One Shining Summer
Autor
Quinn Wilder
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10
HarlequinCHAPTER ONE
“THERE HE IS! The mystery man!”
“Gee,” Charity Marlowe responded dryly from where she sat in a decrepit upholstered chair, her head thrown back, her hair hidden under a towel, and her eyes clenched tightly shut. “He’s just a few minutes early for the unveiling of the new me. Could you ask him to come back later?”
There was no answer to her gibe, and, despite the fact that the fumes in the room told her the substance on her hair was likely to blind her if it made contact, she sat up and risked opening one eye.
She could see the entire cabin in one quick—very quick—glance, and her cousin had disappeared.
“Mandy,” she cried, “come back here. You know the instructions said not to leave this stuff too long...”
“Mmm. I’ll be right there, Char,” Mandy’s voice drifted in the open door.
The minutes dragged by. Charity noticed it was already hot in the cabin. If it was like this at the end of May, it was going to be insufferable by July and August.
“I’m crazy,” she muttered to herself, and then smiled. It felt good to be just a little bit crazy for once in her life. “Mandy!” she called again.
This time there was no response and, sighing, she pulled the towel more tightly around her head, got up out of the chair and went to the door. Her throat closed with pleasure as she looked out. The cabins were located high on the side of a steep hill.
“Only staff could be asked to climb a set of stairs like this,” Mandy had panted as they had wrestled Charity’s suitcases up the hill yesterday.
But because of the height they looked right over the roof of the main building of Anpetuwi Lodge. From where she stood, Charity could see the tranquil green-watered cove, and the darker, sparkling blue waters of the Okanagan Lake beyond. The freshness of the air nearly took her breath away, the air ripe with the woodsy smells of cedar and pine, sunshine touching earth.
She wrapped her arms around herself and sighed. Not so crazy after all.
And then she noticed what her cousin was doing.
“Mandy!”
“I’ve colored hair lots of times,” Mandy muttered, not removing her eyes from the binoculars she had screwed into them. “Quit worrying.”
“I’m not worried about my hair.” That was only partly true. “I don’t think it’s ethical for you to be spying on the lodge’s guests.”
“Come on, Doc.” Mandy managed to pull herself away from the glasses long enough to roll green eyes at her cousin and wrinkle her freckled nose. “What’s unethical about admiring a good-looking man?”
“Through binoculars,” Charity reminded her, but she was smiling. How could one not smile around someone as irrepressible as her gorgeous red-headed cousin?
“A technicality,” Mandy said with a sniff, and returned the binoculars to the main lodge.
“Mandy, maybe you shouldn’t call me Doc, even jokingly. It might—”
“Oh, right! Blow your cover!”
“Well, it was you who said that—”
“Darn right! People are absolutely not going to like ordering their beer from a doctor. My slip. It won’t happen again. Besides—” again she pried her eyes away from the eyeglasses and looked at her cousin “—in just a few minutes you are going to be transformed into a femme fatale. No one would ever guess that the studious, nondescript—”
“I get the idea,” Charity said wryly. “Speaking of which, don’t you think we’d better get this glop off my hair before it turns it green?”
“I told you, I’ve done streaking before. You can leave that stuff on practically forever without it doing any harm.” Mandy’s tone implied that green might be an improvement over Charity’s natural color—an admittedly mousy shade of brown.
Mandy was peering through the binoculars with the intensity of an army scout who had just discovered the enemy, and with a defeated sigh Charity let her own gaze drift in the same direction.
The unsuspecting object of Mandy’s interest had come out of his room in the main lodge and was on what he probably assumed was an immensely private balcony. He was reading a newspaper. Not dreadfully exciting stuff, and yet Charity could reluctantly understand why her cousin found the man intriguing and was having trouble looking away. There was something arresting about him, a masculine potency that leapt the physical chasm that separated them from him with alarming ease.
Strength. His strength was evident even in the distance. She could easily see the broadness of his shoulders underneath a tailored white sports shirt. Long, muscled legs were shown to full advantage by a pair of crisp khaki shorts. He was tanned, and had curly dark hair that glinted in the late-afternoon sunshine. Though too far away to see his facial features clearly, Charity had an impression, again, of strength. Cool, composed strength.
He shifted in his chair, the movement fluid, sending small ripples along the muscles of his legs and arms. There was an animal tension about him, something that suggested alertness, even when he was in repose.
It made Charity even more uneasy about Mandy unabashedly training the binoculars on him. Still, reluctant as she was to aid and abet her curious cousin in any way, she found herself asking with careful casualness, “What’s his mystery?”
“Humph! That he’s here.”
“What’s so mysterious about that?”
“For the whole season. The lodge doesn’t even officially open until tomorrow.”
“How do you know he’s here for the whole summer?”
“I consider it part of my job to know everything about everybody,” Mandy muttered abstractedly. “I check the bookings to get a general idea of what to plan for weekly activities. Have we got seniors or families? When are the regulars coming, and what did they like doing last year? And this guy turns up, in Room 302, week after week after week. Odd.”
“I don’t think it’s so odd,” Charity said.
Mandy sighed and pressed the field glasses at Charity. “Here. Take a look through these.”
“Absolutely not!” Charity said, trying to push the glasses away.
“Well, suit yourself, but one good look and you’d know that men like that generally do not spend their summers in places like this.”
“But this is a world-famous vacation retreat!” Charity protested. Somehow those confounded binoculars were up at her eyes. She fiddled with them, trying to get them to focus.
“Anpetuwi is a world-famous resort—generally favored by the geriatric set, honeymooners and young families. Single people do not flock here. Not with Club Med being in the same price range. Besides, two weeks is about as much rustic charm as most people can stand. So what’s a man like that doing here? For the entire season?”
As if to help Charity answer Mandy’s question, the binoculars suddenly took it upon themselves to come distinctly into focus.
The man’s face was sharply and arrogantly handsome. His cheekbones were high, his nose straight as an arrow, his chin jutting, his mouth wide and sensual in spite of—or maybe because of—the stern downturn at the corner of his lips. His thick eyebrows were furrowed as he read, giving Charity an overall impression, again, of strength, but a forbidding and cold strength. Though she found it hard to judge his age, he had a look of unabashed power that only years of experience could brand on a man’s face. She guessed him to be in his late thirties. Forty at the very most.
She was about to put the binoculars down ashamedly when he lifted his eyes from the paper. His eyes were a stunning dark blue, like new denim, or sapphire. And hard, too, glinting with cool lights of mockery, and sparking with something vaguely dangerous. Mandy was right. His was not the look of a man who vacationed for three and a half months in a place where bird-watching was high on the entertainment list.
“What do you think?” Mandy pressed.
Charity did guiltily drop the glasses. “A mercenary with a price on his head,” she guessed, only half kidding.
“Good thought,” Mandy said approvingly. “I was thinking maybe a Mafia don who’d turned State’s Evidence against his Family.”
“Pretty good, but he’s got the most stunningly blue eyes I’ve ever seen.”
“Does he?” Mandy said. “I always rather thought you had the market cornered on stunningly blue eyes.”
“Night and day. Mine are your everyday garden-variety blue. His are dark...like where the cove water meets the lake over there.”
Mandy shot her an admiring look for her observation skills. “I think Italians can have blue eyes.”
“Only snapping black for Mafia dons,” Charity retorted. She realized it was good to be with Mandy. Her cousin always coaxed a lighter side of her to the surface. In fact, she reminded herself, since they had been children Mandy had always had a knack for getting her somber cousin, normally something of a goody two-shoes, into a great deal of trouble.
With that in mind Charity should have firmly handed back the glasses. She should have said, I don’t know where you got those things, but please put them away before somebody sees the sun glinting off them and assumes it’s me spying on the guests.
But she didn’t. Charity had been obeying her silent “shoulds” most of her life. She was one of those people who obeyed the rules, who was cautious, and never irresponsible. And those were qualities essential to her career in medicine—but not so essential to her carefree summer.
Feeling a fiendish sense of delight at being “bad,” she lifted the binoculars back to her eyes to have one last look at the mystery guest.
She squinted through the glasses, and adjusted them slightly left. Ah, yes, there was his leg. She scanned lazily upward, appreciating the healthy lines of that extremely male body. And then...
Charity gave a squeak like a startled sparrow, and dropped the binoculars so swiftly that the weight jerked uncomfortably on her neck. She turned and darted into the cabin, trying to slam the door even as Mandy squeezed in behind her.
“What?”
“He was looking back!”
“He wouldn’t be able to see you, silly.”
“He was looking back through binoculars!”
“No!”
“I’m afraid so,” Charity said dejectedly. Why was it that every single time she did one little thing that was the least bit out of line she got caught at it? Why was it that she was always with Mandy when that happened?”
“Did he look interested?” Mandy asked cheerfully.
“Interested? Mandy, I have a towel over my head. Quite frankly, he looked furious!”
“He’ll probably never recognize you without the towel.”
“He’ll probably report me, and that will be the end of my search for a perfect summer.”
“Oh, pooh. Men and women look at each other all the time.”
“Through binoculars?”
“You’re too serious, Char. Why imagine the worst scenario? Just think, some day you could be telling your grandchildren. ‘Yes, I first saw your grandpa through a pair of binoculars. He was sitting on the balcony of Room 302 at the Anpetuwi Lodge, and he was snorting smoke.’”
“Mandy, you are hopeless.” But Mandy’s gift for drama and her change to a quavering old voice had brought a reluctant smile onto Charity’s lips. “What am I going to say to him when I see him face-to-face? Should I apologize?”
“Of course not! I have a license to look through these,” she claimed happily, tapping the binoculars. “I’ll be leading the first bird-watching tour in just four days. There was a Whiskey Jack on his porch, you know. You can tell him I was pointing it out to you, should he have the bad manners to bring up the incident.”
“A Whiskey what?” Charity asked, not always able to follow her cousin’s wonderful leaps in logic.
“A kind of bird, not a kind of drink,” Mandy said, with a giggle. “Little robbers, very common to this area, not the least bit afraid of people.”
“In other words, a perfect excuse to be staring at someone’s balcony. I’m ashamed of myself, Mandy, and I should hope you are, too.”
“Not in the least,” Mandy said.
“Mandy, I love you dearly. You are my favorite person in the whole world. You got me a summer job in heaven at a time when it felt as if my life was hell. You’ve talked me into contact lenses, six summer outfits and a bikini. You’ve changed the style and the color of my hair. But I have this niggling little doubt about whether I can get through a summer with you as my roommate and have my sanity intact.”
“Humph! You’ll probably learn to have fun. Wouldn’t that be awful? Besides, what would your one shining summer be like without a few interesting male specimens in it?”
Charity let her eyes move to the view again. One shining summer.
Two weeks ago she had finished her internship at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. Her final rotation had been on the emergency ward, and she had seen it all. Gunshot wounds. Accident victims. Beaten-up prostitutes. Drug addicts. Sometimes she had worked twenty-four hours without sleep.
She was twenty-six years old. She had looked twice that when she had limped into her cousin Mandy’s apartment in Vernon, in the Okanagan Valley, burnt-out, exhausted, disillusioned and emotional. She had intended to stay for a weekend.
Mandy had plied her with tender loving care until the tears had come. The tears, and this tiny little thing within her that she hadn’t even known was there.
Charity had always been smart. The family scholar. The worker. The one with the ambition and the talent and the brains to really make something of herself.
She’d started university when she was seventeen years old. Worked her way through the bachelor of science program in three years, and entered medical school on partial scholarships. She had ground her way through part-time jobs and four years of medicine and two years of internship without complaining, without ever questioning her dream to help her fellow man in the most noble way she could imagine.
And yet, sitting on Mandy’s outrageously colorful couch the night of their reunion, she had realized there was a dream within her she had never acknowledged.
She wanted, just once, to be young. To have fun. To be free and spontaneous. To recapture the adventures of youth that she had missed or lost in years of stress and studying and working. Her work and studies had been so all-consuming that she had never even had a boyfriend!
She wanted, she had told Mandy dreamily, just one summer. To sit on the beach and suntan. To swim, and canoe, and walk, and sail. To listen to bird-songs, and identify foliage. To dance at night. To walk under the stars. To sit by fires and watch the moon rise. To eat hot dogs off sticks and run through sand. To listen to music and read for the pure pleasure of reading.
One summer. One shining summer so she could move into her career without feeling forever the loss of some part of herself.
Words spoken, wistfully, and then put away. But not by Mandy.
Mandy, a kindergarten teacher during the year, had worked at the famous Anpetuwi Lodge as its entertainment director for several years now during the summer. She arranged games and activities for the guests, claiming her two jobs were just about identical, except that her kindergarten children were more mature. Despite Mandy’s tendency to talk about Anpetuwi as if it were an aging aunt—demanding, annoying, falling apart, and hopelessly old-fashioned—Charity knew she loved the place with her whole heart and soul. She even wondered if it might not have been Mandy’s laughter-filled anecdotes about summers at the lodge that had coaxed this deep ache of loss within her to the surface of her consciousness.
Before she quite knew what hit her, Mandy had informed Charity that she had personally landed her a job as a cocktail waitress on the outdoor patio—the Susweca Lounge—at the lodge.
“How can I have a job there?” Charity had demanded. “I didn’t even fill out an application form.”
“Oh, things are pretty casual around the lodge,” Mandy had returned. “Mrs. Foster really likes me. She’s hired a number of people on my say-so.”
Charity’s mind, that formidable intellect that had been governing her every action for years, reminded her of the crush of student loans she had to pay. But her heart, her poor, long-neglected heart, had answered yes, before her head had even begun to calculate all the reasons she absolutely could not and should not give herself over to this madness.
She would have her summer. In the autumn she could return to Vancouver and begin substituting for doctors going on holidays or trips or to take courses until the day she had repaid her loans and could begin to look at having her own practice.
She had known as soon as they had arrived at the lodge that her heart had made the right decision, even though it felt irresponsible and utterly childish to be spending a summer like this, at her age, and after all the work she had done to put the initials M.D. after her name. Her heart had taken wing as she and Mandy had walked down into the lodge.
Motor vehicles were not allowed on the grounds. A parking lot was provided at the top of the property. A paved serpentine path wound down to the lodge through thick natural woods of cedar and pine, birch and wild cherry, oregon grape and wild huckleberry bushes.
At appointed hours, Mandy informed her, a golf cart went up and collected luggage from the covered box in the parking lot, and also delivered infirm guests up the long hill if they so requested.
It was a peaceful fifteen-minute stroll through shady woods down the hill. Birds sang riotously in the thick foliage, and squirrels squawked indignantly as they passed.
With one final corkscrew twist the path came out of the woods, flattened out and meandered along the edge of a lush expanse of green lawn. The path ended at the wide stone steps that led up to the main entrance of the lodge.
Considering the reputation of Anpetuwi, the lodge was surprisingly unpretentious. Constructed in a hexagon shape, it had been built of logs, now darkened with age. It was not particularly large or splendid, and yet it had a warmth and charm and dignity about it that appealed to Charity immediately. Once, someone had put their heart into building this place, and it was still there, somehow, in those dark, rough-hewn logs, in the French panes of glass at the windows, in the white paint of the log chinking, in the red geraniums that already bloomed, radiant, in window boxes.
To the right of the lodge were a dozen or so stone steps leading to a half-moon beach. A volleyball net was set up on it, a wharf stretched out into the cove. Upside-down canoes, red, blue, yellow and green, lay in a neat line near where the beach gave way to the majestic rocks that, except for a narrow opening, closed off the cove from the main part of Okanagan Lake.
The log staff cabins were nestled high on the hill behind the lodge. Reached by several dozen rickety wooden stairs, they were small and quaint, strung out along a boardwalk. Each had its own balcony, tiny bedroom containing two small beds and an eating-living area combined. Each also had a wood stove, and a bathroom so small that someone of Arnold Schwarzenegger proportions would have been afraid to enter it, for fear of never getting back out. Bright red gingham curtains hung cheerfully at all the windows.
Charity had felt something tug at her heart the moment she had first seen this cove. She had known with all her soul that she had made just the right decision.
It was true she didn’t know anything about waiting on tables. Mandy had assured her it was a cinch, but it was the hours that had made her take the plunge into something so totally out of her realm of experience. The Susweca Lounge was open from eight at night until one in the morning. Nothing could have been more perfect for someone who had to work, but desperately wanted to enjoy the sunshine and activities of summer. A few hours of work at night would be a small price to pay for lolling about one of the most beautiful and secluded vacation spots in the world during the day.
Anpetuwi had been in the Foster family for generations, and Mandy had assured her that there was a complete lack of snobbery about staff mingling with guests. Mrs. Foster encouraged the staff to avail themselves of the lodge’s delights. If the people who worked for her were happy, she felt, her guests were happy. Of course, her generous spirit about staff using the amenities of the lodge also allowed her to pay them a pittance that had made Charity’s small salary as an intern seem princely.
“Just the summer,” Charity told Mandy now, touching her cousin’s arm. “Not the men.”
“Humph! I’m not working on this new look so that you can spend the summer celibate, you know.”
Charity shook her head. There was no sense in even trying to tell her cousin—again—that she was just not the stuff that men went wild over. She never had been. She’d always envied Mandy her wonderful looks and her voluptuous compact figure, but she had long ago accepted the fact that she and Mandy were not made of the same stuff.
“Mandy, getting my career off the ground is a challenge that is going to take a few more years of my undivided attention. This is an interlude—as uncomplicated an interlude as I can make it.”
“Don’t be silly. Nobody is suggesting marriage and fourteen children. But a little casual flirtation, a dollop of romance here and there, is the spice of life.”
“Well, not this life,” Charity said firmly. She didn’t know very much about romance, to be sure, just enough to know that it seemed to be a force that did not like to be tamed and squeezed into the orderly compartments of people’s lives. Romance also seemed to be diametrically opposed to peace and relaxation, which was why she had come here.
Not that she need worry, she thought ruefully. She was not exactly a romantic figure. Charity was tall, and thinner now than she had ever been, because of her last rotation with its odd hours and incredible stress. For as long as she could remember, her hair had been kept in a short no-nonsense style that wouldn’t require any of her precious time to look after it. She had not had money for clothes, and neither the time nor the inclination to experiment with makeup and other items of fashion.
In short, Charity had always looked like exactly what she was—an extremely serious, clever, studious young woman. Her family had always referred to her as the “egghead.”
Mandy had begun to whistle as she worked on Charity’s hair.
“Can I look?” Charity demanded.
“No!”
“Why not?”
“I’m not done yet.”
Mandy brought out a makeup box, and while Charity squirmed and complained she dusted on eye shadow and mascara and blusher and lipstick.
“Now can I look?” Charity demanded.
“Not just yet.”
With absolutely no respect for Charity’s privacy, Mandy waltzed over to her wardrobe and began rummaging around in it.
“This one,” she finally decided.
Charity looked at the skirt and blouse her cousin was holding. A light blue wraparound skirt and a beautiful white silk blouse. Casual and yet somehow extraordinarily classy. And no doubt the most well-suited outfit in her wardrobe for her first meeting with her employer, Mrs. Foster, scheduled for later this afternoon.
“I can’t buy this,” she’d protested to her cousin just two days ago.
“You have to,” Mandy had said airily. “Cocktail waitresses have to look gorgeous. Think of it as an investment that your tips will pay you back.”
Charity knew she wasn’t going to look gorgeous no matter what she did, and deciding she needed all the help she could get to lure in those tips that might hold off personal bankruptcy for three months, she had purchased the skirt and shirt—with six other summery, playful outfits that she would probably never be able to wear again as long as she lived.
“Can I look now?” she asked, after she had changed.
Mandy studied her critically, and then a smile tugged across her leprechaun features. “Look,” she agreed.
Charity turned and looked in the faintly wavering glass behind their bedroom door.
Her mouth fell open.
A young woman looked back at her. A tall young woman, with hair that looked thick and wild and was streaked blond as though she had cavorted under the sun all the days of her life.
“Mandy, I think we overdid the streaking a touch,” she said uncertainly.
“Nonsense. Men are crazy for blondes.”
She sensed there was no use reiterating that making men “crazy” for her was not in keeping with her plans for a perfect summer.
She studied herself intently and with astonishment. Her eyes, no longer hidden behind glasses, looked large and blue as a summer sky. The way Mandy had swept her hair back from her face in such untamed curls, and the skillful dusting of makeup, accentuated the highness of her cheekbones, the delicacy of her nose, the soft fullness of her lips. For some reason the simple outfit accentuated her long legs, and made her appear willowy and lithe rather than just bony and flat-chested.
She looked as if she could be on the cover of a fashion magazine.
She turned to her cousin with tears smarting in her eyes. “What have you done to me?”
Mandy shrugged. “Given you your wish. Goodbye, Charity Marlowe, M.D. and hello, Char, sun worshiper and siren.” Her tone lost its impertinence and became gentle. “I’ve always thought you were so pretty, and that it was such a shame to hide that behind those thick glasses, and that studious pallor. You’re beautiful, Char, and it’s a sin to hide that. Even doctors are allowed to be beautiful, you know.”
“Doctors don’t have time to be beautiful,” Charity informed her ruefully. “Besides it seems...superficial, somehow.”
“Well, you’ll have all the time you need to be beautiful this summer—and that’s what summer is about, for crying out loud. Being superficial. I have a lot to teach you about having fun, Char!”
“Poor you. It’s a big job, but I guess somebody had to do it. But the job I’m more concerned about at this moment is being a waitress. You did leave some time in this afternoon’s schedule for that little detail, didn’t you?”
“One full hour,” Mandy assured her. Going over to the little cupboard above an old porcelain sink, she promptly emptied it of glasses, filled each one with water and pulled a tray out from underneath the sink. “There.”
“There?”
“Sure. Just walk around with that for an hour or so. By the time you don’t spill it anymore, you’re a waitress. Presto. A little easier than becoming a doctor, wouldn’t you say?” Mandy glanced at her watch. “I’ll be back in an hour to take you down for a tour of the lodge and to meet Mrs. Foster. She’s a sweetie.”
“Anybody who would hire a waitress without an ounce of experience must be something of a saint,” Charity agreed.
“She is, but don’t fall over yourself thanking her for it. In fact, I wouldn’t even mention it, if I were you,” Mandy advised airily. “She tends to get a bit befuddled, poor old dear.”
Charity’s warning lights came on. “Mandy, you did tell her I didn’t have any experience, didn’t you?”
“I told her everything she needed to know,” Mandy said, somewhat evasively. “Well, ta ta, I’m off to see what I can discover about Mr. Mystery. I’ll be back in an hour.”
Charity wished the topic of Mr. Mystery had not come up again. Her heart gave a little lurch as she thought about running into him at some time, which she was bound to do. It was going to be awkward and embarrassing. She just didn’t have Mandy’s devil-may-care charm.
Also, looking at the loaded tray, Charity had a sinking feeling that there was slightly more to being a waitress than Mandy imagined, but the spot where Mandy had stood was empty. Resignedly she slid the tray onto her arm. It was heavier than it looked. She waddled cautiously across the living room, glaring imperiously but ineffectively at the slopping water glasses.
“Did you order the bourbon and water, sir?” she politely asked the empty high-backed chair in the living room. She took one glass off the tray, unbalanced the entire thing, and stood there looking sadly down at her water-stained skirt.
“At least I missed the blouse,” she muttered to herself.
She looked at the litter of glasses around her. They were the cheap, hardy variety that didn’t break easily, thankfully. Still, she’d have to clean up all the puddles of water dotted across the old linoleum floor. She had just found another large fly in the paradise of her perfect summer.
It had never occurred to her that she would not be a good waitress. She was always good at everything she did. Of course, her pursuits, even her part-time jobs, had always been somewhat more academic. She had worked in the library. She had done research for a medical writer. She had worked in a laboratory.
Never once had it occurred to her that being a waitress might be hard.
But not as hard as her first meeting with Mr. Mystery was going to be. What had possessed her to look through those field glasses?
