Sharing Sunrise (17 page)

His children’s mother. His wife. She wasn’t his wife. He’d never said he wanted her to be. Oh, he’d said he wanted promises, those promises she’d denied him. He’d said he wanted a woman who’d make a commitment yet when she’d said she was willing to do that, he hadn’t accepted it. She didn’t know if he ever would.

And now, he was up there in the sky somewhere, possibly in that very plane that had so recently disappeared behind a thick, white cloud, bound for Sweden, and she was here on the ground, yearning. Was this a taste of what the future would bring?

Three days, three days, three days … the words beat through her mind as she pulled into the marina parking lot. And three nights. He’d left her at midnight to go home for a few hours sleep and to pack. Already, she missed him so much she ached inside.

She got out of her car then stood looking down over the docks filled with boats. “If I feel like this when we’re only apart for three days,” she asked a crow who was trying to tear open a potato chip bag in case there was a morsel in the bottom, “how can he—or I—contemplate my ever again wanting to fly off into the rising sun?”

The crow cocked its head, examined her with one shiny eye then waddled toward her. It pecked experimentally at the toe of her shoe, gave a disgruntled mumble when it learned that shoes aren’t particularly edible, and flew away. She smiled for the first time that morning and made a mental note to start carrying popcorn in her car.

She was still smiling when she entered the outer office, this time because of the friendly chatter she’d encountered all along the wharf as she made her way to work. The marina was no place to feel lonely for long. She might miss Rolph terribly, but there was a lot to be done here and she enjoyed doing it. How could a person need the thrills of constant travel when she worked in a place as stimulating as this one? No, she’d be fine, and in time, Rolph would learn to trust her. Just as she would learn to trust herself.

Somehow, those three interminable days passed, and Marian quivered with anticipation as she unlocked the door of the outer office on Friday morning. Today, sometime today, Rolph would be home.

She glanced at the answering machine and saw the red light glowing. After putting on a pot of coffee, she sat at Kaitlin’s desk and played the tape back, making quick notes of who had called and what each wanted, then went over her appointments for the day. She was nearly finished when Kaitlin and Andrea came in together, laughing, hair tossed by the brisk breeze.

“Are we late?” Andrea asked.

“No. I’m a bit early.”

“You’re always early,” said Kaitlin. “A person’d be justified in thinking you loved your job.”

Andrea grinned. “Or her boss.”

Marian grinned back as she picked up her message slips and headed for the inner office. “Bring your notebook and some coffee when it’s ready, will you, Andy? And Kaitlin, please call a Dr. Jefferson McQuade in room 615 at the Lester House and move our meeting up to two o’clock this afternoon if it’s okay with him. If not, I’ll have to talk to him and arrange another date. I understand he’ll be in town all next week.”

She and Andrea were nearly finished when Kaitlin buzzed. “Dr. McQuade on three.”

After a few polite words of greeting, a minute or two of banter, and a deft parrying of what might have been a verbal pass, Marian was able to get her conversation with Jeff McQuade on track. They arranged a meeting date and time mutually agreeable, and Marian hung up.

“Sorry,” said Andrea, closing her notebook. “When I made that appointment, I didn’t know you’d be busy.” She looked questioning. “There was nothing on your schedule.”

“There still isn’t,” Marian said. “But McQuade’s from Alberta—out here attending a medical conference. He wants to buy a boat for summer use, and then possibly live aboard when he retires in a few years. I’m showing him several when we meet.” She leaned over and traced a finger along the tide graph chart on the wall by her desk. “See this? At eleven this morning, the tide’ll still be too low for any of the marinas to look good. The ramps are too steep to walk on comfortably, the shoreline looks messy, and a lot of people, especially those who aren’t used to the coast, find the low-tide beach odors unpleasant.

“Since I want to make a sale, as well as persuade the man that Sunrise Marina’s the place to keep his boat, I want everything to look its best. It’s those first impressions that count, Andy, that put a client in a good mood or a bad one, and that can often mean the difference between making a sale and not.”

Andrea laughed. “I see. High tide, huh? Sounds vaguely sneaky to me, but I’ll remember that in scheduling viewing appointments.”

“It’s not sneaky at all. Same as selling a house, I think. A real estate agent prefers to show a house when the sun’s shining, when the lawn is mowed and the hedges trimmed. A friend in real estate told me that it’s even best to show a place toward evening when the clients are a bit tired and would love to sit down and curl up. Almost any place can look like ‘home’ under those circumstances. So whenever possible I show boats when the tide’s in, the sun is out and there’s a nice breeze to carry a salty tang.”

“Sounds a bit sneaky to me, too,” said a male voice behind Marian and she whirled, nearly tipping over her chair as she came out of it.

“Rolph! When did you get back?” He stood leaning negligently in the doorway, wearing jeans and little else that she could detect. His hair was damp from his shower and his eyes looked sleepy. They also looked very, very sexy, filled with desire that heated her deep inside. She sensed he’d been watching her quietly for several minutes.

“I’ll get on with these letters,” said Andrea, sidling toward the door, knowing she was an unwanted third.

Marian didn’t look at the secretary. “Okay. Thanks.” The door closed.

“Come here,” said Rolph quietly, his green gaze burning into her.

Marian took a step toward him then halted.

She smiled slowly. “No. I can’t. Remember? Professional behavior?”

“I’ll give you professional behavior,” he said, striding across the room and snatching her into his arms.

“I missed you,” she moaned several moments later. “I never knew it was possible to miss someone so much!”

“Neither did I,” he said, running his hands through her hair, stroking the soft curls, twining them around his fingers. “I couldn’t eat right. I couldn’t sleep right. Even in business meetings I’d find myself drifting into thoughts about you.” He gave her another searing kiss, followed by a long, hot look. “I won’t go away without you again. Next time, you come with me.”

“You’re the boss,” she said, and surrendered to the need running so high in them both.

It couldn’t last long, of course, their little idyll. When the phone rang on his desk, Rolph reluctantly put Marian from him and went to pick it up. The day’s work had begun and he wasn’t even dressed yet. Maybe he should pay as much devotion to business as his assistant did.

With a soft sigh, he watched Marian pack material into her briefcase and give him a wave as she went out the door on her way to her first appointment.

As soon as he was off the phone, he went back into his apartment and dressed, casually this morning, because he had no appointments. He did, however, have plenty of paperwork to catch up on, but for all that, he sat at his desk, feet on the windowsill and stared out unseeingly.

Couldn’t Marian have kept the morning clear, knowing he’d be back? If she’d been away, he’d have done that. Or would he? He thought about it. No, probably not. It wouldn’t have been … He grimaced. It wouldn’t have been professional.

Marian was right. The rule he’d just broken was his rule. He’d set it and he shouldn’t have ignored it. But he hadn’t been exaggerating when he said he’d missed her. And he had meant it from the bottom of his heart when he said that he wasn’t going away without her again.

He swung his feet to the floor, planted his elbows on his desk and buried his face in his hands. God, what was he saying? What was he doing? And more to the point, what was he going to do? He didn’t know, but, for the first time, he thought he could begin to understand his parents’ decision not to travel without each other. He understood, but did that make what they’d done right? If he and Marian married, had children, would he still want her to travel with him when he had to go away?

He knew he would. However much he might want it to be otherwise, he realized that her presence had become an absolute necessity to him. He wanted her to be wherever he was. He wanted her with him all the time. He’d hated seeing her walk out that door this morning, almost to the point where he’d gone after her and begged her to cancel whatever it was she had to do. And if he could be driven to break his self-imposed rules of office behavior, would he also lower his standards when it came to the raising of his children, assuming Marian was their mother?

He didn’t know that, either. Maybe, if there were children involved, he’d be able to be sensible. Maybe? Just maybe? What had happened to all his firm convictions on the way his life was going to be run? What had happened to his plans, his decisions, his certainty that he could find exactly the right woman, live his life to exactly the right tenets?

Marian had happened, that was what. Marian had come along and turned things upside down, made him doubt his righteousness, doubt his own principles, his belief that there was only one way for him to plot out his future. And he hated having doubts. For so long, he had known exactly how it would be. He’d find the right woman, marry her, build a strong, solid house in which to make his strong, stable home, and then he’d raise strong, secure children, girls and boys who would never doubt their importance in the scheme of their parents’ lives.

And was Marian that woman? No. He’d known that from day one, but it hadn’t stopped his feelings for raging out of control. But then, neither was he the man he’d tried to be, if he could let his feelings for her overpower his own conscience to the point that he was ready to give up everything he thought was right in order to have her by his side.

Oh, God! What was he going to do?

“Victory!” Marian came into the office the following Monday at two o’clock in the afternoon. “Jefferson McQuade has just signed a purchase agreement for
Stephanie-Jayne
, and a contract to moor her here in one of the boathouses, berth E-twelve, for at least the next year. I’m going to change then go help him bring her over from Ambrose Bay.”

“Good for you,” said Rolph getting up from his desk and following her as she went into his apartment where she kept boating clothes for times such as this. He watched her slip out of her skirt and tug on a pair of jeans. He loved to look at her, especially when she’d been out in the fresh air and wind. It made her cheeks glow, her eyes shine and tossed her glorious hair into an abandoned tangle that reminded him of the way she looked in the morning. Marian was not an indoor person. She needed the wind and the sea and the brightness of sunshine. “What was the final selling price?”

“Two-fifty,” she said from inside a sweatshirt. Her tousled head appeared as she continued. “The Alderlings wanted two-seventy-five, but they knew they were being unrealistic and were willing to come down after I had a quiet talk with them.”

Rolph raised one brow as he shouldered himself up from his slumped position against the bedroom doorway. “I had several ‘quiet’ talks with them about their unrealistic idea of the value of
Stephanie-Jayne
, from the very first day they listed her with us. How come you succeeded where I failed?”

She gave him a wide-eyed, innocent smile as she sat on the edge of his bed and stuffed her feet into deck shoes. “Just smarter, I guess.” She cocked her head sideways, looking at him while she bent to tie her shoes. “Want some lessons?”

He checked to see that the door leading to the corridor was closed and came to her, pulling her to her feet, sliding his hands around the back of her neck and drawing her in close. “Yeah,” he said. “What have you got to teach me today?”

Moments later, he lifted his head and said, “I’ll come with you and help you move that boat around.” He didn’t like the idea of her being in charge of a sixty-foot cabin cruiser, even though he knew she’d handled larger boats and often under sail, not power. Still, he didn’t want her doing it alone.

She smiled. “Thanks. Jefferson McQuade is a pain in the … left heel. He knows nothing about boats except that he wants one. And now that he has one, he also wants me to give him lessons on handling it.”

“I hope you told him to get lost.”

“I told him to join the Power Squadron.”

As they went through the outer office, Kaitlin held up a hand. “Just a sec, Rolph. Somebody wants to talk to you.”

“Sorry,” he said, taking Marian’s hand and heading for the door. “Take a message. I’ll be out for the rest of the afternoon.”

“But …”

“Kaitlin. A message.”

“Yessir.”

“I can do this alone,” Marian said, holding the door closed so he couldn’t open it. “Go and take that call. It might be important.”

“Nothing’s more important to me than being with you,” he said. “Now, let’s go. We mustn’t keep your client waiting.”

Marian heard the edge in his voice. He wouldn’t be acting this way if her client were a nice old lady wanting to put her late husband’s boat on the market. “Rolph,” she said softly, “he’s my client and I can deal with him. That person on the phone is your client. How can you keep him waiting?”

He glowered at her for a moment, then nodded. “All right, all right. Sometimes I wonder who’s the businessman here, you or me. Seems you’ve got a better handle on things than I have most of the time.”

“That’s because she has,” said Andrea, rushing forward with a smile and a sheaf of papers. “Marian, sign these before you go, will you? Or do you want to read them over first?”

“No,” said Marian, using the corner of Kaitlin’s desk to sign the letters. “You’re getting so good at writing up my reports I’m thinking of turning the whole job over to you on a fulltime basis.”

“Oh, good.” Andrea grinned. “Then I’d get to share the new secretary with you and Rolph?”