Georgia Meets Her Groom

“Don’t you remember me?” he asked softly, his voice sounding thunderous in the otherwise silent room.

At first, Georgia shook her head slowly in response. Then he took one more step forward and brought his face into the light, and she saw his eyes—eyes of a dark blue color she had never quite seen anywhere else, as often as she had searched to find an adequate comparison. Expressive eyes, compelling eyes. Eyes that had once looked upon her full of laughter and a languid kind of affection.

Georgia bit her lip. Now Jack’s eyes were sad and fatigued and framed by shadows. In many ways, it seemed to her then, he was indeed a man she didn’t remember.

“Jack McCormick,” she said on a shallow breath.

As soon as she spoke his name, his eyes cleared of their troubling clouds and his lips turned up slightly at the corners, hinting at a smile she remembered only too well. Her stomach clenched into a tight fist when she realized how much she had missed him all these years.

“So you do remember,” he replied quietly, approaching her with slow, uncertain steps. His voice had deepened over the years, but was still a little rough and youthful. And, as it always had, the sound of his voice made her smile.

Jack laughed then, low and strong, and for a moment she could detect a trace of the boy she had known for a little over a year more than two decades before. Something in him relaxed, the shadows left his eyes and he looked at her with the same puzzling expression he had always seemed to reserve for her alone. For a long time they only gazed at each other silently.

Georgia studied the face above her, comparing it with the one she had known so long ago. Essentially, they were one and the same, yet there were so many differences. His tousled curls, the curls she had thought made him look so rebellions and that she had always had to force herself not to wind around her fingers, were gone. Now his hair was cut casually short. Lines fanned out at the corners of his eyes and slashed along the sides of his mouth, and his cheeks were rough from a half day’s growth of beard.

He’d barely been shaving the last time she saw him, she thought—that morning of his eighteenth birthday, just before he had slipped away from Carlisle without a care, without a plan, without a backward glance.

Without even telling her goodbye.

Before she realized what she was doing, she set her hot chocolate down on the nearest table, then lifted her hand to cup his cheek, skimming her thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone as she had done the first day they’d met. She didn’t know what made her do such a thing. For some reason, it just felt right. Somehow, the years slipped away, and she felt as if she were thirteen again, seeing Jack up close for the first time.

Jack McCormick closed his eyes when Georgia Lavender touched him so tenderly. The gentle motion was nearly his undoing. It was going to be more difficult than he’d anticipated, he thought, seeing Georgia again after all this time. He wished they could go back for just one day—one hour, even—just long enough that he could tell her so many things he wished he’d said to her when he’d had the chance.

He had always regretted not telling her goodbye. It had left him feeling incomplete somehow, unfinished. All these years, he’d just never quite come to terms with the way Georgia had always made him feel. Mainly because he’d never quite understood his feelings for her.

He tilted his head into the soft caress of her fingers, and couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps now it might be too late to try. For over twenty years she had lived a life that he knew nothing about, and he himself had changed in so many ways. The Georgia of his memories was just a kid—a troubled kid, at that.

When he left Carlisle she’d been a scrawny, awkward girl of fourteen, almost fifteen, swallowed by a big pair of glasses, and generally frightened of life. He’d never once felt a stir of sexual anything where Georgia was concerned. Affection, yes. Perhaps he’d even loved her in a way. But she’d been his friend. His confidante. His sanctuary. It had never occurred to him that she might someday become something more.

He opened his eyes and studied her again. The Georgia who greeted him today, however, was a different person entirely. Her coppery hair was shot through with silver now, and her gray eyes were lined with life and laughter. She was round and soft and beautiful. She was a woman through and through. And something inside Jack responded to her in a way he never would have imagined—immediately and irrevocably.

And suddenly he wondered if it had been such a good idea to return to Carlisle after all.

Gently he wrapped his fingers around hers and pulled her hand away from his cheek, noting the hurt in her eyes as he did so. But he said nothing. He had planned to come into the restaurant for a cup of coffee to fortify himself before driving the final mile to the address he’d located in the phone book, and to prepare himself for what he would find when he located Georgia Lavender. But he’d been denied that last little moment of preparation. And he still couldn’t quite assimilate the woman of thirty-seven with the girl of fourteen. So he studied her in silence for a moment more.

Gone was the timid, mousy girl who had slouched through life, averted her eyes from everyone she encountered, and cowered at the mention of her father’s name. In her place was a beautiful, vivacious woman whose dark gray eyes were alive with a vibrant spirit. He wondered what—or who—had brought her to such life in the years that he’d been gone. And something pinched inside him at the knowledge that it hadn’t been he.

According to the listing in the phone book, her last name was still Lavender, but that didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t married. His gaze flicked down to her left hand, and when he oted no sign of a wedding ring, he relaxed a little. There was a good chance she was involved with someone, though, he reminded himself. A woman who looked like she did couldn’t possibly be wanting for dates.

Then he reminded himself that all of that was immaterial. He’d come back for Georgia because she was his friend. Because he’d left her at a time when she needed him, and he wanted to make up for that. What difference did it make if she was married, or even involved? Romance had never been on his mind where she was concerned. He just had a debt to pay to her, and a score to settle with her father, that was all.

Before he realized what he was doing, he pulled her into his arms and hugged her fiercely. He tried to tell himself it was an embrace two very good friends would naturally share after such a lengthy separation. But as he wrapped his arms around her waist and settled his chin on top of her head, his heart began to beat faster than it had for more than twenty years.

When he felt her stiffen in his arms, he immediately released her, remembering that she had never been comfortable with close physical contact. Even where he had been concerned, he recalled sadly. She had always been the first to pull away whenever one of them had needed holding.

He let her move within arm’s length of him, but no farther. For long moments they only studied each other wordlessly, lost in thought, memory and speculation.

Jack McCormick, Georgia marveled. What on earth was he doing back in Carlisle? He was quite possibly the last person she might have expected to see after all this time. But even two decades had not diminished her memory of him. He was still breathtakingly handsome, still touched by roughness and softened with gentleness.

Still able to make her heart race by his mere presence in the room.

It was as if something inside her that had been chained down for centuries suddenly broke free and soared toward the light. All the adolescent longing that had gone unassuaged, all the needful yearning left unfulfilled, all the tentative joy she’d never found elsewhere in her life... All of it rose to the surface in a swift, stormy rush of emotion, and she felt all over again as if she were fourteen years old and would die without Jack McCormick in her life.

His hug had been almost too much for her to bear. How many times in their youth had she been forced to push him away before he somehow discovered just how desperately in love with him she’d been? His embraces back then had resulted from his need for comfort after his foster father’s overbearing bullying. But hers had gone beyond a desire for comforting. Hers had been because she simply wanted to be as close to Jack as two people could be.

What would he say now if she told him how often she had fantasized about making love with him, even at the tender age of fourteen? What would he do if she confessed right now that she’d wanted nothing more in her young life than for him to be the man who made her a woman?

But someone else had performed that service years ago, and Georgia had always regretted not asking Jack to be the one. He would have been more gentle, more tender, more loving. The event might even have been special if Jack had been the one sharing it with her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him.

He didn’t answer right away, and Georgia felt a tingle of apprehension shimmy up her spine.

“I needed to talk to someone.”

She chuckled a little nervously. “Don’t tell me you’re so alone that you have to look up a friend from twenty years ago when you want to have a conversation.”

“It’s about my brother and sister.”

Georgia sobered immediately. She wondered if she was still the only person he’d ever confided in about his family, then decided she must be if he’d risked a time warp back to Carlisle just to have someone to reminisce with about them.

“Is there someplace we can talk?” he asked.

“What’s wrong with right here?”

He looked around, and seemed to realize for the first time that the place was empty except for the two of them. Apparently unmoved by the knowledge, however, he said, “Maybe your house would be better. I’d rather not talk about them in public.”

“But—”

Her objection was cut short, because Rudy chose that moment to appear behind the counter, and he was clearly suspicious of the scene that greeted him.

“Georgia?” he asked in an aged, anxious voice. “This guy buggin’ you?”

She almost laughed out loud. Bugging her? Jack McCormick had been bugging her since she was thirteen years old, when he had sent her pubescent hormones into a frenzy.

“No, Rudy,” she told the old man softly. “This is Jack McCormick. You might remember him. He used to live in Carlisle. But only very briefly.” Too briefly, she added to herself.

Rudy scratched his grizzled chin. “McCormick, eh? Yeah, I remember you. Got in a lot of fights, right?”

A small, irritated sound erupted from the back of Jack’s throat. “Yeah, that was me. I’ve changed quite a bit since then, though.”

“What?” Rudy asked. “Ya don’t fight no more?”

Jack glanced down at the floor, and Georgia got the feeling it wasn’t so much to avoid Rudy’s gaze as it was to avoid hers. “I didn’t say that,” he told the other man. But he didn’t elaborate further.

Rudy nodded, but still seemed wary of the no-longer juvenile delinquent. “Where’s Molly?” he asked Georgia.

At the mention of her name, the big yellow dog on the floor lifted her head from her paws and wagged her tail. She, too, had been eyeing Jack since he’d entered the restaurant, but seemed to harbor considerably less concern about his character than Rudy did.

“She’s right here,” Georgia told the old man, trying to hide a smile. “So don’t worry. Molly will protect me if Jack starts to become his old beastly self.”

Rudy nodded slowly, but added, “I’ll be here all night if ya need me. Supper crowd will be comin’ in any time now.”

Georgia smiled at him. This time of year the “supper crowd” consisted of maybe a half-dozen people, but she took comfort in Rudy’s obvious concern, and his assurance that the entire community would rush to her rescue should Jack try anything funny.

“Thanks,” she said as she lifted a hand in farewell. “Molly? You coming, girl?”

As the couple turned to leave, the big dog ambled after them. The moment the restaurant door closed behind them, the wind assailed them with bitter cold. Georgia braved a glimpse at Jack as they strode toward his car, trying to assimilate the boy of seventeen and his sloppy jalopy with the man of forty who drove something sophisticated and expensive. He’d sold his beloved, beat-up Nova just before leaving town, and although he’d never mentioned it, she knew it was because he’d needed the money. Now, however, judging by his chosen mode of transportation, money wasn’t much of a problem for him.

Jack McCormick had changed, she realized. A lot. And she wasn’t sure whether change was something she wanted to see in him or not. With a wistful sigh, she folded herself into the car after Molly and told herself not to think about it.

Two

They drove the mile to her house in silence. Molly sat in the back seat, leaning forward between them, her heavy panting the only sound interrupting the quiet. Jack gazed with interest at his surroundings as they made their journey. He’d spent less than two years in Carlisle as a teenager, and it had been only one of a dozen locations where the state had placed him. But the small town had always been stamped indelibly at the front of his brain, never to be forgotten. Because this was where he had known Georgia Lavender.

Since his parents’ deaths when he was seven years old, Jack had been shuttled and shunted from group home to foster home to correctional home and back again. He’d been a discipline problem from day one, fighting and backtalking and being generally bad tempered. That’s what happened when a boy was ripped from his home and his family without warning or concern. But no one had ever bothered to address that fact. No one had much cared. Not until he had come to Carlisle.

The place had changed a lot, he noted. It had grown outward and upward, and looked to be quite prosperous for a small coastal community. Georgia lived in a subdivision that hadn’t existed when Jack had last been here, in an area well away from town, where the beach and ocean were too treacherous for swimming, but breathtaking to view, and made less accessible by jagged dunes.

As they drew nearer, he saw that the houses were built up on stilts, unoccupied for the most part, with signs in the front yards advertising that they were for rent. Georgia’s house, sitting alone at the end of a cul-de-sac, seemed particularly isolated, a fact that didn’t set well with him for some reason.

It, too, was perched on stilts, but where some of the other houses were looming structures of two and three stories, geometrically designed with sharp corners and slanted lines, hers was a simple ranch style with a series of stairways that started on the ground and wound about the house, ending in a square deck placed at the center of her roof.

As they emerged from his car, he heard her keys jingling, Molly barking at nothing and the wind whipping wildly about the softly moaning house. And all of a sudden he felt as if time and the rest of the world had receded into nothing.

“You’re awfully isolated out here,” he said, speaking his earlier observations aloud as they trudged up the creaking steps.

“Yes, I am,” she agreed as she shoved back a fistful of hair that the wind had tossed ferociously down on her forehead. “I love it here.”

The interior of the house reminded Jack of Georgia’s bedroom in the big house in Carlisle, where he had spent many a night as a teenager—unbeknownst to her father, of course—when he’d been too afraid to go home. Soft colors, lots of light and flowers everywhere—in paintings, on wreaths, in the fabric of the furniture, growing in pastel-colored planters. Everything was scented with the subtle fragrance of spring blossoms, made all the more poignant because it was the dead of winter and he knew he should be denied such pleasures at this time of year.

He noted a telescope angled upward in front of the windows that faced the ocean, and remembered that she had always had an interest in astronomy, something her father had insisted she turn into a degree in astrophysics or aeronautical engineering. Jack wondered how things were between her and her old man these days. Although he’d been keeping track of Gregory Lavender from a business standpoint, he knew little about the man’s personal life. Certainly, from the looks of her, Georgia seemed to be out from under his thumb, but there was no way of knowing for sure where father and daughter stood currently.

Wordlessly she closed the door behind them, went to the kitchen to fill Molly’s bowl with fresh water, returned to the living room to shrug out of her coat, and turned to face Jack fully.

“So what’s the real reason you’ve come back to Carlisle?” she asked bluntly.

He removed his own jacket and tossed it onto the same chair upon which she had discarded hers. But he remained rooted on the other side of the room opposite her, not certain exactly how to act. Georgia’s question was a simple one, he told himself. So why did he find it so impossible to answer her?

When he met her gaze, he realized she was studying him intently, much as she had been since he’d pushed through the doors of the restaurant a half hour earlier. “Have I changed that much?” he asked quietly, sidestepping her question for the time being.

She nodded. “Yes. Yes, you have.”

“So have you.”

“It’s been more than twenty years, Jack,” she said with a shrug. “That’s a long time. People can’t help but change.”

He nodded. “I know. I just didn’t expect...”

“What?”

He shook his head and left his statement unfinished.

“He’s dead, you know.”

Georgia couldn’t imagine what made her blurt out the news that way—the words just tumbled out without her even having planned to say them. A muscle twitched once in Jack’s jaw, but he offered no other indication that he’d even heard what she said.

“Buck, I mean,” she added softly. She hadn’t uttered the name of Jack’s foster father for two decades, but it still left a bad taste in her mouth when she did. “He died about three years ago. Finally drank himself to death. Faye is dead, too. About six months ago.”

“I knew Buck was dead, but I hadn’t heard about Faye,” Jack said, a complete absence of any kind of emotion in his voice at the mention of his former foster parents. “Can’t say that I’m sorry to hear it, though.”

Georgia nodded. Although his foster mother hadn’t beaten him up the way his foster father had, she’d never done anything to stop the abuse, either. It was easy to understand why Jack couldn’t forgive either of them.

No other words passed between them for several moments, then Georgia remembered she was playing hostess to someone she hadn’t seen in ages. “Would you like some coffee?” She gestured at the fireplace behind her. “I could switch on the fire. We could spend the whole afternoon catching up on everything that’s happened since we saw each other last.”

“That could take a lot longer than one afternoon,” Jack told her with a sad smile.

She shrugged again, a little more anxiously this time. “Then we’ll just have to give it more than one afternoon.”

He said nothing in reply to that, and Georgia nibbled her lower lip fretfully. This was just too weird. Although she had never forgotten. Jack McCormick, he was frozen in her mind as a boy of barely eighteen. A surly, angry boy at that, one who’d had no money, no prospects and no hope when he’d left Carlisle. The man who stood before her now was like a stranger. He looked like Jack, kind of, and he spoke like Jack, in a way, and he moved like Jack, a bit, but he wasn’t Jack. Not the Jack she remembered, anyway.

That other Jack had been such a big part of her life at a time when she’d needed someone badly. For one full year in her young life Georgia had had someone to care for, someone who had cared for her in return. For one full year she’d felt like a human being, and it had been enough to generate the strength she’d needed to start pulling away from her father’s bullying.

But after one year, just when things were starting to look up—for her, at least—Jack had disappeared from her life completely, and she’d been left alone again.

Not that she hadn’t expected him to leave. From that first afternoon when he’d driven her away from her father’s wrath, Jack had made no secret of the fact that the day he turned eighteen, when he was no longer answerable to the state of Virginia, he was hightailing it from Carlisle forever. He’d made clear, too, that he’d never again—not in a million, trillion years—set one foot in any of the towns where he’d been placed as a kid.

And Georgia had never doubted that he would stick to that vow as if it were sacred. However, she’d always thought he might consider taking her with him when he left Carlisle, even if she wasn’t of legal age. Or that he might come back for her when she turned eighteen, too. At the very least, she had thought he would tell her goodbye before he left.

But none of those things had happened. Back then, she had told herself she would be prepared for Jack’s departure when it came, and that she would somehow manage without him once he was gone. And she had. Although it had been painful to lose him, Jack’s determination to survive and thrive in the face of adversity had infected Georgia enough to keep her going, even after he was gone.

And now he was back, a man full grown, driving a car that cost more than most houses, self-assured, successful, dynamic. He was no longer surly, but there still seemed to be an unmistakable anger about something simmering just beneath his surface. Evidently, these days he had plenty in the way of money and prospects. As for hope, however...

“I’m not going to be in town for very long,” he said in response to her earlier suggestion that they give it more than one afternoon, scattering her ruminations.

“So why did you come back?” she asked again. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe you’re here because I was the only person you could talk to, and I just so happen to still be in Carlisle.”

“Something that surprises me, quite frankly,” he remarked, once again avoiding a response to her real question.

She shrugged. “This is my home, Jack. It’s where I grew up. I have a business here, and people know me. I even have a few friends these days. I like Carlisle,” she told him simply. “In spite of...everything else.”

“And just what’s your father up to these days?” he asked.

That was Jack, she remembered as a ripple of tension seared her belly. Always straight to the point. “I assume he’s the same as always. We don’t see too much of each other. Not deliberately, anyway.”

“Why not?”

She gazed at him blandly. “You, above all people, should know the answer to that question.”

He shook his head. “I just thought you might have patched things up between the two of you by now.”

She expelled a sound of disgust. “Not likely.”

He nodded, as if the information were no surprise at all. The silence stretched between them until it became an almost palpable thing. Georgia stared at Jack, and Jack stared at Georgia. Both of them obviously had a lot on their minds. So why weren’t they talking about much of anything?

“Jack,” she finally said when she could no longer tolerate the quiet, “for the last time, what are you doing back in Carlisle?”

She thought she detected a slight hesitation before he told her, “I have some business here.”

Georgia nodded, resignation coiling like a chunk of ice in her midsection. So it wasn’t she who had brought him back to town, after all. “What kind of business?”

“Long story. But obviously having to come to Carlisle reminded me of you. And then I got the news about my brother and sister, and...” He inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. “I wanted to see you, Geo. I’ve wanted to see you for a long time now.”

Geo. It was the nickname Jack alone had used for her. A term of endearment. A term of affection. And hearing it again for the first time in more than twenty years made Georgia want to cry for some reason. She turned hastily, recalling that she had been about to make coffee, and crossed quickly to the kitchen. Unfortunately, with the layout of the small house being what it was, the kitchen was pretty much just an extension of the living room, so she was still well within Jack’s view.