311 Pelican Court (29 page)

He could imagine Jolene crying and upset because he’d disappeared. He should’ve told her he was leaving, should’ve explained that he was inside the mall not more than a minute away. He should never have left her.

Twice since Stephanie’s accident, Jolene had awakened from a nightmare in which Bruce hadn’t arrived to pick her
up from school. In her dreams she learned he’d died the same way as her mommy. It had taken her hours to sleep again.

Bruce realized he must have made quite a sight tearing into the salon, eyes wild. The entire shop seemed to stare at him.

Jolene broke the spell with a calm, “Hi, Daddy.”

His daughter sat at a table with her hands outstretched while Rachel sat across from her, painstakingly painting Jolene’s fingernails.

Now that his heart had decided to leave his throat and return to his chest, Bruce shoved his hands in his pockets and casually strolled over to them.

“You weren’t here when Rachel finished my hair.” She tossed her head to and fro the way women did in shampoo commercials on television. “Do you like it?”

Bruce nodded. Hair was hair, but he did think his daughter looked awfully pretty. Of course, he’d thought that before she had her hair cut, too.

“I got sidetracked in the electronics store,” he told her.

“That’s what Rachel said prob’ly happened.”

The beautician glanced up with the nail polish brush in her hand. “We lose a lot of men to the electronics store.”

Bruce would bet they did. Given a choice, just about any man would look for an excuse to get out of this women’s domain.

“Was she upset?” Bruce asked Rachel.

She glanced up again and smiled. “Only a little.”

“Rachel said she’d paint my nails. Aren’t they pretty, Daddy?”

Bruce considered the bright red polish a moment and then nodded in what he hoped was a satisfactory manner. “Very pretty.”

“We’re almost done,” Rachel said.

“I didn’t mean to stay so long.”

“It’s not a problem,” she assured him. “Once I’m finished, we’ll need five minutes for Jolene’s nails to dry.” She looked up. “Oh—the manicure is on the house.”

He mumbled his thanks. Five minutes seemed an eternity, but this was what he got for losing track of time. While he waited, Bruce paid the receptionist and added a generous tip for the beautician.

When Jolene was ready, she walked with her arms stretched out in front of her as if she’d seen the Bride
of Frankenstein
one too many times.

“Can I have an ice cream cone?” she asked, gazing across at the food court.

“You can if you promise to eat your dinner.”

“I promise.”

Together—but not hand in hand, since Jolene was concerned about preserving the perfection of her nails—they walked over to Baskin-Robbins and stared into the glass case. Bruce chose vanilla, his favorite. Stephanie had never understood how he could prefer vanilla when he had thirty other flavors to choose from. Jolene was just as predictable. She wanted bubble gum.

They sat at a small table and Bruce watched his daughter lick away at her blue ice cream. He smiled at her complete absorption. She smiled back, and he thought his heart would stop. In that split second, she resembled her mother so much.

Every now and then, Bruce caught glimpses of Stephanie in their daughter. In the way her eyes flashed with a smile or the way she moved. It never failed to fill him with an immediate sense of loss and regret.

A thousand times or more, he’d gone over that final day of Stephanie’s life. It had seemed an ordinary day. Completely routine. If only he’d known… If only he could go back and relive that morning.

He’d gotten up at seven, as usual, showered and dressed. He’d kissed Stephanie goodbye, never suspecting that in less than ten hours she would be forever taken from him and Jolene.

“Daddy…”

Returning to the present, Bruce looked over at his daughter. “What, sweetheart?”

“I like Rachel.”

“Who’s Rachel?”

“Daddy! The lady who cut my hair.”

“That’s nice,” he replied absently.

“She’s fun.”

“And she does a good job of cutting hair.”

Jolene nodded. “She wants a husband.”

“What?” Bruce nearly laughed out loud.

“A husband,” Jolene said again. “I heard her talking to the lady next to her, and she said she’s almost thirty. That’s old, isn’t it?”

“Not so old,” Bruce assured her, hiding a smile.

“She said she wanted to be married before she was thirty.”

Bruce thought that was a rather personal discussion to be having in a beauty shop, but what did he know about women’s—“I think you should marry her, Daddy.”

“
What?
”

“You should marry Rachel,” she repeated, as if that was a perfectly reasonable statement.

M
aryellen was depressed. She’d been depressed for weeks. She sat in the bleachers at the waterfront park, sheltered from the rain, and sipped hot coffee out of a plastic cup. Leaning forward, she rested her elbows on her knees and stared out over the dark waters of the cove.

Originally she’d planned to meet her mother for lunch, but she’d been stuck at the gallery with a late delivery and had to cancel at the last minute. She didn’t have much of an appetite, anyway, and appreciated this time alone so she could think. Lois Habbersmith, her assistant and friend, had seemed to sense this and hurried her out the door.

Maryellen had walked down to the waterfront, which was one of her favorite spots. In the summer the city sponsored Thursday night Concerts on the Cove, and the park and every bit of available space would be filled. She’d always loved the music, the laughter, the atmosphere of infectious gaiety.

This afternoon Maryellen felt little of that carefree summertime energy. She’d lost Jon. It was what she deserved for the despicable way she’d treated him. She’d explained her reasons, but apparently he couldn’t forgive her.

That was understandable, she supposed. Her experience with men was limited to one dreadful marriage and a father who’d walked through life in a state of emotional paralysis. There were happy childhood memories, but they were few and far between.

“Lois said I’d find you here.”

Jon’s voice broke into her dark musings and startled Maryellen. She nearly dropped her coffee.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“I’m just surprised.” And happy to see him, so happy it was all she could do not to smile and gush and make an idiot of herself. All three of which she’d managed to do any number of times.

Jon walked up the steps and sank onto the bleacher beside her. He didn’t say anything for a long while. She didn’t, either, and then she couldn’t stand it anymore.

“I want to tell you something,” she murmured. “It’s all right, you know.”

“What’s all right?”

She held her breath, then blurted it out. “That you’re involved with someone else. I don’t have any claim on you and—”

“Who told you that?”

“No one,” she said, not looking at him. “I figured it out.”

Jon frowned and shook his head. “You figured wrong, Maryellen. There hasn’t been another woman in my life almost from the moment we met.”

She stared at him, not knowing what to think.

He was gazing out at the cove. “I loved you long before you invited me to that ridiculous Halloween party.”

Now she was sure she’d misunderstood him. “If that’s the case, you have a funny way of showing it.” They’d barely talked in weeks. Their conversations, such as they were, had
occurred in passing as he picked up or delivered Katie. It seemed he was continually making excuses not to stay.

“I—You didn’t ever want to talk to me,” she said.

“I couldn’t.”

“Well, that explains everything,” Maryellen said—with only a little sarcasm in her tone.

“I was afraid if I talked to you, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from telling you….”

“What?” she demanded impatiently.

“I’ve decided to leave Cedar Cove.”

“Leave?” she cried. He’d just finished saying he loved her! She already knew how deeply he cared for their daughter. Katie needed her father, and the awful truth was that Maryellen needed Jon, too.

“I’m putting the house up for sale first thing in the morning.”

Numb with shock and pain, Maryellen could barely acknowledge his words.

“I’ve already given my notice at The Lighthouse.”

It was too much. More than she could bear. Each word was like a knife in her heart, the pain intolerable, impossible to ignore. Burying her face in both hands, she laid her head on her knees and burst into tears.

“Maryellen…” His voice seemed faint and far away. Then he placed his hand on her spine, as if she were a small child in need of comfort.

“Why?” she asked, raising her head just enough to speak. “If you love me and you love Katie? Why would you leave us?” She’d been such a fool. When she’d first realized she was pregnant, she saw Jon as little more than a sperm donor, never guessing how important he would become to her or their child.

Jon didn’t answer. She knew what he was doing—the
same thing her father had done. Rejecting and hurting those he loved most.

“You never met my father, did you?” she said, struggling to keep the pain out of her voice.

“No…”

“You seem to have a great deal in common with him. He destroyed the people he loved, too.” Pride carried her to her feet and she stood. “If you’re going to leave, there isn’t anything I can say to stop you. The thing is, Jon, I love you, too. I didn’t
want
to love you and I tried everything to keep my emotions out of this, but…but it didn’t work.”

She took another deep breath. “I assumed it would be easy to have a baby on my own. Women do it all the time. But it’s hard, so much harder than I imagined. You were there for me and for Katie, and slowly, little by little, I realized my mistake. I began to see how important a father’s role is to a child. And…to a mother.” She wiped the tears from her cheek. “Perhaps this is what I deserve, but it sure as hell isn’t what Katie deserves. If you walk away from her now, you’re a bigger fool than I ever was.” She started to leave, but his words stopped her.

“All right, I’ll tell you.”

She frowned at him. “Tell me what?”

He briefly closed his eyes. “I’ve got a record, Maryellen. A prison record. You once asked me where I learned to cook. Well, guess what, it was behind bars. I couldn’t tell you for fear you’d take Katie away from me.”

That explained some, but not enough. She lowered herself to the bench again so they sat side by side. “I’d never do that!”

“I trusted someone else, someone I loved. I learned a painful lesson. It’s not one I’m eager to repeat.”

“Another woman?” she asked.

“No, my half brother.” He didn’t add any details, and this seemed all he was willing to divulge.

“Why are you telling me now?” she asked. If he was leaving, anyway, it seemed pointless to admit the truth.

He didn’t respond.

Maryellen refused to let the matter drop. “What made me so trustworthy all of a sudden, especially if you’re about to drop out of my life and Katie’s?”

He had no answer, but that didn’t surprise her. Jon rarely volunteered information about himself. It used to be a game she played when he came into the gallery—getting him to chat about himself, learning what she could about him. Even now she knew damn little.

“This might surprise you, but I suspected you might have done jail time,” she said. It was one of the endless possibilities she’d considered late at night, when she couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t one she’d taken all that seriously, just as she’d dismissed the possibility that he was on the run or an amnesiac or involved in some equally bizarre scenario. Another woman had seemed the most likely….

A scowl darkened his face. “Not the kind of question you want to ask, is it?”

“What was the charge?”

There was a lengthy silence. “I was convicted of dealing cocaine.”

“This is where your half brother comes in?”

Jon nodded. “The two of us were total opposites. He was the perfect son and I was the starving artist. The disreputable kid. My dad and stepmom favored Jim. He was ambitious, a businessman-in-the-making. He was everything they wanted in a son and I wasn’t.”

This was the first time he’d mentioned any family member other than his grandfather and the fact that Katie had been
his dead mother’s name. His grandfather had left him the land on which Jon had built his house. “Where’s Jim now?”

His face tightened. “Dead.”

“Oh, Jon, I’m sorry.”

He nodded, but she saw him swallow hard. He set his foot against the back of the bleacher in front of them and slid his hands inside his pockets. “We lived together, and I was scraping by selling my pictures. I’d take my camera and hike into the forest and get as many shots as I could afford to develop. Jim moved in with me one summer and for a while it was great.”

Maryellen tucked her own hands in her pockets, but leaned closer to him, pressing her shoulder to his, needing to touch him.

“Jim was dealing cocaine. I swear on Katie’s life that I didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He was in college and his friends were the same upwardly mobile type he was.”

“He was selling to them?”

Jon nodded. “Fool that I was, I didn’t put two and two together. Jim always seemed to have money, always seemed to have whatever he wanted.”

“What happened?”

“One night the police came and dragged us both out of bed. They found the stuff. While I was screaming that it was planted and that we were innocent, Jim was selling me to the cops, saying it was mine.”

Maryellen placed her hand on his forearm, and he gripped her fingers with his own, squeezing hard.

“My brother testified against me, and my father claimed—well, he lied and said I was the one with the drug problem and that Jim had only recently moved into the house and couldn’t be involved.”

She closed her eyes, imagining that kind of betrayal.
First his brother and then his father, too. “How could he do that?”

“Dad believed what Jim told him, I guess. He wanted to protect one of his sons—but not the other.”

“Oh, Jon.”

“I haven’t seen or talked to my father since the day I was sentenced. I want nothing to do with him. I don’t know how I would’ve survived without my grandfather’s support. He did everything he could to help me.”

She understood more and more of what he’d been through, the experiences that had shaped him.

“Jim died while I was in prison. My father wrote to tell me, but I never wrote him back.” He didn’t hide his pain or bitterness.

“How long were you in prison?”

“I was sentenced to fifteen years.”

She gasped. Jon, who loved the out-of-doors, had been locked in a jail cell.

“I served seven of those years, and it was seven years of hell.”

“Jim walked away scot-free?”

Jon looked down at their linked fingers and he squeezed so hard she nearly cried out from the pain. “He got a slap on the wrist with probation and then died of a heroin overdose the year before I was paroled.”

Maryellen desperately wanted to comfort him, to hold him in her arms.

“Now you know.” His eyes were cold as stones as he held her gaze. “You can give this information to any court in the land and take my daughter away from me.”

Now she knew why he was putting the land his grandfather had left him up for sale and selling the house he’d built with his own hands. Why he was quitting his job. Leaving Cedar Cove.

“You don’t trust me,” she whispered. He was relinquishing everything that mattered to him because he believed he was going to lose it, anyway. Because the minute he lowered his guard, he took the risk that she, too, would betray him.

“I can’t.” He didn’t bother to deny it. “The only person I can trust in this world is myself.”

“What about Katie?”

“She’s a baby….”

“She’s your
daughter
.”

“I love her.”

“But doesn’t she deserve to know her father?”

His jaw tightened again.

“Eventually you’ll have to trust someone. You can’t close yourself off from everyone. Sooner or later, you’ve got to stop running.”

He didn’t look at her, didn’t respond.

“I can deal with it if you don’t want me in your life, but Katie needs you. Jon, please don’t walk away from her.” She wanted to ask the same thing for herself, but wouldn’t.

“You know everything now.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You won’t try to get sole custody of Katie?”

“No,” she said. “I promise.”

“You probably could, you know.”

“Jon,” she cried in frustration. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said? Katie needs you…. I need you. I’m not going to do anything to keep you out of Katie’s life. Or mine.”

His eyes narrowed. “Would you marry a felon?”

“Are you asking?”

He hesitated and then gave a jerky nod. She watched as he thrust his hands back inside his pockets, hunching his shoulders forward.

She blinked hard to keep the tears from spilling onto her
face. “It would be the greatest honor of my life to marry you, to be the mother to your children and—”

“Children?”

“I’m thinking Katie could use a little brother or sister.”

A tentative smile came first and then Jon broke into the most wonderful deep-chested laugh. The sound of it drifted toward the cove, competing with the sharp cry of the seagulls.

Before Maryellen knew it, they were both standing and she was securely wrapped in his embrace. They hugged each other tightly and then he kissed her again and again.

Maryellen raised her face and wept openly as Jon’s kisses traveled over her forehead, her cheeks, her chin, moving toward her lips. When their mouths finally met, it was a kiss that spoke of faith and trust and love, and she returned those feelings in full measure.

She was breathless by the time he eased his mouth from hers. “I want us to get married soon.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Promise me you’ll never threaten to leave us again.”

“I promise,” he said, and kissed her.

“Promise you’ll always love me.”

“Promise.” Another deep kiss.

“Anything else?” he asked, his eyes so full of love it was almost painful to see.

“Lots more,” she whispered. In fact, Maryellen was just getting started.