Moonlight on Monterey Bay (5 page)

Sam stared at her. He didn’t like things happening haphazardly, or people showing up unexpectedly. But most of all he didn’t like the way her damned appearance cut his breathing short and caused his mind to fuzz. He had been off center all week because of her, and he was damned if he was going to let it continue. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Behind him Eleanor smiled.

“I thought you might have some questions,” Maddie said quietly. Her smile was warm.

“These are wonderful ideas, Maddie,” Eleanor said. “It all fits together so nicely.”

“Why are there so many plants?” Sam asked. What he wanted to ask her wasn’t about plants and furniture. It was about the way she looked at him, about the light that came from her eyes and warmed the inside of him, disturbing him.

“You have so many wonderful skylights, Mr. Eastland—”

“Sam,” he said abruptly.

Progress! Maddie restrained a smile. “Plants will thrive in that house, Sam, and they’ll warm it up.”

“And they’re healthy, too, giving off all that oxygen,” Eleanor added quickly.

Sam looked at Eleanor, frowning.

“Maddie knows what fits that house, Sam,” she said. “Frankly I love her ideas.”

Maddie stepped closer to the table. Her arm brushed against Sam’s. His skin, warm in spite of the air-conditioning, felt good against her bare skin.

Sam felt such a strong response that he stepped away.

“I think these colors will work well too,” Maddie went on. “The house is so wonderful and the view so beautiful, you don’t want to compete with it. You want to be at one with it. And the plantings around the house—”

“What plantings around the house?”

“The ones we’re going to put there,” Maddie said simply.

She smiled at him again, a smile so confident that Sam found it difficult to question her judgment. He wondered if she was as secure and determined in all the other aspects of her life.

“Your house needs to be kept airy, not burdened with heavy furniture, Sam,” she went on. “I need to spend some more time there to figure out all the details. These are only ideas.”

“I want it done soon.”

“I understand,” Maddie said, barely concealing her excitement. He hadn’t said no. If she worked it right, there wouldn’t be room for him to get one in.

“All I need is a bed, a few pieces of furniture,” Sam said. “That’s all the hell I’m asking for.”

Maddie smiled sweetly. “We can manage that too.”

“It’s the opposite of the way it was done before,” Sam said, struggling.

“You don’t strike me as the kind of man who needs elaborate surroundings all the time, Sam,” she said softly. “For relaxing, for leaving work behind and letting your spirit breathe—well, I think this will do fine.”

“Exactly.” Eleanor’s voice dropped to a gentle tone. “It’s been so long since you’ve relaxed that you probably don’t know
what
you’d be comfortable in, but for some ungodly reason, this young woman here seems to know.”

Sam spoke now as if Maddie weren’t there. “You seem to know a lot about this design firm.”

“No, nothing. We both know that I called them by mistake. But fate has a way of barging in sometimes.”

“So now fate is selecting my furniture.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You think I should go with this firm, then?”

“Of course.” It was Maddie and Eleanor, speaking in unison, their voices, the young and the old, melding together in a powerful chorus.

Sam looked back to the table, to the swatches of fabric, the plain, undecorated windows. Oh, what the hell. All he cared about was having a place to which he could escape. The furniture was irrelevant, a practical necessity at best.

And then he glanced back at the painting of the child’s room and a strange feeling rode his belly, blotting out his clear logic. It was a disorienting feeling.

Maddie had walked to the other side of the office and was discreetly looking out the window, leaving Sam and Eleanor alone at the table. “Hope,” Eleanor said softly, glancing from his face to the picture and then back again. “That’s what this is, a house of hope, of new beginnings.”

Sam felt the pounding inside him come back. He looked at his watch again and didn’t acknowledge Eleanor’s comment. Instead he glanced back at the stack of plans and then strode to the door. With one hand on the knob, he turned around, fixing Maddie with an intense stare. “Since Eleanor seems to have her mind made up, the job is yours. You can work out the details with her.”

He closed the door then, the thud of wood against wood echoing in the large room. In a second, Maddie was across the room. She flung her arms around Eleanor. “I have no idea in the world why you are putting yourself out on a limb this way,” she said, “but I’m enormously grateful.”

Eleanor clasped Maddie’s shoulders, holding her slightly away, and looked into her clear green eyes. She said simply, “It’s for Sam, Maddie. I’m doing this for Sam.”

Maddie and Joseph celebrated getting the job with dinner from the corner deli, which they devoured at the table in the conference room, surrounded by sheets of paper, color swatches, and pictures of furniture.

“Joseph,” Maddie announced as they wiped the last crumb from the shiny tabletop and scooped up their work into neat piles, “I’ll be gone for a couple of days.”

“You’ll what?” Joseph’s bushy white brows nearly caught his receding hairline. “Maddie, is there a loose connection somewhere? Sam Eastland wants this place finished yesterday!”

“Of course, Joseph. Calm down.” She rested one hand on his arm. “And that’s why I’m going to devote twenty-four hours a day to this lucrative ticket-to-Joe’s-comfortable-retirement project.”

Joseph sank back into the chair. “Okay. So you’re going up to the San Francisco market to check out furnishings. Good idea.”

“I’m not going to the market. I’m spending the next two days at East of the Ocean.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m going to have the house tell me what it needs, get to know
it
a little better—”

“Know the house?” Joseph rolled his eyes. “Maddie, I’ll introduce you.”

“How can you possibly know what a house needs unless you’re intimate with it? It’s like any relationship, Joseph, when a man and woman—”

“Ohmeohmy!” Joseph rubbed the back of his neck. “Enough, Madeline. I get the picture.”

“I want to
be
in that house for two days. That’s all I ask. I want to wake up in the morning and see where the sun is. I want to see what kind of colors it paints across the floor. I want to listen to the wind and walk the rooms, listen to the walls, feel the spirit of it all—” She rose and kissed Joseph’s forehead. “It’ll work, trust me. See you on Thursday.” And she left, a blur of bright blue, disappearing into the dark night.

It was late Tuesday night when Maddie arrived at the Eastland beach home. Determined to approach her stay as one would approach abandonment on a deserted island, she had brought only essentials: a sleeping bag, flashlight, and large bag of groceries. She hadn’t even brought Eeyore, who was staying with a neighbor. For two days, nothing short of fire, earthquake, or pestilence would budge her from East of the Ocean, and in that time she would commune with the house and the land around it. She would fall
in love with East of the Ocean, and then she would fill it with that feeling.

Walking slowly through the clean, bare rooms, Maddie stretched her arms high above her head and sighed out loud. This was great. Such a wonderful house. It needed people, love, that little girl skipping through it with a sand pail clutched in her hand.…

Maddie remembered the newspaper shot of Sara Eastland. It had been grainy, as such shots often are, and all she could tell was that the then toddler was fair like her father and had delicate features. She’d be around five now. Five years old … The familiar tug, the painful stab in her heart came suddenly, but it was never a surprise. It would always be there inside of her, and that was as it should be, because the connection between herself and her own five-year-old daughter would never be broken.

Maddie slid down to the floor and folded her legs over each other, her back straight and her body facing the open windows. And then, with conscious effort, she pulled her thoughts and longings out of her body and let them rest on the smooth surface in front of her. With the moon spreading its light across the ocean in the distance, she closed her eyes and breathed in the tangy air and prepared for sleep.

All morning Sam Eastland had dialed the London number. Wednesday. Middle of the week. Nine hours
later in London than in California. It was evening every time he had called. Surely they’d be home. Sara had invaded his thoughts the night before and had been with him ever since, through restless dreams and a day of long, tedious meetings. He didn’t know why; it was troublesome, that her image should haunt him this way. He should be able to concentrate, save his thoughts of the mess he had made of his life for after hours. Perhaps it had been better they weren’t home. Sara had trouble talking to him. He was a stranger, thousands of miles away. With each new level of growth and awareness in Sara’s life, Sam slipped more into the shadows; he was a gray image to his daughter, time and distance sucking away his vitality to her.

He poured himself a Scotch and watched the flicker of lights dotting the city. Everyone was going home to begin the weekend. It was time for him to go home too.

Home for Sam was a coveted address to which he had moved when Elizabeth left and the enormous home they had shared was sold. It was a skyscraper condominium that cost more than many people made in a lifetime. It was elegant and sleek—and tonight it was the last place in the world he wanted to be.

Sam shook his head. He had been doing fine, busy as always and handling the latest growth of his company with excitement and finesse. And then something happened. What was it? What had stopped him
in his tracks, stifled the excitement, robbed him of the thrill of deals and contracts?

The telephone rang in the outer office and stirred Sam out of his reveries. While the answering machine picked it up, he loosened his tie, and headed for the door. There was a cocktail party at the Civic Center tonight, but he knew before reaching his private elevator that he wouldn’t be going. A crowded social gathering on a steamy night was not his idea of fun.

And by the time he slipped into his green Jaguar, he knew what
did
seem like fun—well, what seemed bearable. Without a backward glance, he headed for the hills and the ocean beyond.

The road wound through the dark Santa Cruz Mountains. Tonight it was lit by the headlights of commuters hurrying to their homes in the hills. And just on the other side of the hills were the ocean and his empty beach home. Elizabeth had never asked for its furnishings, but he had had them shipped to her anyway, every picture, every chair. It was done out of some sense of purging, he supposed. And then he had foolishly let the house sit there empty for three years.

The low sports car took the sharp curves easily, and Sam smiled into the darkness, breathing in the smell of the pines that climbed the rocky hillside off to the right. He forked his fingers through his thick, windblown hair. Yeah, this was where he should be, not at some crowded cocktail affair, restrained by an uncomfortable tux.

Thirty minutes later he was walking through the hollow hallway of his beach house. The wall switch proved useless, and Sam realized with a curse that there were no lamps in the house. He’d have to settle for the moonlight.

He paused when he reached the living room. Something was different tonight. Looking around, he saw that the telephone was still on the floor, the rooms still empty. In the dim moonlight he spotted some narrow brush strokes of paint along one wall that hadn’t been there before, but that wasn’t it. It was something else, something more intimate. What was it, then? And then he recognized a soft smell, feminine was how he’d describe it. Clean, soapy.

Well, good. Maddie must have been overdoing some measuring or whatever people in that business did. Great. Maybe the next time he came, there would actually be a bed to sleep in and he could spend the night.

As he walked out onto the deck he noticed a bouquet of wildflowers tucked into an empty soda bottle. He hoped it wasn’t a harbinger of things to come; Sam didn’t need fancy things, not like Elizabeth had, but there were limits.

He stood on the deck, his hands flat on the railing, his eyes half-closed as he faced the ocean below. The rhythm of the waves pounding the shore below slowly invaded his body, easing the tightness in the muscles
across his shoulders. The night hung heavy, the moist, briny air a thick cushion for the smell of wildflowers.

Sam didn’t know how long he had been in that trancelike state, looking but not seeing, breathing in, emptying his mind, when a rustle below interrupted the flow. He opened his eyes and peered into the moonlight. An animal? He strained to see into the green-black shadows.

And then the noise grew louder, this time taking on new tones, the wet slap of something against stone. Footsteps.

The only light around was one small security floodlight—but it didn’t illuminate the pathway down to the ocean. The only break in the black night was beams cast by the moon. Within a second or two the noise took human form, and Sam stared at the shadowy shape of a woman walking slowly up the stone pathway.

Sam’s eyes widened.

Coming out of the blackness into a stream of moonlight, she was like some goddess moving in slow motion, her body a silvery-black, fluid form, a graceful blend of light and shadow. The painting of the birth of Venus, the goddess born from the foam of the sea. And then the figure coming up the stairs stepped into a thin stream of light from the only spotlight on the deck. Her head lifted, turned slightly, like a young deer alerted to danger. Their eyes met.

Sam gasped.

Birth of Venus, hell! The masterpiece had nothing on the incredible vision in front of him. She was beautiful. Exotic.

And every solitary bit as naked.

FOUR