A minute later Lindsey burst into the house, breathing hard. Panting, she said between giant gulps of air, “Steve says … if you want to talk to him … you’re going to have to come outside … yourself.”
Meg clasped her hands together. “Where is he?”
“Sitting in his truck. Hurry, Mom! I don’t think … he’ll wait much longer.”
With her heart pounding, Meg walked onto the porch and leaned against the column. Steve’s truck was parked at the curb.
He turned his head when he saw her. His eyes were cold. Unfriendly. Unwelcoming.
Meg bit her lip and met his gaze squarely. It took every ounce of resolve she had to move off the porch and take a few steps toward him. She paused halfway across the freshly mowed lawn.
Steve rolled down the window. “What?” he demanded.
She blinked, her heart racing.
“Lindsey said you had something you wanted to tell me,” he muttered.
Meg should’ve known better than to let Lindsey do her talking for her. She opened her mouth, but her throat was clogged with tears. She tried to swallow, refusing to cry in front of him.
“Say it!”
“I … don’t know if I can.”
“Either you say it or I’m leaving.” He turned away from her and started the engine.
“Mom, we’re going to lose him,” Lindsey cried from the porch. “Don’t let him go ….”
“I … love you,” she whispered.
Steve switched off the engine. “Did you say something?”
“I love you, Steve Conlan. I’m scared out of my wits. You’re right—I have built a wall around us. I don’t want to lose you. It’s just that I’m … afraid.” Her voice caught on the last word.
His eyes held hers and after a moment, he smiled. “That wasn’t so difficult, now, was it?”
“Yes, it was,” she countered. “It was incredibly hard.” He didn’t seem to realize she was standing on her front lawn with half the neighborhood looking on as she told him how much she loved him.
“You’re going to marry me, Meg Remington.”
She sniffled. “Probably.”
He got out of his truck, slammed the door and with three long strides eliminated the distance between them. “Will you or will you not marry me?”
“I will,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time, then she ran to meet him halfway.
“That’s what I thought.” Steve hauled her into his arms and buried her in his embrace. He grabbed her about the waist and whirled her around, then half carried her back into the house.
Once inside, he kicked the door shut and and they leaned against it, kissing frantically.
Lindsey cleared her throat behind them. “I hate to interrupt, but I have a few important questions.”
Steve hid his face in Meg’s neck and mumbled something she couldn’t hear, which was no doubt for the best.
“Okay, kiddo, what do you want to know?” Steve asked when he’d regrouped.
“We’re getting married?” Lindsey asked. Meg liked the way she’d included herself.
“Yup,” Steve assured her. “We’re going to be a family.”
Lindsey let out a holler that could be heard three blocks away.
“Where will we live? Your house or ours?”
Steve looked at Meg. “Do you care?”
She shook her head.
“We’ll live wherever you want,” Steve told the girl. “I imagine staying close to your friends is important, so we’ll take that into consideration.”
“Great.” Lindsey beamed him a smile. “What about adding to the family? Mom’s willing, I think.”
Once more Steve looked at Meg, and laughing, she nodded. “Oh, yes,” she murmured, “there’ll be several additions to this family.”
Steve’s eyes grew intense, and Meg knew he was thinking the same thing she was. She wanted his babies as much as she wanted this man. She loved him, desired him, anticipating all they could discover together, all they could learn from each other.
“One last thing,” Lindsey said.
It was hard to pull her eyes away from Steve, but she wanted to include Lindsey in these important decisions. “Yes, honey?”
“It’s just that I’d rather you didn’t go shopping for your wedding dress alone. You’re really good at lots of things, but frankly, Mom, you don’t have any fashion sense.”
As it turned out, Lindsey, Brenda and Steve’s sister, Nancy, were all involved in the process of choosing the all-important wedding dress. Steve, naturally, wasn’t allowed within a hundred feet of Meg and her dress until the day of the ceremony.
The wedding took place three months later, with family and friends gathered around. Lindsey proudly served as her mother’s maid of honor.
Steve endured all the formality because he knew it mattered to Meg and to Lindsey. Nancy and his mother seemed to enjoy making plans for the wedding, too. All that was required of him was to show up and say “I do,” which suited Steve just fine.
In his view, this fuss over weddings was for women. Men considered it a necessary evil. Or so he believed until his wedding day. When he saw Meg walk down the aisle, the emotion that throbbed in his chest came as a complete and utter surprise.
He’d known he loved her—he must, to put up with all the craziness that had befallen their courtship. But he hadn’t realized how deep that love went. Not until he saw Meg so solemn and so beautiful. His bride. She stole his breath as he gazed at her.
The reception was a blur. Every time he looked at Meg he found it difficult to believe that this beautiful, vibrant woman was his wife. His thoughts were a jumbled, confused mess as he greeted those he needed to greet and thanked those he needed to thank.
It seemed half a lifetime before he was alone with his wife. He’d booked the honeymoon suite at a hotel close to Sea-Tac airport. The following morning they were flying to Hawaii for two weeks. Meg had never seen the islands. Steve suspected he didn’t need a tropical playground to discover paradise. He would find that in her arms.
“My husband.” Meg said the word shyly as Steve fumbled with the key card to unlock their suite. “I like the way it sounds.”
“So do I, but not quite as much as I like the sound of wife.” With the door open, he swept Meg into his arms and carried her into the room.
He hadn’t taken two steps before they started to kiss.
Meg tasted of wedding cake and champagne, of passion and love. She wound her arms around his neck and enticed him to kiss her again. Steve didn’t need much of an invitation.
At the unbridled desire he read in her eyes, Steve moaned and carried her to the bed. After he’d set her feet on the floor, he kissed her again, slowly, with all the pent-up desire inside him.
He reached behind her for the zipper of her dress. “I haven’t made any secret of how much I want to make love to you.”
“That’s true,” she whispered, kissing his jaw. “Thank you for agreeing to wait. It meant a lot to me to start our marriage this way.”
He slipped the sleeve down her arm and kissed the ivory perfection of one shoulder. Then he kissed the other, his lips blazing a trail up the side of her neck to the hollow of her throat.
“You make my knees go weak,” she told him in a low voice.
“Mine are, too.”
Together they collapsed on the bed. Steve kissed her and loosened his tie. With their lips joined, Meg’s fingers worked at his shirt, undressing him.
Soon they were lost in each other, loving each other, immersed in a world of their own. A world from which they didn’t emerge until the summer sun had been replaced by a glittering moon and a sky full of stars.
Back at the reception, Lindsey sat with Steve’s sister, Nancy, and licked the icing off their fingertips. “Do you suppose they’ll ever figure it out?”
Nancy sipped champagne from a crystal flute. “I doubt either of them is thinking about much right now—except each other.”
“We made so
me real mistakes, though.”
“We?” Nancy said, eyeing Lindsey.
“Okay, me. I’ll admit I nearly ruined everything by pushing the marriage issue. How was I to know my mother would take it so personally? Jeez, she just about had a heart attack, and all because I suggested Steve marry her.”
“It worked out, though,” Nancy said, looking pleased with herself. “And I made a few blunders of my own. Getting my friend to go to the shop and say she was Meg wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Steve was bound to find out sooner or later that it wasn’t Meg.”
“But we had to do something,” Lindsey insisted. “They were both being so stubborn. One of them had to give in. Besides, your ploy worked.”
“Better than the flowers I sent.”
Lindsey sampled another bite of wedding cake. “You know what was the hardest part?”
“I know what it was for me. I had one heck of a time keeping a straight face when your mother came to the house dressed in a Tina Turner wig and five-inch heels. Oh, Lindsey, if you could’ve seen her.”
“Steve was pretty funny himself, with his leather jacket and that bad-boy smirk.”
“Neither one of them’s any good at acting,” Nancy said, still grinning.
“Not like us.”
“Not like us,” Nancy agreed.
Father’s Day
Debbie Macomber
For Lois and Bill Hoskins,
living proof that love is
better the second time around.
One
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Robin Masterson muttered as she crawled into the makeshift tent, which was pitched over the clothesline in the backyard of her new home.
“Come on, Mom,” ten-year-old Jeff urged, shifting to make room for her. “It’s nice and warm in here.”
Down on all fours, a flashlight in one hand, Robin squeezed her way inside. Jeff had constructed the flimsy tent using clothespegs to hold up the blankets and rocks to secure the base. The space was tight, but she managed to maneuver into her sleeping bag.
“Isn’t this great?” Jeff asked. He stuck his head out of the front opening and gazed at the dark sky and the spattering of stars that winked back at them. On second thought, Robin decided they were laughing at her, those stars. And with good reason. There probably wasn’t another thirty-year-old woman in the entire state of California who would’ve agreed to this craziness.
It was the first night in their new house and Robin was exhausted. They’d started moving out of the apartment before five that morning and she’d just finished unpacking the last box. The beds were assembled, but Jeff wouldn’t hear of doing anything as mundane as sleeping on a real mattress. After waiting years to camp out in his own backyard, her son wasn’t about to delay the adventure by even one night.
Robin couldn’t let him sleep outside alone and, since he hadn’t met any neighbors yet, there was only one option left. Surely there’d be a Mother of the Year award in this for her.
“You want to hear a joke?” Jeff asked, rolling on to his back and nudging her.
“Sure.” She swallowed a yawn, hoping she could stay awake long enough to laugh at the appropriate time. She needn’t have worried.
For the next half hour, Robin was entertained with a series of riddles, nonsense rhymes and off-key renditions of Jeff’s favourite songs from summer camp.
“Knock knock,” she said when it appeared her son had run through his repertoire.
“Who’s there?”
“Wanda.”
“Wanda who?”
“Wanda who thinks up these silly jokes?”
Jeff laughed as though she’d come up with the funniest line ever devised. Her son’s enthusiasm couldn’t help but rub off on Robin and some of her weariness eased. Camping was fun—sort of. But it’d been years since she’d slept on the ground and, frankly, she couldn’t remember it being quite this hard.
“Do you think we’ll be warm enough?” she teased. Jeff had used every blanket they owned, first to construct the tent and then to pad it. To be on the safe side, two or three more were piled on top of their sleeping bags on the offchance an arctic frost descended upon them. It was spring, but a San Francisco spring could be chilly.
“Sure,” he answered, missing the kidding note in her voice. “But if you get cold, you can have one of mine.”
“I’m fine,” she assured him.
“You hungry?”
Now that she thought about it, she was. “Sure. Whatcha got?”
Jeff disappeared into his sleeping bag and returned a moment later with a limp package of licorice, a small plastic bag full of squashed marshmallows and a flattened box of raisins. Robin declined the snack.
“When are we going to buy me my dog?” Jeff asked, chewing loudly on the raisins.
Robin listened to the sound and said nothing.
“Mom … the dog?” he repeated after a few minutes.
Robin had been dreading that question most of the day. She’d managed to forestall Jeff for the past month by telling him they’d discuss getting a dog after they were settled in their house.
“I thought we’d start looking for ads in the paper first thing tomorrow,” Jeff said, still munching.
“I’m not sure when we’ll start the search for the right dog.” She was a coward, Robin freely admitted it, but she hated to disappoint Jeff. He had his heart set on a dog. How like his father he was, in his love for animals.
“I want a big one, you know. None of those fancy little poodles or anything.”
“A golden retriever would be nice, don’t you think?”
“Or a German shepherd,” Jeff said.
“Your father loved dogs,” she whispered, although she’d told Jeff that countless times. Lenny had been gone for so many years, she had trouble remembering what their life together had been like. They’d been crazy in love with each other and married shortly after their high-school graduation. A year later, Robin became pregnant. Jeff had been barely six months old when Lenny was killed in a freak car accident on his way home from work. In the span of mere moments, Robin’s comfortable world had been sent into a tailspin, and ten years later it was still whirling.
With her family’s help, she’d gone back to school and obtained her degree. She was now a certified public accountant working for a large San Francisco insurance firm. Over the years she’d dated a number of men, but none she’d seriously consider marrying. Her life was far more complicated now than it had been as a young bride. The thought of falling in love again terrified her.
“What kind of dog did Dad have when he was a kid?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t think Rover was any particular breed,” Robin answered, then paused to recall exactly what Lenny’s childhood dog had looked like. “I think he was mostly … Labrador.”
“Was he black?”
“And brown.”
“Did Dad have any other animals?”
Robin smiled at her warm memories of her late husband. She enjoyed the way Jeff loved hearing stories about his father—no matter how many times he’d already heard them. “He collected three more pets the first year we were married. It seemed he was always bringing home a stray cat or lost dog. We couldn’t keep them, of course, because we weren’t allowed pets in the apartment complex. We went to great lengths to hide them for a few days until we could locate their owners or find them a good home. For our first wedding anniversary, he bought me a goldfish. Your father really loved animals.”
Jeff beamed and planted his chin on his folded arms.
“We dreamed of buying a small farm someday and raising chickens and goats and maybe a cow or two. Your father wanted to buy you a pony, too.” Hard as she tried, she couldn’t quite hide the pain in her voice. Even after all these years, the memory of Lenny’s sudden death still hurt. Looking at her son, so eager for a dog of his own, Robin missed her husband more than ever.
“You and Dad were going to buy a farm?” Jeff cried, his voice ebullie
nt. “You never told me that before.” He paused. “A pony for me? Really? Do you think we’ll ever be able to afford one? Look how long it took to save for the house.”
Robin smiled. “I think we’ll have to give up on the idea of you and me owning a farm, at least in the near future.”
When they were first married, Robin and Lenny had talked for hours about their dreams. They’d charted their lives, confident that nothing would ever separate them. Their love had been too strong. It was true that she’d never told Jeff about buying a farm, nor had she told him how they’d planned to name it Paradise. Paradise, because that was what the farm would be to them. In retrospect, not telling Jeff was a way of protecting him. He’d lost so much—not only the guidance and love of his father but all the things they could have had as a family. She’d never mentioned the pony before, or the fact that Lenny had always longed for a horse ….
Jeff yawned loudly and Robin marvelled at his endurance. He’d carried in as many boxes as the movers had, racing up and down the stairs with an energy Robin envied. He’d unpacked the upstairs bathroom, as well as his own bedroom and had helped her organize the kitchen.
“I can hardly wait to get my dog,” Jeff said, his voice fading. Within minutes he was sound asleep.
“A dog,” Robin said softly as her eyes closed. She didn’t know how she was going to break the bad news to Jeff. They couldn’t get a dog—at least not right away. She was unwilling to leave a large dog locked indoors all day while she went off to work and Jeff was in school. Tying one up in the backyard was equally unfair, and she couldn’t afford to build a fence. Not this year, anyway. Then there was the cost of feeding a dog and paying the vet’s bills. With this new home, Robin’s budget was already stretched to the limit.
Robin awoke feeling chilled and warm at the same time. In the gray dawn, she glanced at her watch. Six-thirty. At some point during the night, the old sleeping bag that dated back to her high-school days had come unzipped and the cool morning air had chilled her arms and legs. Yet her back was warm and cozy. Jeff had probably snuggled up to her during the night. She sighed, determined to sleep for another half hour or so. With that idea in mind, she reached for a blanket to wrap around her shoulders and met with some resistance. She tugged and pulled, to no avail. It was then that she felt something wet and warm close to her neck. Her eyes shot open. Very slowly, she turned her head until she came eyeball to eyeball with a big black dog.