Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth) (17 page)

But he had seen it on her face once, though not on the camera. It was how she’d looked at him at the airport before turning away and leaving him behind. Calm and pity.

He chucked the catalog toward the garbage bag and missed. It flopped over the open floorboard exposing the bilge where it teetered for a long moment. The corner folded. It disappeared below with a sodden splat. Crap. He really needed to fix that missing board in the floor.

The last envelope had Angelo’s writing on it. His friend hadn’t come by in a week and
Russell couldn’t face going to see him.

Mail, though. That was a bad sign. Angelo had occasionally sent postcards when they’d lived on opposite coasts. Neither of them was much at writing. He tore off the end.

Nutcase appeared to have slipped into another of her mid-afternoon naps.

A newspaper clipping and two, hundred-dollar bills wrapped in a sheet of white paper. One word across the paper.

“Jerk!”

Two hundred dollars. They were for… what? Then he remembered. He’d tossed them on the table, as if paying for…

“Idiot!” He jerked up to a sitting position and banged his head on the low overhead above the pilot berth. He fell back prone as Nutcase growled and dug her claws into his chest at the unannounced change of position. His tee-shirt was no defense against her talons. He extracted her claws and tossed her onto the table. He sat up more carefully this time.

Idiot! He’d treate
d her like… like a babe from 1-900-Dial-a-Babe. “Nice dinner conversation, honey. Here’s a couple of bills for your time.” Damn! He’d meant to pay for the meal he’d ruined. Well, here it was back in his face once again. He jammed the bills in the pocket of his jeans.

He unfolded the clipping.

A Restaurant for Romance

by Cassidy Knowles

Oh god! Angelo was going to bloody murder him. He forgotten that she’d been there to review the restaurant. The good and the bad. Her article would play from New York to San Francisco. She couldn’t break the restaurant, but she could certainly ding it. Ding it bad. He hadn’t told her, but he used to follow her columns when he was looking for the hot new restaurant to charm someone into his bed. Usually worked too. The lady had taste and people listened.

He scanned the article.

A good review. Thank god!

No, a great review. It sounded so good, he wouldn’t have credited it except that he’d shared the meal with her. The
Baby Scallop Kebob had been incredible. He could feel his mouth water again as he read about it. It had also been the high point of the meal right before he…

The chef made exquisite choices. Even the dessert wine, previously unknown to this reviewer, so complemented the fig-custard, puff pastry that this diner was transported back to the chef’s home town of Monterosso. The narrow beaches, the high cliffs, the home cooking, and the strong wines of the Ligurian region of Italy.

A little side column described the wine exactly as he’d tasted it. Only he hadn’t. He’d been far too grouchy to notice even half that. But she made him think that he had. She was really good at this.

A fine meal can be destroyed as easily by poor company as a poor chef.

Ouch! Okay, here it comes. Here’s where she slaughters Angelo’s. And it was all his fault. Angelo was never going to forgive him. The thin paper was crumpling in his hands.

Whether making a marriage proposal, as was done and joyously accepted by a bride-to-be, or looking to celebrate fifty glorious years together, there can be no better place than Angelo’s Tuscan Hearth. Bring the person you love to this restaurant and you’ll never be forgotten for it. Ever.

There it was. Published. Syndicated into over two hundred markets.

Cassidy Knowles was going to forgive him… never!

Cape Flattery, Makah Bay

First lit: 1857

Automated: 1977

48.3717
     -124.7366

Cape Flattery was so named by Captain Cook when he arrived at the Northwesternmost point of what would eventually become Washington State in 1778. “In this very latitude geographers have placed the pretended Strait of Juan de Fuca. Nothing of that kind presented itself to our view.” And so he dubbed the cape a “flatterer.”

The Strait of San Juan de Fuca leads to the massive Puget Sound which hosts such cities as Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

The lighthouse was built with the light tower itself incorporated into the building so that the keepers did not have to risk the hostile natives to maintain the light. The natives were hostile because they had been decimated a few years before by a smallpox epidemic brought in by the light’s construction workers.

According to the GPS, Cassidy was about halfway
down the trail to the Tatoosh Island Lighthouse at Cape Flattery, the northwestern-most point of Washington State. It was such a beautiful day she was practically dancing along the three-quarter-mile long trail. Spring was finally here, the winter rains had eased off and the sun shimmered down from a crystalline sky. These were the moments she was glad she’d returned to the Pacific Northwest. The buds were opening in the vineyards she’d driven past, the flowers edged forth and filled the air with their sweet scent, battling the cherry trees for her nose’s attention.

The trail was a bit rough, but just fine in her hiking boots. Actually, according to the GPS, they were overkill, but she wanted to get some use from them. They made her feel solid, standing square upon the earth.

“Is that what men feel like when they do that hand on the hips thing?” A passing bumblebee was too busy about her task to answer.

The trail had started in a huge empty parking lot. If that lot were filled in the summer, the trail would be nuts.
A weekday mid-morning was a far better time to be here. The dirt path descended down through trees, twisting down to simple, split log foot-bridges over muddy passages.

Despite the groomed trail, it was as wild a place as she’d ever been. Twenty or so miles from the nearest town, at the end of the road, at the end of the country for that matter. She was presently the northwesternmost person in the continental U.S. Possibly by all of that twenty miles.

It reminded her of growing up in the country and how much she’d enjoyed it as a child and not enjoyed it as a teen. When had that changed taken place? She shrugged. No reason to care today. Today the world consisted of little Cassidy Knowles, a mucky trail, and a new lighthouse.

She followed a side branch to a little viewing platform. A stout rail was all that separated her from an impossibly long drop. The water lay a hundred or more feet below. Sheer islands plunged upward from the ocean into the air, their heads covered in tall caps of fir trees looking like a teen’s moosed doo. The Pacific rolled and splashed unheeded about their rocky bases.

If she raised her arms, she could fly. If she were to sing, her voice could be heard around the world.

Cassidy returned to the trail and headed for the next lookout taking the exhilarating floatiness down the trail with her.

“Hey! Wait!”

She looked back to see who was calling. Her foot came down hard on a rock, the shock jarred her whole body.

Russell Morgan. She turned away before he could recognize her, but there was nowhere to go. No escape along the open trail.

She could hear his feet pounding as he ran up the trail.

“Hey! You in the red coat. Wait!”

Resigned, she stopped and turned.

Russell stumbled to a halt, a fancy camera banging against his hip. “I’ve been looking for… Oh, it’s you.”

He had the decency to blush bright red at her continued silence.

“Sorry, that came out wrong. Let me start again. Hi, Cassidy. I didn’t expect to see you here.” He looked down the length of her body as if he were inspecting a mannequin.

Glancing down she saw her red leather coat, it was too warm for the parka. Black leggings and her new, barely dirty, hiking boots. They now appeared as ungainly clown feet at the end of overly skinny, pogo-stick legs. Ridiculous with the high-fashion coat, but she like the way it felt.

His gaze returned to her face. “Your hair.”

She reached up to check it, but it was still up in the clip that should keep it out of her face even in the wind that every lighthouse apparently cultivated.

“What?”

“It, uh,” he shook himself as if coming awake from a dream, “looks nice.”

“Thanks.” If he thought a lame compliment was going to begin to make up for…

“I’m really sorry for some of things I said the other night.”

“You mean a month ago?”

His expression blanked for a moment.

“A month ago? Really?”

Just how dense was he?

“Twenty-six days.” Ugh, really, really lame, Cassidy Knowles. She sounded like a pining female who counted the days, hours, minutes, and seconds. It was easy. Today was May first and their date, if one could call it that, had been on April fourth. Thirty days hath September, April, June, and…

He flashed one of his killer smiles and she did her best to resist its power. It was a really good smile.

“That makes this a mighty belated apology, doesn’t it? Perhaps if I got down on my knees?”

“How about a kow-tow?”

With the light breeze ruffling his brown hair, a worn denim jacket that outlined his wonderful upper body, he dropped to his knees and pounded his forehead three times against the a patch of sand.

“Please forgive me, O Great Goddess of the Wines.”

He rocked back on his heels and grinned up at her. “Better?”

“That’s not fair.”

“What?” He stood once again and she noticed that her eyes were about level with his chin. His shoulder was just the right height to lay her head on if they were slow dancing. Stupid image. She definitely didn’t want to be around Russell Morgan for a moment longer than she had to. Absolutely not long enough for a dance. Her brain had clearly taken a holiday.

“Jerks aren’t supposed to make me smile. Especially ones I’m mad at.”

“Cheating, huh?” He slid his hands into his jeans pockets as if he were Harrison Ford and he’d just defeated the entire German Army on his own.

“Definitely.”

“Well, can I walk with you a bit, if I promise to be less jerky?”

“Is that possible?”

He shrugged eloquently, “I can try. No guarantees.”

It would be tempting to blast him with some witty remark and walk away, but she could never think of them when she most needed them.

“Okay,” as if she had a lot of choice in the matter, there was only the one trail and not another soul to be seen.

He bowed slightly and indicated she should walk ahead. They moved toward the point in silence until one of them had to speak or she’d go stark raving mad.

“Do you—”

“Isn’t it—”

“You first.”

“No, you.”

He looked grumpy, but she waited him out.

“Do you come out here often?”

She shook her head. “My first time.”

“Me, too. Do you, ah, go to many lighthouses?”

Her foot caught on a rock and she stumbled forward. He reached out a hand to steady her, but she didn’t take it.

“Seemed like a nice day for a drive. I wasn’t really going for the lighthouse. I thought the northwest point of the U.S. might be amusing.” She was babbling like an idiot. But she’d be damned before she’d tell him that she’d been collecting lighthouses for the last five months.

“What about Alaska?”

“Continental U.S.” You jerk.

“That always bothered me. ‘Continental U.S.’ Like Alaska is on some other continent.”

“Contiguous U.S. Does that make you happier?”

“Immensely.” He started whistling as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

“Is this your first time?”

She glanced over in time to see a wolfish grin cross his face for a moment. That definitely hadn’t come out right, but she was not going to blush. Her cheeks didn’t appear to be paying attention to her orders and were heating up abruptly.

“I meant—”

“Yes and no,” he saved her with a casual drawl that might still have a bit of the grinning male ego. “First time here.”

She focused on the trail ahead and continued placing one foot in front of the other.

“How about you? Are you a lighthouse virgin?” He said it with every sexual insinuation possible dripping from his tongue. She’d obviously given him too much credit. What were they, in high school?

“Jesus. Do you go out of your way to be insulting?”

He stopped his damn whistling. Actually, he was no longer beside her and she had to backtrack to where he halted.

“No.” He shook his head, his voice as soft as the breeze wending its way through the green moss. “No. I’d have to say that you bring out the worst in me.”

“I’m honored.”

He bit his upper lip and inspected the sky for a moment.

“Can we try this again?”

“You already started twice.”

“Third times the charm?”

If he’d made it a statement, she’d have left him and to hell with the ferry ride, the three-hour drive, and the stupid lighthouse. But he looked pitiable. How a handsome, broad-shouldered man over six feet tall could look so lost was a wonder. Did he know that she had a weak spot for lost souls?

She looped her hand through the crook of his arm and tugged him along the trail. Once they were walking together, he unwound a bit. De-stiffened enough to bend his legs in some semblance of normalcy.

“Hi, I’m Cassidy Knowles. Yes, I’m a lighthouse virgin. This is my first one.” She’d be nice to him for Angelo’s sake, but that didn’t mean she was about to let him one single inch into her life.

“Russell Morgan, pleased to— I really was pleased to meet you. You seemed like a nice lady at dinner, no matter how I mangled it.”

“I have rarely been attacked quite so thoroughly.”

“Well, you didn’t deserve it.”

She’d thought a lot about what he’d said. Hard not too.

“I’m less sure of that now than I was then.”

Where the trail narrowed, he walked awkwardly with one foot in the mud so that she could stay well on the trail. It did make her think a little better of him.

“You made your feelings for me quite clear in your review.”

She had, hadn’t she.

“I was…”

“Irritated? Hurt?”

“Really, really pissed.”

“Ah, well. I’d wager that isn’t something your average date achieves quite so thoroughly.”

“No, Mr. Morgan. You’re a first. Though there was this one guy.” She told him the story about Richie who had hallucinated her as hell-spawn.

He told a story about a horrid double-date he’d had with Angelo when they were in high school. Twins that Angelo could keep straight just fine, but not him. Kept trying to kiss the wrong one.

He was actually charming when he wasn’t in a vicious back-biting mood. Cassidy could feel the muscles under her hand. His strong bicep flexing easily as they moved over the last of the rocks, an unconscious strength easily shifted to aid her balance over the rocks. She enjoyed holding the man’s arm, of feeling, even for an instant, that they belonged side-by-side. A warmth ran through her that had nothing to do with the May sunshine.

Rounding the last bend in the trail, they came upon a small viewing platform raised a half-dozen steep steps above the rocky clifftop. She waved him forward, though he tried to insist that she proceed first. There was chivalry and there was climbing a half-dozen ladder-steep steps that would place her behind right in his face.

“Jerks before ladies.”

“Even redeemed ones?”

“You aren’t redeemed yet, go.”

He ascended, like most males, only using every other step. Good butt, she couldn’t help noticing. And grinned. Turnabout was sometimes fair play. She followed him up the ladder.

Then she stopped noticing Russell Morgan at all.

The sweep of the Cape Flattery shore spread before them. Three-quarters of the horizon was water. To the right was the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. To the left was the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean. And straight ahead was a rocky, sprawling island, the last land before Alaska and Japan.

A few hundred yards offshore, Tatoosh Island popped from the water like the bottom of a cooking pot, flat-topped and sheer-sided. The green grass and few firs did little to mitigate the desperate isolation of the lighthouse perched on the edge of the cliff. It was no wonder that a lighthouse keeper and his assistant had attempted a duel to the death over some imagined insult. Both had been saved by another assistant who had removed the lead from the bullets before the three shots were fired.

Its beacon winked at her across the narrow passage.
The light called out, seeking aid or was it offering guidance?

Perhaps it was both. She scanned the water, right and left. The only thing that was missing was the sailboat.

# # #

Russell had finally left to amble along the edges of the high cliff. Even now Cassidy could see him poking along inspecting every nook and cranny of the narrow point, as if he’d lost something. Occasionally he’d snap a picture with that fancy camera of his but even that looked less like inspiration and more like habit. At long last he headed down a side trail that appeared to lead to the bottom of the cliff.

She took the moment alone to pull out her father’s letter.

Dearest Cassie,

You can hold onto something so tightly that your nerves go numb and you no longer notice your deathgrip on it. Not until it is too late, or near enough.