Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish (11 page)

Having spent years in Lindstrom Beach, Mac was familiar with Glen Oak. Sixty miles from Lindstrom Beach, Glen Oak was the major city that serviced all the smaller towns around it. All the large chain stores had outlets there, there was an airport, hotels, golf courses and the regional hospital.

“Golfing,” he guessed. “I have to warn you, I’m not much of a golfer. Too slow for me.”

“That’s okay, we’re not golfing.”

“Not even mini?” he said a little sadly as they passed a miniature golf course. He was aware he would like to go miniature golfing with her.

And horseback riding, for that matter. He wondered what it would take to talk her into bungee jumping.

He frowned as Lucy pulled into the hospital parking lot.

“We’re going to a hospital for fun?” Mac asked. “Oh, boy, Lucy, you are in worse shape than I thought.”

“I tried to warn you.”

Perplexed, he followed her through the main doors. She did not stop at the main desk, but the receptionist gave her a wave, as if she knew her.

What if she was sick? What if that’s what she was trying to tell him? Mac felt a wave of fear engulf him, but it passed as she pushed through doors clearly marked Neonatal.

She went to an office and a middle-aged woman smiled when she saw her and came out from behind her desk and gave her a heartfelt hug.

“My very favorite cuddler!” she said.

Cuddler?

“This is Macintyre Hudson, the man I spoke to you about this morning. Mac, Janice Sandpace.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Hudson. Come this way.”

And then they were in a small anteroom. Through a window he could see what he assumed were incubators with babies in them.

“These babies,” Janice explained, “are premature. Or critically ill. Occasionally we get what is known as a crack baby. We instigated a cuddling program several years ago because studies have shown if a baby has physical contact it will develop better, grow better, heal better, and have a shorter hospital stay. It also relieves stress on parents to know that even if they can’t be here 24/7, and many can’t because they have other children at home or work obligations, their baby is still being loved.”

Lucy had already donned a gown with bright ducks all over it, and she turned for Janice to do up the back for her.

“You’ll have to gown up, Mr. Macintyre.”

He chose a gown from the rack. It had giraffes and lions on it. Lucy was already donning a mask and covering her hair.

Her eyes twinkled at him from above the mask.

He followed suit, as did Janice. She showed him how to give his hands a surgical scrub.

“Today we have multiples,” Janice told him from behind her mask. “Twins. Preemies.”

She gestured to a rocking chair. Lucy was already settled in one.

Side by side in their rocking chairs.

And then Janice brought Lucy the tiniest little bundle of life he had ever seen. Tightly swaddled in a pink blanket, the baby was placed in Lucy’s arms. It stared up at her with curious, unblinking eyes.

“Amber,” Janice said, smiling.

In seconds, Lucy was lost in that world. It was just the baby and her. She crooned to it. She whispered in its tiny little ear. She rocked.

This was what she did for fun.

Only, the look on her face said it wasn’t just fun.

What Lucy did had gone way beyond fun. Her eyes on that baby had a light in them that was the most joyous thing he had ever seen.

Suddenly fun seemed superficial.

Lucy glanced at him. Even though she had a mask on, he could tell she was smiling. More than smiling—she was radiant.

“This is Sam,” Janice said.

He looked up at her. His panic must have been evident.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll walk you through it. Support his neck. See how Lucy is holding the baby?”

And then Mac found a baby in his arms. It looked up at him, eyes like buttons in the tiniest wrinkled face he had ever seen.

“Talk to him,” Janice suggested.

“ET, call home,” he said softly. If he was not mistaken, the baby sighed. “I was just kidding. You look more like Yoda. A very handsome Yoda.”

He looked over at Lucy, crooning away as if she’d been born to this.

He didn’t know what to say.

And then he did.

He sang softly.

It felt as if they had been there for only seconds when Janice came back in and took the now sleeping baby from him. “Thank you,” she said.

“No, thank you.”

And he meant it.

They were quieter on the way home. When she drove by the mini-golf course, he didn’t feel like playing anymore.

Seeing her with that baby, he had known. He had known what he had wanted his whole life and had been so afraid of never being able to have that he had pretended he didn’t want it at all.

She drove into her driveway. “I have so much to get done for the gala!”

But he wasn’t letting her go that easily. “Is that a charitable organization, the baby thing?” he asked Lucy.

“Yes. It’s called Cuddle-Hugs.”

“Why aren’t we doing Mama’s fund-raiser in support of that?”

“Of course they need money to operate, but that’s not what Mama chose.”

“I’ll talk to Corporate this afternoon. I’ll have them call Janice. Anything they want. Anything. They’ll get it.”

“That’s not why I took you there, to solicit a donation.”

“I know. And we didn’t go to Vancouver to buy you a dress, but I bought it for you anyway.”

“You bought me that dress?” she gasped.

“So, what do you think now, Lucy Lin? Could you fall for a boy like me now?”

CHAPTER NINE

I
T
WAS
ALL
wrong. It was not what he had wanted to say at all.

Mac could have kicked himself. He didn’t know where the question had come from. It certainly hadn’t been on his agenda to ask something like that. That certainly hadn’t been the reason for his donation, the reason for the fly-in shopping trip yesterday. He hadn’t done it to impress her.

It was all just a gift to her. He had found his better side after all.

But now somehow he’d gone and spoiled it all by bringing up the past. Over the past few days Mac had convinced himself that they had pretty much put the past behind them.

But really, wasn’t it was always there, the past? Wasn’t that why he’d made her go to the yacht club and stand up for herself? Wasn’t it true that he could not look at her without seeing her younger self, without remembering the joy of her trust in him, the way she had felt in his arms, the way her heated kisses had felt scattering across his face?

She took a startled step back from him. “Oh, Mac,” she said, “when I said that all those years ago, it was never about what you had or didn’t have.”

He gave her his most charming smile. “It wasn’t? You could have fooled me.”

“I guess I did fool you. Because I didn’t want you to know how deeply it hurt me that you never, ever told me a single thing about you. Not one single thing about you that mattered. And then when you left, you didn’t even ask me to go with you. It seems nothing has changed. Even these gifts, so wonderful and grand, are like a guard you put up. That smile you are smiling right now? That’s the biggest defense of all.”

“You want to know why I never asked you to go with me, Lucy? It wasn’t because I wasn’t willing to fight for you. It was because you loved this place more than me. It was because I could see your family being torn up and your friends looking at you sideways as if you’d lost your mind. I gave you your life back. The part I don’t get is that you didn’t take it back. At all.”

“No,” she said, quietly, “I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“This isn’t how it works, Mac, with you keeping everything to yourself, while I spill my guts.”

“You know what? I’ve had about as much of Lindstrom Beach as I can handle. I wish I had never come back here.”

“I wish you hadn’t, either!”

He watched, stunned, as she walked away, went into her house and closed the door behind her.

With a kind of soft finality.

“Mama,” he said a few minutes later, “something’s come up. I have to go back to Toronto. I bought that dress for Lucy. Will you give it to her?”

“Give it to her yourself,” Mama said, and went up the stairs. He heard her bedroom door slam.

Both the women he loved were mad at him.

Wait a minute! He loved Lucy? Then he was getting out of here just in the nick of time....

* * *

Lucy listened to
Mac’s plane take off.

“I don’t care if he’s gone,” she told her cat. “I don’t. I always knew he wasn’t staying.”

She had a gala to finish organizing. She had her dream of Caleb’s House to hold tight to.

She burst into tears.

When the phone rang, she rushed to it. Maybe it was him. Could he phone her from the plane? Was he telling her he was turning around?

“Hello from Africa, Lucy!”

Her mother was brimming with excitement. She’d seen an elephant that day. She’d seen a lion. Somehow, Lucy didn’t remember her mother like this.

“Anyway,” her mother said, “I know you’ll be busy on Mother’s Day, so I thought I’d phone today. I didn’t want you having to track me down adding an extra stress to your day.”

That was unusually thoughtful for her mother. It made Lucy feel brave.

“Mom,” she said, “do you mind if I paint the house purple? I mean, it’s not purple, exactly, a kind of lavender.”

It was kind of a segue to
Do you mind if I turn our old family home into a house for unwed mothers?

“Lucy! I don’t care what color you paint the house. It’s your house!”

“Mom, did you give me this house because you felt sorry for me? Because you thought I’d never get my life together without help from you?”

“No, Lucy, not at all. I gave you that house because I hated it.”

“What?”

“It was the perfect house, I was the perfect doctor’s wife and you were the perfect doctor’s daughter.”

“Until I ruined everything,” Lucy said.

“It’s only in the last while that I’ve seen how untrue that is, Lucy. When you got pregnant, it blew a hole in the facade. When you miscarried, I thought we could patch up the hole. That everything would be the same. That you would be the same.

“But you didn’t come back. You didn’t want what you had always wanted anymore. I think, at first, we were all angry with you for not coming back to your old life. Me, certainly. Your friend Claudia, too.

“Now I can see how we were really all prisoners in that house. Trying to live up to your father’s expectations of us. Which was a nearly impossible undertaking. Everything always had to look so good. But keeping it that way took so much energy—without my even knowing it, had sucked the life force out of me.

“That hole you blew in all our lives? I glimpsed freedom out that hole. If your dad hadn’t died, I would have left him.”

Lucy was stunned.

“Lucy, paint the house purple. Swim naked in the moonlight. Dream big and love hard. I’m glad you didn’t marry James. He was like your father—in every way, if you get my drift. He was cold and withholding and a control freak. And he was a philanderer.”

“Mom? Mac came back.” Somehow this was the talk she had always dreamed of having with her mother.

“And?”

“I love him!” she wailed. “And he left again!”

“Sweetie, I can’t be there. If I was I would take you on my lap and hold you and comb your hair with my fingers until you had no tears left. That’s what I wish I had done all those years ago. The night the baby died.”

A baby. Not a fetus. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Life has a way of working out the way it’s supposed to, Lucy. I am living proof of that. I love you.”

“You, too, Mom. I’ll be thinking of you on Mother’s Day.”

“Now, go eat two dishes of chocolate ice cream. Then go and skinny-dip in the lake!”

Lucy was laughing as she hung up the phone. Her mother was right. Everything would work out the way it was supposed to.

Mac was gone.

But she still had Mama, and the gala, and the babies to cuddle. Sometime, somewhere, she had become a woman who would paint her house purple, and who had a dream that was bigger than she was.

And he was part of that. Loving him was part of that.

He hadn’t ruined her life. Her mother had made her so aware of that. He had given her a gift. He had broken her out of the life she might have had. He had made her see things differently and want things she had not wanted before.

That’s what love did. It made people better. Even if it hurt, it was worth the pain.

Lucy was going to cry. And eat the ice cream. She’d skip the dip in the lake. She was going to feel every bit of the glorious pain.

Because it meant she had loved. And her mother was right. Love, in the end, could only make you better. Not worse.

* * *

Mac was aware
he was cutting things very close to the wire. He’d gone back to Toronto. His life had seemed empty and lonely, and no amount of adrenaline had been able to take the edge off his pain.

He loved her. He loved Lucy. He always had.

He had to give that a chance. He had to. And if it required more of him, then he had to dig deep and find that.

He was aware he was cutting things close. He arrived back in Lindstrom Beach the night before the gala.

He had never felt fear the way he felt it when he crossed back over those lawns and knocked on Lucy’s door.

“Can I come in?”

When she saw it was him, Lucy looked scared to open that door. And he didn’t blame her. But hope won out. She stood back from the door.

“You’re in your housecoat,” he said.

“It
is
nighttime.” She scanned his face. “Come sit down, Mac.”

The room was beautiful at night. She had a small fire burning in the hearth, and it cast its golden light across fresh tulips in a vase, a cat curled up on the rug in front of it, a book open on its spine on the arm of the chair. What would it be like to have a life like this?

Not a life of adrenaline rush after adrenaline rush, but one of quiet contentment?

A life of Lucy sharing evenings with him?

He couldn’t think about that. Not until she knew the full truth. He sat on the couch, she took the chair across from him, tucked those delectable little toes up under her folded legs.

“Lucy, if you care to listen, I’m going to tell you some things I’ve never told anyone. Not even Mama.”

Why was he doing this?

But he knew why. He could see it all starting again. She loved him. She wanted more from him. She always had.

She was leaning toward him, and he could see the hope shining in her face.

He considered himself the most fearless of men. No raging chute of white water ever put fear into his heart, only anticipation.

But wasn’t this what he had always feared? Being vulnerable? Opening up to another? Tackling a foaming torrent of raging water was nothing in comparison to opening your heart. Nothing in comparison to letting someone see all of you.

But once she knew all his secrets would she still love him? Could she? Now seemed like the time to find out.

Mac took a deep breath. It was time. It was time to let it all go. It was time to tell someone. It involved the scariest thing of all. It involved trust. Trusting her.

He hesitated, looking for a place to start. There was only one starting point.

“When I was five, my mom left my dad and me. I remember it clearly. She said, I’m looking for something. I’m looking for something
more.

“As an adult, I can understand that. We didn’t have much. My dad was a laborer on a construction crew in a small town, not so different from Lindstrom Beach. He didn’t make a pile of money, and we lived pretty humbly in a tiny house. As I got older I realized it was different from my friends’ houses. No dishwasher, no computer, no fancy stereo, no big-screen TV. We heated with a wood heater, the furniture was falling apart and we didn’t even have curtains on the windows.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know if he couldn’t afford that stuff, or if it just wasn’t a priority for him. My dad loved the outdoors. Since I could walk, I was trailing him through the woods. In retrospect, I think he thought of
that
as home. Being outside with his rifle or his fishing rod or a bucket for picking berries. And me.

“Mom left in search of something
more,
and I don’t remember being traumatized by it or anything. My dad managed pretty well for a guy on his own. He got me registered for school, he kept me clean, he cooked simple meals. When I was old enough, he taught me how to help out around the place. We were a team.

“My mom called and wrote, and showed up at Christmas. She always had lots of presents and stories about her travels and adventures. She was big on saying ‘I love you.’
But even that young, I could tell she
hated
how my dad lived, and maybe even hated him for being content with so little.

“When she left, there was always a big screaming match about his lack of ambition and her lack of responsibility. I was overjoyed when she came, and guiltily glad when she left.

“Then she found her something
more.
Literally. She found a very, very rich man. I was eight at the time, and she came and got me and took me to Toronto for a visit with her and the new man. Walden, her husband, had a mansion in an area called the Bridle Path, also called Millionaire’s Row. They had a swimming pool. She bought me a bike. There was a computer in every room. And a theater room.

“That first time I went for a visit with them, I couldn’t wait to get home. But what I didn’t know was that the visit there was the opening shot in a campaign.

“My mom started phoning me all the time. Every night. Why didn’t I come live with them? They could give me so much
more.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.

“What I didn’t really get was how she had started undermining my dad, how she was working at convincing me only her kind of love was good. She would ask questions about him and me and how we lived, and then find flaws. She’d say, in this gentle, concerned tone, ‘
Little boys should not have to cook dinner.’
Or do laundry. Or cut wood. Or she’d say, mildly shocked, ‘
He did what? Oh, Macintyre, if he really cared about you, you would have gotten that new computer you wanted. Didn’t you say he got a new rifle?’

“In one particularly memorable incident, I told her my dad wouldn’t let me play hockey because he couldn’t afford it.

“She expressed her normal shock and dismay over his priorities, and then told me she would pay for hockey. I was over the moon, and I ran and told my dad as soon as I hung up the phone.

“I can play hockey this year. My mom’s going to pay for it!”

“You know, I’d hardly ever seen my dad really, really mad, but he just lost it. Throwing things around and breaking them. Screaming, ‘She’s never paid a dentist’s bill or for school supplies, but she’s going to pay for hockey? She’s never coughed up a dime when you need new sneakers or a present to bring to a birthday party, but she’s going to pay for hockey? What part of hockey? The fee to join the team? The equipment? The traveling? The time I have to take off work?’
And then the steam just went out of him, and he sat down and put his head in his hands and said, ‘Forget it. You are not playing hockey.’

“This went on for a couple of years. Her planting the seeds of discontent, literally being the Disneyland Mama while my dad was slugging it out in the trenches.

“When I was twelve, I went and spent the summer with her and Walden. I made some friends in her neighborhood. I had money in my Calvin Klein jeans. I was swimming in my own pool. She bought me a puppy. She didn’t have rules like my dad did. It was kind of anything goes. She actually let me have wine with dinner, and the odd beer.