Authors: Cara Colter
“And then you showed me this whole other side of myself. You weren’t threatened by me and because you seemed to love me exactly as I was I became what I had never been before—this girl full of light and love and laughter. When you walked away from that, I just didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be.
“And then I found out I was pregnant.”
“Did you think about an abortion?” he asked her.
“Of course! But in the end, I simply couldn’t. The child was the part of you I got to keep.
“After Whitney was born, my Aunt Meg offered me the job with Botanical Bliss. It seemed like such a godsend because I was so mixed up, felt so much older and wiser in some ways and so much younger and more confused in others. I didn’t feel so sure I wanted to take the world by storm, anymore. I didn’t feel so sure about anything as I once had.
“You know what? Whitney’s made it all worth it. She’s worth every sacrifice, and if some dreams were left by the wayside, she replaced them with new ones. Being a good mom is making just as much of a contri
bution to the world as being a good mayor. Maybe more. She showed me that.
“I work with unwed mothers, too. I run a little support group for them. It’s the same tragic story over and over again. My story over and over again. Women who are too young giving away too much to men who use them and discard them all too willingly.”
He drew a deep breath. So this was how she had managed to keep the flame of anger alive so long, kept it burning so brightly. She dealt in men betraying women on a regular basis.
“I didn’t know you were pregnant, Jordan. Surely that’s a difference in the story. It’s not as if we didn’t take precautions.”
“To regret it all would be to regret Whitney.”
“Tell me more about Whitney,” he said, after she’d been silent too long.
“I hoped her first word would be Mommy, of course,” Jordan said, and smiled with soft remembrance, “but it wasn’t.”
“What was it?”
“It’s awful. You don’t want to know.”
“It can’t be that awful. And even if it is, I do want to know.”
“Her first word was poop.”
“No!” He laughed. “Poop?”
“Um-hmm. An unfortunate incident with her crawling in the backyard and almost touching some. I yelled, ‘poop, don’t touch,’ and apparently my emphasis on that word had a huge impression on her. She began to yell poop and didn’t stop for a week. She yelled it in church, in the grocery store, out of her stroller as we walked down the street.”
He laughed, tickled that his daughter was such an
original. “And then Mommy was her second word, surely?”
“Oh, no, not my daughter. I think tuna was her second word.”
“Tuna?” he said, incredulous.
“Oh, you know how it is with first-time mothers.”
He didn’t but he didn’t want to say that.
“I named everything we touched, everything she pointed at, everything in the cupboards, everything in her world. That was the extent of my conversations for a full year. Chair. Table. Dog. Cat. Rug. Blankie. Tuna.”
“I’m sorry I missed it,” Owen said, and meant it. And he was sorry he had not been there to make her world wider, to give her reprieve from those one-word conversations, to make her feel grown-up and sexy and beautiful and interesting on those days when she felt anything but.
“Oh,” she said, waving her hand around the grove, “compared to all this, you would have found it very boring, I’m sure.”
“No. All this pales in comparison to the miracle you are telling me about.”
She gave him a quick, hard look and he felt her relax slightly, the pressure against his shoulder increase just a bit.
“Do you like tuna?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“You see I couldn’t understand that. I hate it. So it seemed impossible my daughter acted toward tuna the same way most kids act toward ice cream.”
“Genetically predisposed to tuna, poor kid. What else does she like?”
“Um, let’s see. Raffi. That’s a children’s singer. Elephants. Her whole room is decorated with elephants.
Her grandmother painted them all over the walls for her. Blue ones and purple ones and green ones and red ones.”
Her grandmother. He felt again the ache of loss. Jordan had a whole world he knew nothing about. He wondered if her mother looked like her, had supported her through this. He hoped the opportunity to know Jordan’s world as thoroughly as he wanted her to know his was not gone.
“Whitney likes water, and sand and chocolate pudding. She likes painting with her fingers, and eating with them. She likes funny hats and overalls and red shoes.” She laughed self-consciously. “I’m boring you.”
“No, you aren’t. What doesn’t she like?”
“Um, let’s see. She doesn’t like small babies—I think they attract far too much attention and make too much noise. She dislikes classical music. Sitting still in church. Naps. Rain.”
“Jay-Jay?”
Jordan glared at him, and he retreated hastily. “When did she walk?”
Again, he noticed that smile of pure love. “One week after she turned one year old. She’d been scooting around holding on to furniture. And all of a sudden she just let go and walked across the room. No faltering, no falling. But the look on her face! She was astonished with herself. In awe of herself. And really, she still seems that way.”
“What did you do for her first birthday?” He wanted to keep her talking forever. He loved the look on her face when she talked about Whitney, he loved how her voice flowed, even and rhythmic like a river.
“Oh, I made her a cake and iced it with pudding and she ate it with her hands and got it in her hair and
wrecked her dress. And I took three million pictures of it.”
“Can I see them some day?”
“I guess.”
She was still uncomfortable contemplating the future with him playing an active part in it, he could see that.
“What about her second birthday?”
“I don’t remember.” That was said very quickly.
“Yes, you do,” he prodded gently.
“Okay. My parents wanted to go to Disneyland for her birthday. I thought it was ridiculous. She would never remember it. She does, though. Especially the Dumbo ride. A real hit.”
“Why didn’t you want to tell me that?”
“I don’t know,” she said grouchily.
“Did something happen when you went back to California that was painful for you?”
She gave him a look that told him she resented his perception—and maybe appreciated it just a little, too.
She sighed, and then in a rush said, “I took her to that beach where you and I used to go, and I cried, and it made her sad and it wrecked her birthday. She was touching my cheeks, saying in this desperate little voice, ‘mommee, no cwy, mommee no cwy.”’
He felt as if Jordan had placed a knife to his breast, slid it in to cut his heart to ribbons.
He was beginning to understand just how hard it was going to be to repair the hurt he had caused. For the second time, he entertained the smallest of doubts. He wondered if it was even possible to repair a failure this colossal.
He didn’t want to say he was sorry again. The word seemed so stupid in the face of such a huge pain.
“If I had known about her, I would have been there.”
He could tell by the look on Jordan’s face, that somehow he had managed to say exactly the wrong thing.
“Thanks. You couldn’t be there for me, but if you had known you had a daughter, you could have been there?”
He was crossing a minefield. A minefield of his own making, mines of hurt and pain and betrayal. He knew, left to his own devices, he would never be able to navigate it safely. It had to be something else that guided him; intuition, heart, soul.
God, maybe.
He turned to her, looked at the barrier in her eyes, sighed, and leaned his forehead against her shoulder. He felt her stiffen, then slowly relax.
He thought of her alone, finding out she was pregnant. He thought of her finding out that the man she knew as Ben Prince had never existed. He thought of her going through fear and uncertainty about her future. He thought about her pain bringing that baby into the world. He thought about her dreams going up in smoke. He thought about her on a beach in California crying.
“Owen?”
He did not lift his head, but he felt her fingertip on his wet cheek.
“Owen, don’t,” she said. “Please, don’t.”
It was the moment he admitted what had come to him partially on that cell floor in the villa on Majorca. Prince Owen Michael Penwyck was a failure. In the one area in his life where it really mattered he had failed utterly and completely.
She was lifting his head from her shoulder, holding his face between both her hands, looking at him.
For a dizzy moment he knew she was going to kiss
him, and he leaned toward her. Her lips brushed his, feather soft.
He wanted to wrap his hand in the hair at the back of her head, pull her closer, tempt her lips open with his own.
But he knew something she did not.
That they were surrounded by security people in this quiet grove, watching their every move.
He reeled back from her, and saw the hurt register in her face. “We’re not alone,” he told her.
“What?”
“Since the kidnapping, security is very tight.”
She sank up to her chin in her perfectly modest bathing suit. “There are people watching us right now?”
“Watching out for us might be a better way of saying it.”
“Were they watching us all that time in California?”
“I suspect so, yes.”
“That night on the beach?”
“Possibly.”
“I can’t ever live like this, Owen,” she said fiercely.
“Maybe that’s why I never asked you to.”
“People watching you all the time. And all the rest of it. I mean it’s lovely, but it’s so impossible, like a fairy tale. The carriage, the ponies, the horses, the fake gardens. It’s Hollywood. It’s not real life. I don’t know who you really are.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “For a moment just then, you did.”
Doubt showed in her face.
And then that moment, too, was spoiled. A man broke from the trees. As soon as he saw it was Cole Everson, Owen bit back his irritation.
If possible, Jordan sank even deeper in the water, only her nose and eyes showing.
Cole dropped down on one knee beside the water. “Your Royal Highness,” he said apologetically, “I’m so sorry, but this is urgent. An abandoned coal shaft has collapsed outside of Marlestone. There were children playing in it.”
Owen’s annoyance evaporated. “Will Broderick go?”
Cole’s expression said how effective Broderick’s presence would be at the site. “The helicopter’s on the way here to get you, sir.”
Owen nodded. “See if one of the security people is wearing a suit that will fit me.” He could hardly go as the highway man. He took a deep breath, accepting the weight of responsibility. Despite his youth, because he had given of himself so completely in the past five years, the people of Penwyck counted on him. They turned to him to guide them, to comfort them, to lead them, in good times and in bad.
Cole left, and Owen opened his eyes and turned to Jordan. Her eyes were wide on his face.
“You were right. I have misled you,” he said quietly. “I wanted you to have fun. I wanted you to feel like a princess. But my life really isn’t about having fun. Today was as much a novelty for me, as for you. My life is about duty. I have to go.”
Maybe, she was the one who had been realistic from the start. Maybe he should have just wished her well with her ordinary life, and her man.
An exterminator, for God’s sake. How could he wish her well with that?
Maybe by putting her needs ahead of his own. But he knew he did not have the luxury of dealing with this now. He turned and pulled himself from the pool. There
were people everywhere now. Someone handed him a towel.
“I want to go with you.”
He took a towel and held it out to her, folded it around her, as she stepped from the pool.
He thought it was the first positive sign between them. But then he thought of what they might find there. Distraught parents, hurt children, maybe even dead children. The press would be there in droves. His urge was to protect her. “Jordan, it’s not a good idea.”
“You want me to know who you really are. Let me see you. Let me come. Maybe I’ll be able to help. I’m not afraid.”
And he could see that she wasn’t.
He knew it was foolish to mingle affairs of the state with affairs of the heart. Dylan would probably never do it.
But the loneliness caught him off guard, the ache to have someone beside him, someone who he could turn to.
Owen, he told himself, you’re a selfish boor. “You can’t come,” he said, sternly.
She folded her arms over her chest and the towel. “You don’t see me as your equal in any way, do you? You don’t see anybody as your equal.”
“I’m just trying to protect you.”
“I’m a grown woman. I can protect myself, thank you. I don’t need any man to decide what’s good for me and what isn’t.”
“Any reporter foolish enough to get near you would probably be impaled on your tongue,” he said.
“Does that mean I can come?”
“Yes.” She actually smiled at him as if she meant it. Surprisingly the decision felt right. And he wondered
why it felt so much more right to take her with him on this official duty than it had to send a carriage to pick her up this morning.
He had no more time to think about it. He could hear the helicopter in the distance.
“Y
our Royal Highness, we’ll just brief you with the details we have.”
Both Jordan and Owen were once again dressed, he in a gray double-breasted suit he had borrowed. Amongst all these well-dressed men, she was decidedly out of place in her old kitchen whites with the chocolate dribble down the front. Still, perhaps it was the outfit that helped make her invisible. She was able to observe without anyone paying the least attention to her.
Jordan had known Owen only as a carefree and somewhat reckless boy. And no matter what he said about duty, she did not understand precisely what that meant to Owen until the exact moment that man—Owen had called him Cole—had come and dropped down onto one knee beside Owen at the pool.
She had watched Owen transform before her eyes, from a young man into a prince. Not a prince in the way she had ever thought of that position: rich, pampered, catered to, out of touch with the real world.
And not a prince as Owen had demonstrated it since she had arrived on Penwyck: a man who could command carriages and conjure ponies and provide scrumptious picnic lunches with the snap of fingers.
No, a prince in a different way.
A prince among men. She had watched his face change, as the news of the mine disaster was relayed to him. His features became grave, somber. She had seen a light flicker to life deep in his eyes and had recognized it as courage, pure and undiluted. She had seen a firmness in the set of his mouth that she had not noticed before. She had watched him draw a deep breath as if he drew strength into the broadness of his chest. He had set his shoulders with resolve, as though he were ready to take on the weight of the world.
What Jordan saw was not just emerging maturity, but something greater, a kind of agelessness. She knew, in that moment, why people wanted Owen to be king.
He had an indefinable quality that the word charisma didn’t quite encompass. It was presence, a way of being.
She watched now, keenly observant, as Owen became the center, as men older and more seasoned than he looked toward him, deferred to him, gave him a respect that went far beyond the title of Your Royal Highness that he was addressed with. Somehow he had earned the deference of these men, and Jordan had the startling thought that somehow, in that wondrous summer of laughter and love, she had managed to miss the essence of Owen.
The thought astonished her. And intrigued her.
A helicopter came overhead, and she looked up at it. Yellow and black, it had the royal crest emblazoned on the bottom of it.
In California he had seemed like just another penniless
student. Once they had rented a convertible for a day, explored the twisting coastal highway, and it had seemed so deliciously extravagant.
It hurt to realize even that had been part of the lie, the deception he had played on her. He could have bought that car and ten more like it without blinking an eye.
And yet, looking at his face now, she was so taken with the absolute integrity she saw there. Who was he really? Had she ever known? Did she want to know? What would it cost her to find out?
What would it cost her to walk away without finding out?
Somewhere, she realized it had gone beyond choice. She felt compelled to discover who this man she had once thought she loved so deeply and so completely really was. She didn’t just want to go with him, she
had
to go with him.
As the helicopter landed in the little glade Owen broke from the knot of men that surrounded him, and came back to her. He took her elbow and leaned close.
“Have you ever ridden in a helicopter before?” he shouted above the noise.
She shook her head. With all that was going on, and all that he was the center of, he had remembered her, thought of her protectively, even after her stern insistence she did not need his protection. She tried to guard against the warmth that caused in her, but she was not completely successful, anymore than she had been completely successful at guarding her heart from him this day.
It had been a long time since someone had looked after her.
“Keep your head down as you approach and exit it.
Very important. If you forget,” he made a slicing motion across his throat, and grinned, “chop-chop.”
For a moment, he was her Owen again, not some intimidating stranger who commanded the respect and liking of a whole nation, the extreme love and loyalty of his staff.
Her Owen.
Very dangerous thoughts, especially when coupled with words like love. Still, in that split second smile, she saw something. Owen
wanted
to be all that he had been that long ago summer: carefree, laughter-filled, adventure-loving, reckless. Free.
Destiny had deemed otherwise.
So, he had power and privilege in his world in amounts that other people, including her, only dreamed about. He had high-spirited horses and high-powered helicopters at his disposal. He lived in a palace, surrounded by unbelievable riches and luxuries. He was waited on hand and foot.
But he paid a price, some of his laughter lost, some of his irresistibly reckless spirit tamed.
Jordan noticed Owen was as comfortable getting settled on that helicopter as she was finding a seat on public transport. He put on a headset, and helped her with hers, his fingers brushing the sides of her cheeks, making her tingle with unexpected yearning.
But was there any way these two worlds could ever meet? Their worlds had met once, but he had been pretending to be just a normal everyday guy. To fit into his world, would she have to pretend to be things she was not? Worldly? Sophisticated?
She wondered if the sinking sensation in her stomach was any indication of how successful the melding of their worlds could be. She could feel her stomach head
ing for her feet as the huge machine lifted straight up. She closed her eyes, held tight to the armrests.
And then her fingers were gently being tugged free of the armrest. Owen’s hand closed around hers, and he looked deep into her eyes and smiled, and just like that her stomach calmed. His smile, strong, confidant, made it seem like any distance could be bridged.
“Don’t worry,” his voice crackled over the headset, reassuring in her ear, “it’s perfectly safe.”
But nothing about her world felt perfectly safe anymore. Everything felt turned on end, just as it had the last time Owen had been in her life.
“The mine is an old coal mine outside of Marlestone,” he told her, and she suspected he was not just sharing the information he had received so far, but distracting her as well. “It’s been closed since the sixties, the entrance supposedly sealed.
“The children of Penwyck have this distressing belief that the old coal mines might have diamonds in them. They seem to manage to get inside all the time.
“We get a lot of moisture on Penwyck, and engineers are speculating it may have penetrated the mine from above, slowly rotting the timbers. The kids may have been digging, or chipping at the rocks. It may not have taken much to cause the collapse.”
She felt the strangest little twinge that he was taking her into his confidence, that he wanted to tell her about it, that he was treating her as a partner and an equal—and all at the same time as taking her mind off the fact they were several hundred feet off the ground in a contraption that didn’t look like it should be able to fly.
“When did it happen?” she asked.
“About ten-thirty this morning.”
She looked at her watch. It was now just after noon.
“The kids are on the other side of the cave-in,” he said gravely. “We think there are five of them, two girls and three boys, ranging in age from eight to eleven.”
“And are they alive?” she whispered.
“The engineers can hear sounds, someone tapping, but there’s no way to know, yet, if they are all okay or what kind of shape they are in. At the moment they are very carefully assessing how to move the fallen section of the tunnel without causing more to come down. They’re also trying to insert a small microphone throughout the rubble so they can determine what kind of shape the kids are in.”
“And what will you do when we get there?”
He hesitated. “Pray to be shown what to do,” he said simply.
The answer showed a humility she had never seen in Owen, and her amazement must have shown in her face, because he quickly changed the subject.
“Now, I should read this.” He tapped a folder he was holding. “It’s a bit of information about the kids and their families. It may help me know what to say when the time comes.”
His hand still in hers, frowning slightly as he concentrated, he read.
How familiar was that scowl of fierce concentration. She remembered it from when they had studied late in her small room, she dressed in his shirt, he naked from the waist up, wonderfully self-assured about his body.
She felt a little shiver and recognized it. Desire. She always warned her girls that it was not to be trusted, except to cloud every issue.
She turned to her window and allowed herself to peek out. The view was magnificent, rugged mountains falling
into the sea, the deep woods, the pastoral farms and pastures. It was beautiful, an enchanted island.
His.
His island. His people. His destiny.
How could an average girl from Wintergreen, Connecticut ever fit into this picture? He acted as though he thought it would be no problem, but had he thought it through? The Owen from the past had been so impulsive, so spontaneous.
She reminded herself she had dropped into his lap. It was not as if he had made a conscious effort to find her, invite her into his life. How long before one, or both of them, woke up to the fact she did not belong here?
In minutes the helicopter passed over the city of Marlestone, went to the hilly country beyond it and began to descend. Out her window she could see the cluster of emergency vehicles, the lines of cars snaking down the road toward the mine. Then she spotted the opening to the mine in the side of a hill. Closed up, as he had said, a hole had now been torn in the rotting, flimsy boards. It looked sinister and unfriendly. Inside would be terribly dark and dank, full of spiders and things that scurried.
Jordan shuddered, and wondered what would make a child go in there. And then she thought of her own daughter. If Whitney found an opening into such a mysterious place, and if she was unsupervised for a moment, and if she believed a treasure was waiting for her, was there any question what she would do?
She’d be inside that tunnel in a flash, of course, curious, fearless.
The helicopter set down in a cordoned off area, surrounded by the flashing red and blue lights of emergency vehicles. There was a huge crowd gathered—emergency workers, families, friends, townspeople, media.
As soon as the helicopter came to rest, Owen got up. He let go of her hand, then hesitated, picked it up and kissed it.
She understood. He was not here for her now. He was here for them.
The door was opened for him, and he stepped out, crouching, an exit he had obviously done a thousand times before. She watched, listened to the whir and click of a hundred or more cameras going off, and realized he had faced that a thousand times before, too.
She suddenly wanted to be anywhere but here, in her horrible stained kitchen whites, a dowdy girl, with rat wet hair, following the prince around. But one of the security men was holding the door for her, and she realized she had no choice.
She needn’t have worried. Once Owen disembarked no one noticed any other member of his entourage. He was the focus, and he handled the attention politely, but firmly, making his way through the assembled media, the crowds parting until he was nearly at the entrance of the mine. She just flowed along in the center of the suited men behind him.
There was a huddle of people there, set apart from all the others by the rawness of their pain.
Families of the children trapped in that mine.
Jordan could barely look at the mothers, their pain was so intense, so naked. How on earth could Owen do something in the face of such terror? In the face of such panic? In the face of such sadness?
And yet Owen did not back away from the pain, but went toward it, embraced it. Jordan saw the courage that was at the very core of him, and could not help but be awed by it.
He stopped at the first woman at the edge of that hud
dle of miserable humanity. Her narrow shoulders were hunched and shaking under a thin, worn jacket. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut from crying. Her husband, in green work clothes, was nearly as distraught as she, and trying so valiantly to be strong, to hold her up.
What would they think of the privileged young prince being here? Jordan would have felt like she was intruding in moments too personal to be shared with anyone.
Owen took both the woman’s hands in his, and Jordan watched amazed as the woman looked up into her prince’s face. She actually tried to curtsey, but Owen stopped her with a gesture that erased the barriers between them.
Jordan did not know what Owen said to the woman, only that she could almost see his energy transfer to her, something lighten in her face, some faint hope come to life in her eyes. She was hanging on his words, and then she was talking, and he leaned closer to her, and listened to every single word. He listened, patiently, compassionately, until she had said everything she needed to say.
One by one, he gave this indefinable gift to each member of this distraught group. Brothers and sisters, grandmothers and grandfathers, each person who was missing a family member inside that mine, got as much of his undivided attention as they needed.
What Jordan saw was that his being here meant the world to them. It meant everything to them that the man who would be their king cared about their families, grieved with them, was here to lend his support and his strength.
No one looking at the grim cast of his features would ever doubt how much he cared, his utter sincerity.
After consoling the families, Owen turned to the
mouth of the tunnel. Boards had been broken away enlarging the hole the children had slipped through.