Second Honeymoon

The ground was springy and the air smelled sweetly of moss and fallen needles; Troy tramped along, his heart pounding in his chest because at any moment now he might see Lucy.

Tucked into a sheltered cove, the Seal Bay Inn was a two-storied cedar building, with an expanse of glass overlooking the ocean and a generous deck where chairs and pots of flowers were scattered; a small cabin sat a little apart from it in the trees. “It’s delightful,” Troy said spontaneously. “Who built it, Keith?”

“Me.”

“You did a fine job.”

Keith said nothing, merely gestured for Troy to go ahead of him through the sliding glass door. It opened into a spacious living area paneled in pine; the sea and sky were as much a part of the room as the comfortable sofas and well-furnished bookshelves. An alcove was taken up by a long trestle table laid for dinner. Then Troy heard footsteps coming down the hall and felt his heart rise into his throat. Lucy. It had to be Lucy.

But the woman who entered the room was very different from Lucy. For one thing, she was at least eight months pregnant; for another her hair was as straight and dark as Martine’s, although it was pulled back into a ponytail from a face unadorned by make-up. She said in a friendly voice, “You’re our new guest—Mr Daniels, I believe?”

Struggling to overcome a crushing disappointment, Troy remembered that he’d reserved under a false name to avoid alerting Lucy to his arrival. He said awkwardly, and untruthfully, “I hope you don’t mind—my friend Daniels couldn’t come at the last minute. So I took his place. Donovan’s the name.”

“That’s no problem. Welcome to Shag Island, Mr Donovan. I’m Anna McManus.”

Because her smile was innocent of guile, Troy felt ashamed of his deception. Fighting down the urge to ask about Lucy, he went upstairs with her and approved his room.

“Dinner’s in half an hour—I ring the bell,” she said. “The bar’s downstairs; you keep your own tab. Please let me know if there’s anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant.”

Give me back my wife, he thought wildly, and with relief closed the door behind her. He’d hoped to meet Lucy with some semblance of privacy; now, it would seem, she’d be waiting on all the guests at the dinner table.

Her face, when she first saw him, would tell him all he needed to know. He must keep his eyes glued to her face.

But thirty-five minutes later, when Troy was seated in the alcove, the woman who carried in the bowls of steaming fish chowder was plump and middle-aged, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the stove. The widowed Mrs Mossop, thought Troy, and politely made conversation with the four other guests, whose names he’d forgotten as soon as he’d heard them and whose impassioned discussion about a buff-breasted sandpiper couldn’t have interested him less. Lucy surely hadn’t left the island, he thought, his throat constricting with terror. She must be in the kitchen, working behind the scenes. She had to be.

However, Anna was the cook that evening—so Mrs Mossop informed them, when one of the guests complimented her on the roast chicken. “It’s Lucy’s day off,” she said. “She’ll be back in the morning, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’ll make blueberry pancakes for breakfast; she was going berry-picking today.”

So she was here. He could relax.

But tomorrow seemed an aeon away. Troy ate his apple pie with less attention than it deserved, swallowed his coffee and excused himself. Hoping to bump into Lucy, he hiked along the shore until dusk. Then, knowing he hadn’t got a hope of sleeping yet, because he was still jet-lagged, he sat in one of the chairs on the deck, watching the last peach flush fade from the sky.

His body merged with the shadows. A pale arm of the Milky Way gestured gracefully across the heavens, whose blackness was studded with larger, brighter stars, their cold, impersonal light making him all the lonelier.

An owl hooted in the distance. A crescent moon rose, curved like an empty bowl; the tide sucked at the rocks. And then, overriding the sounds of the sea, Troy heard the one voice he’d been wanting to hear for months. Lucy’s voice. He twisted to face the woods and saw two people standing close together on the little porch of the cabin.

“Thanks so much, Quentin,” Lucy was saying, her clear, light voice carrying through the velvet darkness. “I had a lovely day. I promise I’ll make you some blueberry muffins tomorrow.”

“I got you home later than I’d planned—you have to get up so early in the morning.”

“It was worth it.”

“I’ll drop by tomorrow for the muffins.”

“Great.”

Because Troy’s eyes were so well adjusted to the night, he had no trouble seeing Quentin lean forward, kiss Lucy, then move back. His fingernails digging into the chair, he missed Quentin’s next, low-voiced remark; Lucy laughed lightheartedly in return and went inside the cabin. Quentin flipped on a flashlight and disappeared down the path. Lucy closed the door and almost immediately a soft light glowed through the windows facing the sea, as though she had lit a candle.

Troy surged to his feet. On the long plane flight from Vancouver he had played with a number of different scenarios for the meeting between him and Lucy; none of them had included another man. Every one of his carefully reasoned speeches vanishing from his mind, he jumped over the railing of the deck and marched across the grass. Raising his fist, he knocked on Lucy’s door.

“Coming!” she called, and even as she opened the door was saying, “Did you forget——?”

Her voice broke off. Because the light was behind her, Troy couldn’t see the expression on her face, although her gasp of shock and her instinctive step backward were only too obvious. Pushing past her, he went inside.

She had lit two oil lamps—one beside the double bed, one on the table by the window. It took him less than two seconds to see the marks of her occupancy in the tiny cabin, none of which included a photograph of either himself or Michael. Stationing himself against the edge of the table, he said viciously, “What a cozy little setupdoes the artist go along with it?”

“Troy! What are you doing here?” Her face paled, and suddenly she stepped to meet him, her fingers digging into his wrist under his light wool sweater. “Mother—is she all right? There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

“There’s a great deal wrong, which has nothing to do with your mother or your sisters and everything to do with us.”

“You frightened me…”

He glanced down. It was Lucy’s left hand that was clasping his wrist. Her finger was bare of the narrow gold band he had given her on their wedding-day. He said roughly, “Where’s your wedding-ring? And your engagement ring?”

She jerked her hand away. “I left the sapphire in Ottawa—a busy kitchen is no place for an expensive ring.” Her gray eyes openly defiant, she added, “I took off my wedding-band before I got on the boat to come over here.”

“You left your married name behind as well. Isn’t Donovan good enough for you any more?”

Suspicion had darkened her eyes. Ignoring his question, she said, “It was a Mr Daniels who was supposed to arrive today. Not you.”

“I made the reservation under a false name,” Troy said.

She was standing so close to him that her scent drifted to his nostrils. As though this was the only cue his body needed, it sprang to life, desire shooting sparks amid his anger like fresh wood tossed on to a fire. She looked wonderful, and this, too, fueled his rage. Her bare legs and her face were lightly tanned, her full breasts pushed at her loose cotton sweater, and her hair, longer than he had ever seen it, was a thick mass of mahogany curls. When Troy had last seen her, five months ago in Ottawa, she’d been thin and pale, with hollows under her cheekbones.

The last vestige of speech, planned or otherwise, vanished from Troy’s brain. He put his arms around Lucy, pulled her against the length of his body and kissed her.

She fit. He knew her as he knew himself. She was his.

His kiss deepened, his hands rediscovering with frantic hunger the arch of her ribs, the little bump of her vertebrae where her neck met her shoulders, the labyrinth of her soft, fragrant hair. I’ve come home, he thought, his rage dropping away like a garment no longer needed.

He had felt the shock slam through Lucy’s frame when he had first touched her; she had been standing as rigid as an iron bar in his embrace. But then she began to tremble and shake, like aspen leaves in the wind, clutching his sweater as if she might fall down were she to let go. Troy parted her lips with his tongue, wanting to savor the sweetness of her mouth, aching for her to open to him like a sunflower to the golden light of morning, to bend to his touch like long grass to a summer breeze.

“Lucy,” he whispered, showering kisses on her lips, her cheeks, her throat. “Lucy, I love you so much.” And somewhere, distantly, he remembered that these words had never been part of his plan.

She shoved against his chest with a strength that jarred every nerve in his body, and wrenched her mouth free. “Let go!” she cried. “Troy, let go of me or I’ll scream the place down.”

She looked entirely capable of doing so. Trying to gather his wits, which were scattered like confetti at a wedding, Troy said urgently, “You felt it, too, Lucy—you must have. It was like coming home after a long absence to the one you never meant to leave. It couldn’t only have been me who felt that way—tell me it wasn’t!”

“I don’t want to go home!” she cried, in a voice raw with pain. “Why do you think I left in the first place? Because I couldn’t bear it—because it was killing me.”

“Say it, why don’t you?” he rasped. “Because I was killing you—that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

Behind the question lay all the pain of their last six months together. Because if Lucy had withdrawn from her clients and her friends, she had also withdrawn from Troy, in a way that had devastated him.

In the first few days after the baby had died Lucy hadn’t cried at all. Stunned, blank-faced, she had wandered around the house like a lost soul. Then one day a neighbor who had been away had innocently asked after him and Lucy had broken down, shutting herself in the nursery and sobbing for hours at a time. Although Troy had done his best to comfort her, he had been fatally hampered by the rawness of his own grief, and, without him being quite sure how it had happened, her withdrawal had become a pattern that he’d never been able to break.

Worst than that, though, had been Lucy’s refusal to make love with him—her almost hysterical repudiation of the intimacy that had bound them together. At first Troy had understood. Even though he had been struggling, for her sake, to keep his own emotions under control, for days at a time, and from moment to moment, he had lived on the very edge of falling apart; and he had sensed the same fragility in Lucy. But later, when he had gone to her for consolation, desperate for a physical closeness that might keep the blackness of his sorrow at bay, she had struck him away.

She was afraid of getting pregnant again, or so she had said; she couldn’t bear to start another baby. It had made sense, and Troy had believed her. However, as week after week had passed, and she’d continued, stony-faced, to reject him, Troy had begun to doubt the rapture they had once shared, and even the love that bound them together; the woman who was his wife had become a woman he no longer knew. And that had been the cruelest cut of all. Lucy, his beloved wife, had turned into a stranger.

Shaking his head like a wounded animal, Troy came back to the present. Lucy had stepped away from him, perhaps frightened by something in his face, her body rigid with tension. She said, “I stayed away just so we wouldn’t go on hurting each other like this.”

“You’re a coward, Lucy.”

She flinched. Then, raising her chin, she said, “Maybe instead I know when to let go.”

It was Troy’s turn to flinch. His naïve assumption that he might have fallen out of love with Lucy had vanished without a trace at the very first sight of her; if anything he loved her all the more. That he had even considered the possibility of his love being dead seemed laughable in the unalterable fact of her presence. Let go of her? He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.

He might have to. She had taken off his ring and was no longer using his name. She had pushed him away when he’d kissed her. She had—to use her own wordslet him go.

Then she said, and there could be no mistaking her sincerity, “Troy, I don’t want to cause you more pain. Can’t we start this conversation over again?” She swallowed, the small movements of her throat filling him with frenzied longing. “Where did you come from? And why did you come?”

The table was hard against the backs of his thighs. Troy wrapped his fingers around the curved wood to keep himself from touching her and said harshly, “I came from Vancouver, which is where I happen to live—remember?”

Because the door to the cabin was still open a fraction, small brown moths were fluttering at the threshold. Lucy went to close the door, then leaned against it, visibly needing its support. “Why are you so angry?”

She had kissed Quentin, and laughed with him in the intimate darkness in front of her cabin. But Troy she had pushed away. “Oh, I’m not angry,” Troy said sarcastically. “I just love seeing you with another manpromising to make him muffins, for Pete’s sake—when for the last four months you haven’t even done me the courtesy of a phone call to let me know where you are.”

“We’re separated,” she said mutinously, pushing her hands in the pockets of her blue shorts.

He looked at her in silence. Her face was almost as well known to him as his own. Her cheeks were flushed, her features given character by the imperious bump in her nose and by her brows, dark as the wings of a bird. Her eyes were, like his own, gray, although in certain lights they swam mysteriously into depths of blue. “Separation must agree with you,” he said deliberately. “You look better than you have since Michael died.”

“Don’t!” she said in a choked voice.

Troy fought for control, bunching his knuckles against the table. But for far too long his feelings had been cooped up inside him, and the sight of her—so beautiful, so sorely missed, so unattainable—was more than he could stand.

“Don’t, what? Don’t mention Michael’s name?” he flared. “Pretend he never existed? We both know better than that, Lucy. We know his death was the reason you moved out on me.” Not for the life of him could he have disguised the anguish in his voice as he added, “You don’t even have a photo of him here…Do you hate him so much for dying?”

“I loved him too much to ever hate him for anything,” she whispered. “I’m trying to forget what happened——”

“Forget Michael?”

“I’m trying to accept his death, to move on—that’s why I keep my photos of him out of sight.”

“Move on with Quentin? Is that the plan? How clever of you to have taken off your wedding-ring before you got here.”

“Troy, you can’t push your way in here and start throwing accusations at me. Nothing gives you that right!”

“I do happen to be your husband,” he said, with deadly calm. “Or are you trying to forget that, too?”

“How can I? You won’t let me!”

He took a deep breath. “You asked why I came here. I came to offer you a choice. Either we live together as husband and wife or I want a divorce.”

Her eyes widened and her whole body tensed, like a sparrow who, safe in its hedgerow, had suddenly sighted a hawk perched on a nearby branch. She stared at him blankly while the slow seconds ticked by, and for the life of him Troy couldn’t have guessed what she was thinking. Then she said, her voice not quite steady, “That sounds more like an ultimatum than a choice.”

“You can call it what you like. I’ve gone on long enough being neither one thing nor the other—I’m not married because you refuse to live with me, but I’m not divorced either, so I’m not free to pursue any other options.”

“Other women, you mean,” she flashed.

“I didn’t say that, Lucy.” Belatedly Troy struggled to find the right words. “I want intimacy and companionship and a family—all the things you and I shared that felt so right. The things that made me so happy. I still want them with you, of course I do. But——”

“I can’t, Troy! Not again, never again…It hurts too much.”

It was a cry from the heart. “You can’t hide forever,” he said fiercely. “You never were afraid of living, Lucy. When I met you, you had enormous courage.”

“That was then. This is now. I’ve changed; you’ve got to accept that.”

“I won’t allow you to turn into someone less than who you are!”

“Maybe you have no control over it,” she retorted. “I’m not one of your patients—I’m not a nurse you can order around.”

“Dammit, I’m not like that! I love you—that’s why I’m here.”

“Love should set you free,” she said incoherently. “You brandish love in front of me like a set of chains.”

With deadly emphasis Troy said, “So the answer’s divorce.”

“Stop putting words into my mouth! I’ve seen you once in the last year, yet you waltz in here, as though you own the place, and expect me to make a huge decision with all kinds of ramifications in the space of five minutes, just because it’s convenient for you—you really do have a nerve, Troy.”

“So how long will it take you to make up your mind?”

“How can I possibly know that?” she snapped.

“You want to have your cake and eat it too,” he said furiously. “Keep me dangling like some kind of tame rabbit and in the meantime live exactly as you please. It won’t wash, Lucy. I’m sick to death of it.”

“I’m not making a decision at eleven o’clock at night that’s going to affect my whole life,” she seethed. “Go home, Troy. On the first plane. I’ll write to you; I promise.”

Knowing he was shooting himself in the foot, yet hearing the words spill from his mouth, Troy sneered, “And does that promise mean any more to you than the blueberry muffins you promised Quentin?”

“You really are intolerable,” Lucy cried. “Get out of here. I’ve had more than enough and right now divorce seems like a very viable option.” She whirled and flung the door open. “I’ve said I’ll write to you, and I will.”

He let go of the table, flexing his fingers, and crossed the painted wooden floorboards. “You can’t fool me—you don’t like the word divorce any more than I do. You might want to think about that tomorrow while you’re mixing that batch of muffins.” He looked straight into her eyes. “You might also want to think of what best honors our son’s memory. Running away from reality like a child afraid of the dark—or embracing everything that life brings with it, both good and bad, happy and tragic.” Lightly he ran one finger down her cheek to the corner of her mouth. “Goodnight.”

He walked out on to the porch and closed the door in Lucy’s face. Her jaw had dropped at his last speech—almost the only one he’d made that he’d rehearsed beforehand—and she’d been, temporarily anyway, speechless. He had needed that small victory, because his whole body felt sore, as though an unseen opponent had pummeled him mercilessly against a concrete wall.

She hadn’t agreed to a divorce. But she had accused him of holding her captive with a love that was like chains.

An image he hated with all his soul.

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN the bell chimed for breakfast the next morning, Troy had just finished shaving. He gazed at himself in the mirror, dabbing at the small cut on his chin. He looked exactly like a man who’d had about three hours’ sleep. Although three was probably an exaggeration.

His eyes, deepset at the best of times, were now bruised by the remnants of a night trapped between nightmares and the raging hunger of his sexuality. To know that Lucy was so near and yet so far had been torture. Worse, perhaps, had been the extinguishing of any hope that he no longer cared for her. He loved her—heart, soul and body. He’d probably, he thought gloomily, running a comb through his hair, love her forever.

For all the good it would do him.

His mother had once compared the color of his eyes to the rock from the quarry near where he’d grown up. Maybe chains were that same unrevealing, stony gray. If he stayed here, would he be treating Lucy like some medieval prisoner? Manacling her to him by force?

His cut appeared to have stopped bleeding; he should go down to breakfast. He straightened the mirror, remembering how Lucy had used to love tracing the strong line of his nose and the curve of his lips down to the cleft in his chin with her fingertip. She had used to find him irresistible.

Not any more.

If he were smart he’d take her advice and get on the first flight out of here. And then he’d accept the job in Arizona. If she did come back to him they could live just as well in Arizona as in Vancouver; with her at his side, he didn’t care where he lived.

She was afraid of love. Afraid of its costs and penalties.

Or else she hated his guts; that didn’t seem too unlikely either.

He adjusted the collar of his blue open-necked shirt and then, as though he couldn’t help himself, he replaced his wedding-ring on his left hand.

When he went downstairs only his place was empty at the trestle table; the birders had all been up at dawn and were now ravenously tucking into heaped blueberry pancakes and jugs of hot maple syrup. The buff-breasted sandpiper had been usurped by the long-billed dowitcher as the main topic of discussion. Troy drained his orange juice and helped himself to a pancake.

“Would you like coffee?”

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