Not Another New Year’s

Hannah Davis stood on the wide sidewalk outside San Diego…

The most beautiful man Hannah had ever seen in her…

Women had always been a weakness of his, Tanner Hart…

Perched on a corduroy-covered couch, with a half-downed tumbler of…

Hannah awakened, and information sank slowly into her muddled brain,…

If Tanner had thought his luck would change with the…

Her head doing a rerun of the woozy spins from…

Tanner tipped back his favorite chair at his favorite table…

Despite himself, Troy admired the princess’s courage. When faced with…

The next morning, Hannah tiptoed out of the suite, aware…

The lost puppy was him, Tanner thought later. Lost, sick,…

What? After her long speech about being capable of handling…

Desirée discovered that even sleepy Coronado could suffer from traffic…

Tanner knew the world wasn’t fair. There was that damn…

Hannah shared a late breakfast set up by room service…

Desirée arrived for her shift at Hart’s smelling of lemongrass…

After playing hooky the day before, Hannah had promised herself…

With Hannah in tow, Tanner sprinted toward the parking lot…

Tanner decided he would have to distract Hannah from the…

The bar wouldn’t open for at least half an hour,…

Hannah lifted a languid hand to her nose and sniffed…

“I don’t know why you’re so angry,” Hannah said, her…

Never having had anyone to count upon, Desirée didn’t expect…

Troy trudged out of the surf, his longboard under his…

At midday, Hannah’s small collection of belongings was packed in…

After lunch, Tanner drove to his house, telling Hannah they…

Stunned by the revelation of Tanner’s bargain with her uncle…

Hannah was gone and it was too quiet in Tanner’s…

Ignoring despair, Hannah nurtured her anger as she hoofed it…

Days ago Tanner had told Hannah that a Secret Ser…

Things I Hate about New Year’s

Finding last year’s list of resolutions and realizing that it might as well serve as this year’s list too.

H
annah Davis stood on the wide sidewalk outside San Diego Airport’s Baggage Claim and tried convincing herself she hadn’t just lost everything. After all, she had her health (which was actually saying quite a lot for a second grade teacher during flu season) and she had relative youth, though she was on the downhill slide to thirty.

But she no longer had her luggage and she didn’t have her purse. Meaning she had no clothes, no shoes, no undies, no toiletries, no ID, no credit card, not even a ChapStick. She glanced down at her scraped and nicked palms and tested the flex of her bruised knees. Maybe running after the person she’d seen hurrying out the sliding doors pushing her purloined baggage cart—purse perched on top—hadn’t been such a smart idea. But she’d only turned away for a moment
to offer aid to a “mama”-wailing toddler, and when she’d turned back it was to see the backside of a stranger shoving her stuff outside.

In her immediate pursuit, she’d tripped in her new black pumps, losing precious minutes. By the time she’d gotten upright again, the stranger and all her things had disappeared.

Airport security had been as helpful as any busy law enforcement entity would be as night fell on New Year’s Eve. They’d taken her statement and said they’d be in touch. Given that her cell phone had been stolen along with everything else, and since she didn’t know where to say she’d be staying because she had no way to pay for accommodations, she’d told them one of the two addresses on nearby Coronado Island that she’d committed to memory.

“Ma’am?”

Hannah’s head jerked around to meet the brown-eyed gaze of a young Marine dressed in sand-colored desert camouflage. His companion was garbed the same and had a set of freckles stretched across his baby face.

“Ma’am, we saw you fall a while back. Are you all right?”

Hannah’s heart squeezed. She’d seen dozens of members of the military in her travels through airports that day. Young men and women sacrificing for their country. A trio had been in line at the Starbucks in Sacramento. The man in front of her had paid for their macchiatos.

When a dozen had debarked the plane at the gate next to hers, spontaneous applause broke out all over
the concourse. In the airport bookstore a motherly looking woman had given a young soldier a spontaneous hug.

Obviously, to most people the sight of them spurred patriotism and pride.

Her heart squeezing hard once again, Hannah looked at the pair beside her and could only wonder if either one of them was a bigamist.

“I’m fine,” she said, clearing the bitterness from her throat. “Thanks.”

For the fifth time she considered running back inside to the bank of pay phones by the escalator. One collect call and her overprotective parents would breathe a sigh of relief that they could make the arrangements to straightaway return her to the family fold and their small, Northern California farm town.

She could be home before this year ended.

Only to ring in the next without any relief from all the unanswered questions, the sticky pity, the hot cheeked shame she’d been living with during the last one.

Returning home would also mean returning without the vacation—the adventure!—she’d claimed she wanted to everyone who would listen. And without achieving the real desire that was in her heart.

That thought was enough to turn her toward the nearby taxi stand. She couldn’t go back without seeing these ten days through and learning just how her right choices had turned out to be so very, very wrong.

Without finding out what was wrong with
her.

So she’d stick it out without resorting to any kind of bailout from Mom and Dad.

On the slick vinyl seat of a cab that smelled like pine air freshener and Armor All, Hannah sat back, straightening the legs of her new black jeans, a necessary purchase after the I’ve-been-dumped her to drop fifteen pounds in the last eight months. Then she surreptitiously fished beneath her pressed overshirt and satiny camisole to locate the three twenties she’d slipped into the left cup of the built-in shelf bra (which was roomy anyway, thanks to the weight loss, a sure sign that God was a man).

Finding the folded bills, Hannah blessed the travel savvy of Paula, the woman who taught third grade in the room beside hers at Harold Mott Elementary School. During the weekly meeting of their Potluck Club, she’d shared some of her expertise.

Spare cash in the bra. Check.

Memorize the address of your destination. Check.

Never leave your purse anywhere but slung across your chest.

Ooops.

“Big date to night?”

Hannah met the gaze of the cabbie in the rearview mirror. She pushed her straight dark hair off her face and behind her ears to get a better look at him in the dashboard’s glow. With his bald pate and wattly neck, he bore a strong resemblance to her boss, Harold Mott Elementary School’s principal. It had initially reassured her, always a bit nervous in a car, and now the similarity compelled a certain obedience.

Hannah had always tried to do what was expected of her.

“No big date,” she said, her gaze shifting toward the side window. “Not long ago I was…uh…” How should she put this? Jilted? Ditched?
Humiliated by the man whose engagement ring I wore?

Picturing Duncan in her mind, a little fire kindled to life in her belly, but she instantly stamped it out. She shouldn’t nurture bad thoughts about him.

Clearing her throat, she looked toward the driver and started again. “You see,” she said in an apologetic tone, “it’s just that—”

Wait. Apologetic tone? Why was she apologizing?

The answer was almost as embarrassing as what had happened to her several months back. The truth was, she was sounding sorry because Hannah Davis didn’t like to disappoint. Since six, Hannah Davis had always wanted to please.

Need someone to review the policies and procedures manual?

Need someone to permanently take over the cold and damp early-morning yard duty?

Need someone to soothe little Timmy’s manic mother who couldn’t accept that at seven he wasn’t yet prepared for matriculation at Stanford University?

Hannah Davis had always been your (wo)man.

“I ask,” the cabbie said, as he took the exit leading to the Coronado Bridge, “because if you don’t have a New Year’s date, the address you gave me—of Hart’s bar—well, it might not be the best place for a woman like yourself to find one.”

A woman like myself?
Hannah’s forehead pleated, then the question flew from her mind as they ascended the upward sweep of the bridge. Her breath
caught at the view. The overhead lights rimming the curving span looked like suspended lanterns, leading directly to a diamond-strewn patch of carpet floating on dark Pacific waters. Beneath the bridge was a bay dotted with illuminated boats that appeared more like pretty toys than real modes of transportation.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the bristling skyscrapers of downtown San Diego, and while that view was spectacular too, what was ahead mattered so much more.

For a country girl like herself, straight from inland farmlands, Coronado appeared beautiful and tempting and exotic. Like the adventure she’d claimed to everyone at home she wanted.

Her heartbeat sped up and she let herself imagine that was all she was after on this trip. The island truly looked like an opportunity to see and do new things.

A chance to be someone other than dependable Hannah Davis who had been so easy to dupe.

Who was such, as her students would say, a dope.

The cab driver turned out to be even more like Hannah’s paternal principal than she’d first thought, she realized, listening to his grumbles as they reached their destination. She took a swift glance at the anonymous-looking, innocuous-appearing, stucco store front that was the entrance to Hart’s. To be honest—and to some comfort—it appeared a lot less foreign and exotic than her first glimpse of Coronado itself.

The establishment took up one end of a small,
utilitarian strip mall. There was a darkened nail place next door and a filled parking lot out front.

“Should I really be worrying?” she asked, looking over at the older man.

“I don’t like to see any young lady traipsing into a bar alone,” he said.

“But I know people in there,” she assured him. Not really. Her
uncle
knew people in there. A man who used to work for him, a man named Tanner Hart, had returned to his hometown of Coronado and was employed at the bar. Uncle Geoff had given this Tanner the heads-up and she’d been told to meet him there the next morning. To keep the family off her back about her solo vacation, she’d agreed to a little face time with a Coronado native.

Now she hoped she’d find Tanner Hart here tonight. Maybe he could help her solve her no luggage, no ID, not-much-money dilemma.

“Still,” her self-appointed protector muttered from the front seat of the cab as he put together her change. “You look so…so…I don’t know. Wholesome.”

Hannah wanted to cry. Wholesome were cows in the pasture. Wheat fields. Women who patiently waited for their playing around fiancé.

Her fingers went to the first button of her staid, starched shirt and flicked it open to reveal the notch at her throat. “I don’t know how you could tell such a thing about me during a short car ride,” she declared.

“I don’t know either,” the cabbie replied, handing some bills over the seat. “But you sure do seem like a schoolteacher.”

Hannah crumpled the money in her hand. Having grown up, gone to college, and got employed within a forty-mile radius, she’d always assumed people knew she was a teacher because…because they knew she was a teacher. They knew
her.
But now she lifted her left wrist and gave a tentative sniff. Was there Crayola in her pores? Did she smell like construction paper and glue sticks?

Yes, she had precise D’Nealian handwriting, but that didn’t show on her face, did it?

Giving up on the depressing analysis, she climbed out of the car. Then she stood on the empty walkway outside the bar and waved as the cab drove away. She took a moment to breathe in the damp, salty air, so different from the earthy alfalfa and manure scents of home.

After another minute she turned toward Hart’s no-nonsense storefront. And stalled some more. She had the oddest feeling that once she opened the metal door in front of her she would never be the same again.

Silly.
That was part of the plan, wasn’t it?

Still, she hesitated, until the darkness of the parking lot seemed to creep toward her. Her scalp prickled and she moved forward as if some unseen hand approached from behind—

The bar’s door popped open.

Light shot out.

Music swamped the sidewalk.

That reaching hand she’d sensed at her back was real. It caught her shirt between her shoulder blades.

Pulse jolting, Hannah gasped. Wrenched away.
Fell to her hands and knees for the second time that night.

Looked up and between legs—male, female, and those belonging to the bar’s chairs and tables—glimpsed the most beautiful man she’d ever seen in her life.