Cherished Beginnings (9 page)

The temperamental brakes locked as she brought the minivan to a stop under the palmetto trees at the side of the O'Malleys' driveway, sending Xan's medical bag rocketing between the two front seats.

"Hey," said a sleepy voice from the nether regions of the minivan, "a fellow can hardly sleep while you're driving so dangerously. I wish you'd learn to apply brakes as carefully as you deliver babies."

Incredulously she swiveled in her seat. Her eyes met those of an indignant Xan Copeland, who was struggling to sit up on the cot in the back of her minivan and quite obviously stifling the urge to yawn. Judging from the way his hair fell so loosely over his forehead and from the half-staff look of his eyelids, he was just waking up from a midday nap.

Chapter 5

"I won't ask you the obvious question," she said when she was able to overcome her amazement at finding him there.

"Go ahead," he urged. Now he lurched toward the front of the minivan where he squeezed between the front seats and settled himself opposite her. His eyes twinkled mischievously.

"Well, then," she went on, "suppose you tell me why you're sleeping in my car."

"Because after I brought you home last night, I was called out to deliver a baby, and I didn't get much sleep. And because I found out I had a bag that didn't belong to me, which meant that you had mine."

"And then?"

"I spotted your vehicle in the real estate agency parking lot after I left my office at noon, and I thought I'd wait for you to return so we could exchange bags. I remembered you had a cot in here, so I couldn't resist the chance to nod off for a few minutes. How was I to know that you'd abduct me?"

"Abduct you?" sputtered Maura.

"It's a good thing it's my regular afternoon off or my office staff would be incensed. They don't like it when I disappear without a trace. By the way, what are you doing this afternoon?"

"I'm going to the beach. Here, take your bag. I don't suppose you have mine handy?"

"Indeed I do. It's at the foot of the cot." He paused. "Say, I'm going to the beach, too. I'll wait for you on the boardwalk. Can you be there in fifteen minutes?"

She fixed him with an exasperated look. "Xan, I have serious thinking to do. I don't want to share my time with anyone, I just want to be alone."

"And after I went out of my way to help you yesterday, too. How's the car running?"

"Beautifully, thank you. I appreciate everything you did. How much was the garage bill? I'll write you a check."

"There's no bill. It was only a broken fan belt. If you want to even things up, all you have to do is meet me at the beach. I'll try not to interfere with your mental processes. You can be as alone as you like. Just let me sit and look at you." He was flirting, heaven help her.

"Xan, I don't see how I could possibly think things through if you're there," she protested.

"I'm only proposing adding myself to you for an hour or two, nothing heavy. What do you have to think about, anyway?"

"Setting up my practice in midwifery," she said in her own direct way, figuring that he wouldn't press her after that.

"Good," he said. "That's exactly what I want to talk to you about."

This surprised her. "Honestly?"

"Yes. Let's go to the beach together. It'd be a chance for us to talk." He had dropped the flirtation and now seemed so sincere that she considered it. "There are some things that you should understand before you go ahead with these plans of yours," he insisted.

"It's too late for you to change my mind. I'm going to establish a practice in midwifery in Shuffletown no matter what. I have financing and I've signed a lease."

His heart plummeted. Still, maybe it wasn't really too late. "Then you'd better hear what I have to say about the Shuffletown community and why I know I'm right when I tell you that women are better off with hospital births."

If he had thrown down a gauntlet, it couldn't have been more of a challenge. And if he wanted to tell her why he was in favor of hospital births, she'd have a chance to refute his beliefs with her own impassioned defense of home births. "All right," she said. "I'll meet you on the boardwalk in fifteen minutes."

Xan's smile showed his relief, but there was an underlying gravity, too. "It's a deal."

"Can I drive you home?"

He shook his head. "I live on the ocean side of the island. It's only about a five-minute jog. Anyway, you'd better save your vehicle for more vital transportation problems."

"Let's hope it's not going to break down anymore. And here, you might as well take this," she said, handing his bag over.

He got out of the minivan. "I'm glad to get it back," he told her, looking up at her through the window. "I'm sure I'd look ridiculous in that smock you wear." His eyes sought and held hers as they both grinned.

He'd disarmed her totally. She couldn't stay annoyed with him, she thought helplessly to herself as she let herself into the house. It would be better if she could. For she knew, even if he didn't, that there was no future for the two of them, at least not in a traditional, romantic man-woman relationship. She wasn't going to let personal feelings get in the way of her mission here. She'd already proven unworthy of her vocation and her order. But she wasn't going to prove unworthy of the poor people who needed her, ever again. Not even for Xan Copeland.

* * *

After a few moments' thoughtful hesitation in front of her closet, Maura pulled out the black swimsuit Kathleen had bought for her. Maura had finally consented to owning the black one-piece tube because she had thought it was sedate.

However, combined with her shape and her tawny coloring, it made her look slinky and voluptuous, with a decidedly seductive effect. She didn't stop to put on a cover-up and was totally unaware of her allure as she hurried across the street and along the wooden walk across the dunes, looking for Xan.

Xan was waiting for her, leaning against the rough railing beside the steps to the beach and gazing out over the wide expanse of sand. The ocean was calm today, but the flat sea bottom extended far out, creating waves that rolled inward upon themselves at a steady pace, one after the other.

Maura caught her breath when she saw Xan. He exuded maleness by simply standing there, his hair blowing in the wind. He wore a narrow blue band of a swimsuit, and its taut outlines left little to the imagination. The clothes he usually wore had done nothing to show off his long muscles, his golden tan, or his sinewy legs.

Maura had a flashing unbidden vision of her own long legs smoothly intertwined with his beneath cool white sheets. Touching in that way would be perfectly natural... and then she brought herself up short. What she was thinking of was an invasion of her private space, and even, most likely, would lead to an eventual invasion of her body. She couldn't even imagine such a process, at least not in connection with herself.

Xan had known that Maura would look gorgeous in a swimsuit, but still he was surprised as he watched her approach. Her hair flickered like flames in the afternoon sunlight. He hadn't realized that her waist was so tiny that he could probably span it with his two hands, and it curved outward so beautifully into her hips that she seemed sculpted, created by an artist with an inspired eye for proportion.

"We could walk down the beach for a while," he said in greeting. His eyes gleamed in welcome.

"All right," she said, following him down the stairs to the sand.

Summer was a busy time on Teoway, the season when families and their children arrived to spend time and plenty of money on a vacation to rival any for food and facilities and just plain fun. There were bicycle trails through the woods and the ruins of an old mansion to explore, but the wide sandy beach was by far the most popular recreation area. However, the crush of people thinned out considerably as Maura and Xan strolled toward the deserted southernmost end of the ten-mile-long island.

"Tell me about yourself," Xan said suddenly when they had left everyone else behind.

This startled her. She hadn't expected to be spotlighted. "What do you want to know?" she hedged.

"Where you were born. Your background. All of it." He gazed down at her, and she felt a tug of remembrance as his eyes met hers. They looked misty, and she knew he was thinking about last night.

"I was born in Chicago," she said. She swiveled her head and stared resolutely forward.

"Irish?"

"Kathleen and I grew up Irish-American with all that our Irishness implied," she said.

"And what was that?" he asked curiously. His own background was old-family Charleston, and he couldn't imagine growing up any other way.

"Big parties with green beer flowing freely on St. Patrick's Day, parochial schools, and my first communion in St. Bridget's Roman Catholic Church, with me wearing the white communion dress when it was new, and Kathleen complaining about the yellowed hand-me-down when she had to wear it two years later for her own first communion."

"Go on," he encouraged.

"We always ate steaming hot oatmeal on cold Chicago winter mornings, because McNeills always eat oatmeal in the winter. We'd go as a family to confession every Saturday night, and then Dad would take us all to Feeney's ice cream parlor for peppermint ice cream afterward. Oh, there are lots of memories. I like thinking about those days, even though it seems very long ago."

"Your mother, what was she like?" He couldn't help asking questions. In his fascination with her, he had to know everything, absolutely everything about her.

"Mom was Fiona Grady, and she married Chicago's most confirmed bachelor John McNeill against everyone's advice when she was eighteen. She tamed him, they say. I was born a year later, and Kathleen two years after that. We would have undoubtedly been a big family if Mom hadn't come down with what was always referred to in whispers as 'female trouble' and had an operation."

Maura remembered that time. She'd been four years old and frightened at her mother's white, pinched face when she came home from the hospital.

But Fiona had recovered, and she had gone on to preside over a family that was famous throughout their neighborhood for its individualism. Maura was the quiet one and passionate about her faith. Kathleen was a butterfly, trailing scads of admirers from the time she was in kindergarten. Their father was a man's man who never let anyone push him around.

And Fiona was a born do-gooder. Instead of belonging to the altar society and learning how to starch and iron the altar cloths to the priest's satisfaction, Fiona surprised everyone by joining the anti-pollution movement before it was fashionable to do so. Her leadership abilities soon surfaced, and she was much in demand as a speaker at rallies all across the U.S. The cause took up every spare moment and then some, but Maura and Kathleen grew used to her frequent absences, and Maura learned at a surprisingly early age to cook the family oatmeal without lumps, a technique Fiona had still not managed to perfect.

Maura was still explaining how to cook smooth oatmeal when she and Xan came upon a driftwood log, its surface gray and shiny, protruding from the sand. Xan led Maura to it. He spread the blanket he'd brought in front of it, and after a moment's hesitation she sat down beside him.

"Don't stop talking," he urged, thinking that he loved to watch the expressions on her face as they provided the backdrop for the mellifluous flow of words. "Tell me about your father."

"Oh, he's a big burly man who loves my mother and us and hunting, in that order." She laughed a bit. "Right now he and Mom are on an extended backpacking trip in Alaska. It was Mom's retirement present to Dad."

"Are you close to your father?"

Maura nodded. "We're all close. But my father—well, the thing about him that affected me most in terms of my life was that when I was a child he would disappear for weeks into the Michigan north woods or the wilds of Canada to hunt bear or moose or ducks, and when he arrived home with his trophies I'd be sickened by the thought of so much killing and throw up into the nearest receptacle." Her father's hunting expeditions left her with a loathing of hurting any live thing. She didn't know why she wanted to tell this to Xan. It seemed so personal.

Xan didn't laugh or make light of her feelings. Instead he gazed at her with respect. "I'm the same way," he told her. "There's a lot of wildlife on Teoway Island, and hunting isn't allowed, although the whole island used to be a private game preserve for the very wealthy. I look at the ducks and the raccoons and the deer who brighten my life by their very presence on the island and wonder how anyone could be so cruel as to harm any one of them."