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There’d been the age thing, of course, but Sam hadn’t wanted to hear about that. Far as she was concerned she was a grown-up woman of legal consenting age, and that was that. Didn’t help matters, either, that her mother had been the same age when she’d met and fallen in love with her dad.
Then there’d been Cory’s friendship with Tristan, forged during those hellish days spent together in an Iraqi prison. Tris hadn’t been happy when his baby girl, the daughter he still remembered as a ponytailed tomboy, had declared her intention of dating a thirty-two-year-old friend of her father’s. Cory had been fighting a strong sense of guilt about that the weekend he’d gone to visit Tris, Jessie and Sam at the lake house. Memorial Day weekend, it had been. Lord, how well he remembered that terrible day….
It’s been a beautiful day. Last night’s thunderstorms have moved on, and the skies have cleared to a typically hot, hazy, sun-shiny summer afternoon. The lake is crowded with boats of all kinds, shapes and sizes: pontoons loaded with partying lake-dwellers waving to neighbors on their docks, flat-bottomed bass boats with solitary fishermen stoically riding out the chop in quiet coves, lots of other ski-boats, and of course the Wave Runners and Jet Skis, zipping illegally in and out amongst them all.
In the midst of all the chaos, Sam is determined to teach me to water-ski. I’ve never considered myself particularly talented when it comes to sports, but she’s patient—or stubborn—and it seems as if I might be getting the hang of it, finally. I’ve gotten up—again—and this time it feels like I might stay here awhile. Tris is driving the boat, while Jess sits watching me from the spotter’s seat in the rear, and Sam rides beside me on her knee board. Above the hiss of the water’s spray I can hear her shouting encouragement and praise.
He remembered the feel of the goofy grin on his face, the breathless exhilaration when he successfully jumped the wake.
He remembered the two kids on the Jet Ski, a boy and a girl riding tandem, cutting in close…too close.
I hit the water with that stinging thump that’s become all too familiar to me this day, and I hear Sam’s yell and Jessie’s whoop, and the sound of the boat’s motor throttling down, then circling slowly back to me. Jess leans over the back of the boat, calling to me, asking if I’m ready to call it quits.
That’s when it happens.
I don’t see the accident, none of us do, except maybe Tristan. But we all hear it—that terrible grinding crunch. I hear Tris shout as he guns the boat, and then he’s heading away from me toward the mouth of a nearby cove. Far off across the roiling surface of the water I can see the teenagers’ Jet Ski floating at a crazy angle next to a capsized bass boat.
Then I’m swimming, swimming toward the wreck, swimming as hard as I’ve ever swum in my life before, and my heart feels like it’s on fire in my chest.
I hear Jessie screaming at Tris, and the sound of a splash as Tris hits the water. And after what seems an eternity, I see Tris’s head reappear, and next to it that of the unconscious fisherman. I feel an awful jolt of adrenaline shoot through me a moment later when I see both Tris and the fisherman slowly sink back beneath the surface of that muddy water.
A thought flashes through my mind: No! No way he survived eight years in an Iraqi prison to die in this godforsaken pond. No way!
That’s when I haul in air and dive.
Things become confused…I’m operating on instinct.
I’m underwater, I feel something…I grab hold of it. It’s Tris, and I grab hold of him and try to fight my way back to the surface. And I realize I’m fighting a losing battle because Tris still has a death grip on the bass fisherman and isn’t about to let go.
I think, God help us, we’re all going to drown.
And then…my head’s above water, and I see Sam, plowing toward us through the water on her knee board, digging hard with both arms and yelling and cussing like a maniac, and she’s shoving life preservers at me, and her strong hands are everywhere, helping me, lifting Tris, pulling them both up out of the water.
There’s a lot of yelling and thrashing around, and everything is gasping, coughing, choking, sobbing pandemonium….
In spite of the confusion, some images stayed clear in his mind: Sam treading water while breathing into the fisherman’s mouth. Jess doing the same for the teenaged boy in the bottom of the boat while she sobbed and swore furiously at Tris between breaths. Tris clinging to the side of the boat, gasping for breath and glancing over at Cory with haunted eyes.
Later that evening, after paramedics had flown the three accident victims off to the hospital in a medevac chopper, after Tris and Jess, Sam and Cory had all showered and eaten and calm had been restored, Sam and Cory took the boat and went out again onto the now-serene and all but deserted lake. To watch the sunset, Sam said, but Cory had known her real reason for wanting to get out of the house was to give her mom and dad some privacy. They’d been having a rough time of it since Tris’s return from the dead, Cory knew. It was Jess’s concern about her husband that had led her to call Cory, to ask for help from the one person she felt might understand what Tris was going through.
How well he remembered that night, too, and what a strange contradiction there seemed to be between the peace and quiet of tranquil water reflecting sunset clouds…the first and brightest star of evening…and the sense inside himself that something profound had happened to him this day. That being here with this woman, a milestone had been passed in his life, one equal in import and magnitude to his parents’ death and his sojourn in Iraq, one that would change the direction of his life irrevocably.
“Look,” Sam says, “there’s the Wishing Star.”
She tells me, then, how she wished on that star when she was a little girl, and she tells me the poem and we recite it together: “Starlight, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight…”
“What did you wish for?” I ask her, smiling, thinking how very young she is.
“Uh-uh. You’re not supposed to tell. Otherwise, it won’t come true.” And she smiles and tilts her face up to mine.
It was then, in that moment, that he’d forgotten any thoughts he’d ever had about how young she was. He’d remembered instead her strength and her courage. He’d remembered her intelligence and sensitivity, her stubbornness and arrogance and husky, sexy laughter. And he’d lowered his head and kissed her.
Oh, how he remembered that kiss.
What do I expect—something sweet and innocent and virginal, maybe? Instead…I find myself lost. Lost in a sensual jungle…lush, humid, beautiful, exhilarating…terrifying. I’m afraid I may never escape; I don’t want to, really. But at the same time I’m afraid, as inside me I feel battlements I’ve spent a lifetime erecting begin to shiver and quake.
It takes all my wits and will, but I fight my way free, and I’m thinking, How am I ever going to hold out against this?
And I think, Tristan, my friend, I’m sorry—forgive me—but I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with your daughter….
He had held out for a lot longer than he’d believed possible, though he hadn’t been able to make Sam understand why, even with her long, silky body warm and soft against his, her strong fingers tracing paths on his skin for her eager mouth to follow, when all her woman’s instincts and the evidence of her senses told her how much he wanted her, he could still refuse to take her to bed.
Sam hadn’t understood, that night on the lake…a night and a kiss so beautiful, so full of sweetness and hope and promise it had made his soul ache. It was only the first of God-knew-how-many times he’d disappointed her.
Chapter 3
“Okay, I just wanna know one thing.” Tony wiped beer from his lips with the back of his hand and leaned back in his chair. “If you still had a thing for this Sam chick, why in the hell did you marry Karen?”
Cory watched the waiter in his white tunic and black slacks weave his way between tables on his way back to the bar. “Boy, you don’t mess around, do you?” he said mildly. “Straight for the throat.”
“Whatever works,” Tony said, burping agreeably.
Cory picked up his beer glass and sipped, then reconsidered and took a couple of hefty gulps. Talking about personal stuff—his personal stuff—never had come easy for him; he figured priming the pump a little couldn’t hurt.
He coughed, frowned and said, “It’s not that simple.”
“Never is.” Tony nodded at him in a so-go-on kind of way. “Quit stalling.”
Instead of replying, Cory shifted around in his chair, ran a hand through his hair and swore under his breath.
“Okay,” Tony said, sitting forward and planting his forearms on the table, “I’ll get you started. You met this…”
“Samantha.”
“Yeah. You met Samantha right after you came back from Iraq, right? And it was love at first sight. Dyn-o-mite. So that’d make it…” he counted on his fingers “…six—no, seven—years later you married Karen. I have to assume you dated the lady some before you popped the question. So, what were you doing during the previous six years? Were you and Samantha together all that time?”
“We dated,” Cory hedged, scrubbing a hand over his eyes. “Off and on…”
“Dated…as in, dinner and a movie? Or dated…as in, you give her a drawer in your apartment and she keeps your aftershave on her sink?” Cory glared at him. “Hey, you were sleeping with her, right?” Tony waggled a finger back and forth like a tiny windshield wiper. “Look, man, the kind of sexual tension I been pickin’ up here, that doesn’t come from nothin’. So gimme a break, okay?”
There was a pause while Cory drank more beer, then pursed his lips, steeling himself. “There were long periods when we didn’t see each other,” he said at last, in a voice Tony had to lean closer to hear. “She was in school in Georgia, I was working out of New York, on assignment a lot of the time. When we did manage to get together, it was like we’d never been apart. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It was…” he waved a helpless hand “…like touching a match to fireworks. Like dropping a torch in dry tinder. Like that. We couldn’t seem to help ourselves.”
Tony stared at him for a moment—probably in shock, Cory thought, to hear him give up so much personal stuff at once, and so easily. Then belatedly he nodded, as if in sympathy. Cory glanced at him, shifted in his seat and forced himself to go on.
“Then, the time together would end, she’d go back to Georgia, I’d go back to New York, we’d resume our lives. She had hers, I had mine. Not,” he said wryly, “that I didn’t spend a lot of my time thinking about her when I wasn’t with her. I’d like to think she spent some time thinking about me.” He paused for an absentminded sip of beer. “I never asked her whether or not she dated anyone else when we were apart. I have to assume she did.”
“Tough way to run a relationship,” Tony offered, shaking his head in sympathy.
Cory nodded, then shrugged. “We both had other things on our minds, I guess. For me, I think it was a case of…I was just biding my time, keeping busy, traveling a lot, waiting for her to finish school. In the back of my mind was always the thought that once she graduated, we’d find a way to work things so we could have a more…I don’t know, steady relationship.” Once again the wry grin stretched the unwilling muscles in his face. “As it turned out, she had other ideas.”
Tony was nodding, hunched over his beer, apparently staring at the front of Cory’s shirt. “Things to see…places to go…people to…uh.”
“Something like that.” Cory lifted his beer glass, discovered it was empty and signaled the waiter with it instead. “Her big thing was, she had her heart set on being a pilot, like her dad. Her mom wasn’t going to hear of her joining the military, so off she went to flight school. Didn’t take her long to get her private pilot’s license, and again I thought…okay, maybe now. But after that…” He frowned, distracted by the waiter’s approach. When their order for two more of the same had been taken and the waiter had gone away again, he resumed. “After flight school, she pretty much disappeared for a while.”
“Wait a minute. Disappeared? As in…went missing? That’s kind of freaky.”
“As in, dropped out of sight. Out of my life. Oh, I’d get phone calls from her. Sometimes she’d e-mail me. Always full of how much she…how much she missed me. But also how much she loved what she was doing, how exciting it all was, and that it was what she’d always wanted to do. And if I happened to have some free time, let’s say, and suggested we get together, she was always off somewhere ‘training.’ Well, hell,” he added bitterly as the waiter arrived with two fresh glasses of beer, “a man can only take so much.”
“You got that right,” said Tony stoutly, lifting his new glass in a salute.
When the waiter had been disposed of, Cory claimed his glass and leaned in, in a companionable sort of way. He’d been right about the beer; telling his story was definitely getting easier. “I mean, I’d been waiting for the woman for five years. Then, too, I wasn’t getting any younger. You know, I was in my late thirties, approaching middle age, and I’m feeling like there’s something missing in my life. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to be settling down, cut down on the travel, have some kids before I’m too old to enjoy ’em. You know?”
Tony was nodding again, like one of those little dogs people put in the back windows of their cars. “You got the ol’ nesting urge. Happens. Hasn’t happened to me, yet, but I’ve heard about it.”
“So, right about then’s when I met Karen.”
Tony went on nodding. “She caught you at a weak moment.”
“Yeah,” said Cory gloomily, “I guess.” But he felt guilty even saying it. It had been a whole lot more complicated than that, but he didn’t feel much like getting into it with Tony. Not now. Not with Sam back in his life and “What was I thinking?” the phrase uppermost in his mind.
After a moment he straightened himself up and said, “Hey, I’m not proud of it, okay? She was there and Sam wasn’t, and after a while I convinced myself what I felt for Karen was love, and that made it all right, somehow. It was a case of somebody being in the right place at the right time.” He tilted his head, considering that. “Or, from her point of view, maybe the wrong place at the right time…. Anyway. So—” he shrugged, drank beer, burped gently and waved his glass in a c’est la vie gesture “—I got married. End of story. Or anyway, you know the rest.”
“Uh-uh.” Tony’s head movements had changed direction. “Not so fast. What about Samantha? How’d she take it, you going and getting married on her like that?”
Cory gave him a sideways look. He was feeling defensive again. “Come on. It wasn’t like that. Not like I sent her a Dear John—or Jane—letter, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’d already agreed it was time to cut each other loose…go our separate ways. I sure as hell didn’t need her…her permission.”
Tony said, “Humph,” in a thoughtful way, then narrowed his eyes. “Who called it off? You break up with her, or she break up with you?”
“What difference does it make?” Cory said, squirming a little.
“Helluva difference. The dumpee always carries a bigger grudge than the dumper. It’s kind of a natural law.”
“Look, it wasn’t like that, okay? Anyway, I don’t know if I even remember.”
Oh, but he did, though. He probably remembered every moment of that last night together, every word spoken. The things he’d said to her—gently, he’d thought at the time. Calmly. Rationally. Explaining to her that he wasn’t getting any younger, and…oh, all the other things he’d just told Tony, and how patient he’d been, waiting for her all through college and flight school, and as much as he loved her and always would, how long did she expect him to wait for her to grow up?
Oh, boy. He’d realized the moment those words were out of his mouth they might not have been the best choice. Plus, no matter how gently he’d phrased it, what he’d done was force her to make a choice between him and the career she loved, and Sam never had taken well to ultimatums. He remembered, could feel it still, the sick, sinking feeling in his stomach when he saw her eyes harden to cold, dark fury. He felt chilled even now, remembering the implacability in her voice as she’d replied.
“Then don’t,” she says. “Don’t wait for me anymore.”
Just that; Sam never has been a great one for words.
As I watch her walk away from me down a rain-slicked Georgetown street, part of me—a long-buried, almost-forgotten part—is howling in pain and anguish like an abandoned child, all set to hurl myself after her and beg her to forgive me, forget everything I’ve said, that I will wait for her forever if that’s what it takes to keep her in my life.
But another part of me, the adult part that has governed me since I was nine years old, is already deadened to the pain…growing numb with acceptance that this is for the best. And already growing used to the idea that the woman I’ve considered the love of my life for so long, I must henceforth remember as the one who got away….
“Uh-oh,” Tony said. “Speak of the devil. Uh…not that I think she’s…well, you know what I mean. Look who just walked in.” He hauled his beer close and subsided, looking vaguely ashamed, while Cory shot a quick guilty look toward the bar’s entrance.
In keeping with the hotel’s “tropical hideaway” theme—which meant many of the guest rooms, including his, were on stilts, right at the water’s edge—the bar’s ambiance was lush and exotic. Reminded Cory of the old Tiki Room at Disneyland, which he recalled visiting once during his college days. Here, though, the plants and flowers were real, and the sounds of trickling water came from miniature waterfalls that cascaded invisibly through the greenery. Instead of the clacking of animated birds, the background music emanating from hidden speakers was muted, exotic and unfamiliar.
The entrance was a small elevated landing flanked by stands of bamboo that leaned inward toward each other to form a doorway arch, illuminated by a soft mellow spotlight. It was like a small stage, and dead in the middle of it stood Sam, looking as though she belonged there, her head held high in that almost arrogant way she had, her short blond hair shining like sunshine, spiked and curling slightly with the damp.
His heart slammed against his ribs, but all he said was, “I see her.”
No cargo pants and baseball cap tonight. She wore a wrap skirt in tropical splashes of orange and peach and red that hit her a couple of inches above the knee and set off the soft golden tones of her skin, and a yellow knit tank top that clung to her small firm breasts and slender waist like the hide of an exotic animal. She looked confident and at ease, there in the light, her long, naturally lean body relaxed, but seeming to vibrate with strength and energy held in reserve.
“So does every male in the room—every one that’s got a pulse,” Tony muttered out of the side of his mouth. “Man, I only wanna know one thing. How in the hell’d you ever let a woman like that get away?”
Cory winced. The question was too close to what he’d been thinking to himself a moment ago. He said in a voice gone unexpectedly guttural, “Like I said, I tried my best. She had other ideas.” He took a swallow of beer that seared his throat.
“Think she’s looking for us? Hey—she’s looking this way.”
“No—don’t—” But it was too late. Tony had already lifted his beer glass and was gesturing with it in a welcoming way.
“Hey—Captain—over here.”
With his pulse a hollow tom-tom beat in his belly, Cory watched Sam give Tony a little smile and a nod, pause briefly to speak to the white-jacketed host who had rushed over to greet her, then make her way unhurriedly through the maze of rattan tables.
As she walked among the tables, it occurred to Sam that her legs felt rather odd. Not weak—she’d never say weak—but…as though they weren’t all that well strung together, put it that way.
Oh, Lord, it’s still there. All these years later, and it’s as bad as ever. Like one of those tropical diseases, she thought, that pop out every now and then even when you think you’re over it. Like malaria.
She tried hard to keep her eyes on the bald guy, the photographer—Tony, that’s it. She kept her eyes and her smile focused on him and tried not to look at Cory, but how could she help but see him sitting there? Sort of leaning back in his chair, relaxed as always, wearing a loose-fitting long-sleeved shirt in some kind of coarse, rugged material softened and faded by long wear and many washings.
He’d be watching her, she knew, with his lips slightly curved, eyes dark and intent behind the rimless glasses he always wore. It was the attitude that made him such a successful reporter, that way he had of making a person feel they were the most fascinating and important person in the world, that nothing mattered more than what they had to tell him.
It would only occur to them a long time afterward that they’d spilled their guts to him, told him their deepest, darkest secrets…and that they knew absolutely nothing about him.
“Hey,” she said by way of a greeting, in the manner of the deep South in which she’d been born and mostly raised. She slid into the chair Tony had gallantly shoved out for her with his foot.
After risking a glance at Cory, who raised his beer glass a fraction of an inch, tilted it toward her and gave her his enigmatic little half smile, she turned the brightest one she could come up with on Tony.
And found he was already signaling a waiter. “Hey—can we get another one of these over here?”
She started to shake her head, but before she could get a word out herself, she heard, “Sam doesn’t like beer,” in the quiet, deep voice that always made something thrum beneath her breastbone, like bass synthesizers thumping in the distance. “She’s got a sweet tooth. Rum and Coke’s her drink. Right, Sam?” She swiveled her head toward him, braced for that first contact with his penetrating blue gaze. “At least, it used to be.”
“Still is,” she said lightly, and although it nearly killed her to do it while her teeth were clenched, nodded and smiled at the hovering waiter. We have too much to deal with tonight, she told herself. Silly to start with a fight over something so trivial.
“Hey, Captain, you’re looking mighty fine tonight.” Tony was smiling at her in a way that, though blatantly flirting, still managed to be unexpectedly charming.
The man definitely has charisma, Sam thought with regret. What a pity it was wasted on her. What a relief it would be to enjoy something so simple, so painless, as pure, uncomplicated sexual attraction.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling at him as she shook herself back in her chair. “I do like to change out of my khakis now and then. Shower…you know—get rid of the hat-hair.”
“You used to wear it longer.”
The casual words stung her nerves like wasps. She looked at Cory and—no great surprise—found him staring at her, although something in his eyes…
“Don’t like to drink and run…” Tony abruptly shoved back his chair, making her jump. For those few seconds she’d forgotten his existence.
