Summer at Willow Lake (45 page)

“I was just telling Jenny that we’ve known her grandparents even longer than we’ve been married,” Granddad said.

“That’s true,” Nana said. “I bought a sweet cheese kolache from Sky River Bakery on opening day—the Fourth of July, 1952.”

Jenny looked amazed. “You remember that?”

Nana beamed. “Helen’s kolaches are quite unforgettable. I hope we can pay her a visit tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Jenny said, and Olivia realized she was on the verge of tears.

“Do you dance, Jenny?” Their father stepped in with an air of gallantry. He’d probably seen what Olivia had seen, that Jenny was getting overwhelmed. Olivia couldn’t imagine what it must be like, discovering so many new connections, practically overnight.

“Not very well,” Jenny confessed.

“Me neither, but I would love to dance with my daughter.”

“I was going to help serve the cake,” Jenny said, hesitating.

“I’ll take care of it,” Olivia said. “Go and dance with Dad.”

Jenny put her hand in his and they came together awkwardly, laughing a little. Olivia stood and watched them, feeling a funny catch in her throat. This, she realized, was going to take some time—getting acquainted with the sister she’d never known. She saw her mother’s parents, Gwen and Samuel, watching from their table.

“If looks could kill,” Dare said under her breath as she came to help with the cake.

“I’ll go talk to them.” Olivia took two plates over to the Lightseys’ table. “Enjoying the party?” she asked brightly.

“Oh, indeed,” her grandfather said.

“Where’s Mom?” Olivia looked around for her mother.

“Unfortunately, Pamela wasn’t feeling well, so she went back to the hotel.”

The knot in Olivia’s stomach tightened. “I know it’s awkward,” she said, “but I hope you’ll be happy for us. Jenny is wonderful.”

“She seems perfectly lovely,” Grandma Gwen agreed, pushing aside her slice of cake without tasting it. “And we understand that none of this is her fault. Still, you have to consider what this means to you, Olivia.”

Olivia caught the implication. As her sibling, Jenny would share in their father’s affections—and in other aspects of his life, including his fortune. “I’m fine with this,” she said firmly. “Dad and I talked about it at length. She’s as much his daughter as I am.”

Grandma Gwen sniffed. “You must be certain to look out for your own interests, shouldn’t she, Samuel?”

“Indeed,” he said again, which seemed to be his standard reply to everything since he’d grown hard of hearing.

Olivia escaped, not wanting to continue the conversation. She understood their loyalty to her mother, but now was not the time to discuss the matter. Suddenly she felt every bit of the heat and the crowd and all the champagne she’d drunk, and she stepped outside to get some air. It was quiet here. The sun was gone, and the deep purple night seemed to breathe mystery.

She was hoping—praying—that Connor had seen her head outside. They still hadn’t had a minute together, and she felt lost without him. This was a first for Olivia; she wasn’t used to this desire to share every aspect of herself with someone.

As she was pacing back and forth, pondering this new development, a car’s lights washed across the parking lot, then stopped and went dark. A few moments later, a shadow stirred on the path from the parking area and she saw the outline of a tall, big-shouldered man. The orange spark of a cigarette end made an arc through the air, then disappeared as the man approached.

“Mr. Davis?” Olivia said. “Please, come inside. My grandparents were hoping you’d stop in.”

Terry Davis was dressed in dark pants and a shirt that still bore creases of newness. “I can’t stay long,” he told her. “I just stopped by to pay my respects.”

“You know they’d love to see you,” she assured him.

He shrugged, looked at the ground. He was a large man, tall and broad. Studying him, Olivia could see where Connor got his striking good looks, but in Terry, that deferential air diminished him, somehow. “To tell you the truth, I really came here to have a word with you, Miss Bellamy. That is, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind a bit, but please, call me Olivia.”

“Yes, ma’am. The fact is, ma’am, I’m working on step nine.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of my twelve-step program. It’s the one about redressing people I’ve hurt in the past. There are a lot of them, you included.”

“Me?” Olivia couldn’t fathom what he’d ever done to cause her harm. “But I don’t—”

He held up a hand. “I need to try to make amends if I can.”

“Oh. Um, so this is something I can help you with?”

“All you have to do is listen.”

She hesitated, then had a seat on the bottom stair of the main entrance. “I can do that.”

He sat down beside her. “It’s about that night nine years ago. You know the night I mean.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Olivia asked Connor. The evening had slipped away and it was nearly midnight by the time she found him.

Connor pushed away from the bar, where he’d been talking—with seeming civility—to Freddy. When Olivia saw Connor, she nearly forgot what she meant to say. It was really the first chance she’d had all night to get a good look at him and, for a few moments, it was impossible to stare and think at the same time.

“Tell you what?” he asked.

She flushed, feeling several pairs of eyes on them, and led him out to the relative privacy of the deck, now lit with twinkling lights. “Your father found me earlier. He told me some things about that last night back when we were kids. Things you never bothered to explain.”

“Like what?” His posture turned defensive, stiff and unyielding.

“He said he drank too much that night.”

“My father drank too much every night.”

“But that night, he told me he chose to do it at Hilltop Tavern, and afterward, he ended up with his car in a ditch. He said you showed up just before the state patrol, and that you got behind the wheel and claimed you were the one driving, so your father wouldn’t get a DUI charge.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So you never told me any of this, Connor.”

“It’s not mine to tell. There’s that pesky anonymity thing—”

“You let me think…” She was starting to sputter, all the old hurt flaring to life inside her.

“That it was all about you?”

Ouch. “It was a simple enough explanation. You should have told me,” she said.

“Christ, do you think it was easy, talking about the fact that my father was a drunk? What would telling you accomplish?”

The memory of that night still had the power to burn. “You were my first boyfriend. That night—what we were going to do—it meant everything to me.
Everything.
And then to have it turn into some kind of joke, and you disappear—”

“Lolly.” His voice was quiet, anguished. “You were the one who walked away that night.”

Oh, God. He was right. She’d always blamed Connor but she’d made a choice that night, and she’d never bothered to find out what really happened. She’d spent nine years believing Connor had walked away from her that night, and now she had to face the fact that it simply hadn’t happened that way. She had fled from the pool at the waterfall and never looked back. Now she realized that if she had, she would have seen Connor ignoring the jeering, drunk counselors, throwing on his clothes, going after her.

Finally, just moments ago, Terry Davis explained why Connor had never made it to her cabin that night. Someone tipped him off that his father was in trouble. What followed sounded like a nightmare—Connor insisting to the state patrol that he was the driver.

“Your father said you were sent to the county jail over in Kingston.”

“That’s right.”

His face was unreadable, but she knew it concealed a world of pain. He’d been a scared kid, alone, trying to save his father from a DUI charge and jail time. She could picture him all too vividly, caught in the glare of the harsh lights, tossed in among the other Saturday-night guests, shouted at, “roughed up,” as his father had put it.

“I wish you’d told me. Called me or—”

A very small smile flickered on his lips. “Lolly. It didn’t work like that. And then, trying to explain everything to you, well, it would have been harder on us both.”

She nodded, aching for the boy he’d been, the one who hid so much pain, even from her. She’d been afraid of his intensity and of the complexity of his life. And that, she realized, was the fundamental difference between her and Connor. Her childhood had not been ideal, but at least she’d
had
a childhood. When they were together at camp, it was too easy to forget how different their lives were. But the reality was that Connor had grown up fending for himself and watching over his own father, just as he’d done that night.

According to Terry, seeing his son sent to jail in his place was the bottom he needed to hit in order to make the decision to get sober, and he went into a ninety-day rehab program.

And Olivia, knowing none of this, went back in New York, moved into her college dorm and tried to pretend the whole summer had never happened.

“What could be harder than losing you without explanation?” she asked, remembering the agony she’d suffered.

“Losing you now,” he said simply, and finally his smile warmed. “That would be harder.” He bent down and kissed her, briefly but firmly, on the mouth. “The implication being that we’re together now.”

Olivia felt dizzy from his kiss and wished he’d do it again. She paused, letting the cool ripple of a breeze off the lake clear her head. “I’m not going to contradict you.” She wanted him to throw her on the back of his motorcycle and ride off into the hills, never to return. She wanted their lives to fit together the way their hearts seemed to. “I just want…” She paused. It was so hard to put into words. “I want to know I’m not making a mistake this time. I’ve been wrong so many times, I don’t trust myself anymore.”

He chuckled. “I can’t save you from making mistakes, Lolly. No one can, not even you. And why would you want that anyway?”

So simple, she thought. That was his gift, that clarity, whereas she tended to think things through to their most absurd degree. “But—”

“Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.”

She couldn’t believe he was smiling at her, as though he was enjoying this. “We’ve built separate lives, Connor. I just don’t see how this can work.”

“You move to Avalon and we build the house together. And you tell your grandparents you’ll oversee the reopening of the camp.” He was almost infuriatingly matter-of-fact.

“You’ve been talking to Granddad and Greg.”

“At length,” he admitted.

Olivia bit her lip and gazed up at him. She pressed the palms of her hands against the impossibly fine fabric of his tuxedo jacket, feeling the solid warmth of him. Her heart leaped, but another part of her reared back. Connor was asking her the same thing Rand Whitney had asked her—to walk away from the life she’d built, the business she’d struggled with and nurtured.

“Their idea about the camp—I think they’re having trouble letting go. It’s a great idea, creating a retreat for families, but it’s just…a dream,” she said.

He gestured out across the lake. “This whole place started as a dream. I never told you this, but my dreams started here, too. The first time I came to this place, I was able to imagine some sort of life for myself that didn’t completely suck. That was huge for me. I can’t tell you how huge.”

She remembered that angry, blue-eyed boy, with the hip-hop clothes and duct tape on his sneakers, and she wished she could somehow reach back in time, put her arms around him and embrace him, tell him everything was going to be all right. She’d had that chance, though. Years ago. And she hadn’t taken it.

“I’m so glad…” she began, then laughed a bit nervously. “I don’t know what I’m glad about. That we had this summer. That maybe we…”

“Maybe we what?” He slid his hands under hers and laced their fingers together. “Listen, I can be flexible. If you don’t like the idea of staying around here, we’ll live where you want.”

Again, so simple. “You’d move to the city for me?”

“Hell, I’d move to Tierra del Fuego for you if that’s what you wanted.”

She looked at their hands, the palms pressed together, fingers entwined. She’d held on to him like this the last time they’d made love. “I’m not sure what you want me to say,” she admitted.

“Then just listen. I love you, Lolly. I’ve loved you since we were kids, and that’s never, ever changed, even though I never told you. Instead, I hurt you and let you go. I’m not doing that again, honey. Ever. We’re grown-ups now. We know how to do this. You follow me?”

She felt dazed, her heart filling up with a cautious but undeniable joy. “I’m sort of stuck on the part where you said you love me.”

“That’s a good place to be stuck. I love you and I always will, every single day of my life. We’re from two completely different worlds, and we live completely different lives, but there’s this thing between us. It’s always been there. Tell me I’m not imagining it, Lolly.”

Her throat felt thick with tears, and it hurt to swallow. She refused to let herself cry, though. Refused to ruin this perfect, perfect moment with tears. “I love you, too, Connor,” she whispered. The words came from a place inside her that welled up like a hidden spring. “I always have, too, even when I was hating you.”

He smiled, touched her cheek. “I know, honey. I know.”

As she tilted her head back to study his face, she felt the tears melt away, replaced by pure joy. He made her smile, and he made her feel safe. Could love really be that simple?

He let go of her briefly, checked his watch.

“Is something the matter?” she asked.

“I’m in a slight hurry here.” He grinned again, perhaps with a flash of nervousness. “I need to do this before midnight.”

“Do what?”

“I just think it would be good luck to propose to you on your grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.”

Her heart sped up. She panicked, yet at the same time she knew that this was exactly what she wanted. In a crazy way, it made sense. “You’re proposing to me?”