Twice Loved (copy2)

(Back Cover)

“Go 
away, Rye! I’m afraid of what you do to
 me!”

Five long years ago, lovely Laura Dalton waited on the bleak Nantucket shore for the day her beloved husband Rye would return ... and then she learned his ship was lost at sea.

Only Dan, Rye’s closest friend, was a shining beacon to light the dark hours ... a father to her baby ... a husband to a grateful widow.

But who could foretell that a wind-roughened sailor with sun-bleached hair would anchor again in a port that had given him up to the briny deep? That he would walk down a scallop-shell path toward the familiar gray clapboard?

He stands at the doorway, vowing he will have her. And Laura knows that even though she gave herself to another, her heart still belongs to him.

For Rye is home again ...

“A story so powerful it will wash over you like the Nantucket tides in a Nor’wester and sweep you away to a new realm of tender sensuality...”

—Affaire de Coeur

“Incredibly poignant ... a masterly exploration of the relationship between a man and a woman..

—Jennifer Blake, author of 
Royal Seduction

“The emotions of the lovers are so real and so intense, they become your emotions. You are sure to be swept away for a rewarding interlude.”

—Vivien Lee Jennings, 
Boy Meets Girl

“An excellent plot theme, sensitively rendered ... a thoroughly enjoyable book.”

—Esther Sager, author of 
Only 'Til Dawn

“A story so compelling and exciting that you won’t want to put it down.”

—Terri C. Busch, 
Heartline

LaVyrle Spencer is the author of such well-loved novels as 
The Fulfillment, The Endearment
 and 
Hummingbird

Also by LaVyrle Spencer

THE FULFILLMENT

THE ENDEARMENT

HUMMINGBIRD

SEPARATE BEDS

YEARS

A HEART SPEAKS

THE GAMBLE

VOWS

JOVE BOOKS, NEW YORK

A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Jove edition / June 1984

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1984 by LaVyrle Spencer.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-515-09065-4

Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

The name “JOVE” and the “J” logo are trademarks belonging to Jove Publications, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

To the three people I love most
— 
my wonderful husband Dan and our darling daughters Amy and Beth

Chapter 1

1837

It 
HAD BEEN 
five years, one 
month, 
and 
two 
days since Rye Dalton had seen his wife. In all that time only the salty kiss of the sea had touched his lips, only its cold, wet arms had caressed him.

But soon, Laura, soon, he thought.

He stood on the deck of the whaleship 
Omega,
 a two-masted schooner riding low in the brine just beyond the shoals of Nantucket Bay, her hold crammed with brimming oil casks, “bung up and bilge free,” so that none of the precious cargo would be lost. The hand on the larboard rail was burnished to the shade of teak, as was the face that contrasted starkly with thick brows and unruly hair bleached almost colorless by years of sun and salt. That hair, badly in need of cutting, added a ruggedness to the bold Anglican features. A thick tangle of side-whiskers swooped almost to his jaw, emphasizing its squareness, then jutting toward the hollow of his cheek. A handsome man with a mariner’s wide stance, he stood rock-ribbed and anxious, studying the distant shore.

Just short of Nantucket Shoals, the 
Omega’s
 sails were reefed, her anchors dropped, and the lighters used for unloading were lowered from their davits. Her crew boarded the boats, babbling eagerly, their ribald banter laced with excitement. 
They were home.

The lighter slipped through the calm waters of Nantucket Bay, but across the sun-splashed surface it was difficult to make out the crowd awaiting their arrival at Straight Wharf. The May sun transformed the top of the water into a million gilded mirrors, each shaped like a tiny, flashing fish, blinding the blue eyes of the man who squinted quayward. He need not see her—she’d be there, he knew, just as most of the town would be. The watchtower out on Brant Point had spotted the 
Omega
 long since, and word would have spread; she was coming in, plowing deep: the voyage had been successful.

The bright reflection paled and the crowd came into view. Weeping women waved handkerchiefs. Old retired sea-dogs scraped crusty wool caps from graying pates and hailed the returning whalers with flapping arms, while lads with salt in their dreams gaped in awe, impatiently awaiting their day for becoming heroes.

The lighter thumped against the pilings, and Dalton’s eyes scanned the crowd. Within minutes the wharf was a melee of happy reunion: sweethearts hugging, fathers holding children they’d never seen, wives dabbing happy tears from their eyes, while horse-drawn buggies and carriages waited to bear the arriving seamen away to their homes. Other lighters were already arriving from the 
Omega,
 and stevedores began unloading heavy wooden casks of whale oil and blubber, rolling them down a wooden gangplank with a rumble like low, constant thunder. Horse-drawn drays waited to haul the cargo off to warehouses along the waterfront.

At last Rye’s boots touched solid planking that neither rolled nor pitched. He shouldered his heavy sea chest, caught his pea jacket under one arm, and moved through the crowd, searching anxiously. All about were skirts flared over baleen hoops and waists pinched tight by whalebone corsets. His gaze swept them cursorily, searching for only one.

But Laura Dalton was not there.

Frowning, Rye swayed up the length of Straight Wharf, picking his way between clusters of townspeople, his stride wide and balanced even under the weight of the sea chest. In his wake, matrons gaped at each other in stunned surprise. A pair of young girls tittered behind their palms, and old Cap’n Silas, knees crossed, back hunched against the weather-bleached wall of a bait shack, nodded silently to Rye, squinted at the tall young cooper as he moved up the street, puffed on his pipe, and grunted, “Uh-oh!”

Leaving the excitement of the wharf behind, Rye passed warehouses redolent with tar, hemp, and fish. From the noisome tryworks where blubber was melted down into whale oil came its omnipresent reek, mingling with billows of gray smoke from the cauldrons.

But the rangy seaman scarcely noticed the stench, certainly not the occasional eye peering inquisitively at him from chandlery, ropewalk, and joiner’s shop as he strode along the cobbled streets toward the heart of the village. At the head of the wharf he entered the lower square of Main Street itself. Before him, rising from the great harbor and ascending in gently rising slopes toward the Wesco Hills, spread the town where he’d been born. Ah, Nantucket, my Nantucket!

A lonely outcropping in the North Atlantic, the island lay thirty miles asea, off the clay cliffs of Martha’s Vineyard, to the west and the windswept moors of Cape Cod, due north. The Little Gray Lady of the Sea, Nantucket had come to be called, and she certainly looked it today, sleeping beneath an arch of blue sky, her silvery cottages gleaming like rough-hewn jewels in the high May sun. The cobbled streets contrasted sharply with the startling green of new spring grass along the walkways, giving way to paler paths of sand and shells farther inland. Salt breezes swept across the open heath, carrying with them the fragrance of blossoming beach plums and bayberries, while in dooryards apple trees bloomed in scented explosions of white.

Rye paused long enough to pick one, hold it to his nose, and savor the delicate fragrance, made the more precious for being a product of land instead of sea. He drank deep, as if he might make up for the five-year dearth of such pleasure. Then, thinking again of Laura, he frowned in the direction of home and strode on purposefully.

Within minutes he came to a quaint lane of startlingly white scallop shells. They clicked beneath the crush of his boots, and he hoisted the sea chest higher, reveling in the remembered sound, the scent of the apple blossoms, and the familiarity of the cottages he passed. A wild thrum of expectation pounded through his vitals at the thought that he was, at last, 
walking 
home.

He reached a 
Y
 in the path, the left branch leading away to Quarter Mile Hill, the right narrowing toward a gentle rise upon which rested a little story-and-a-half saltbox, typical of most on the island, its sides and roof sheathed in silvered shingles, unpainted, polished by wind and salt and time until each board gleamed like a lustrous gray pearl. Its leaded windows were long gone, melted down for bullets, decades before as a sacrifice to the Revolution, but on either side of the door small panes gleamed in wooden frames and white shutters spread like open arms to allow the spring day inside.