem­bered Margo being in another movie. Well, she hadn't had to work. Maybe she'd been satisfied as a devoted wife and mother.

  'Poor Margo,' Libby said and then, remembering Sam and the strong bond she shared with her own child, she added, 'Her poor daughter.'

  Maddy just nodded, not speaking, just took the clothes and tucked them away in drawers.

  Libby did not say, 'Poor Alec' She did not even think it. Not then. Not later. She had no emotions left for him at all.

  She didn't see Alec, but she knew he was there. He was everywhere she went. How could he not be when all she had to do was walk down the street and people stopped what they were doing to glance at her?

  She'd been here three days now, poking about the town, renewing acquaintances, making contacts. And, while she never mentioned Alec or Sam, she doubted that there was anyone on the island who hadn't heard. The island grapevine did its work well.

  'Long time ago,' she heard them murmur. 'Her and Mr Alec. Only got to look at the boy.'

  They were unfailingly polite to her, though. They smiled. Those who remembered her greeted her warmly, opened their arms to both her and Sam. She knew they understood. Children like Sam, born out of wedlock, were not that unusual on the island. More than one man had come and left a permanent reminder of himself.

  But most of those men did not come back.

  Alec had. Probably more than once. His family, after all, owned a home here. If anyone was the interloper, it was Libby, and she knew it.

  She knew, too, that she should leave. Her mission was accomplished—the unspoken one, at least. It had taken her only moments to realise that she was no longer the foolish young woman who had fallen in love with Alec Blanchard. With joy she put Alec behind her now, made him part of her past. If she regretted the circumstances, she didn't regret Sam. But, regrets or not, she was ready to move on.