The Thrill of It All (20 page)

It took him hardly any time to reach the top of the pillar of rock. There was another man up there—Gwen’s brother from the rock gym?—to help him off with his harness. Then Magee stood alone, on top of the world, it seemed. She wanted him so badly she could cry.

Drew commanded again, “The prompter.”

She read it silently first.
To show just how extreme you can get in Mountain Logic gear, Michael Magee will demonstrate a maneuver called tightroping a slack line.

That cable she’d noticed when she’d walked onto the stage was no cable at all, she realized, but climbing rope. She glanced up at it, stretched high above her. Barefoot, Magee approached the ledge, then glanced down at her.

Her heart stumbled. Unable to look away, she remembered Gwen’s brother taking off the climber’s harness. Which meant Magee wasn’t wearing a safety leash.

Her heart stumbled again and her mouth went desert-dry. What did he think he was doing? Talk about stupid stunts!

But she could see that reckless gleam in his eyes and she thought about how lost he’d seemed the day before without his “purpose” of taking care of Ashley and Anna P. It had never occurred to her that climbers had a death wish, but the idea suddenly had her around the throat and was squeezing.

She cupped her lapel mic, preparing to shout him out of this foolishness.

“Felicity.” Drew’s voice in her ear interrupted. “We’ve blocked off the entrance to the amphitheater and its parking lot, but I just got word that there’s a group outside who want in. They say they’re your family?”

Now?

Now?

It had to be Charms. Only Charms could mess up a simple instruction like “use the telephone” and show up at a time like this. She felt like screaming in frustration.

Well, let them cool their heels until she persuaded Magee not to take this tightrope walk.

“Felicity? Thumbs-up, we’ll let them in. Thumbs-down, we won’t.”

With a grimace she glanced toward Drew at the rear of the audience, then back up at the eerie grin on Magee’s face. She was really going to kill him this time if he didn’t stop this nonsense
immediately.
But how?

Unless…It would stall him, she was sure of it.
Never looking away from Magee, she flashed Drew a thumbs-up.

She recognized when the newcomers entered at the rear of the amphitheater, because Magee blinked, his face showing sudden surprise. The rest of the audience was leaning forward in their seats, their eyes on him, and they must have seen the way his expression changed, too. Everyone’s heads, including Felicity’s, turned.

And there they were, the whole motley crew that was her family. Aunt Vi in another of her straight-from-the-seventies polyester pantsuits. Uncle Billy, in his grease-stained coveralls and gap-toothed smile. Ashley, Anna P. on her hip. Roberta, the old geezers, and the only well-dressed one of the bunch—her cousin the golf hustler—too far back for anyone to see, naturally.

But Ben? She glanced up at Magee and then back at the grouped Charms. No goofy towhead in sight. Her heart pounded.

Looking at Aunt Vi, she mouthed the question. “Where’s Ben?”

“Surprise!” From the side entrance to the stage, a figure came running. Goofy, towheaded Ben had grown into a tall, goofy towhead in the last couple of years. Felicity had never seen a more precious sight.

Paralyzed by relief, she let him rush her, then tackle her with a one-armed bear hug that had her mic leaping in one direction and her IFB in the other. She didn’t care. Instead, she hugged him back, her arms locking around his lanky form. “You idiot.” She said it over and over.

He only laughed, then pulled away to look down into her face. “Unlucky idiot. Or maybe just lucky to have you in the family.”

She almost
shh
ed him, but with her mic swinging on its wire somewhere at her feet, she didn’t bother. A story explaining who Ben was and why he was here would occur to her any second.

And though Drew was probably going crazy, without her IFB in, she didn’t know about it. So she took another minute to get a question answered. “What happened? What took you so long?”

He laughed again, like the darling doofus he was. “You can thank Uncle Billy for that. They had me out at some old place in the desert. On our way back, we ran into an area of road he’d salted. Four blown tires.”

She gaped at him. “I swear I’ll kill him with my two bare hands!”

“That’s why he sent me up with a peace offering.” From behind his back, Ben whipped something out.

Felicity stared at the blob of metal in her cousin’s hand.

“Uncle Billy and Mom put it back together for you,” Ben continued. “I heard it looked a little different before, but hey, I think they did good.” He shoved it at her.

It took Felicity a moment, but then she realized what was in her hands—what Uncle Billy and Aunt Vi had done. They’d rebuilt her Joanie.

Apparently the statue hadn’t broken cleanly in two, because when soldered back together she’d lost her elegant stance for a much less ladylike slouch.
Her scars and scrapes were still in evidence, but someone—Aunt Vi, it had to be—had glued a chartreuse pom-pom on top of her head as a hat-cum-coverup for the major damage that part of Joanie had sustained on her near-fall from the mountain.

Mountain…She looked up, but Magee was no longer there. She glanced toward the rest of the Charms and found him, leaning against the rock behind them, all dark hair and gunslinger glare. Her gaze moved back to the family, and by contrast, their love and pride in her shone from their eyes.

Her fingers squeezed the cool metal of the Joanie.

When he’d accused her of turning her back on her family, she’d told Magee the only people she had to love her were strangers. But looking out at the Charms, she had to take it back. Take it all back.

She’d been wrong. So wrong.

All this time, the Charms had loved her, even when she’d distanced herself from them. They’d loved her when she’d made up stories about them. They’d always loved her.

But she’d done the whole, dumb Dorothy thing, hadn’t she? Gone to Oz looking for love, when all the time it was in her own back yard?

Cradling the Joanie against her, she smiled up at Ben. “You’re right. They did do good. I love it just as it is.”

As they’d loved her, just as she was. Orphaned or not, they’d always thought of her as one of their own.

Turning toward her family, she held up the Joanie. “It’s wonderful!” More than wonderful, perfect. Oh,
yes. Just like the Charms were perfect, scars, scrapes, pom-poms, and all.

Love could do that.

Then, realizing they hadn’t heard her, she grabbed for her dangling mic and clipped it back into place. Beaming, she shook the Joanie in the air. “Thank you! Thank you, Uncle Billy and Aunt Vi!”

The collective gasp of the audience made it absolutely clear her secret was out. Uncle Billy wasn’t a wine connoisseur. She supposed no one would believe Aunt Vi and the George Bernard Shaw Society now.

But so what? Who needed public adoration when Dorothy had Aunt Em and Felicity had Aunt Vi? With a wave of her free hand, she urged the Charm clan toward the stage. Then she turned to the camera and said, “I have some lovely people I’d like you to meet.”

As they filed toward the stage, smiling, Felicity almost clicked her heels three times—but then stopped herself. She was already home.

T
he second hour of Felicity’s
All That’s Cool Afternoon
went more smoothly than the first. The Charm relatives were given seats in the audience. She’d wasted so many minutes on her reunion that Drew had instructed her to move on from the Mountain Logic products to the others. Her sell of the Caruso sauces had sounded sincere.

The truth was, they tasted really good.

When Drew finally said in her ear, “We’re out,” she slumped onto her stool. Her assistant handed her a bottle of chilled water. Then, after a long, closed-eyes swallow, she took stock of her post-show surroundings.

Shooed along by staff members, the audience was heading out of the amphitheater toward the parking lot and waiting buses. Her Charm relatives, somewhere in the middle of the pack, appeared content to be herded along with the rest.

Drew stood in the middle of the clearing seats, huddling with the first cameraman. As for Magee, he’d disappeared after his aborted attempt to tight
rope the slack line. But as she lifted her sweating bottle to take another swallow, he sauntered back onto the stage from the side entrance, his climbing harness in his hand.

His gaze brushed her face. “You surprised me, dollface.”

She didn’t know what to say. “I surprised a bunch of people, I think.” Her staff, Drew, her viewers. Her job might be at stake.

Magee didn’t say anything more, just studied her face as if he were trying to figure her out. She didn’t know what her expression revealed, though she knew that after the stress of the day she was out of defenses. If he stood there much longer, she might lose all her pride and beg him to take her in his arms. Admitting who the real Charms were and accepting and appreciating what they’d always offered her hadn’t changed anything about that other truth she’d finally admitted to herself as well.

She was in love with Magee.

She could only hope that the memory of his last words to her in the trailer—
Love you? I hope to God I’m not that stupid
—would stop her from making a fool of herself and blurting it out.

His eyes still on her, he stepped into the climbing harness.

She blinked. “What are you doing?”

“I agreed to tightrope. Drew wants to get it on tape.”

For the teaser segments, she presumed, and noted that the first cameraman, Warren, was now in posi
tion. Drew stood at the rear of the amphitheater once more, watching. She gestured toward him, then looked back at Magee. “If you’d like, I can…I can talk him out of it.”

A wry smile flickered over his mouth. “I just bet you can.” Metal clicked against metal as he latched the harness around his hips. “But you know me—I’m big on following through with my promises.”

Just one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with him. “You’ll use the safety leash, though, right?”

He walked toward the rock pillar he’d free-climbed earlier. “Ready?” he asked Warren. At the other man’s nod, he glanced over at Felicity. “I don’t think so.”

Her heart leaped as he leaped onto the perpendicular surface, about four feet off the ground. She rose from her stool, clutching her water bottle to her chest. “What do you mean, ‘I don’t think so’?”

He glanced down at her, then reached for another hold. “I mean, no, I’m not going to use a safety leash.” With another stretch, he moved farther up the rock, farther away from her.

“Don’t be crazy!”

“I feel a little crazy.” He made a lateral move that widened his stance.

Twenty feet above the amphitheater’s stage, his body hugging the rock, stuck to it with only finger pads and toes, he was grinning at her. That wild, reckless grin of his that was starting to scare her. “What are you doing, Magee?”

“Testing my theory, dollface. I told myself there was some purpose to what happened on that mountain
eighteen months ago. But now I’m working on a new hypothesis.”

Her stomach drew into a tight fist as he moved up. Shading her eyes, she stepped back to get a clearer view of him. “What hypothesis is that?” she called out. With the audience gone, her voice echoed against the surrounding rock walls.

“That there’s no meaning whatsoever.” He reached behind him to the chalk bag hanging from the harness at his back. “And that the better man died, while the Lucky Bastard lived.”

Speechless, she stared at him as he groped for the chalk with his other hand. A scattering of dust fell from the lip of the bag, the afternoon light turning it golden, like an angel’s dust.

But where were they? Where were the angels she’d met that night in the desert now?

Something touched her shoulder. Startled, she whirled to face Magee’s old friend, Gwen’s brother. “What is it—?” She didn’t know his name.

“I’m Barry.” His serious expression magnified her own anxiety. “There’s another way to the top. It’s a scramble, no climbing. Can you do it?”

“Of course I can do it.” She glanced down at her tight skirt and high heels. “I
will
do it.” As she followed Barry out of the amphitheater, she swiped one of the sample pairs of Mountain Logic rock shoes from the pile of products.

Once around the corner, she kicked off her heels and peeled down her pantyhose, then laced up the flat, rubber-soled rock shoes. They were a little big, but
would have to do. Then she ran after Barry, and saw what he meant by “another way to the top.” A series of various-sized boulders were tumbled behind the pillars that made up the amphitheater walls. While it looked a bit more than a “scramble” to her, she thought she could do it, if—

“Do you have a knife?” she asked Barry.

When he handed a pocketknife over, she used the blade to hack at the bottom of her skirt, turning the modest hemline into a mini.
Now
she could scramble. “Let’s go.”

It was harder than she thought. Air wheezed in and out of her lungs as she tried following each of Barry’s steps. But with that image of Magee’s reckless grin burning in her brain, she pressed upward, and then finally found herself standing on top of one of the pillars.

The wrong pillar, she realized, as Magee pulled himself over the top of the other, twenty-five feet and the tightrope away. Her head jerked toward Barry. “But—”

“We can’t get to the other one like this,” he said.

She looked back at Magee. He was frowning at her, giving her a dose of that dangerous, gunslinger stare. “I can’t let you do this,” she called across the chasm.

His expression eased and he laughed, his hands going to the latch of his harness. “How are you going to stop me?”

“By reminding you of…of what could happen.” Her stomach twisted at the thought. “You should know life…life is beautiful, every minute precious.”

His harness dropped to the ground and he made no sign that he’d heard her. “Magee! Magee, listen!”

He looked across that yawning distance.

“That night in the desert,” she said. “I never told you…”

“Never told me what?” he asked, drawing closer to the edge.

Her heart stuttered. “I saw you. I saw you from outside my body, from above the both of us.”

“You’ve been spending too much time around Peter.” He bent over to unlace his shoes.

“I was dead, Michael. I know I was dead.”

He stilled, then straightened, tossing the shoe in his hand to the ground. “You couldn’t—”

“I did.” She had tried to ignore and to pretend away the experience, because it was unnerving and…confusing, but it seemed to be clearing up in her mind even as she spoke. “I saw you pleading with me to live. I saw you kissing my hand and holding it against your cheek.”

He looked angry now. “Then you were half-conscious.”

“I wasn’t. You know I wasn’t. I was dead. And there was a warm, dazzling light opening behind me and as I turned toward it, two figures stepped out. They were familiar to me—I think they were my parents.” Of course they were, she thought, suddenly remembering. They’d been wearing the same clothing as she’d seen in that photograph she’d found at Aunt Vi’s.

“And then, Magee, I had a choice. I could go with them into that beautiful shining light, or I could…I
could go back into my body.” Heavenly love or earthly love. And she’d looked at that gorgeous stranger with tears in his eyes and that desperate note in his voice, and her selfish heart had opened up and taken him in. “There was nothing random about it, nothing random at all.”

“If I follow that logic, dollface, then you’re saying that Simon chose to die, that he chose to walk away into that bright light of yours and leave Ashley and Anna P. and me behind.”

“No!” She shook her head, frustrated. “I’m not saying that. I’m not saying I have all the answers. But I know that when I opened my eyes, when I realized that I was
alive,
I saw the world as louder, brighter, sweeter, and I don’t think you should take all that beauty for granted.”

But he was already unlacing his other shoe. Panic caused her breath to stutter in her lungs and she couldn’t think of another way to dissuade him. She didn’t have anything else to offer up.

Except the one thing that would strip away her pride—and probably wouldn’t stop him anyway.

He approached the rope strung between them. It was now or never, just like that moment of choice she’d made that night in the desert. But she’d been…she’d been promised earthly love! She’d chosen it, she’d chosen him, and he wasn’t doing his part!

Earthly love,
she thought again. And then it hit her, hit her hard. She’d been promised love on earth. And she had it, didn’t she? She loved him. But she’d never been promised that Magee would love her back.

And he was inches away from walking across the air without a net.

“Michael! Michael, one more thing.” There was nothing left to do but lead with risk and hope for reward.

With more than a trace of impatience, he looked up. “What now?”

“I’m in love with you.” She smiled, even though she felt the sting of tears in her eyes. “Just so you know, I’m in love with you.”

“Nice try, Lissie,” he replied, shaking his head. “Opposites attract, I’ll give you that. But love? I don’t think so.”

He didn’t believe her! She’d laid bare her heart, let him see her naked emotion, and he thought it was just something she’d said to stop him. Tears stung again.

He pulled his shirt over his head and threw it down. “I have to do this.”

What was she supposed to do now? She’d wanted to believe so much that fate or destiny or the angels had conspired to bring her a soul mate, her true Mr. Right. That’s what she’d chosen that night in the desert.

She blinked and, in the dry air, found that her tears had evaporated. And then she found that her fears had evaporated, too.
Believe.
That’s what she had to do. Have faith in something besides smart choices and hard work. Have faith in love. And hadn’t the enduring love of the Charms shown her she could?

“I have to do this,” he said again.

Felicity took a breath. “Yes, you do,” she said softly. “Yes, I think you do.”

It wasn’t a death wish, Magee told himself, shaking his arms to relax the muscles. Despite what Felicity thought, what Barry was thinking, if the expression on his face was any judge, he wasn’t doing this to cancel out the life that Simon’s heroic effort had granted him eighteen months ago.

He was doing it because…

Hell, he was no better at navel-gazing now than he’d ever been.

Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath. Then he opened them, and keeping his chin lifted and his gaze on the narrow strip that tied him to this earth, he stepped out.

The rope sagged. It was tighter than when they knotted it down at the rock gym, and he accommodated the slight wobble with ease. He’d known climbers who pushed things right to the brink, claiming then they saw God in every pitch, but Magee had never believed a higher power would waste time with some death-courting idiot unless it was to haul his ass off to hell.

Magee continued walking across the rope, steady and sure. A slight wind tickled his hair away from his face, but it wasn’t enough to distract him. He made it past the halfway point and kept moving.

At the three-quarter mark, Magee was close to admitting he didn’t have a clue why he was up on the
rope and what he hoped it would accomplish. Then, still several steps from the other side, he remembered that Simon used to term riskier moves as calling angels, and maybe, Magee thought, maybe that’s what he was doing now.

Calling angels.

For the answer. Was his life a random chance, a happy un-accident? He took another step, and then another. Was he alive because his luck, after all, had held?

I told you
.
You’re alive because it wasn’t your time to cark it
.

The Aussie voice was in Magee’s brain and on the breeze blowing across his sweating face.

Shaking his head to dislodge it, he had to seesaw his arms to keep his balance. His stomach lurched.

His heart took the fall he was suddenly desperate not to make.

Fear welled, taking up the freed space inside his chest. He froze, as everything changed. Instead of daylight, it was darkness, below him, around him. Waiting for him. Was it death?

It’s not living, which is what you’ve been doing the last eighteen months, mate. Step out, you dumb yobbo, step out and grab life around the neck
.

But Magee couldn’t move, not when his limbs felt so cold and clumsy and there was all that bleak darkness yawning beneath him.

“Magee.”

Lissie’s voice. He looked for it, for her, and his gaze found hers. Over the distance between them, their connection, that link he’d sensed so often,
forged. How had he dismissed it before? How could he have thought it simple chemistry when now he could see it was so much more?

More than chance, it was something big, it was whatever forces that came together when two people—against the odds—fell in love.

Step out, you dumb yobbo, step out and grab life around the neck
.

This time he obeyed, and holding fast to that line between himself and Felicity, he made the last steps. On solid ground, he grabbed the first thing his arms found—her.