CAROLINE DIDN’T KNOW what to think. After handing Ben that ultimatum letter at the Stewed Clam, she’d been expecting a call. Or maybe he’d even show up at her door. She’d been trying to decide what his silence meant. Was he merely ignoring her, still counting on her returning home and things continuing just as they’d been? Which, although she hated to think it, wasn’t going to work for her. Maybe he was giving himself time to seriously consider the words that had come straight from her heart.
Could he be deciding how much he was willing to change to keep the woman he’d sworn to love, honor and cherish that day amid the moss-draped oak trees in her parents’ backyard? If a green space three times the size of Honeymoon Harbor’s park could be called a yard.
An army of gardeners had mowed, trimmed and clipped, so the lawn looked like a huge putting green and the gardens could have held their own against the Biltmore Estate, which, when built during the Gilded Age, had been the largest private home in the nation. Her mother was a renowned Southern belle who, after providing the family with both an heir—Caroline’s brother—and a daughter born to marry well into their class, had handed her offspring to nannies and turned all her attention to gardening. Her passion for creating floral perfection had her making a pilgrimage to North Carolina every year to confer with the Biltmore gardeners. Other plants had been grown from heritage seeds from Monticello and were said to have been avid gardener Thomas Jefferson’s favorites.
In addition to the arbor covered with a pink climbing rose appropriately called New Dawn, beneath which she and Ben had exchanged their vows, thirty more varieties bloomed in a rose garden that had won the city’s garden show award every year for as long as Caroline had been alive. At the far end of the lawn, a white tent had been erected for the reception for three hundred of her parents’ closest friends. In the kitchen (which was larger than the house she’d moved into after her marriage) another army of chefs and servers had kept the reception running like clockwork.
Caroline had known that Ben hadn’t expected such an ostentatious display of wealth. But she’d been proud at how he hadn’t appeared the least bit intimidated. After all, why should he be? Not only was he the man she’d chosen to marry, he was a far better man than others she’d grown up with. Including her own father who, despite having a law degree from Vanderbilt, spent more hours a day at the country club than his office. He had, she’d accidentally discovered when she’d been a junior in high school, a fondness for women around the same age as the twenty-four-year-old bourbon he favored.
She’d sensed, during their early years of marriage, that every time they had an argument, her husband had expected her to go running home to her parents. To her previous life of wealth and privilege. What she suspected he’d never entirely understood or believed was that she’d always found her parents’ life suffocating. Everyone behaved exactly the same way, expectations remained the same generation after generation, and certain things just weren’t done. Like choosing a career as an artist, or complaining about your husband’s wandering eye. Having watched her mother suffer her father’s adultery in silence for so many years, Caroline had decided, that memorable day when she’d gone into the pool house looking for a book she thought she’d left there, and walked in on her father and a woman who was definitely not her mother having sex, that she was going to break the mold.
The day had sparked the flame that had her taking that trip across America. The trip where she’d met a man with strong hands, a brilliantly creative mind (although he hated it whenever she told him that) and, although he kept it well guarded, a heart as big as the vast Western landscape she’d fallen in love with.
She hadn’t understood how such a smart, manly male like Ben Harper had remained single, but deciding that the women of Honeymoon Harbor must be blind, stupid or both, she’d taken less than a minute to stake her claim on him.
Life experience had changed him over the years, given him challenges that she’d watched him fight to overcome. It had only been the past two years that she wasn’t certain if he could find his way back to the husband she’d loved. The partner she’d wanted to spend the rest of her days with.
Then, just when she’d feared he’d given up on them, this morning he’d surprised her.
“Ben left flowers in front of my door this morning,” she told Mike as they stood in a meadow, painting the wildflowers dancing like ballerinas in the breeze. It had been his idea that she try her hand at plein air painting, which was all about leaving the four walls of the studio and capturing the landscape in its natural setting. He’d told her that the practice went back centuries, but had been turned into an art form by the French Impressionists.
“I think you’d find the spontaneity suits you,” he’d said.
And he’d been right. She was immediately drawn to the freedom, but was quickly discovering that it was also more challenging than it looked due to the constantly changing light and weather conditions. But she’d never been one to turn down a challenge.
“Has he mentioned your letter?”
She’d told him about Ben, not because she was attracted to Mike Mannion, though there had been that brief flirtation the night of the play years ago, the night she’d met the man who’d become her husband, but because he’d become a friend she could talk with to get a man’s take on her problem.
“No. But they were roses. A beautiful hybrid that blends from coral to orange. They’ve always been my favorite because they reminded me of the honeymoon in Hawaii we’d been planning to take. But shortly before the wedding, he discovered that his father had driven the company deeply in debt. So, instead of flying off to paradise, we came back here, buckled down and got to work.”
“Like the steel magnolia you are,” he suggested, as he painted in the shadows of clouds moving over the mountains. Clouds that made the painting an entirely different one than it would have been two minutes earlier. Plein air, she was discovering, was all about change. Just like marriage.
“Ben’s always called me that,” she murmured, watching as a butterfly flittered over a flower, and trying to quickly sketch it in. “I’d told him that the only things I missed about my old life down home were the rosebushes my mother dedicated her life to cultivating. So he bought me that bush, the first of many, for our first anniversary,” she said. “The same week we managed to get Harper Construction back in the black. We planted the bush together, then sat out on the deck, drinking mai tais he’d made from a mix he picked up at the market, and drinking in the scent of the flowers.”
And talking about how someday they’d get to Hawaii. She wondered now if he was sending her a reminder of that promise. And that maybe it was his way of saying he wanted to talk.
Then why the hell didn’t he come by her apartment? Or at least call.
“I’ve always envied him,” Mike surprised her by saying. “For having won you.”
“You make me sound like some sort of prize.”
“Yeah.” He cringed a bit at that. “It sounds sexist, but the thing was, I fell for you when I was putting those last-minute touches on that forest scene that had gotten dinged while setting up. You came over and we talked about painting.”
“I remember it well.” He’d been handsome and she found their shared interest in art appealing.
“Then that damn rainstorm happened, and you started talking to Ben Harper, and I realized, watching the two of you together, and the chemistry was so electric, that I didn’t stand a chance.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” If she had, would she have ended up with this man? No, she decided. She enjoyed his company, he was still handsome, and she loved her classes and their conversations. But Ben Harper had, and undoubtedly would, whatever happened in their marriage, always hold her heart.
“It was a disappointment.” Then he treated her to a warm, wry grin. “But, as you can see, I’ve survived.”
“But you’re still single.”
“When I find a woman as perfect as you, I’ll give up my bachelor days without looking back. Ben’s a lucky man. Hopefully, only because I want you to be happy, he’ll pull his head out of his ass.”
Well. The clouds had rolled over the meadow, bringing with them a light rain that created drops on the flower petals, but if it kept up would have them quitting for the day. Which was probably a good thing. Because between the roses outside her apartment door, and Michael’s surprise admission, Caroline’s life had just become even more conflicted.