Authors: Peggy Gaddis
Secret Honeymoon
Peggy Gaddis
Avon, Massachusetts
A Sneak Peek from Crimson Romance
“Going home! Going home! Going home!”
To others aboard the train the wheels might go “Clickety-clack, clickety-clack!” but to Cathy Layne, perched on the edge of her seat, her eager eyes on the flying landscape outside, the wheels said, “Going home!”
How many long, weary months in Vietnam had she wondered if she would ever be going home again! Her too thin body in the smartly cut uniform of the Army Nurse Corps was almost rigid as she watched each beloved, once familiar, now strange scene flash past. Her brown-gold hair, tucked neatly beneath the provocative little overseas cap, topped a face that was still a lovely oval, despite hollows in her cheeks, the faint circles beneath her eyes. She had been very ill and she was desperately tired; but she had sixty blessed days of leave before she must report for another assignment, or for discharge. And she meant to spend those sixty days doing very little save resting, eating, sleeping—and being with Bill.
The very thought of Bill, never far from her heart and mind even during the age-long months of horror and destruction, brought a lovely color to her face and lit a sparkle in her tired eyes.
When the train halted at the Cypressville station, Cathy looked about her, quick with delight at the loved familiarity of the old, dingy station. Nothing had changed; it was all as she remembered it.
Where was Bill? She had wired him the time of her arrival, taking it for granted he would be as eager to see her as she was to see him—yet he was not here.
Behind her a warm, eager voice said, “Well, bless you, child, here you are—and I’m that glad to see you!”
Warm arms enfolded her, and Cathy laughed and cried as the woman patted her back and kissed her cheek.
“Well, well, if it ain’t a sight for sore eyes to see you again! Cathy, I’ve missed you—and land alive, the way I’ve worried about you!”
It was Aunt Maggie Westbrook, big, kindly, warm-hearted; the woman who had taken a frightened, big-eyed ten-year-old girl, when her mother died, and given her a home. Aunt Maggie, who was not really a relative at all, but a neighbor who had known and loved Cathy’s mother and who had been unable to see the small Cathy go to an institution.
Scooping up Cathy’s bag in one strong, ample hand, her other arm about the girl, Aunt Maggie sailed across the platform. “Sailed” was a good word, Cathy told herself halfway between tears and laughter, for though Aunt Maggie was big and heavy she moved with an astonishing lightness; her unfashionably long skirts billowed a little with the energy of her movement and gave the impression of a sturdy, dependable sailing ship in a strong wind.
“Aunt Maggie”—Cathy paused beside the ancient car which Aunt Maggie alternately reviled and cajoled and abused—“where is Bill?”
Aunt Maggie looked unhappy, but she said casually, “He’s out of town, chick. That old harridan sent him away yesterday on a business trip.” Aunt Maggie’s tone put quotation marks about the last two words.
“But he knew I was coming home, I wired him,” protested Cathy.
“Want to bet he never laid eyes on the message? Not if you sent it to the house. The old battle-ax would have hid it from him,” said Aunt Maggie grimly, as she inserted her ample body behind the wheel of the little car that she fondly called the Betsy-Bug.
“Oh, but surely she wouldn’t do that!”
“Look, chick, that Edith Kendall would do anything if she thought she could get away with it! I wouldn’t put anything past her! She’s so darned scared that her precious boy will snap her apron strings and find a life of his own—and a wife—where she can’t boss him around.”
The Betsy-Bug made its sedate way at twenty-five miles an hour through a district that grew increasingly prosperous-looking until it came to a climax at an impressive yellow brick house that crowned a low hill, with a sweep of velvety lawn dotted with beautiful old trees. Beneath the warm touch
of spring, the trees wore tiny leaves that were like curled baby fists, and there were borders of tulips and daffodils and hyacinths all along the graveled drive.
“Look familiar?” suggested Aunt Maggie wryly, and jerked an inelegant thumb toward the house.
“Very impressive,” said Cathy dryly.
“What worries me,” said Aunt Maggie as the Betsy-Bug scampered past the impressive fieldstone fence with its grilled iron gates, “is how Bill stands living there. Like living in a jail— Oh, of course, with all modern improvements. But a jail just the same.”
Cathy laughed unsteadily.
“Darling, I’m beginning to suspect that you don’t like Mrs. William Kendall too much,” she said teasingly.
“Like her? Does anybody?” snorted Aunt Maggie. “Anyway, she’d resent it furiously if anybody dared to like her. She’s much too important to be liked.” She wants to be known as the Lady Bountiful of the Manor—provided she doesn’t have to spend more than a dollar and a quarter befriending the poor.”
The Betsy-Bug had left the yellow brick with its imposing grounds and was progressing steadily, if not speedily, a mile or so beyond, to where several cottages faced each other along the highway, each with its own garden plot and half an acre or so of farm land.
A neat white picket fence enclosed one of these. It was a trim white cottage, freshly painted, hip-deep in blossoming shrubbery, its walk and drive blazing with spring flowers, the orchard at the back hung with scarves of palest pink and creamy white.
Aunt Maggie turned the Betsy-Bug’s blunt nose through the gate, drove along to the back of the house, and heaved a sigh of relief as she pried herself from behind the wheel.
“I’m either going to have to diet or stop trying to drive,” she said comfortably as she had said a thousand times before. “I starve myself, drop a few pounds—and then I laugh it back on again!”
“If you lose so much as an ounce, I’ll—I’ll sue you,” Cathy threatened. “You’re just exactly the way I want you, darling!”
“Then I’ll make an apple pie for supper, with lots of cinnamon and sugar,” said Aunt Maggie cheerfully, and put her
arm about the girl and held her close. “It’s good to have you home again, chick.”
“It’s good to be here, darling. I used to dream of the place—and of you.” Cathy kissed the plump cheek and looked about her. “But you’re terribly spruced up, darling. Fresh paint and the pickets all in place.”
“Well, what did you think I was going to do with all that money you sent home—spend it in riotous living?” demanded Aunt Maggie. “I finished paying for the house, and then I put in some new furniture, and painted it—and made a deed out in your name.”
Tears were very close and she finished tartly, “And now, for Pete’s sake, cut out the weeps and come on in. I know you’re worn out.”
Aunt Maggie took her proudly through the house, and Cathy was deeply touched at the shining order, the freshness and undeniable charm of the little place.
“This is your room,” said Aunt Maggie, and stood back to look at it. The cream-colored walls, the ivory woodwork, the honey-maple furniture, the glazed chintz draperies with the ruffled organdie looped back beneath them. “If you don’t like it, we’ll heave it all out and start over again.”
“Like it? I love it! You’re a darling,” said Cathy warmly.
“Phooey!” said Aunt Maggie, once more her brisk, vigorous self. “Your clothes are in the closet—the stuff you left behind. Maybe you’d like to get out of that uniform and into something cooler. There’s plenty of water for a hot bath. I can’t get used to the fact that there’s
always
plenty of water for a hot bath, with that new electric heater in there. And I’ll fix us some supper.”
They had had supper and the dishes had been washed and put away, and Aunt Maggie and Cathy were on the wide, old-fashioned front porch when a car came swiftly out from
town and skidded to a stop at the gate. A man leaped lightly over the low gate and came running up the walk.
“Cathy!” said Bill. His voice was little more than a choked whisper, yet to Cathy it was like a great boom that made her heart turn over. “Cathy—oh, my dearest—is it really you?”
He came to her, stumbling a little, and knelt beside her and drew her into his arms, holding her close and hard against him. Neither of them knew that at the first sight of him, Aunt Maggie had risen and left the porch. They had forgotten Aunt Maggie; they had forgotten everybody but each other.
There was a long, blessed interval. It might have been moments, it might have been hours; neither of them knew nor cared. It was enough that after long, long months of waiting, they were together again. But when at last he held her a little away from him and could look into her eyes, Bill asked sternly, “What was the idea of just slipping home and not saying a word to me, Cathy? Why didn’t you let me know you’d be here today?”
“I sent you a wire from Atlanta yesterday,” she told him.
She saw his brows draw together in a puzzled frown.
“You sent a wire? I didn’t get it,” he said then.
“I sent it to the house, thinking you’d be more certain to get it there than if it went to the mill.”
A look of bitterness touched his face and he nodded.
“I see,” he said after a moment.
“Does she still dislike me so much?” asked Cathy hesitantly.
“Don’t let’s think about her now, darling. Let’s just think about us. I’ve—I’ve missed you so, Cathy.”
He kissed her hard and held her a little away from him. But the dusk had thickened now, and her face, though only a few inches from his own, was a pale blur in the darkness.
“You’re thin, angel—and you look terribly tired,” he said and his voice ached with tenderness. “Darling, now that you’ve resigned—”
She laughed a little, softly, a laugh that was a caress.
“I haven’t resigned, my darling. One doesn’t ‘resign’ from the Army!” she reminded him.
“Well, then, now that you have your discharge—”
“I haven’t,” she interrupted quickly. “I have sixty days’
leave and after that I report for a check-up. For reassignment if I pass the physical; for a discharge if I can’t.”
His arms tightened anxiously about her.
“You were wounded?” he asked sharply.
“No, of course not. I’d have written you, or had someone write,” she comforted him swiftly. “I’ve been ill—fever—nothing too serious. I’ll shake it off and pick up a few pounds and be in the pink by the time my leave is up.”
She waited a moment, holding her breath. Here, if ever was the time for him to say, Don’t you suppose I want to marry you, Cathy? Ask for your discharge and we’ll be married. But he didn’t say it. There was a tiny, taut silence, as though he sensed what she was thinking and because he could not—
dared
not?—say that, he kissed her again.
“Well, anyway,” he said roughly, “you’re home now and a lot can happen in sixty days. Cathy, my dearest, have you any possible idea how much I love you?”
Cathy put down the small, uneasy fear in her heart that seemed, somehow, disloyal, and said eagerly, “Tell me about it!”
But even as he held her close and kissed her and whispered into her ear all the lovely things she had so long dreamed of hearing him say, that little uneasy questioning feeling persisted.
Bill shook her ever so gently after a while and laughed down at her tenderly.
“I must have some pretty high-powered competition,” he teased. “All those dashing pilots and so on.”
“You wouldn’t have had any competition if all the best-looking men in the world had been standing in line, suing for my heart and hand,” she told him with a small, shaky laugh. And contentment flowed into her heart beneath the hard, eager pressure of his kiss for which she had hungered so long.
