Love Finds You in Hershey, Pennsylvania (18 page)

Dmitri seemed to accept this explanation. He nodded in understanding. “You know, I meant to tell you from the moment I met you—I really admire how well you run your restaurant.”

This admission momentarily caught her off guard. “Really?”

“Really. You’re very good at what you do—designing the menus, creating recipes, managing the staff, making sure everything runs smoothly. It’s all quite impressive.”

She allowed a small smile of pride. “Thanks.”

“I wish I were more like you.”

This statement caused her satisfaction to deflate a bit. Did this have something to do with his own restaurant?

“Oh? What do you mean?”

He seemed to think he had said too much, because he fell silent for a moment.

“Nothing,” he awkwardly answered her. “Just that I wish I had your…natural business sense. Your intelligence.”

They lapsed into silence and drove for another few minutes. She watched the familiar local icons sliding by—the streetlights resembling wrapped and unwrapped Hershey’s Kisses, the green-and-yellow-trimmed trolleys shuttling tourists around town, the words “Hershey Cocoa” spelled out in brown-tinted shrubbery in front of the Hershey Foods Plant. She breathed deeply the rich, unmistakable aroma of cocoa permeating the streets of her hometown. Chocolate. It was soothing.

Let aromatherapists tout their lavender essential oil any day; a fragrant drive through Hershey soothed her faster than any scented diffuser.

Just as Sadie was getting ready to ask if she could take the wheel to get them to their destination, Dmitri turned onto a street they hadn’t encountered yet. His driving suddenly acquired a more definite purpose.

Sadie frowned. If she didn’t know better, she’d think Dmitri was driving to Agape Christian Academy—Kylie’s school, where Jasper was employed as an elementary teacher.

“Dmitri…do you know where you’re headed?”

He nodded.

“But…”

Thoughts of chocolate decadence fled as they approached the street leading to the school.

“Are we going to the school?” She twisted in her seat to view the road behind them. “Dmitri, is that where you’re taking me?”

What could he possibly have planned? He didn’t answer her, so she simply sat back and waited. Within several minutes’ time, they pulled up to the back entrance of the academy’s auditorium. Dmitri put his SUV in park, slid the keys from the ignition, and exited the vehicle.

Not bothering to wait for him, Sadie pushed open her own door and swung her feet to the ground. Dmitri came alongside and extended his hand, but she ignored him. He waited until she was out and then closed her door.

“This way,” he gestured, toward the entrance.

She raised an eyebrow before forging ahead of him. A brief scan of the parking lot revealed no other vehicles on site.

Approaching the auditorium door, she saw lights seeping warmly through the cracks. Dmitri jumped ahead to open the door for her, and as it widened, she could see that all the lights were glowing—on the stage and on the auditorium floor.

Stepping inside, she stared at the stage. It was set for a production, although Sadie was certain there was no drama currently in the works. And classes were nearly finished for the year…. A summer production maybe? Neither Kylie nor Jasper had mentioned anything, however.

But something surely must have been planned, for the stage had become a romantic world of arched doorways and twinkling white lights with vines of roses stretching up a latticework to touch the edges of a painted marble balcony.

The scene, for whatever story, was simply breathtaking. A few of the props were familiar to her from the hours she had spent here in helping Jasper with school plays and watching Kylie perform in the preschool productions.

Kylie had played a carrot in the last presentation. At first, she had demanded her hair be dyed green, but following the entire exhibition, she had refused to touch carrots for a week. Yet this was no vegetable pageant. Whatever the school was staging, it had to be a glorious story. At least if the stage was any indication.

Coming back to herself, Sadie turned to ask Dmitri what this was all about, but to her bewilderment, he had gone. The door was closed, and only now did she note the soft rumble of his SUV as it pulled out of the parking lot.

“What is going on?”

Too enthralled with the soft lights and magnificent stage to even care, Sadie turned back to the auditorium and took several tentative steps toward the front. It was like a wonderland.

There was a river of golden carpeting across the stage floor that pooled beneath pillars of slim white stone. Wreaths of ivy and pale blue silk draped a colonnade that accommodated a circular stone fountain. And to her right slanted a tall, oval balcony, fenced in by a row of what appeared to be iron scrollwork. Rose petals littered the ground like crimson tears fallen from heaven. Ascending to the platform, she bent to touch them.

They were real.

“Do you like it?”

She whirled. She knew the voice but found her heart wedged so tightly in her throat that she couldn’t acknowledge it.

Jasper came from backstage, his steps falling lightly on the golden carpet. He looked different than when she had left him at the house. He was dressed in black slacks and a white dress shirt. Simple. But the classy outfit certainly made him stand out in these surroundings.

Unable to look at him without her heart pounding erratically, her eyes faltered from his as she scanned the set once more.

“It’s gorgeous,” she murmured softly. “It must have taken ages to assemble.”

“Oh, not so long as you think,” he answered. “Remember Ray, who works for the Hershey Theatre? He let me borrow some props and helped set it all up.”

“What’s it for?” she asked, her eyes still avoiding his.

“For you,” he gently declared.

She couldn’t help but look at him then. “For me?”

He nodded, taking two steps closer to her. “Remember in tenth grade, when the school put on
Romeo and Juliet
…and you wanted to play the lead?”

“They gave it to Allison Seitz,” Sadie remarked in distaste. “And she forgot her lines only halfway into her first scene.”

“But they still wouldn’t let you be Juliet,” he said.

“No,” she remarked with a touch of bitterness. “They wouldn’t.”

“Even though you’d have made the most
perfect
Juliet.”

She glanced at him. “What are you getting at, Jasper?”

He held his arms out at his sides to encompass the whole of the stage. “Now’s your chance. This is for you.” He lowered his arms. “You get to be Juliet.”

She turned and moved several steps in the opposite direction of him. “Oh, that was forever ago, Jasper. I don’t want to play Juliet anymore.”

He took several steps forward to compensate for the distance she had placed between them. “Every woman wants to be Juliet,” he softly replied. “To be wooed and won. To have someone love her so much he’d rather die than live life without her.”

Sadie swallowed. “Life didn’t turn out so well for Juliet,” she pointed out.

Jasper conceded, “No, it didn’t. But she was happy. For a while.”

“Not long. Never long enough.”

“How long is long enough? Would it have been better to never have known love than to live a lifetime without it?”

She trembled. He stood only a couple steps away now. “I’ve had my love, Jasper. There’s nothing left for me now.”

“How do you know unless you give it a chance?”

“With great passion comes great risk,” she noted.

“But without great risk comes no passion at all,” he retorted.

It was a compelling argument.

“Here.” He reached out a hand, which held a worn, yellow copy of
Romeo and Juliet
. “Give it a try. It might surprise you.”

She hesitated a moment, but he winked and she felt herself relax. “It’s only a play…right?”

She moved, touching the playbook. Her fingers tingled as her knuckles brushed against Jasper’s hand.

“There was no time for costumes,” he apologized. “But we’ll just call this a rehearsal.” He motioned toward the gilded steps leading to the balcony.

“Go ahead.”

She licked her lips.

“Go on,” he urged.

She glanced at him.

“I’m right here to catch you if you fall,” he murmured.

She took several tentative steps, and before she knew it, she stood on the balcony, looking down at Jasper.

He opened his own copy of the play and cleared his throat.

“Act two, scene two?” he suggested.

She swallowed.
Of course. What else?

Jasper began the scene. “ ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound… But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?’ ”

He ran through Romeo’s lovesick lines with a passionate tenderness that could have melted the hardest of hearts. Sadie’s own pulse quickened at the rough compassion in his voice.

When it came time for her to speak, she faltered the one line she had. “ ‘Aye me!’ ” Her voice cracked. It actually sounded like Juliet was in distress, as she should be.

Jasper said in a stage whisper, “Good!”

She gulped. He continued his lines. When it came time for her to speak once more, she sounded firmer, though no less nervous. Jasper continued as if this was truly a performance, though they were the only two in the auditorium. His enthusiasm was catching, and Sadie soon found herself playing along.

“ ‘How camest thou hither?’ ” she asked, “ ‘Tell me, and wherefore? The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, and the place death, considering who thou art, if any of my kinsmen find thee here.’ ”

Jasper only glanced at the script. “ ‘With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls, for stony limits cannot hold love out: And what love can do, that dares love attempt; therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.’ ”

They went on. Sadie found herself staring down at him as he spoke, the stage lights bouncing golden off his light-colored hair. When he looked up at her, his eyes were filled with warmth and a longing she had never known. She had no reason to fear him, she realized. Not Jasper, who had dried her tears and long held her steady through life’s hardest blows. Dear, loving Jasper, who had known her through her best and her worst and loved her in spite of it.

He stared up at her now and fell silent. Her heart swelled with… could it really be…love?

“Sadie?”

“Mmm?”

“Your line,” he whispered.

“Oh.” She looked down at the script, but the words were a blur of sweet nothings. “What’s my cue again?”

Jasper repeated his last line. “ ‘O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?’ ” She found her place. “ ‘What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?’ ”

He answered, again without looking at his script, but staring up at her with his heart in his eyes. “ ‘The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.’ ”

Something in the way he said it… It was a line from the play, Sadie knew. But the words were meant for more than that. Could she give him her heart? Could she love him as he… Had he even claimed to love her?

“Sadie?” he prompted.

She leaned down. He was so handsome in the white shirt with his blond hair dropping into his eyes.

“ ‘The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine,’ ” he repeated his line.

Sadie stretched toward the balcony’s edge, suddenly wishing she could touch him, if only for a moment.

“ ‘I gave thee mine before thou didst request it,’ ” she softly told him—and then, before she realized what was happening, she toppled over the balcony’s edge toward the stage.

It wasn’t a high balcony, for the auditorium wasn’t large. But it was enough of a drop that Sadie gasped and squeezed her eyes shut as she fell. At any second, she expected to feel the hard slam of the wooden floor, cushioned slightly by the gold carpeting, against her body. But in an instant it was over, and she fell neatly into Jasper’s outstretched arms.

His broad grin told her he was thrilled with the way things had played out.

“See? I told you I’d catch you if you fell.”

And she kissed him then to let him know she believed he would.

It seemed too perfect to last.
That was the thought continually whispering through the hallways of Sadie’s mind. Maybe Jasper really did love her, and maybe she really did love him. But she had long ago quit believing in songs and poems that declared love could move mountains, plumb the ocean’s depths, and overcome any obstacles set before it. Sadie didn’t really believe love had ever halted a catastrophe, and she was too focused on that thought to realize that love had done its fair share of aiding in the recovery of several tragedies.

Love was a season, and in Sadie’s case, the seasons had always ended up being rather short ones. So the dark winds in her mind murmured through the night.

But when Jasper was with her, the voices silenced, and she was able to believe, for fleeting stretches of time, that he really could outlast the inevitable. He could love her long enough to make her believe it was worth trying.

Jasper’s hand on her face, his fingers in her hair, and his eyes on hers…these were the things that banished the black thoughts and left her hopeful. As long as Jasper was near her…