Strangers When We Meet

by Marisa Carroll

  She lifted her hands to pull off the headphones that tethered her to the console. Armand was watching her with a tight, set look on his face. The engineer beside him was frankly panicked. She thought of the others who depended on her for their jobs, the listeners whose loyalty she depended on for her own. She couldn’t just walk away, even if it meant losing the man she so stupidly refused to admit she loved.

  Squaring her shoulders, she punched the toggle. “Okay, folks.” She hit the cough button that momentarily closed her mike, then cleared her throat. She was a professional;

  she was going to act like one whether or not she was going to pieces inside, because it was the right thing to do. Her fingers curled into fists and her nails bit into her palms, but her voice came out steady and clear. “There you have it. Your host has a real love-life dilemma of her own. Love at first sight? Is it real or is it chemistry? And if she follows up on it, is she going to live happily ever after or regret it until her dying day? Let’s hear your opinions. David on line one. What have you got to say?”

  “Wow! This is heavy. I don’t really know what to say. I was going to call to ask you what you think of a date who orders the most expensive meal in the restaurant and then leaves most of it on her plate and won’t ask for a doggie bag. I work hard for my money. I mean, is it really crass to tell the waiter you want to take it home?”

  Emma smiled, using the back of her hand to wipe away her tears. “That is a problem. If the date’s going well, I’d say leave the chateaubriand on the plate and look like a real player. If it’s not and you don’t care if you impress her or not, hey, that’s a great piece of beef going to waste.”

  “Yeah, I kinda thought the same thing. She was a real witch, so I brought the steak home. But I’ll remember what you said. It’s a good rule of thumb. And, Emma, can I say something else?”

  “Sure, David. Fire away.”

  “I guess I do believe in love at first sight. It’s never happened to me, but my mom and dad only knew each other five days before they ran off to Vegas and got married. They’ve been together for thirty-five years.”

  “Thanks, David. That’s good to hear. And let me know when you find a girl that either cleans her plate, or suggests you share the leftovers in the morning. Leah, you’re on ‘Night Talk with Emma Hart.’ It says here you think love at first sight is the most romantic thing that can happen to two human beings. Do you want to expand on that a little?”

  “Hi, Emma. Longtime listener. First-time caller. I think that Blake guy, whoever he is, has the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard....” Emma let the woman talk, paying her only the slightest attention. The next two calls were a little easier. She had her groove back. By the third, the tears had dried on her face and her hands were no longer trembling, but she was still trembling deep inside with the need to reconnect with Blake.

  “Okay, guys. Dion, Ruby and Javier. You’re up next, right after the break. This is Emma Hart and you’re listening to ‘Night Talk’ on WTKX.”

  She switched her mike to a secure channel and keyed Armand. “Is he on the line?” she asked.

  “Nope,” Armand replied. Emma’s heart fell. He wasn’t going to call back. She’d lost him, and it was no one’s fault but her own.

  “Keep trying.” She may have been her own worst enemy in the past, but now that she’d come to her senses, she wasn’t going to give up without a fight. “I have to talk to him.”

  “No problem.” Armand grinned.

  “What? I thought you said you couldn’t get him back.”

  “Didn’t have to, he’s right behind you.” She felt the brush of air across her neck and shoulders as the door to her studio swung open on silent hinges.

  Blake was standing there, leaning on a cane. He was dressed all in black, his free hand thrust deep into the pocket of his trench coat. There were still deep grooves carved from nose to chin, but beyond that and the cane, he looked completely recovered from his wound.

  “We were cut off,” she said, reaching up to pull the headset off.

  “You’ve got two minutes, thirty seconds till we’re back,” Armand warned, his voice growing faint as she discarded the apparatus and rose from her seat. “Don’t waste it.”

  “I won’t,” she answered aloud.

  “You won’t what?” There was a hint of a smile along the edges of his lips, but otherwise Blake didn’t make a move toward her.

  “I won’t waste the two minutes and fifteen seconds we have until the break is over.” She took a step toward him. “I thought you’d cut me out of your life when you hung up.” There was a distinct quiver in her voice, but she didn’t try to cover it up.

  “No,” he said. “It was just tough love. I wanted you to get back to your show. I knew what you were going to say. I didn’t need to hear it right then.”

  “You’re very sure of yourself.”

  “No,” he said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Emma flew into his arms. “I love you. I should have told you that days ago, but I was afraid. I’m not afraid anymore.”

  His arms came around her, and he held her so tightly she could scarcely breathe. “I know. I could tell from the way you handled your callers. You’re back on track, Emma.”

  She pressed herself against him, smiling with the rightness of it. “I’d rather stay right here.”

  “We’re down to a minute and a half, and then you’re back on the air.” His head swooped down, and he covered his mouth with hers. The kiss was quick and deep, soul-shattering and over much too fast. “We’ll take it as slow as you want from now on, Emma. Long courtship. Long engagement. Long, long marriage.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. Now that you’ve got me, we’re going to make this legal ASAP.” She looked at him, raised her hand to touch his cheek. He would have kissed her again, but she put her hand on his chest to hold him back. “We’ve only got a minute left. We’ve got a million things to work out. What about the McGillicuddy place? Your getting back to your roots? What about the syndication deal?”

  “Yes to the McGillicuddy place. I don’t give a damn if they elect Tubb mayor of Cooper’s Corner. I want that place. I think you do, too. Yes to getting back to my roots. Yes to the syndication deal. Did you think I’d ask you to give it up?”

  “I— No. But—” How could they make it all work? She didn’t know, but suddenly, excitingly, she wanted to try.

  “Some day we’ll leave the city. I want to raise my kids where there are trees and grass and creeks to play in. All four of them,” he said, smoothing her hair behind her ear.

  “All four of them?”

  He nodded. “Three boys and a girl.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Armand hollered from the door of the engineering booth.

  “Okay. Four. Radio is one career you can adapt to pregnancy.” She could see all of them playing in the meadow behind the old farm. The boys would look like Blake. And her little daughter, she would look like Blake, too. But first things first. Babies would come later. She could see something else in that vision of the future. In the restored barn on their farm, a state-of-the-art broadcast studio. If she was going into this syndication deal, she was going to ride it all the way to the top. Limbaugh had his own studio. So did Imus and Dr. Laura. In five years she would write her own ticket.

  She looked at Blake with shining eyes, and he smiled at her. “You can write your own ticket in seven or eight years,” he said, reading her mind with no trouble at all, with one exception.

  “Five years,” she said. “That’s all it’s going to take.” Hours ago she had been too conflicted to decide between whole wheat or rye with her ham sandwich. Now she was settling her career, her future, her entire life in a matter of moments. She was either crazy or truly, irrevocably in love.

  “My mistake.” He touched her lips to his. “Five years it will
be. Then I’ll retire to the life of a gentleman farmer, and you can support our substantial brood.” He was suddenly serious, his hands tightening almost painfully on her arms. “I love you, Emma Martha. I think I fell in love with you the moment I first saw you. I love you today. I’ll love you tomorrow. I’ll love you until the day I die and beyond.”

  “I was a little slower on the uptake,” she confessed, feeling the sting of tears behind her eyelids and blinking them back. She wouldn’t cry. She was too happy to cry. “But once I make up my mind, there’s no changing it. I love you, Blake. Today. Tomorrow. Forever.”

  “Fifteen seconds,” Armand yelled, slamming open the door to his booth.

  “Back to work, woman,” Blake ordered, spinning her into her seat. She picked up the headset and slipped it on just as her theme music faded into silence. She felt Blake’s hands on her shoulders as he stood silently behind her chair. Reaching up, she covered his hand with her own. She would never be afraid to listen to her heart again. She would never doubt her ability again. She would never doubt love again.

  With a flip of the switch, she sent her voice out over the airwaves. “We’re back. This is ‘Night Talk’ on WTKX. Tonight we’re talking about love at first sight. Is it myth? Or is it magic? How many of you have experienced the phenomenon? Did it last? I know what I think about that, but let’s hear what you all have to say. C’mon, Manhattan, light up those lines.” She turned her head and smiled into Blake’s eyes, leaving no doubt that her next words were for him. “This is Emma Hart. Let’s take on the night together.”

  Epilogue

  Thanksgiving

  IT HAD STARTED to snow sometime in the last hour, Maureen observed as she lighted the candles in the deep window recesses of the dining room at Twin Oaks. Not enough on the ground yet to warrant a sleigh ride, but it was still easy enough to envision a Currier and Ives moment, with the church steeple just visible beyond the humpbacked bridge and the hills smoky-gray in the fast falling twilight.

  She wondered if Grace Penrose had noticed. Of course, it was over a month before the village Christmas Festival got underway, but as far as the festival organizer was concerned, it was never too early to start snowing. Grace was turning pages for Beth Young as she played the piano in the gathering room. Maureen decided not to disturb the performance. She’d let Grace discover for herself that it was snowing when she called the assembled group in to dinner.

  She lingered for a moment, watching the people gathered around the blazing fireplace. Her father was talking animatedly to the couple from Boston who were staying at Twin Oaks because their son was in the military and unable to get back to the States. They hadn’t wanted to spend the holiday alone in their empty house, they’d explained, and they didn’t want to go to an impersonal hotel. A friend had suggested Twin Oaks was just what they were looking for. It was exactly the kind of referral that Maureen wanted for the B and B, a place homey enough that people were comfortable spending an important family holiday there.

  Her father, bouncing Randi on his knee while Robin hung on to his arm, was laughing at something the gentleman from Boston had said. Justin Cooper looked well, Maureen decided with satisfaction. His new job teaching in an English language school in France had been good for him. She missed him being nearby, but she was happy that he was finding a new life and a new career for himself. Maureen still missed her mother terribly, they all did, but life went on, and the pain grew a little less each day.

  Folding her arms beneath her breasts, Maureen turned to survey the dining room. It looked just as picture perfect as the New England landscape. Copper and gold mums and red daisies nestled in crystal vases flanked by lighted tapers. A huge centerpiece of gourds and Indian corn, nuts and apples, topped by a pineapple, anchored the great mahogany table where Clint would carve the turkey.

  The sideboard was already groaning under the weight of half a dozen pumpkin and mincemeat pies, molded salads and homemade nut bread. A separate table had been designated for the hot dishes. Clint had hollowed the biggest pumpkin from the garden, saved from Keegan’s marauding jack-o’-lantern raid a month earlier, and had turned it into a punch bowl with the help of a plastic liner. The aroma of mulled cider mingling with the myriad other good smells emanating from the kitchen made her stomach growl. She glanced at her wristwatch.

  “We’ll eat at three,” Clint had told her. “I’ll call you when I need help bringing dishes to the sideboard. Until then, go mingle. Just keep me informed of the football scores.”

  It was two-thirty. All the guests had arrived except Ed Taylor, their neighbor, and Martha and Felix Dorn. But the doctor and his wife would be along shortly. Blake Weston and Emma had left to pick them up an hour ago. A flicker of movement caught Maureen’s attention. She leaned forward to look out the window, instinctively keeping out of sight of whoever was outside. Her heart rate had accelerated to an unacceptable level, and she took a couple of deep breaths to settle it. She’d been jumpy since the night Blake Weston had been shot on the mountain. Her cop’s instinct told her it hadn’t been an accident, even though there’d been no evidence to the contrary so far.

  A familiar rail-thin figure was coming up the walkway, stooped shoulders hunched against the cold. Maureen threw open the big door. “Ed. Happy Thanksgiving! You didn’t walk, did you? Why didn’t you call? Someone would have come by to give you a ride.”

  “Happy Thanksgiving, Maureen. I didn’t need a ride. Isn’t more than half a mile or so from my place. Sure smells good in here.”

  “Dinner will be ready in half an hour or so. Why don’t you go warm up by the fire,” Maureen said, taking his threadbare canvas coat and old felt fedora from his skeletal hands. He’d lost weight over the fall and looked more frail than she’d ever seen him. But she knew how proud he was. He wouldn’t welcome any inquiries about how he was taking care of himself these days. She’d leave that task to Felix Dorn. The best help she and Clint could give their neighbor was to keep buying his chickens, something she had every intention of doing. And she’d make sure he had a ride home later in the evening, too. She didn’t want him trudging to his farm in the dark.

  A car was coming up the drive, and a few minutes later Martha and Felix arrived at the door, accompanied by Blake and Emma. “We haven’t kept you from serving dinner, have we?” Martha asked anxiously as Blake took her coat to hang on the brass rack inside the gathering room.

  “Clint’s resting the turkey. We’ll eat in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “We got to talking about wedding plans and lost track of the time,” Martha explained, unconsciously rubbing her arthritic hands to ease the ache from being out in the cold.

  “You lost track of the time,” Felix grumbled. “I didn’t. I’m starved half to death.”

  “A Christmas wedding in Florida. Doesn’t that sound lovely?” his wife continued, paying her spouse no heed whatsoever.

  “It does,” Maureen agreed.

  “Very small and very simple,” Emma said. “That’s the only way I can get Granddad and Blake’s parents to even come.” Emma helped her grandfather stash his gloves in the pockets of his coat.

  “Martha and I are going along to Costa Rica to put a crimp in the honeymoon,” Felix said in his usual bad-tempered growl.

  “Oh, Felix. We’re doing no such thing.”

  Emma laughed and shooed her grandfather toward the fireplace, where the others were gathering in anticipation of being called to the feast. “Granddad and Nana are going to visit my parents at the consulate in San José. Blake and I are planning to spend a few days in
a jungle retreat my parents have visited and enjoyed before. Monkeys come right up to the veranda of your cottage, and there are dolphins swimming in the bay.”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  “It does. It will be the last chance for a vacation I have for a while. The new syndicated version of my show debuts the first week of January.”

  “I’m looking forward to being able to pick you up on one of the local stations,” Maureen said, and meant it.

  “I’m looking forward to the new concept. It’ll still be cutting edge, but I want to move past the sex-in-the-city format and take on a few more topics. Kind of life-after-sex-in-the-city.”

  “No more shop talk,” Blake interrupted. “Go back to talking about the honeymoon trip. Emma’s father found a poison dart frog in their bathroom sink at this place one morning.”

  “It wasn’t a poison frog,” she said, wrapping her hand around his arm and giving it a little shake. Blake smiled at her. He seemed completely recovered from the gunshot wound that had nearly taken his life only weeks before. Emma and Blake had accepted Maureen’s reluctance to talk about her former life, even though they suspected the shooting might have had something to do with it. It was a sign of true friendship, to Maureen’s way of thinking, and she hoped someday she would be able to tell them everything.

  “But it was a very big frog.”

  “Tyskita’s a wonderful place.” Emma turned her attention to Maureen. “It’s going to seem even more wonderful tomorrow morning if I wake up and there’s a foot of snow on the ground.” She shivered. “It’s getting really cold out there.”

  “I’ll make sure you have an extra blanket for tonight,” Maureen said automatically. Both Blake and Emma were staying at Twin Oaks, even though Emma’s grandparents had protested it would be the last time they would have Emma to themselves.