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Authors: Abbie Williams

Tags: #Minnesota, #Montana, #reincarnation, #romance, #true love, #family, #women, #Shore Leave

Wild Flower (2 page)

BOOK: Wild Flower
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“See?” he murmured, as I clutched him close, his forehead bent to my left shoulder. “I knew it.”

“You always know it,” I murmured back, utterly content, my fingers sunk into his hair. I kissed his jaw, scratchy with stubble. “You're the world's best lover.”

He laughed, tickling my skin, whispering, “I aim to please, that's all.”

“That's the secret,” I giggled, and he gently shifted us. I turned to snuggle my back against his chest.

From behind, he slipped one hand over the sloping curve of my belly and murmured, “How's the boy?”

I teased, “He's probably scarred for life now.”

Justin's chest rumbled with laughter. He teased back, “Nah, he must be used to it by this point.”

As though in response, our son poked what was either a knee or an elbow just beneath my belly button. I caught Justin's hand and maneuvered it to the spot. He smoothed his palm over my skin and said with quiet reverence, “Hello there, son. Did we wake you?”

“I'd say that's a big ‘yes,'” I responded, curling my fingers through Justin's. With his free hand, he swept hair from the side of my neck and kissed me there. The baby pushed firmly against our joined hands.

“Take it easy on your mama,” Justin said, patting my belly.

“Yes, since your daddy was just pretty hard on me,” I replied, and again Justin laughed, his breath warm on my neck.

I shivered and snuggled closer, whispering, “'Night, honey.”

“G'night, my sweet little woman,” he said back, leaning to turn off our bedside lamp, then catching me back against him.

Justin was snoring within a minute, though I lay awake for some time while the baby moved in what felt like gentle somersaults, contentedly watching the waning moon as it inched diagonally across our bedroom window on its journey westward. Though we hadn't officially confirmed that I was pregnant with a boy, I knew my prediction was correct, just as I'd known with Clint and Rae. Since I was a little girl I had experienced these inexplicable flashes of absolute knowing; my great-aunt, Minnie Davis, had also been endowed with such abilities, and it was from her that I had learned, if not when, at least
what
to expect when a Notion overtook me. It was always spontaneous, always sudden, and often in dream form. I had been plagued with enigmatic dreams my entire life, though a dream containing a Notion was different than the regular, disjointed jumble of images from any other night.

Great-Aunt Minnie had foreseen my first husband Christopher's death when I was still a teenager and we were only dating; he had given me a promise ring for my birthday less than a year earlier. I could even pinpoint the moment the Notion struck her on that warm spring evening as she'd been braiding my hair. I had sensed the sorrow flowing from her fingertips, the pause in the motion of her hands. She hadn't told me anything except that I would be all right; though it had taken me over a decade and a half to fully realize it, Great-Aunt Minnie was correct in this prediction.

“My grandma had the gift,” she'd told me. “It goes far back in our family. Trust it, Jillian, always trust it, even when you don't understand exactly what it shows you.”

And I always had.

This autumn would mark mine and Justin's three-year wedding anniversary. I had been in such a terrible car accident in September of 2003, just the day after Gran, my beloved grandmother, passed away. I had been so utterly and blissfully happy the night before, on my birthday, when Justin had asked me to be his wife. Not so much as a flicker of a Notion had warned me of Gran's impending death or the car accident that nearly killed me just a day later; I had to cling to the belief that things happened for a reason, tried not to blame myself too greatly for the instances when a Notion had failed to alert me.

My older sister Joelle didn't tell me until later just how much Justin had suffered to see me in the hospital bed, unmoving and unresponsive, knowing I was pregnant but not if I would survive. The thought of it made me cringe even now. I still had trouble driving a small car after dark, preferring either Justin's truck or the work truck from Shore Leave, yet besieged with the memories of being broad-sided that night.

Since that autumn, Justin had sold his old house a few blocks from Fisherman's Street, where he had lived for the duration of his marriage to Aubrey. Working over a period of a year, we had (with considerable help) cleared out a section of woods on the property about a quarter-mile to the east of Shore Leave, where we'd built our own cabin. It wasn't grand on the scale of some of the places ringing Flickertail Lake like majestic pearls on an expensive necklace, but instead cozy, functional and well laid-out. I'd been insistent on a few small luxuries, such as a master bathroom and a decent entryway, spacious enough to accommodate our messy outer gear during the average six months or so of winter we routinely experienced in northern Minnesota. We also had a gorgeous picture window, complete with a bench seat, and a stone fireplace that Dodge had helped Justin build piece by piece.

Our cabin had three bedrooms; the baby would sleep in with Justin and me for probably the first year of his life. Clint's room would eventually become the new baby's. I felt a pang in my heart at the thought of my oldest son moving away from me for college, though it wasn't as excruciating as it would have been without Justin and Rae. I remembered where I'd been three years ago, lonely as hell, in love with Justin without fully realizing. I had been so lost, Justin so bitter from both the terrible accident that had irreparably scarred his face and the embarrassment of a cheating wife; in a small town like Landon, everyone had known within forty-eight hours that Aubrey had not only left him, but left him for someone else. Recalling that summer when we'd at last admitted our feelings for each other made me scoot closer to my sleeping husband, shifting gently to press a soft, lingering kiss to his chin, breathing his scent. Even in sleep, he tightened his arms around me.

I love you
, I told him silently.

Aubrey's barbed words in the grocery store came unwittingly back to me as I lay sleepless, along with her clear intention to elicit guilt. I sighed a little, considering. Beneath the surface there had always been a connection between Justin and me; even unacknowledged, it had raced along swift and strong. As much as I had once loved Clint's father Chris, there had been a part of me that always belonged to Justin. Even Aubrey, who was shallow and petty, had discerned this, so perhaps I deserved to feel the sting of guilt, at least a little.

You still hate her, admit it.

Fine, I still fucking hate her. Even if she had a tiny little bit of a point.

She had once been married to Justin, had been the recipient of his love, his kisses and his incredible touch, for years.

Jilly, quit it.

The burn of jealousy was of course ridiculous. Nevertheless, I found myself gritting my teeth as I imagined all the way back to high school, when Justin had been a lanky football player and Aubrey a popular cheerleader. She'd intimidated me to no end; though we'd been in the same grade, she had always possessed an attitude of being worlds ahead of the rest of us. The only person not snowed by Aubrey's behavior had been my sister Joelle, who was (and still is) a complete knockout, and who had been dating the most arrogant, over-confident and notorious boy in Landon High at the time, Jackson Gordon.

The phone suddenly rang; I had the ringer turned off on our bedside cordless, but heard the one in the kitchen jangling. I eased from beneath the covers and headed down the hall to snatch it up before both Justin and Rae woke up. The microwave clock read 11:37, but it was just Joelle, I knew.

“What's up?” I asked my sister upon answering, settling carefully upon my chair at our table, leaving the room dark. I propped my feet on the chair opposite, Clinty's usual spot.

“Jilly Bean, sorry to call so late,” Jo said. “I knew you were up. I tried your phone first, but you didn't answer. I didn't wake anyone did I?”

“No,” I assured her. Joelle and her husband Blythe lived just a stone's throw from Justin and me, in a similarly-styled cabin, though they had four bedrooms to accommodate their son Matthew and two of Jo's three daughters; Joelle's oldest, Camille, lived in my old apartment above the garage at Shore Leave, with her fiancé and her little girl. I asked my sister, “You want to come over and sit on the porch for a bit?”

“Yeah, I was hoping you'd ask,” she said in response. “I'll be there in a sec.”

I plucked Justin's worn flannel shirt from the peg in the entryway and stepped into my red flip-flop sandals before heading out under the stars. Justin and Clint had hung a wooden swing from the beams overhanging our porch, and I sat there, listening with pleasure to the sounds of the night. The air was warm and some of the humidity had been swept away by a whispering breeze. There was a pair of great grays in the woods beyond our yard, I was pretty sure; their haunting calls made me long for my grandmother, dear Gran, who had also loved the sound of owls.

Jo came walking up from the path that led to her house no more than a minute later, wrapped in a hooded sweatshirt of Blythe's, carrying a tin candle lantern that I recalled from our childhoods, something Mom claimed had been in the Davis family for over a century. It threw the golden light in a thousand tiny pinpricks from the nail holes punched in patterns throughout, as though Jo was being trailed by a flock of dancing fireflies.

“God, I wish we still smoked,” Jo said as she climbed the porch steps, hanging the old lantern on a cast-iron peg near the front door. I scooted over so she could join me on the swing.

“You can say that again,” I murmured longingly. Gran and Great-Aunt Minnie would have scoffed at us, as both of our menfolk (rather than ourselves) had driven the decision that we give up the bad habit. I recognized that it was the right choice, but I still truly missed the feel of a burning cig in my hands. I missed blowing smoke rings; I missed the way a cigarette helped me slow down, gather my thoughts. I knew there were healthier ways to do so, but shit. I was a creature of habit.

“How's the baby?” Jo asked, bending a knee on the swing to face me, smoothing her right palm over my belly.

“He was doing acrobatics just a minute ago,” I said.

“Matthew finally nodded off. We can manage to get him into his toddler bed, most nights anyway, but he'd still rather sleep with us instead.” She added, with soft affection, “Bly just can't refuse him anything.”

“He's as much as a marshmallow as Justin when it comes to the kids,” I agreed, then teased, “We have to be the disciplinarians, Jo, we can't back down.”

“Yeah, that's a scary thought. It is hard to say ‘no' to Matthew, I admit. He's so darn adorable. And Bly just worships him, can hardly let him out of his sight.” Jo shifted a little, tucking her loose golden hair behind her ears. “You know.”

She meant the fact that years ago, when he still lived in Oklahoma, Blythe's ex-girlfriend had gotten pregnant and then proceeded to have an abortion, without telling Bly. The ache of this would always be present in Blythe's sensitive soul, Jo and I both realized, and so I understood that she couldn't be too irritated with him regarding their son. And Matthew was the sweetest little kid in the world, with his blond curls, blue-gray eyes and lisping voice. The only two who failed to succumb to him were Rae, and Camille's daughter Millie Jo. Instead, they bossed Matthew every which way from Sunday.

“So, I have two things,” Jo said then, and I studied my sister's face in the light thrown by the lantern, its graceful contours more familiar to me than just about any other in my life. I was so glad that she lived near me again that it was difficult to express in words; I knew she felt the same. I waited patiently for her to continue.

“First, I'm worried about Camille,” she said. She asked intently, “Jills, you haven't had any…you know…”

“I would tell you instantly, if so,” I assured her. “And besides, Camille is so happy it radiates off her like a beam of sunshine.”

“I know, and I'm so grateful for that,” Jo said. “They're so in love. It's not that, though I'm worried she's going to get pregnant before their wedding. Seriously…”

“They are pretty…active,” I giggled in agreement. “But come on, they're engaged, and Mathias is very…” I giggled more at all of the descriptive words that popped into my mind, words a mother may not really want to hear in conjunction with her daughter's lover, such as
virile, sexy
, or
studhorse-like
. I finally settled for, “It's that Carter magnetism.”

Joelle giggled a little too, setting the swing into gentle motion with one bare foot.

“Like you should talk,” I teased her, letting suggestive innuendo flood my tone. “Your own man is awfully…
magnetic
. In fact, if I don't mistake myself, I'd guess he proved that to you this very evening.”

Jo snorted a laugh this time, elbowing my ribs.

“So, what's worrying you, exactly?” I asked. “Do you want a drink? If I can't have one, at least I can watch you enjoy. I've got gin…or a beer…”

“No, Jills, I'm fine, just relax,” Jo said. She shifted a little on the swing and then explained, “Mathias told me just yesterday that he's worried about Camille's nightmares. You know…”

I did, as Camille had mentioned them to me in early spring. She had never experienced Notions that I was aware, though I felt strongly this was something different. It had to do with the old photograph she'd found two years ago, a picture with a tremendous amount of energy surrounding it; I had only held it in my hands for a second before realizing this. The photo was of one of the first Carters in the Landon area, a man named Malcolm, standing beside a beautiful horse. The back of the image was scribbled with the words
Me & Aces
. Camille was obsessed with discovering what had happened to him. The dreams to which Jo was referring had been plaguing my niece of late, dark dreams of loss and terror, of wandering without end. I didn't know exactly what these meant, only that they seemed to be intensifying.

BOOK: Wild Flower
3.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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