Geneva liked the notion of men being in love with her, and in fact, had pretty much become an expert at finding ways to coax such admissions from them. She had always had admirers, usually several of them at a time, and had always enjoyed watching them jockey for position among themselves, challenging one another like boyish rivals over a rich prize. Geneva understood that the games she played with them often made her seem superficial, particularly to less beautiful women, but it had never bothered her enough to stop her from playing them. Until Howard, she had never really given her heart to any of them. Perhaps that’s why he had been so attractive—he had been so damn hard to get—and why his desertion had wounded her so severely.
Of course, this business of love at first sight was only a joke. She had learned long ago not to become too excited over such pretended gallantry. Once a gorgeous Canadian actor named Terrance had asked her to marry him immediately after they were introduced. She had been flattered, even though she knew he was jokingly referring to the green card she would be able to provide for him. She had made light of it, but secretly she had toyed with the idea of getting a real proposal from him (at that time in her more frivolous past, she had been keeping an informal tally of proposals). To that end, she had flirted outrageously with him for a week before a mutual friend gently pulled her aside and informed her that Terrance was homosexual.
Yes, she sighed, Renaissance poets may have believed in love at first sight, but modern men only make jokes about it. Still, it might be fun to see if she could make John Smith stop joking and love her, not seriously, of course, but enough for an interesting diversion while she recovered from Howard’s treachery. She began humming to herself as she drove into Rachel’s driveway.
The children were playing with the runaway cats when she arrived. Rachel came from the house with flour on her hands, her golden hair pulled up into a loose braid, and Geneva could not help but hope that she was as pretty as her older sister. Craftily, she wondered how well Rachel knew John Smith. She got out of the car smiling.
“Well, what did you think of the good doctor?” asked Rachel, barely suppressing a smirk.
“He’s exasperating, but cute, and he kept the Three Stooges,” returned Geneva. “And why didn’t you tell me the two of you have been talking about me behind my back?”
“Oh, I didn’t want to influence your first impression. I thought you might like him. Come on in the house and tell me all about it. By the way, your cats showed up five minutes ago.”
Geneva was eager to talk about John Smith, DVM, more eager still to find out more about him. She decided to get the facts straight first. “He’s not gay, by any chance, is he?” she asked offhandedly. No use turning herself inside out for a man with suspicious tendencies.
“Good grief, no! He’s been seen with half the women in the county, and the other half is lined up waiting their turn. Gosh, I thought he’d be just your type. What makes you think he’s gay?” Rachel was visibly disturbed.
“Oh, no reason. I just wondered. Lots of eligible men are.” Geneva did not wish to pursue this line of conversation and be forced to explain her folly concerning Terrance the actor. “He has a broken leg. I guess that’s why he hasn’t been riding.”
“Oh, yes, I know, but he said he hopes he can go riding with you when it’s healed, you lucky thing.”
“Well,” Geneva replied ruefully. “I guess I’ll have to work on being a little more helpless if we do.”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t tell you how he broke it?”
Rachel looked at her slyly. “What did he tell you?”
“That he was rescuing some woman on a runaway and took a fence badly. Have you ever heard of anything more romantic?” For the first time, Geneva allowed her sister to see how interesting she found Dr. Smith to be.
Rachel gave her a strange smile. “Oh. Yes. That is romantic.” She looked off toward the mountains, and smiled again, murmuring, “Yes, he’s very good.” She turned conspiratorially. “Well! Why don’t we do something about getting the two of you together? Shall we hatch a plot?”
Geneva laughed. Like herself, Rachel also was an incorrigible matchmaker and schemer who had no scruples about arranging and rearranging situations and facts if it meant that somebody, particularly if that somebody happened to be one of themselves, might end up in more interesting or advantageous circumstances.
“You’re awful!” laughed Geneva. “Remember how we stalked Wayne for a month so that you could ‘accidentally on purpose’ run into him up on Jacob’s Mountain?”
“It worked,” beamed Rachel. “There’s magic on that mountain, I tell you, and I bet if we could get you up there with John… Well! Just wait until I drop these twins before you walk down the aisle. I want to look good in the pictures.”
Geneva hugged her sister, simultaneously chiding her for her unabashed attempts to manipulate Geneva into moving back home permanently. Still, she appreciated Rachel’s line of thinking; besides, after Howard, she felt she needed a boost. John Smith might prove to be rather fun.
After dinner that evening, Geneva and Wayne went for their usual sunset ride while Rachel put the children to bed. When the riders returned, Rachel was sitting at the loom, working in subtle reds.
“Hi,” she said, absorbed in the pattern. “Did you have a good ride?”
“Yes, but we missed you,” replied her husband as he rubbed her shoulders and nuzzled her hair. Geneva remembered when Rachel had decided that Wayne was “The One” and had gone to astonishing lengths to get his attention. At that time, Wayne was a shy, quiet, gangly man, not comfortable with his own body and less comfortable with women. He had just moved into the area to join a practice in Tucker, and Rachel, already attracted to him for reasons no one could fathom, had determined to marry him when she discovered how much he liked babies and horses. Rachel recruited Geneva, and together they devoted an entire summer to snaring him, although it had turned out to be more difficult than they anticipated. Wayne had been distant with Rachel, perhaps frightened by her beauty, perhaps too busy to notice that she was pursuing him.
But Rachel had honed in on him as confidently as queen to drone, and the poor man never knew Rachel’s plans for him until he was at the brink of the hive. Geneva smiled to herself. There must have been some magic up on Jacob’s mountain. Within a year after his “accidental” meeting with Rachel, Wayne had been transformed into a confident, loving husband, and he seemed to grow more contented as his family grew larger. Geneva did not want to spend her life turning out a brood of children up here in these hills, but she sure wanted what Rachel and Wayne shared. If only Howard would come to his senses…
No, it is too late for that, she decided morosely. In fact, there’s probably no one out there who will be to me what Wayne is to Rachel. The exhilaration of the morning’s meeting with John Smith turned to bitter, choking dust in her heart, and she turned her head away from the nuzzling couple, mourning for her lost future.
But early the next Friday, the day she was to return her cats to John’s office, Geneva woke, surprised at how warm and excited she felt at the prospect of seeing the handsome veterinarian again. She had spent some days lecturing herself about the irresponsibility of her unbridled dreams of the week before and had told herself that she had outgrown her infantile desire to collect men’s hearts like a string of trophies. But today those self-chastising thoughts evaporated as she washed her hair and dressed.
Oh, you’re baaaad, she hummed to herself, thinking about how much fun it was going to be to flirt with the guy down the road. She actively calculated the strength of her arsenal as she rounded the cats into her car. She knew John liked her hair, so she would show up early, while the sun was still low enough to shine straight through it and show off all the gold. Confident of her beauty, she now wondered what it would take to make John think she was witty and bright as well. She went through her memory for jokes about animals, weighing them, determining which ones were clean enough to tell
.
As she slipped behind the wheel, Rachel gave her a wink and a smile and said with mock innocence, “He likes spunky women.”
“What are you grinning about?”
“Just thinking about Jacob’s mountain.”
“Rachel, you cut that out. You know I have no intentions of luring that poor man up there. What would I do with him after I caught him? Can you see a country veterinarian in Washington, DC?”
“I’m sure you’d think of something. You always were able to manage dichotomies. And duplicities,” she muttered under her breath.
“I heard that!” yelled Geneva out the window as she cranked up the car.
When she arrived at John’s house, Geneva found a note on the door stating that he had been called out and would be back by eight o’clock. Since it was nearly that time now, she decided to wait for him. She glanced back at the cats lolling in the back seat preparing themselves for a nap, then she got out of the car, leaving the windows down so they could enjoy the cool. She wandered around the yard, admiring the pearly morning, the dew-laden Black-Eyed Susans, and the blue chicory growing with exuberance along the fencerow. She breathed the flavor of the honeysuckle, then peeked into the outbuildings, the office, and then, after a half-moment’s struggle with her conscience, decided to check out the main house where John obviously lived.
There was a large window that might look into the living room, but it was high, and enormous holly bushes grew densely in front of it. Undaunted, Geneva mounted the porch steps, then swung her legs over the railing. She stood on the outer edge of the porch, hung on to the rail, and leaned out far enough to peep through the window.
The view was both more and less than she expected. She had thought she would see something of some masculine luxury, like a lazy boy recliner and a big television, but this room was spare and minimally furnished with Shaker furniture and a sisal rug on the hardwood floor. A plain bookcase brimming with books stood against one wall; two simple prints of English hunting dogs graced another wall. There was one large potted schefflera in the south window, but nothing more. There were no curtains. It was a nice beginning, she decided, clean and unpretentious, but much too Spartan, and it needed softening. Some sort of window treatments and more furniture—maybe a better bookcase. Pillows, an oriental rug for more warmth… Geneva became lost in what she would do to make the room more attractive and interesting. Slowly, insidiously, a Master Plan began to take shape in her head.
She tried to push it away, telling herself that the last thing in the world she wanted was to be the wife of a hillbilly veterinarian, but no sooner did she find the two halves of her mind in agreement over this than she began remembering John’s eyes and wishing that the man they belonged to belonged to her. Finally, she gave up the battle and allowed herself to indulge in the game of Siamese Twins, which she often played whenever she felt twinges of homesickness.
In the Siamese Twins game, Geneva fantasized that she was two people with different bodies but whose minds were interconnected. One of them could be home among her restful green hills; the other would go about her daily work and continue her climb in social and artistic circles in the city. Each could enjoy the experiences of the other, and they even occasionally might change places. They were so identical that no one could tell them apart. The country twin would go to the city for a bit of excitement; the city twin would come home to rest and ride and enjoy solitude among the craggy rocks. Geneva delighted in the game, frequently diverting her mind to it no matter where she happened to be, but particularly in traffic and in crowded elevators, and although she knew she was silly to indulge in such an impossible fantasy, it often seemed to be the only thing to keep her going the days she felt overwhelmed by the suffocating noise of the city.
Today she imagined that she was the country twin who happened to be married to a handsome veterinarian who read sonnets aloud to her in the evenings after they had returned from a thrilling ride on half-wild horses. They would make love in front of the fireplace, and her hair, the same color as the flames, would splay out over the carpet, and the scent of jasmine and sweet olive would perfume that air. She would…
Suddenly, she heard a car turn into the driveway. Panic rose up like a hot hand and grabbed her stomach, jolting her so violently that Geneva lost her grip on the rail and fell to the soft, damp earth. Falling through the holly, she caught her elbow on something hard and pointed on the way down. With pain searing her arm, a moment or two passed while she gasped and writhed on the muddy ground before she managed to collect herself enough to scramble behind the bush. She crouched there watching John’s Jeep approach. As the immediate pain began to subside, her mind clicked into focus. First she thanked God that she had worn a green shirt, then she pulled her bright hair back, tucking it into her collar. With a pounding heart, she made herself as small as she could and focused her attention on the man who stood barely ten feet away.
John was looking at her car, then he turned and surveyed the yard area calling, “Ms. LeNoir?” Geneva hunkered down lower, underarms stinging from sweat screaming to get out through the antiperspirant, and watched him hobble directly toward her. She held her breath momentarily, releasing it carefully only when he seemed to change his mind and walked back to her car. After he circled it once, he looked up again, searching the horizon.
“Ms. LeNoir? Geneva? Are you around here?” Geneva prayed, shutting her eyes tightly and promising all manner of things to the Almighty if He would just get her out of this mess. She pushed away the fog threatening to cloud her mind long enough to formulate a plan, then she sat back and waited for a miracle.
It happened. John walked around the side of the house. As he passed out of view, Geneva made her break, ignoring the claws of the holly in her hair and across her face. After a moment of panic, she cleared the bushes and dashed for the car. Breathing hard, she yanked open the car door, grabbed the sleeping Dr. Zhivago, then ran madly toward the open field. She ran as low and as fast as she could while looking over her shoulder for sight of John. By the time he came into view again, she had made it about twenty-five yards, well into an exuberant thicket of brambles. Immediately she turned and stood, then casually began making her way back toward him.
“There you are!” he called. “I thought that was your car.” He hobbled toward her, then stopped, surprise and shock in his face. Fearing the worst, she looked down at herself to ascertain what kind of damage she had sustained to cause his reaction. It was not a pretty sight: a large tear had left a hole in the arm of her shirt; blood oozed from her elbow, and her hands were scratched and dirty. Her pale linen shorts were caked with dirt, and more blood ran down from the scratches on her legs. Slowly she became aware that she was gasping for breath and that her heart was pounding. She gave a little moan when she realized that she was also sweating.
“Good grief, what happened to you?” exclaimed John. Geneva concluded that her face must look awful, too. Frantically she searched her brain for a way to make the lie convincing.
“Dr. Zhivago got away from me and took out toward home. I, uh, chased him, and, uh, tripped. I think I must have landed on something hard,” she concluded lamely, looking woefully at her wounded elbow.
“Oh, you poor thing,” said John, but his eyes showed admiration. “But I’ll be darned if you didn’t catch the cat and hang onto him. You’ve really got spunk.” He beamed at her with frank pleasure. “Come on, let me help you into the house and see if there’s anything I can do. Here. He can find his own way home, and we’ll look at him later.” He lifted Dr. Zhivago from her arms and set him down, then he took her good arm and gently led her toward his house. When Geneva realized how close a call she’d had, she began to tremble. Black spots swam before her eyes; she felt so dizzy that she stumbled through the long, golden grass.
“Careful. Goodness, you’re awfully pale. Does it hurt bad?” John looked at her compassionately.
She managed a weak smile. Thank God for the injury. It explained her distress. “It
does hurt some. I guess I feel a little lightheaded.”
“Do you think you can make it back to the house? You can lie down there, and I’ll take a look at the arm.” He tried to put an arm around her waist, but his bulky cast came between them and prevented them from walking. Then he tried to support her from the other side, but she winced when he touched her injured arm.
“Aren’t we a pair,” he laughed. I think the least you could do is tear up the other arm. How am I supposed to rescue if you if I can’t get near you?”
Geneva began to recover. There was no suspicion in his wonderful green eyes, and she realized that an unparalleled opportunity shimmered before her. If John liked spunk, he’d get it. She put on her brave face and said cheerfully, but with a hint of expressed pain, “We’ll just hobble back together. I can make it—it’s just a few scratches.”
As John took her hand, she became aware of his scent again and felt a sudden and powerful desire to bury her face in his neck and hair. The country twin relaxed. She began to enjoy this moment of victory as she felt her smooth palm press against John’s work-rough one.
But her smug confidence splintered when, just as they negotiated the steps to the porch, she glanced off to the right where she had fallen. There, halfway between the porch and the ground, was a nail sticking out of the wood siding. On that nail was a square of bright green linen, exactly the same shade of Geneva’s shirt. She stumbled again.
“Hang on, we’re almost there,” said John, carefully guiding her through the front door. “Let’s go into the kitchen. You can sit down and we can take a look at that arm, wash it off a bit.”
In the kitchen, he gave her a drink of cold water and sat down to see to her elbow, but when he touched her, his hands, so capable and gentle with the cats, suddenly shook and looked too big and cumbersome upon her slender arm. He tried, awkwardly, to push the snug sleeve of her shirt up above her elbow, and after one unsuccessful attempt, his face clouded. “I’m just bumbling here,” he said sadly. I can cut it off just above your elbow here, or if you like, I can give you a shirt to put on—that is, if you think you can get this off by yourself.
The Women of Jacob’s Mountain Boxed Set Page 5
