Promises in the Night: A Classic Romance - Book 2

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Take a deep breath.

Try again.

Larkin Walker inhaled slowly, then straightened the index cards that held keywords from her speech in bold black letters. Course 36, “Organization: Key to Success,” recommended using these makeshift cue cards, but she was beginning to think that method worked only for speakers whose hands didn’t shake like a clothesline in a stiff north wind.

“Learning needn’t stop when... who says you’re too old to learn to play the piano or take up ballet . . . it’s only a matter of—oh, no!”

Index cards cascaded to the floor, sliding under chairs and slipping beneath the water cooler in the corner of the room, where other workshop speakers sat clustered together. Larkin stooped down quickly, praying that she could gather up her notes before anyone noticed.

No such luck.

“Don’t tell me you have stage fright!” Adele, owner of the School for Advancement, gave Larkin a look from beneath her individually applied false eyelashes. “I can hardly believe you’d find that little group in the auditorium terrifying.”

“Speaking before a crowd is quite different from dancing before one, Adele. This is my debut on the lecture circuit.”

Adele calmly fixed a stray lock of frosted hair that bobbed over her forehead. “Doesn’t the Learning Center offer any courses on public speaking?” She rested her hands in her lap and smiled. “With a business community like we have on Long Island that was the first course I listed in my syllabus.”

Larkin took a deep breath. “I guess my business acumen isn’t quite as well-developed as yours.” She called up the friendliest smile she could manage. “Perhaps I should have signed up for a course or two at your school.”

George, the continuing education director at Hofstra University, threw his head back and laughed. “Touché, Adele! Looks like the new kid on the block is catching on.”

Adele immediately redirected her bad mood toward him.

This was not the time or place to get into a verbal sparring match with a heavyweight champion like Adele Masters. Larkin’s nerves were too badly frayed for her to stand a chance. She slipped out into the hallway and tried to calm herself down by pacing the narrow corridor.

Larkin was a participant in an all-day seminar called “Single in America: View for the Future,” which was being held at the Sheraton Smithtown on Long Island. When her assistant, Patti Franklin, had presented the idea to Larkin, it had sounded like a fantastic way to reach a larger section of the public. Now that it was almost her turn to take the stage, Larkin questioned her own wisdom. She could barely remember her own name, much less her speech.

“Never again,” she said aloud. “Not unless I’m tranquilized first.”

“Cold feet?” she heard Patti’s familiar voice behind her.

“Cold feet, cold hands and a cold heart,” Larkin said, turning to look at the flamboyant redhead in a cobalt blue mini.

“I don’t understand you, Larkin,” Patti said, shaking her tangled mass of curls. Her enormous yellow earrings looked like UFOs. “You’ve danced before thousands, and you can’t manage a simple speech?”

Where have I heard that before?
“Dancing I was sure of. Public speaking is something brand new.”

“Nothing to it. You just walk out there, tell them what you plan to say, say it, then wait for the applause.” Patti snapped her fingers. “A breeze.”

“Easy for you to say, hiding behind that clipboard.” Larkin extended her speech notes toward the younger woman, with a grin. “Why don’t you stand up there and promote the Learning Center for me?”

“And give the audience chopped liver when they’re expecting caviar? They’d probably throw tomatoes at me.”

Larkin swatted the woman over the head with the deck of index cards. “Why should they bother to throw tomatoes at you? You’re always the first one in line to throw them at yourself. I wish you would—”

“Don’t tell me, I already know it by heart. Believe in myself, stop putting myself down, lose twenty pounds ...”

“I never said you should lose twenty pounds.”

“I just thought I’d slip that in. Tim said—”

“I don’t care what Tim said. If only you’d stop going out with these rejects from the Disco Hall of Fame, you might have a higher opinion of yourself.”

Patti flipped through the notes on her clipboard. “If only I took Course 307, How to Love Yourself When You’re Afraid Nobody Else Will, my life would be a bed of roses.”

“At least it might eliminate a few of the weeds.” Larkin draped an arm around the younger woman and, squeezed her shoulder. “Think of it this way: if you don’t meet any interesting men in class, at least you’ll learn something while you’re there.” She laughed at the look on Patti’s face. “I bet you can’t say that about the Swizzle Stick or The Lion’s Lair.”

“You’d be surprised what I’ve learned at the Swizzle Stick. Did you know that—“

Patti was just about to launch into one of her more hair-raising stories about the Long Island bar scene when the sound of polite applause from the audience out front stopped her.

“Am I up next?”

“No. I checked the program. You’re on just before lunch.”

“Wonderful,” Larkin said ruefully. “Everyone’s stomach will be rumbling, and they’ll be so cranky I’ll probably be booed off the stage in favor of tuna surprise.”

“Whatever happened to positive thinking?”

“I’m positive I’ll forget why I’m up there; I’m positive I’ll get so tongue-tied that it will take three dentists an hour to untangle my mouth.”

Patti grabbed the index cards from Larkin and arranged them in the proper sequence. “You’ll be a smash if you’ll just relax.” She put the cards into the deep pocket of her dress. “Get your mind off your speech for a little while.”

Larkin resumed pacing the hallway, with Patti jogging to keep up with her. “Who’s holding down the fort? We have two classes this afternoon and—”

“Vivian is at the reception desk, Sharon is doubling as registrar, and both instructors say they’ll be in, despite the rain.”

“Did you call the roofer about the leak in the rear classroom?” Larkin had noticed a small rupture in the ceiling during the last spell of rain and kept neglecting to have it taken care of.

A slow, pleased smile spread across Patti’s round face. “Gordon heard me tell Vivian about it, and next thing I knew, he was up on the roof checking it out.”

Gordon Franklin had been working for Larkin and the Learning Center for two months as a general handyman and messenger.

“You realize your brother is incredible, don’t you, Patti? He seems to know what has to be done before I do.”

“And you realize I’ll never be able to repay you for giving him a chance. The change in him is nothing short of miraculous.”

Patti’s gratitude embarrassed Larkin, and she was about to change the subject when one of the seminar directors burst out of the waiting room.

“Come on, Learning Center, move it! The guy from Hofstra is in the john tossing his cookies. You’re on next.”

Panic whipped through Larkin.

“I can’t,” she said to Patti. “I have to run through the speech again. I didn’t even get to—”

Patti placed the pack of index cards in Larkin’s hand. “Thirty seconds, Walker. Let’s go!”

Patti propelled Larkin through the waiting room and toward the entrance to the auditorium stage.

“Pretend this is Radio City Music Hall,” Patti whispered in her ear as the introduction began. “Pretend you’re in your spangled leotard and it’s just another performance.”

“And please welcome Ms. Larkin Walker.”

Larkin straightened her shoulders, smoothed her hair back and searched her memory for her best theatrical smile. “Like this?”

Patti gave her the thumbs up sign. “Perfect,” she said. “Now, go break a leg!”

A
lex Jakobs
, Ph.D., slid his long body lower in the chair and let his eyes droop shut.

“Sit up, Jakobs,” the gruff voice next to him muttered. “You’re giving the press a bad name.”

“Quiet, Harry,” he said to the older man. “I’m not the press. Besides, this is the first good sleep I’ve had in a week. This seminar is better than Valium.”

Alex had just suffered through six workshops filled with the strangest conglomeration of material he’d ever seen presented in one place: advice from jaded divorcees on the realities of romance; talks from bartenders on “you are what you drink”; and a panel presentation on the single consumer and his or her fiscal power. All of that, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.

Alex glanced to his right at the crowd of single men and women, all of whom had paid seventy-five dollars a head to sit there and listen to what they already knew all too well: loneliness was big business. All the talk of a sexual revolution, the joys of freedom, and the fun of an unfettered relationship fell apart before the anxiety visible on every face in the room.

And how well Alex understood it all. It was hard to settle for just sex when you’ve known what it was like to make love.

Harry, the photographer, next to him, muffled a yawn with the back of his hand, and Alex’s serious face ignited with a grin.

“You dozing off on me, Harry? You know Mathison is expecting a full photo spread to go with my feature.”

“If you get a feature out of this malarkey, you deserve a Pulitzer along with your Ph.D., Jakobs.” He muttered a mild oath that made Alex laugh out loud. “This is how I get paid for twenty-five years of loving devotion to
Metro Monthly?”

Alex pulled off his suit jacket and draped it over the back of the empty seat in front of him. “No,” he answered as he loosened his burgundy-colored knit tie. “This is how I get paid for agreeing to do Mathison a favor. I’d rather be flying.” Normally Alex spent his Thursday mornings flying his Cessna and thinking about his cable TV show that aired every Thursday night.

Mathison, the editor of
Metro Monthly,
a New York metropolitan area magazine, had thought Alex Jakobs, noted therapist and old friend, would be the perfect writer to handle the singles’ seminar.

“You’re the only single guy I know who can string two words together,” he’d explained, trying to convince Alex that he could have more fun at the Sheraton than behind the controls of his plane. “Besides, what the hell do us old married guys know from singles’ bars?”

They envied him; that was the saddest part of all. They envied him the freedom that Alex would have traded in a split second for one more chance to tell Rikki how much he loved her.

As his textbooks said it would, the pain did grow less with each year, the reminders less frequent. However, now and again he’d see a woman with hair the color of sherry or hear the sweet sound of a song from their youth, and the enormity of his loss would tear at his heart, reminding him of the true meaning of the word forever
.

Life, unfortunately, rarely grants a man the chance to say the things he’d left unsaid and, for Alex, that truth had been the sharpest grief of all.

He was glad for the interruption when Harry let loose with a slow whistle and began looking for his camera on the floor between their chairs.

“Things are definitely looking up,” Harry said. He moved into the aisle to get a shot.

A tall, slender woman of about thirty glided toward the podium. A chorus of whistles and good-naturedly ribald remarks accompanied her approach, but she managed to remain unruffled by them. A small, amused smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. Alex sat up straighter and began scribbling notes in his own peculiar form of shorthand.

“Knit T-shirt dress, color of a ripe tomato...wide leather belt ... heels ... great legs.”

It wasn’t much of a dress, really. It seemed to have no structure at all, simply flowing over her curves in a very intriguing fashion. It was the kind of dress that depended upon the woman who wore it to bring it to life. This woman managed to make it sparkle with unmistakable flair and sophistication.

She was fine-boned and fair-skinned, and her Renaissance face was wreathed by a cloud of sandy blond waves that tumbled almost to her waist. He didn’t know if it was the lighting or a gift from a generous god, but her hair seemed shot through with golden lights that shimmered beneath the fluorescent fixture overhead.

He glanced at the other people sitting up there on the stage. No, it was a gift from the gods, all right. Fluorescent lights made everyone else look green.

He glanced again at the agenda. She had to be the woman from the Olympia Health Spa. No one could have a body as gently yet strongly curved as hers unless she gave it the attention due a full time job. Yes, he thought as he watched her arrange her notes in a neat pile at the stand and let her enormous eyes scan the room slowly while she collected her thoughts, he could easily imagine her in a tight-fitting leotard.

“You’re right, Harry,” he murmured. “Things are definitely looking up.”

L
arkin’s smile
masked her nervous tension.
I should have worn the spangled leotard,
she thought.

The walk across the stage to the podium was the longest one of her life. Quickly she gauged the distance between herself and the fire exits. If things got tough, it was nice to know that she was only eighty feet from freedom.

“Have you ever imagined sailing over the countryside in a hot-air balloon or drifting over the estates on the North Shore in a free-flying glider? Do you have a yen to learn French or take up ballet? If you’ve dreamed of any of these things, but are convinced you’re too busy or too tired or too old to try them, I’m here to tell you that at the Learning Center anything is possible.”

Nothing. Not a smile, not a nod, no reaction at all. Something was definitely wrong.

“Learning isn’t confined within the walls of a university or –“

Larkin searched the audience for the slightest sign of encouragement. An overweight red-haired man snoozed in an aisle seat, his lower jaw sagging open. A young blond woman in the first row was hanging on to her purse as if it were the lifeline on the
Titanic.

In the wings Patti coughed, and Larkin glanced over in time to see her do a wonderful imitation of the sleeping man.