Seducing Nell

“What does that mean?” Kyle asked with genuine interest

Nell sat up, scrubbing her nose with her sleeve. “It means yuk, ugh, disgusting and gross.”

“Good morning to you, too,” Kyle said.

She scowled at him. “Pleasant awakenings—so that’s what you meant.”

“His name is Sherlock.” The dog was sitting back on its heels. It was a bloodhound, lugubrious of face and drooping of jowl. “He’s quite old, very deaf, and loves all the guests—Oh, good morning, Gladys. This is Nell. Remember I mentioned last night that she was camped by the beach? Well, the party got a little rowdy. So I brought her here.”

“Them young fellas, they only go there once a month or so, but when they take over that beach they make more noise than the gulls on the first day of lobster season. How do you do, dear? I bet you’re hungry. How about some nice pancakes and bacon?”

Gladys was fiftyish, with tight gray curls and matronly hips. “I hope we didn’t disturb you,” Nell said.

“Arthur and me, we’ll sleep through the Second Coming.” Gladys chuckled heartily at her own joke.

“You make yourself right at home, dear. I’ll go put the coffee on.”

Kyle’s hair was damp from the shower and he was clean shaven. Feeling very much at a disadvantage, Nell got to her feet Her hair was tumbling to her shoulders and her clothes were crumpled from having slept in them. She said warily, “Where’s the bathroom?”

“End of the hall.” He thrust his hands deep in his pockets. “Those caribou have a lot to answer for.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“Without them, we wouldn’t have met.”

Although the look on his face was inscrutable, his gist seemed entirely clear to Nell. He’d rather not have met her. Which, when she was suffering from an almost uncontrollable urge to kiss him good—morning, was a lousy way to begin the day. Nell said, “I have one unbreakable rule—no arguments before I have my first cup of coffee. Excuse me, please.”

She picked up her haversack, edged past him and hurried down the hall toward the bathroom.

CHAPTER THREE

A SHOWER did wonders for Nell. Her haversack always contained her toilet articles. She’d borrowed Gladys’s hair dryer and had just finished brushing out her long hair when Kyle tapped on the door. “Pancakes are ready.”

She could braid it later. Nell opened the door. “Lead me to them,” she said.

But Kyle’s big body was blocking the hallway, and there was something in his face that stopped her in her tracks. He reached out one hand, letting his fingers slide the length of her hair, gathering a handful of it and lifting it to his cheek. As though he was paying homage to her, Nell felt, and knew, absurdly, that she wanted to cry.

He said huskily, “You’re so beautiful. So alive. I…”

But as she waited, breathless, his mouth suddenly tightened. A flash of pain, so short-lived that she might have imagined it, banished the tenderness that had suffused his features, and with shocking violence he dropped her hair, wiping his palm down his jeans as though her touch had contaminated him. Turning on his heel, he grated, “Come on. Gladys is waiting for us.”

Numbly, Nell followed him through the living room and into the kitchen, which smelled deliciously of hot coffee and bacon. She carried on a conversation with Gladys that apparently made sense, she avoided looking at Kyle and she drained her coffee mug in record time. During this process, anger slowly began to spread through her, like the heat of the coffee. How dare Kyle treat her as though she were a mechanical doll, something to be turned on and off with the flick of a switch!

But as she munched on apple pancakes drenched in syrup, she remembered the way pain had ripped away his gentleness and stole a glance at him through her lashes. If her past had its demons, so, too, did his; not for the first time she wondered how he had hurt his knee.

“Last night, Kyle said you were all the way from Holland, dear,” Gladys said, passing her the butter. “Now what brought you to Caplin Bay? You can’t even find it on some of the maps.”

In the shower, Nell had had time to think. She didn’t want to camp in Caplin Bay again tonight, even though she was sure the partygoers were all nursing horrendous hangovers and would go nowhere near the beach. Furthermore, her money was limited, and she’d spent the better part of two weeks putting off the meeting that was the real reason for her trip. She said with a modicum of truth, “Ever since I arrived in Newfoundland I’ve been hearing about the outports—the settlements that you can only reach by boat. I’d like to stay in one for a while. So today I plan to take the coastal boat to Mort Harbour.”

Although she had rehearsed this sentence while she was rinsing her hair, somehow it didn’t sound as convincing as she would have liked. However, Gladys apparently noticed nothing amiss. “Well now, that’s nice, dear. You and Kyle can go together.”

Nell’s jaw dropped. “You’re going to Mort Harbour, Kyle?”

“That’s the plan,” he said evenly.

“Why are you going?”

“To visit friends of a good friend of mine.”

His reason sounded no more convincing than her own. Although she couldn’t very well say that. “What time does the boat go?” she asked weakly.

“Four o’clock,” Gladys said. “Want I should call Mary and make reservations for you, dear?”

Nell already knew that Mary Beattie owned the only guest house in Mort Harbour and she’d already decided she must stay there for a few days because it was the obvious way to get to know the people who lived in the outport. “All right,” she said. “I’ll start out there anyway. Thanks, Gladys.”

Within minutes, Gladys was putting down the phone. “You’re all set Good thing we phoned. She only has two rooms and Kyle had reserved the other one.”

Nell’s eyes flew to his. “Aren’t you staying with your friends?”

“No,” he said.

Quit prying was what he was really saying. “You were right about those caribou,” Nell announced.

“You told me you couldn’t afford bed—andbreakfasts.”

Because Nell was essentially a truthful woman, she tended to trip herself up when she did lie. “My financial state is really none of your business,” she said loftily, and speared another pancake.

“We’re never told what the princess says to St George after he rescues her, are we?” Kyle said unpleasantly, and got up from the table. “Thank you, Gladys. I’ll be back later to get my stuff.”

He had disappeared by the time Nell finished eating. She went to the beach and collected her gear, then did a wash and hung it on Gladys’s line. The wind billowed through it, ballooning her T—shirts as though they all contained women in the last stages of pregnancy. Like her grandmother all those years ago, Nell reflected, and went for a brisk hike along the shore. It took only the first five minutes for her to conclude she couldn’t possibly plan a strategy for meeting her grandfather; she simply had to wait on events. The rest of the walk she spent trying not to think about anything but the whitecaps on the water and the gulls wheeling and dipping on the wind. Worrying about her grandfather was a totally nonproductive pursuit And, apparently, she would have met Kyle sooner or later anyway; Mort Harbour was definitely too small for a man like Kyle Marshall to remain anonymous.

Was the good friend he had mentioned a woman?

With vicious strength, she fired a rock into the tumbling waves. His past couldn’t have been devoid of women. Women in the plural. Not one of whom was any of her business. If she’d been smart, she’d have come straight from St. John’s to Mort Harbour, rather than allowing herself to be seduced by the beauties of the national park at Terra Nova. Then she wouldn’t have met him.

She tramped another two miles along the rocky beach, ate a banana and a muffin for lunch, then hiked back to Gladys’s. Her clothes were dry. She repacked her gear under Sherlock’s reproachful brown eyes, left money for Gladys and headed for the wharf. Kyle was already there. She nodded at him distantly and marched up the gangplank to board the boat, a move that felt every bit as momentous as entering the huge jet in Amsterdam that had brought her across the Atlantic.

The coastal boat, stout and sturdy, rather like an overgrown tug, had a passenger lounge, a snack bar and a big shed for freight anchored on the deck. It was clearly a working boat; yet there was an air of sociability about it that Nell found very appealing. She propped her pack by the shed, watching as boxes of groceries and supplies were casually handed down from the dock and stacked in the shed with no system that she could discern. At about quarter past four, the gangplank was drawn up, the mooring lines were thrown on board and the captain blasted a signal as they pulled away from the dock. The strip of water widened.

Nell moved to the stern, staring mesmerized at the wake. She was on the last lap of a journey that had started the day she had read her grandmother’s diary in the attic of the old brick house that belonged to Nell’s mother and father, the house where Nell had grown up. The diary, musty smelling, the ink faded, had described at great length all the members of Anna’s family, her friends, the fears of war, the hunger and travails of the occupation. But then had come the liberation, and the diary had changed. There were no more close—written pages dense with adjective and adverb. Instead, the entries were terse, with big gaps between them.

A Canadian regiment had been billeted for a weekend in the village of Kleinmeer where Anna lived. Anna had met one of the soldiers and instantly fallen in love with him. His name was Conrad Gillis, and he was from a little place called Mort Harbour in Newfoundland. Delirious with the joy of liberation and the pangs of love, Anna had taken Conrad to the old barn on her uncle’s farm. There they’d made love several times. Anna’s actual words had been cryptic: “We have been together in the barn. The sun caught the dust in the air and danced with it. I didn’t tell him I love him.” Then Conrad’s regiment had to leave and Anna discovered she was pregnant. “My moeder and my vader say I may keep the child and live with them. I am lucky. My friend, Anneke, is being forced to give up her baby…I have made inquiries. Conrad is married. So there will be no marriage for me. I have brought disgrace upon my family in the eyes of the village. The only thing I am glad of is that I didn’t tell him I love him…Today my daughter, Gertruda, was born.” And there the entries had ended.

Gertruda was Nell’s mother.

The spaces between these short sentences had seemed to reverberate with all that had not been said. The village was small. Gertruda would have grown up knowing she was different, that somehow her very presence had brought shame upon the family. No wonder she had moved away from Kleinmeer as soon as she was old enough. No wonder she had embraced a rigorous respectability and the strictest of rules and had married a man twenty—seven years her senior in whom there was no spark of passion. No wonder she had warned Nell against the perils of sex.

The tragedy was that Gertruda had been dead two months before Nell had found the diary; so Nell could never tell her mother that now she understood her behavior. Understood and forgave. For Nell had suffered from the stultifying atmosphere of the old brick house: the lack of laughter, fun and play; the harsh rules that had set her apart from the other children; the sense of secrecy, of things kept from her that, nevertheless, affected her every move.

As far as she could remember, she had only met Anna once, and that was when she, Nell, had been very young, perhaps three or four. She had known she had a grandmother; she had also known, with a child’s perceptiveness, that this grandmother was not to be discussed.

And now she was on her way to meet Anna’s lover, Conrad Gillis. He, she could only assume, could have no idea that he had fathered a child in a foreign land or that he had a Dutch granddaughter. Her attempts to write a letter that would break this news to him before she arrived on his doorstep had all ended in the wastebasket—crumpled balls of paper that failed miserably to communicate what surely could only be said face—to—face.

So here she was on Fortune II on her way to Mort Harbour. She had made inquiries to ascertain that Conrad was still alive and living in the same place. And that was the extent of her knowledge. Except that she was scared to death.

From behind her, Kyle said, “You look as though you’re trying to solve all the world’s problems.”

They had moved beyond the shelter of Caplin Bay into more open water; the boat was heaving on the swell. Balancing against the rail, Nell turned to face him. “Just my own,” she said lightly. “How long will it take us to get there?”

“At least two hours—it’s on the far shore of the peninsula. And what are your problems, Petronella Cornelia?”

“Whether or not I’ll get seasick,” she said dulcetly.

“Right,” he replied wryly. “The wind’s sou’west—it’ll get rougher yet.”

He was standing astride, his hair a dark tangle, his jacket flattened to his chest “I bet you don’t get seasick,” Nell said.

“My dad was a fisherman—I was brought up around boats.”

Unable to contain a strong curiosity to know more about Kyle, Nell asked, “Here in Newfoundland?”

“A little outport on the northern peninsula. In those days, the coastal boat came twice a year, and there were no roads.” He grimaced. “It’s all too easy to romanticize the outports, especially in these days of urban blight But even though the fishing was good, my family was always dirt poor. Worked day and night and never got ahead.”

Although his clothes were casual, they weren’t cheap; she had instantly recognized the label on his rain jacket “You don’t look poor now,” Nell ventured.

“I got out—as soon as I could. And I stayed away.” He scowled at her. “Why am I telling you all this? I never talk about myself.”

“Are you married?” Appalled by her wayward tongue, Nell added in a rush, “Scrap that question. It’s nothing to me whether you’re married or not”

The bow of Fortune II rose to meet the swell, and spray lashed her cheek, plastering her hair to her head. “We’d better move forward before we get soaked,” Kyle said. He grabbed her arm, and together they lurched to the shelter of the bridge. Bracing himself with an arm above her head, he said, unsmiling, “No, I’m not married. Came close once, but it didn’t work out. Is there a man in Europe waiting for you to come home?”

She shook her head. The wind was snapping the flag at the stern and flinging rough—edged curtains of spray against the shed, and perhaps it was this that made her blurt, “I don’t want to go back to Holland. I want to stay here.”

“In Newfoundland? Forget it, Nell. The economy’s the pits.”

Her need had nothing to do with the economy; somehow she had expected Kyle to understand that. Obscurely disappointed, she watched the spume streak backward from the caps of the waves.

“Holland’s your home,” he added reasonably. “That’s where you belong.”

“No, I don’t! I don’t care if I ever go back.” She suddenly couldn’t bear the closeness of his big body. Ducking beneath his arm, she lunged for the railing that was on the lee side of the boat and stared out over the wind—whipped water, knowing that her eyes were stinging with tears. Then she saw his hands grip the rail on either side of her so that she was encircled by him. Twisting around, she choked, “And don’t you dare laugh at me!”

“I hate to see you cry,” he said in an odd voice. “You’re running away from a man, aren’t you, Nell?”

“I don’t let men close enough to me that I have to run away. It’s this place…there’s something about it. I feel as though I’ve come home, as though I’ve found what—ever ever I was searching for without even knowing I needed it.”

The boat plunged into a trough. Nell staggered, banging her nose against the zipper on Kyle’s jacket He drew her closer, steadying her. “Why don’t you let men close to you?”

“Why haven’t you ever married?” she countered.

“We both have secrets. That’s what you’re really saying.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” she asked with a touch of bitterness. She had grown up in a household of secrets. Secrets that made her the woman she was.

“I sure have,” Kyle said, and for a moment his irises turned the same color as the black and depthless ocean. Then, in an abrupt change of mood, he grinned down at her. “I’ve got an idea—why don’t we go up on the bridge? We can look at the charts and see where we’re going.”

When he smiled at her like that, her very bones seemed to melt in her body. I’d probably jump off the bridge if he asked me to, she thought foolishly. “Okay,” she said.

“Newfoundland’s a hell of a place to live, Nell,” he said with sudden violence. “Nine months of winter and three months of moose flies.”

She had the impression he was talking more to himself than to her. “Where do you live?” she said.

“At the moment, precisely nowhere. Come on, we’re going to the bridge. First thing you know, I’ll be spilling out my entire life story to those big blue eyes of yours.”

She said impetuously, “I wish you would.”

“I’ll tell you this much—I’m in no position right now to meet a woman, Nell.” He let go of the railing. “Now head for the ladder.”

“You’re giving orders again.”

“You’re damn right I am. Move it.”

“Only because I want to,” she said haughtily, and began climbing the narrow stairs, clutching the wet railings as hard as she could.

The view was worth the climb. Fortune II was skirting the coastline, with its long range of rugged, tree—clad cliffs against which waterfalls spread their lacy white palms. Ragged, gray—edged clouds raced through the sky, daubing the hills with light and shadow. The captain pointed out deserted graveyards and abandoned settlements of indescribable loneliness, and in a manner that reminded Nell of Wendell, told her about the harrowing winters of the early settlers from Cornwall and Devon. Kyle drew her attention to nesting terns and the huge white gannets swooping close to the waves. And Nell fell in love even more deeply with a landscape as different from her homeland as it could be.

It’s my grandfather’s blood in me, she suddenly knew in a flash of insight. That’s why I love this place. Of course it is. Why didn’t I think of that before?

Somehow this realization seemed to conquer the fear that had been gnawing at her ever since she’d embarked on the coastal boat. But when, two hours later, she caught her first glimpse of the tiny outport of Mort Harbour through a gap in the cliffs, all her fears rushed back in full force. She glanced around to see where Kyle was, hoping he wasn’t watching her.

He, too, was gazing at the little patch of houses whose presence seemed only to magnify the terrible fragility of human striving and the vastness of sea and land. The emotions on his face were as raw as the slash in the cliffs. Dread, Nell reflected, and a terrible reluctance, as if he’d rather be anywhere else than here. Emotions that were so akin to her own that she had to suppress the urge to rush over to him and offer him comfort.

He didn’t look like a man who was simply visiting friends.

Secrets. He had as many as she.

She turned away, not wanting him to know she had seen feelings that were intensely private. The boat was entering the harbor, which was ringed by gaunt hills; like a womb it enclosed a long, low island in its calm inner waters. As they approached the government wharf, Nell saw little fish sheds on stilts at the cliff base, small square houses huddled together for solace, and brightly painted Cape Islanders rocking gently in the wake of the coastal boat’s passing. What if her grandfather was away? Or ill? What if he wouldn’t see her?

Her knuckles white with strain, she gripped the railing so tightly that her nails made tiny moons in the paint, and if she could have miraculously transported herself back to Middelhoven and her parents’ old brick house with its tall windows and its yews in the front garden, she might well have done so. Then a hand dropped onto her sleeve, a man’s hand with long, lean fingers and a dusting of dark hair over the taut bones. Kyle’s hand. She wished him a thousand miles away.

“Nell, what’s wrong?” he asked urgently.

She tried to pull her arm away. “Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that—something’s up. You’re not just a tourist checking out the quaint little Newfoundland outports. I know you’re not.”

“Stop it, Kyle!”

“You can trust me, you know,” he said.

She couldn’t tell anyone why she was here, not until she had spoken to Conrad. That much, at least, she owed her unknown grandfather. “Please—just leave me alone. You’re imagining things.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“Whereas you don’t seem able to understand when you’re not wanted,” she declared, and saw an answering anger harden his features.

“That’s the second time you’ve told me to get lost Guess I’m kind of a slow learner,” he snarled. “Why don’t we just agree to have nothing to do with each other from now on? That, it seems to me, would be simpler all round.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Nell retorted. Which was a lie if ever there was one. Until she’d met Kyle, she’d always considered herself a truthful person.

From directly above their heads, the boat’s horn blasted its signal of arrival. Kyle flinched, his fingers digging into her arm as the shock ran through his body.

His reaction seemed all out of proportion to Nell. She asked uncertainly, “Are you okay?”

The engines had gone into reverse. Under cover of the noise, Kyle grated, “You want it both ways, don’t you? The sweet, womanly concern and the barefaced lies. I don’t need either one, do you hear me?”

Because she couldn’t possibly have told the truth about the purpose of her visit, Nell had done the opposite and lied. In the process, she’d lost something irretrievably precious: Kyle’s trust What more did she have to lose? “You’re not just visiting friends—I saw your face.”

“What I’m doing is my own goddamned business and not yours. From now on, stay out of my life, will you?”

“I don’t care what you’re doing!” she cried, adding one more lie to the total. “Just leave me alone!”

Unfortunately, the captain cut the engines on her last four words. Heads turned, and there was a titter of laughter from the other passengers.

“I will never again go anywhere near a caribou,” Nell seethed, turned on her heel and seized her pack out of the shed. As the gangplank was lowered, she hung back, watching them unload the freight, steadfastly refusing to even look for Kyle. Not until the crowd had thinned on the wharf did she ask directions for Mary Beattie’s house.

Long wooden boardwalks had been built across the rocks, linking the houses, the fish shacks and the general store. Nell tramped along, wondering where Conrad lived. She was only a few hundred feet from the square blue house that was Mary Beattie’s when she saw Kyle emerge from the side door and start climbing the grassy slope behind the house. He had not, she was almost sure, seen her. At least she was spared making artificial conversation with him in front of her unknown landlady.

The blue house had bright pink trim, orange daylilies swarming around the side door, and scarlet geraniums lining a path outlined with white—painted rocks. Before she was even in the door, Nell felt her mouth lift in a smile; nothing could be further from the house where she had grown up. Mary Beattie was also a delight: young, pregnant and friendly. The only catch was that the two guest rooms shared a bathroom and were cut off from the kitchen and living room by a door that was kept firmly shut.

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