There were the mountains of paperwork it had taken to register as a charity. Also, there was a photocopy of the application she had just submitted for rezoning, so that she could have Caleb’s House here, and share this beautiful, ridiculously large house on the lake with young women who needed its sanctuary.
One of her three cats snoozed in a beam of sunlight that painted the wooden floor in front of the old river-rock fireplace golden. A vase of tulips brought in from the yard, their heavy heads drooping gracefully on their slender stems, brightened the barn-plank coffee table. A book was open on its spine on the arm of her favorite chair.
There was not a hint of catastrophe in this wellordered scene, but it hadn’t just happened. You had to work on this kind of a life.
In fact, it seemed the scene reflected that she had finally gotten through picking up the pieces from the last time.
And somehow, last time did not mean her ended engagement to James Kennedy.
No, when she thought of her world being blown apart, oddly it was not the front-page picture of her fiancé, James, running down the street in Glen Oak without a stitch on that was forefront in her mind. No, forefront was a boy leaving, seven years ago.
The next morning, out on her deck, nestled into a cushioned lounge chair, Lucy looked out over the lake and took a sip of her coffee. Despite the fact the sun was still burning off the early-morning chill, she was cozy in her pajamas under a wool plaid blanket.
The scent of her coffee mingled with the lovely, sugary smell of birch wood burning. The smoke curled out of Mama Freda’s chimney and hung in a wispy swirl in the air above the water in front of Mama’s cabin.
Birdsong mixed with the far-off drone of a plane.
What exactly did I’ll be there as soon as I can mean?
“Relax,” she ordered herself.
In a world like his, he wouldn’t be able just to drop everything and come. It would be days before she had to face Macintyre Hudson. Maybe even a week. His website said his company had done 34 million dollars in business last year.
You didn’t just walk away from that and hope it would run itself.
So she could focus on her life. She turned her attention from the lake, and looked at the swatch of sample paint she had put up on the side of the house.
She loved the pale lavender for the main color. She thought the subtle shade was playful and inviting, a color that she hoped would welcome and soothe the young girls and women who would someday come here when she had succeeded in transforming all this into Caleb’s House.
Today she was going to commit to the color and order the paint. Well, maybe later today. she was aware of a little tingle of fear when she thought of actually buying the paint. It was a big house. It was natural to want not to make a mistake.
My mother would hate the color.
So maybe instead of buying paint today, she would fill a few book orders, and work on funding proposals for Caleb’s House in anticipation of the rezoning. Several items had arrived for the silent auction that she could unpack. She would not give the arrival of Mac one more thought. Not one.
The drone of the plane pushed back into her awareness, too loud to ignore. She looked up and could see it, red and white, almost directly overhead, so close she could read the call numbers under the wings. It was obviously coming in for a landing on the lake.
Lucy watched it set down smoothly, turning the water, where it shot out from the pontoons, to silvery sprays of mercury. The sound of the engine cut from a roar to a purr as the plane glided over the glassy mirror-calm surface of the water.
Sunshine Lake, located in the rugged interior of British Columbia, had always been a haunt of the rich, and sometimes the famous. Lucy’s father had taken delight in the fact that once, when he was a teenager, the queen had stayed here on one of her visits to Canada. For a while the premier of the province had had a summer house down the lake. Pierre LaPontz, the famous goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, had summered here with friends. Seeing the plane was not unusual.
It became unusual when it wheeled around and taxied back, directly toward her.
Even though she could not see the pilot for the glare of the morning sun on the windshield of the plane, Lucy knew, suddenly and without a shade of a doubt, that it was him.
Macintyre Hudson had landed. He had arrived in her world.
The conclusion was part logic and part instinct. And with it came another conclusion. That nothing, from here on in, would go as she expected it. The days when choosing a paint color was the scariest thing in her world were over.
Lucy had thought he might show up in a rare sports car. Or maybe on an expensive motorcycle. She had even considered the possibility that he might show up, chauffeured, in the white limo that had picked up Mama Freda last Mother’s Day.
Take that, Dr. Lindstrom.
She watched the plane slide along the lake to the old dock in front of Mama Freda’s. The engines cut and the plane drifted.
And then, for the first time in seven years, she saw him.
Macintyre Hudson slid out the door onto the pontoon, expertly threw a rope over one of the big anchor posts on the dock and pulled the plane in.
The fact he could pilot a plane made it more than evident he had come into himself. He was wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses, a leather jacket and knife-creased khakis. But it was the way he carried himself, a certain sureness of movement on the bobbing water, that radiated confidence and strength.
Something in her chest felt tight. Her heart was beating too fast.
“Not bald,” she murmured as the sun caught on the luscious dark chocolate of his hair. It was a guilty pleasure, watching him from a distance, with him unaware of being watched. He had a powerful efficiency of motion as he dealt with mooring the plane.
He was broader than he had been, despite all the digging of ditches. All the slenderness of his youth was gone, replaced with a kind of mouthwatering solidness, the build of a mature man at the peak of his power.
He looked up suddenly and cast a look around, frowning slightly as if he was aware he was being watched.
Crack.
The sound was so loud in the still crispness of the morning that Lucy started, slopped coffee on her pajamas. Thunder?
No. In horror Lucy watched as the ancient post of Mama Freda’s dock, as thick as a telephone pole, snapped cleanly, as if it was a toothpick. As she looked on helplessly, Mac saw it coming and moved quickly.
He managed to save His head, but the falling post caught him across his shoulder and hurled him into the water. The post fell in after him.
A deathly silence settled over the lake.
Lucy was already up out of her chair when Mac’s head reemerged from the water. His startled, furious curse shattered the quiet that had reasserted itself on the peaceful lakeside morning.
Lucy found his shout reassuring. At least he hadn’t been knocked out by the post, or been overcome by the freezing temperatures of the water.
Blanket clutched to her, Lucy ran on bare feet across the lawns, then through the ancient ponderosa pines that surrounded Mama’s house. She picked her way swiftly across the rotted decking of the dock.
Mac was hefting himself onto the pontoon of the plane. It was not drifting, thankfully, but bobbing co-operatively just a few feet from the dock.
“Mac!” Lucy dropped the blanket. “Throw me the rope!”
He scrambled to standing, found the rope and turned to look at her. Even though he had to be absolutely freezing, there was a long pause as they stood looking at one another.
The