The Trouble with Magic (Loveswept) (13 page)

“I thought you wanted me to tell you something fascinating,” she complained, pushing at her glasses with the back of her hand, frowning at him.

“I did. This isn’t,” he said, shifting in his squat position, his leg muscles cramping.

“It is fascinating, so pay attention. I’m going to quiz you on it later.”

He watched the crazy curls around her face flutter in the wind and wondered how he could have ever wished them restrained. He took in the thick, dark plait resting on her shoulder and couldn’t resist the vision of what she might look like with her hair loose, wavy, tumbling over the soft curves of her body—her naked body. ...

“This is a perfect example of the island’s development. The rock, the moss, the vegetation,” she said, hunkered down beside him, brushing her hands across the rocks. A solitary tern flew overhead, passing low as if to investigate the lesson. “Most of the islands are granite hilltops—a billion-year-old-Precambrian rock—flooded six thousand years ago after the last ice age. The barren rock was colonized by lichens, and as soil developed, moss grew, then grass, then shrubs, and finally the trees.”

She stood and scrambled over the rocks, taking no notice of the pounding waves below. ... at least, not the notice Payton was taking in them. Vertigo was a good word for what he was experiencing.

He hurried to catch up with her.

“Now the fascinating part,” she said, as she waited for him to join her on the path that encircled the entire island, that would take them high atop the rocky cliffs for a breathtaking view of the waterway or low along the boulders at the water’s edge, “... is that the hot, dry, southwest slopes, exposed to sun and wind, create a climate typical of latitudes much farther south, thus the southern hardwoods. But the protected northeast slopes are cool, moist, and shaded, allowing northern plants and coniferous trees to prosper. This is a phenomenon called microclimate, and it’s what maintains the islands’ remarkable variety of flora and fauna.”

“Fascinating.” More fascinating was the way the frail winter sunshine seemed to catch and shine in the depths of her eyes.

Ignoring or perhaps not even hearing his sarcasm, she went on with great verve. “I’ve always thought so. The deer, the wild turkeys, the snakes, turtles, birds ... it’s all so intricately balanced and—”

“Enough,” he said, breaking in on her tribute to nature, taking her hand and turning her to face him. “I’ve been in your biology class for hours now, and I’ll admit it’s interesting, but it doesn’t fascinate me.”

“At breakfast I asked what you wanted to do today and you told me you’d leave it to me, to fascinate you. I’m doing my best.”

“Do better. Tell me something about you.”

“Me? I’m not fascinating. Unless you find someone who’s been to jail fascinating, and I’ve already told you about that,” she said, turning away from his piercing gaze to continue their walk, making no effort to remove her hand from his.

He wasn’t ready to move on. He tightened his grip and pulled her back to face him again.

“Harriet Wheaton, you’re as wild and unpredictable as these curls when they blow in the wind,” he said, indulging his fondness for them with a gentle touch. “I want to know all about you.”

She laughed. “You do know all about me. I’ve told you my family history, my history. There’s nothing left to tell.”

“Tell me a secret. Tell me something about you that isn’t part of a public record, that no one else knows, only you.”

“A secret?” She had none. Up until she’d gone to prison, her life had been terribly ordinary. A happy childhood, an awkward adolescence, college, career, jail, picking up the pieces of her life, and another career. But no real secrets.

“It can be just a thought,” he said. “A thought you’ve never spoken aloud.”

Ah, she had lots of those.

“Come on,” she said, pulling at him. “I’ll show you a secret thought.”

Chill winds blew in their faces and rolled dark clouds across the sky. There was more scrambling over rocks, but Payton didn’t mind, it was an easy downhill slope toward the water in the bay, near the dock and the boat house.

“Gosh. I haven’t thought about this in years, until now. I wonder if it’s still there,” she said, careful of her footing on the slick surfaces.

“What?”

“Come on. If it’s still here, it’ll be right over ... Yes. There. Look.”

He did and saw nothing but rock and water. He watched as she jumped a tide pool and stepped up against a huge wall of stone beyond the normal waterline.

“Look there,” she said, smiling. “It’s still here. I did that when I was thirteen.”

He couldn’t comment on what he couldn’t see. He put his hands on her shoulders from behind and leaned closer. There, rubbed in the rock, were the letters
HMW.

“Harriet ...” he started.

“Martha.”

“Wheaton.” He chuckled. “Your folks really had a thing for old names, didn’t they? Too bad you didn’t have any sisters to share them with.”

“They’re family names. That’s why I did that,” she said, nodding to the crude marks in the rock. “I hated my name. I hated all the family history and being part of something I didn’t really have anything to do with and that I couldn’t get away from.” She paused. “Actually, I just hated being thirteen and not being anyone special, just part of a line. I wanted to make my mark, so to speak. I wanted to let the world know somehow that I was here.”

“Even then, all this was a responsibility,” he said, almost to himself.

“Always.”

“Then why not sell it? Get out from under it. It could be your contribution to the island’s history.” He could hear it already. “Jovette Island was sold, late in the twentieth century, by Harriet Martha Wheaton, whose mother was the last Jovette.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” she asked, realizing that her position in life wasn’t a common one. “This place isn’t mine to sell. It doesn’t matter what my last name is, it could be Jovette and it still wouldn’t belong to me. It’s not like the orchard or my car or the house in Massena. They belong to me and I can sell them. But for the brief span of my lifetime this place is only in my keeping, it belongs to the Jovettes, all those before and all those after me.”

He studied her thoughtfully, trying to imagine her sense of infinity. What would it be like to be a part of something that always was and always would be? He’d always compared his own life to that of a comet, a solitary star with no orbit, streaking through the sky for a short time. And when it burnt out, it was gone forever and forgotten.

Continuity was another dream he’d given up. Children. Grandchildren. It had seemed to him that it was more important to get from one day to the next as painlessly as possible, than to worry about living forever. How could he nurture and protect a child when it took everything he had to nurture and protect himself?

Still, he could see how important it was to Harriet.

“I must be losing my mind,” he said suddenly, and more to the world at large than to her.

She looked at him. “And you’re just now taking notice?” she asked, grinning.

He was serious. In a silent fit of madness, he said, “You should sell some of the antiques in the house. The first editions in the library alone would pay the back taxes on this place. The attic’s a gold mine, and you’d never miss a lot of that stuff. Sell it.”

A tremor passed through his body, his hands trembled. Relief, shock, courage, weakness? He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, only that it wasn’t planned and that it had shaken him to the core.

Harriet could only stare, baffled and curious. Did he know what he’d done, or
was
he losing his mind?

He had turned and was looking out over the water when Harriet stepped in front of him, looped her arms around his neck, and stretched on tiptoe to kiss him.

He accepted her gift of appreciation with a shyness neither of them expected. Inept in the presence of true affection and admiration, he permitted the modest declaration, then stepped away from her, sorely ill at ease.

But Harriet wouldn’t let go. In that microsecond she knew she’d never be able to let go of him. Like a primed siphon, her heart felt the emptiness in his and began to pour forth her love, wanting to fill all the dents, hollows, and punctures that had drained him of his hopes and dreams and of his trust.

She locked her lips to his and kissed him with a passion that bowled them both over.

What could he do?

Payton removed her glasses, slowly, carefully, deliberately. Then he wrapped his arms around her and held on tight. He followed her into oblivion and joined her in a celebration of sensation. The earth lost its trajectory, falling, dropping closer and closer to the center of the galaxy. Their bodies burned like the fires of the sun, melting away thought and memory.

She grew weak in his arms, and when the heat threatened to overtake him as well, they sank slowly to the cool, smooth stones and continued to stoke an inferno that Sol himself would have admired.

“Payton,” she murmured against his lips, expecting no answer, simply speaking his name in wonderment. She had never known such needs—to give, to take, to fill and be fulfilled. She had never known such urgency—to touch, to feel. She had never known such a lightness as she felt loving Payton.

“Hmm?” He pulled his lips from hers, then returned twice more before he was ready to pay attention to what she had to say. “What?”

“Nothing. Just Payton.”

Humor sparked through the haze of passion in his eyes, and he took on a sappy sort of smile.

“I’m really tempted to see what you’d do if I suggest you sell your beautiful boat too,” he said, his fingers toying with the dark wispy curls that he was coming to think of as his own private pleasure. When she laughed, he looked back into the fathomless mysteries that were her eyes—they were bright and happy. “I wouldn’t complain if you did it again, but ... why did you kiss me like that?”

“You needed to be kissed.”

“Why?”

“Because you did something that was very sweet and very kind and very much part of your nature, and it scared you.”

He felt naked and vulnerable, and it angered him that she could make him feel that way. He gave her glasses back to her. Then, turning from her, he sat up and watched the water curl up onto the rocks, wash over the sides, then slip back into the river.

“Don’t start pretending to see things in me that aren’t there, Harri,” he said, his voice gentle and soft, his warning blunt and hard. “I pointed out an obvious solution to your money problems, that’s all. I figured you’d have spotted it sooner or later yourself. But sooner would get us rescued quicker.”

So much pride, she thought, her heart swelling and aching to the point of bursting with her love for him. How horribly he must have been hurt to be at such incredible odds with himself.

“Well, whatever your motives for telling me, it was a nice thing to do, and I appreciate it,” she said, carefully sidestepping his dignity. “But selling the island piece by piece is out of the question.”

Payton wanted to scream and yell at her. Instead, he looked at her and calmly asked, “Why?”

She growled and shook her fists in frustration. “It’s not mine to sell,” she repeated. “The first editions belonged to my grandfather and his father and his father. ... Certain pieces of furniture belonged to my grandmother, other pieces to my great-grandmother and still others to my great-great-grandmother. There isn’t one stick of furniture or a book or a picture or a knickknack outside those in my bedroom that are truly mine to sell. It all belongs to the house; to its past and to future generations.”

“But what if you lose it all?”

“Then I’ll lose it all,” she said, prepared to accept that fate but not willing to surrender to it.

“You can’t maintain a place like this on a teacher’s salary, Harriet,” he said, combing an agitated hand through his hair before he looked at her.

“I could if I sold the orchard.” She folded her arms across her bent knees and rested her cheek on them. “If it weren’t for the orchard, I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now. Well, maybe. I don’t know. It was one of those things that seemed right at the time, and then it turned out all wrong.”

“Sounds cosmic to me,” he muttered dryly.

Maybe it was—the thought flickered briefly through her mind. After all, would she be sitting on the beach with Payton Augustus Dunsmore IV, falling hopelessly in love, if her life had taken a different course years earlier?

“Several years ago, before my father got ill, before Max and the trial and all, my father had a couple of poor crops—not enough rain, and an unhealthy economy—which is always hard on farmers. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that my father was close to bankruptcy and needed enough money to tide him over until he got a good crop and the economy picked up. Not an enormous amount of money, but a large enough sum that we had to take out a mortgage on the island for a while. He ... we usually kept the island unencumbered, with only the yearly taxes and the maintenance to pay for, but we felt it was an emergency, and we were sure that things would right themselves and that we could repay the loan in no time.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged, thinking her answer was obvious. “My family is lucky at love, not gambling.” She sighed. So far, she hadn’t been particularly lucky with either. “We had a couple more bad years with the orchard, which we’d sort of expected, but then things sort of fell apart. I went to prison, my father became ill, we kept losing money, then my father died. ...” She lifted her head and watched a cargo ship pass by the opening of the cove. “I was in so much financial trouble by the time I was released from prison that I wanted to turn around and go back inside. I had nothing.”

Payton was familiar with the word destitute, he knew what it meant, but it was something that he couldn’t fully comprehend until he had experienced it. And he’d never come anywhere close.

“I used my father’s life insurance money to pay off his personal debts and to pacify the banks until I could sell the orchard, and then I was going to use that money to save the island. All I needed was a little time.”