ACT II: Scene 13
I Could Have Danced [Fox Hunted] All Night
SAN NOUVEAU ISLAND, CALIFORNIA CHANNEL ISLANDS
Wherein our heroine finally gets wise. Sort of. It’s about time, after all.
It took every single ounce of my willpower to keep ironing Mo-No’s riding outfit at the ironing board within earshot of the woman.
Enduring a full-on description of Monique-Noelle’s parasailing adventure with Henry, how she nearly lost her swimsuit when she flew up in the air in the harness attached to the parachute being pulled by the speed boat, was almost more than a girl should have to be subjected to—especially when I was completely ga-ga over the same guy myself.
“I thought it was so romantic up there, above the waves, seeing everything, that he’d take his moment, but he’s so stodgy. No kiss even with that view.” She wasn’t talking to me, of course. Happily, I was not her confidante for this feast of unappetizing details. However, I had to be on standby while she painted Chachi’s toes and Dreena painted her dog’s toenails—with hearts and flowers.
Bless him, bless him for not kissing her on the parasailing trip, during the yachting club ball, or any other time. I did not want to share lips with someone who’d kissed Mo-No.
Wait, was I expecting Henry to offer me a kiss sometime?
I was. I totally was. He’d dangled it tantalizingly in front of me for nearly half an hour last night, and I hadn’t taken it—for a lot of reasons, none of which seemed valid in the light of day.
I wanted that kiss. Somehow, I’d get it. Someday.
“Are you sure he’s into you?” Dreena couldn’t hide a jealous edge to her tone. As I’d earlier learned, Dreena hadn’t found a replacement beau for her current husband yet, and it bothered her to no end that her much fatter friend had. “I mean, sure, he spends all day every day with you, eating your food, riding in your car, playing tennis at your club, but if there’s been no affection, I’d be cautious.”
“Cautious! If I don’t have this guy’s ring on my finger by Christmas morning, I’ll buy you a new set of Coach luggage. I’m that confident.”
“But what about your own feelings, Mo?”
“You want me to be honest about my feelings? I feel like I want someone hotter than Bainbridge. Henry Lyon is supernova hot. Did you see him without his shirt? I did, and there was a lot more to be feeling after that sight.”
Dreena must have been unmoved because Mo-No hardly paused.
“Oh, you want more feelings than that? I feel like I have a lot of beauty and fashion sense that I could share with the world, and as it stands currently, I don’t get to be on the arm of someone who will make me look good. I feel like I’d rather have arm candy and be arm candy, at the same time, rather than just be somebody else’s arm candy. Two pieces of candy is better than one.”
I couldn’t fault her for that reasoning. I liked candy. A lot. Especially when it came in the same shape and size as Henry Lyon. Who invited me to go horseback riding with him. Swoon with a capital s.
“But there’s more. I feel like I want someone who can take me to the next level in the social circles of Hollywood. Henry’s been all over the tabloids for a movie premiere he attended before coming to San Nouveau. Did you know a director is considering casting him for a remake of The Man from Snowy River? They don’t even know if he’s done any acting.”
Oh, he’d done acting. Extremely good acting. All week.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t fault her shallow reasoning. Candy-wise, I could use a sugar hit now, considering that I could feel my IQ dropping as I listened to them.
Suddenly, she was shooting more orders at me, a holler from the other room.
“Eliza, bring me the light purple nail polish from my bathroom.” She made kissy noises at Chachi. “Chachi needs a few lilacs painted on this toenail. Mommy loves lilacs.”
From the cupboard under her master bathroom sink, I pulled the bottle of polish she’d requested. But while I was crouched there, Mo-No’s words sank in about her not having developed any actual feelings of deep emotion for Henry. All she wanted was a temporary trade-up, someone who could be her stepping stone into Hollywood society.
Stepping stones? They got stepped on.
She planned on using Henry, just like she’d used MacDowell Bainbridge. After which, she’d just keep stepping and stepping until everyone she’d met was trampled. Including me, including Sylvie.
Monique-Noelle was nothing but a Thing—a thing that trounced everyone in her path.
Our efforts would never have the desired effect. It hit me hard, as I crouched in that bathroom, that nothing we’d been doing would ever change her. She would never stop looking for the next new thing.
I’d judged her by my own view on life, assuming she wanted what every other woman with a heart on this planet wanted: love.
Mo-No wasn’t looking for love.
With the possible exception of Chachi, Mo-No didn’t care about any other living creature except herself.
No matter what I did from this point on, Sylvie’s future was doomed.
A decision solidified in me, like acrylic nails hardening under a heat lamp. I was going to just go find Henry and tell him to forget it, that we’d drop this whole charade this instant. I would get him his phone this afternoon, and he could call his geneticist and go back to his kingdom.
This whole thing had been for naught.
***
The stables where we were gearing up for the hunt smelled like home. Like heaven. Like everything good and fresh. Straw, horse flesh, steaming breath from their nostrils. I rubbed my hand across the velvet nose of Trafalgar, the horse belonging to Mr. Bainbridge and which he’d named after himself.
Rich people were odd.
Henry stood there, adjusting Trafalgar’s saddle like he’d done it a million times. I watched in confusion, not sure what exactly this man was. He could golf, play tennis, sail a yacht, saddle a horse, and claimed to own not just a bus station with a view but also a plane and a helicopter.
Sure, I’d been around him pretty much daily for the last week, but I didn’t know him at all. Could any of his wild tales of his life in the Alps be real? He’d mentioned a brother. He’d mentioned the name of his station, which I’d intended to look up, but I’d been interrupted by barked orders from Mo-No.
Who was Henry Lyon, exactly?
I needed to find out.
But I also needed to cut him loose.
Oh, but letting him go now felt like surgery. Did I have to tell him this instant that I’d given up on Mo-No as a lost cause? Couldn’t it just wait until after we’d gone on a nice horseback ride all over San Nouveau together? I ached for the feel of a horse beneath me, the wind in my hair, the strength of a horse’s gallop, the smell of a good lather from its skin. It’d been a long time, too long. Couldn’t it be postponed until after I’d done my letter best to prevent that fox from being hurt?
Yeah, this conversation teetering on the tip of my tongue could wait, just another couple of hours.
“They tell me you’ll like Trafalgar.” He tightened the cinch around Trafalgar’s girth, and then the flank cinch, and then the front one again, checking to see whether the saddle was secure. It reminded me of watching my dad put a saddle on his horse Richter when I was a little girl.
“He’s tall, but I don’t mind.”
“You’re sure that stirrup length is right for you?” Henry double checked to see everything else with my saddle was correct, and then about whether I had the right horse for my height and my rider’s personality, and then about whether I needed anything to drink. It felt so nice to be looked after like this.
Henry Lyon charmed me. Just like he’d charmed everyone else.
“It’s all great, Henry. I’m excited to go.” That was true. I hated myself for it just a little bit, but the prospect of going out there with Henry, with nothing but the sky and the island and the horses and each other made giddy eddies swirl in my stomach.
“Come on. You’re ready.” Henry led me, Trafalgar, and his horse Chantilly, to stand among the San Nouveau fox-hunting elite in the stable yard where the festivities were to be explained. City officials swarmed around Henry, cracking jokes, talking about the merit of different breeds of horses, making speculations about the markets in Asia. After just a week, he’d joined in their conversation, not just served as a satellite for it like when we were at the golfing match. He really could fit in anywhere, it seemed.
Which made me wonder whether any of it was real. Had he just insinuated himself into my life, into my heart, like he had the rest of these people? I couldn’t help doubting how much was sincere, when it came to his expressed feelings for me. Wasn’t he doing the same number on Mo-No?
I hated thinking of that. I refused to think of that. I was going to ride a horse beside a handsome man, and then I was going to say goodbye to him. This day, I would savor the good.
And save an innocent fox.
“How do you know what to say back to them when they talk about securities and stocks and all that financial mumbo jumbo?” I asked when no one else could hear.
“There’s a copy of the Wall Street Journal delivered every morning to the Bainbridge house. I glance it over.” He shrugged.
Brilliant move, especially when I considered that my own efforts at reading it had always ended with a clunk after page one.
This guy continued to exceed every expectation—by miles.
While he went to get our final instructions from the hunt boss, I shot Polly a text.
Thanks for packing up my laptop. Can you send over the phone I ordered for Henry in the shipment? It’s there, right?
She got right back to me.
So, does this mean Operation Better Person is accomplished? Sure. Heading to the express courier after lunch.
That would be in an hour. Which meant by late afternoon, all of this would be over. One, we had to get the clothes back to Burt before they were noticed missing. Christmas seemed like a time when a studio would do inventory on costumes as no other work would be going on. Every day’s delay was putting Polly’s friend at risk.
Two, it wasn’t fair to keep Henry here any longer, not without coming through on my promise of the phone, now that I’d decided to drop the prank on Mo-No. Once he had his precious phone, which he’d graciously refrained from asking me for and which he’d more than earned over the past week, I didn’t really know what would happen. Would he take off immediately? Would he linger, hang out with me for a day on the mainland so I could tell him about the feelings budding inside me like spring swells on a cherry branch?
I adjusted my grip on Trafalgar’s reins. The ending rumbled at me in the distance, like an encroaching thunderstorm.
All good things had to come to an end.
But before they did, I really wanted to get to the bottom of who this guy had been before his life took its tragic turn and left him stranded and hungry and alone.
Because there was a lot more to Henry Lyon than I’d originally assumed when we picked him up in the bus station. The clues he kept dropping for me, like the Alps and the name of the bus station he owned, Cherrington Downs, they meant something. If Henry really was from Australia, though, and if he really had come to California for a top-secret business opportunity involving a geneticist and marbling and mutants, I’d be eating crow for months and years to come. Especially if he also had that plane and helicopter he was talking about.
If I could have looked it all up, I probably would have been able to piece it all together. I cursed San Nouveau again for their insane internet cloistering.
But it all felt too far-fetched, and whenever I’d tried to unravel all the knots, they’d just gotten more tangled.
“Here’s the course.” Henry rode up beside me and held out a map of the island. “We’re assigned to this sector.” Because it wasn’t large, the pairs of riders could be assigned to various areas and cover the whole island of San Nouveau.
“Oh, I’m glad we didn’t get the city sector. That sounds dangerous.” Shooting a poor little fox in the first place was wrong, obviously, but within city limits? That would be ludicrous.
“Yeah, we’re up here.” He pointed to an area on the map I recognized instantly: the cliffs near where the helicopter transport landed when they came in. I’d taken Henry there the first morning of our time together on the island, and it was where I’d had my meltdown when I’d looked over the edge at the breakers.
It was also where I’d felt Henry’s arms encircle me, calm me, and heal me from my terror. I stole a glance at those arms again now, a thrill of memory running down my chest. An ache of need followed quick on its heels, and I hated myself for it. He was leaving. He was leaving me, most likely today.
We lined up with the other riders at the stable yard, side by side. By my estimate, Trafalgar and Chantilly, the horse Henry rode, joined fifty more horses ready to chase one poor little dog-like creature.
“Do you think the fox will be caught?” I said, but my words were drowned out by a bugle playing that ‘tally-ho’ tune, and every horse and rider scattered. Henry and Chantilly took off at a trot, and I pressed my heels into the flanks of Trafalgar.
We were off.
It was weird because I’d pictured everyone riding together in a pack, all charging at top speed after some bloodhound. At least that was the image I’d seen in those British dramas about the fox hunt. Instead, we’d paired off and been dispersed like the Ten Tribes of Israel.
And, hey. Where were our hounds? Nothing resembling a hound had been hanging out at the stables. Sure, there had been a Mo-No-type trophy wife and her Maltipoo, but not a single hunting dog of any breed had yapped around.
Henry set the moderate pace with Chantilly, his big, buff-colored mare. I matched it astride Trafalgar, the strength of the black-coated horse’s muscles pounding beneath my saddle. Ripples of impact coursed up through my own muscles with Trafalgar’s every footfall.
“How is it to be on horseback again?” Henry tugged Chantilly’s reins to the right, and we followed a beaten path in the rocks.
“It’s paradise.” The steed’s strength, its grace, the way Trafalgar practically floated as he leapt obstacles, I couldn’t help but say, “I’m in heaven.”
“You look like it.”
“Like what?”
“Like paradise. Like a woman in love.”
Little did he know.
“Er, with a horse, I mean.”
I blushed at his hedging of his statement, wondering if he did know, after all. How obvious were my rising tides of interest and affection for this guy?
We rode onward, up some inclines and around the scrubby vegetation toward the cliffs.
“Does anyone else have our same acreage to cover for the hunt?”
“It’s all ours. Just you and me, Elizer. All alone.” Henry sent me a grin that flashed those white teeth of his, shooting straight to my already happy core. He rode extremely well. Believe me, I noticed. “We need to look out for more of a silver coat, less than a red one like I’d normally expect to see. They say this fox is native to the channel islands of California, which makes this their natural habitat. Some are in zoos, but this is the only place in the wild.”
“And we’re hunting them? We can’t. I won’t let us. This is the wrongest thing I’ve ever done.” I blurted this, showing all my cards, and following up with a barrage of ranting. “I won’t let anyone shoot those animals. Full disclosure, I only came on this trip with the idea of creating a distraction and trying to prevent the cruelty. If I’d known they were endangered, I probably would have called in the U.S. Army to stop today’s events—er, probably the U.S. Navy. Admiral Pickering has pull, and he’s Polly’s dad. He could get attack boats and sailors here in minutes to stop this insanity, and—”
I paused because Henry looked at me, pulling his horse up to a halt. I tugged on my reins too, ready to launch another lecture-missile.
“What?” I caught my breath after the big tirade. “You’re looking at me like you don’t believe me. But look, friend. I have my phone. Polly is on speed dial. Her dad would never allow this to—”
Henry burst into laughter. It was a gut laugh, a full-on guffaw, like the one he’d exploded with at Frogs in the Sand at the inappropriate moment. It made his eyes dance and his face turn red and his head fling backward.
“What’s so funny? That I think I can stop this? Because I might just be a nanny who can’t get her Ph.D. research project approved, but I know somebody who does have power, and he has a heart and a concern for the animals God created and gave us on earth. Now, I’m not some kind of bleeding-heart animal protection fanatic. I’m a farm girl. We ate all the meats—from animals we raised. However, I know the difference between a pet and a source of income. I’ve shot a lot of rattlesnakes in my life, and a few other pests. Once I nearly shot a bear that was coming after a sheep and her lamb. Guns aren’t the problem. However, I’m not going to stand by and let a bunch of people kill an endangered fox for sport. Nope. No way.”
Henry’s laughing sustained itself all through my outburst, but it subsided now as we stood still on a patch of short, yellowed grass with the salt air of the ocean and heavy pine scent floating all around us.
“Is that what you think was going on today? If so, I don’t know how you said yes.” He ran his fingers through his hair that was already windswept. “Didn’t you know the hunt is just to locate the foxes and get as close as possible to an accurate count on them all in one day? It’s a service. It’s done so that the Channel Islands Conservation Authority can tag them and track their repopulation.” Henry reached over and took my hand, sending a shock up my arm. “Nobody is killing the foxes. They’re saving them.”
These facts peppered me like shot, dropping me in my tracks, like I would have the bear eating my dad’s lamb at the Circle G—if I’d had better aim.
“Oh.” Come to think of it, besides not seeing any hunting hounds, I also hadn’t seen any guns this morning. Not one. “Are you sure?”
“Mm-hmm.” His eyes were still dancing.
A flush of relief and embarrassment washed me from head to toe, with an after-tingle at the fact that Henry still had his rough and callused hand in mine.
“Oh,” was all I could say again.
He released my hand and clicked his tongue to get Chantilly started off again. With my ego and self-righteousness parked safely at the bottom of the nearby ocean, I followed after him, soon catching up.
“You’ve shot a bear?” he asked when Trafalgar and I came up alongside him. “Seriously? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Elizer. You are absolutely legend.”
Legend? I felt like The Legend of the Girl Who Cried Fox. If there were a stronger word for conclusion-jumping fool, I deserved it.
“I said I’d shot at a bear, not shot a bear.” It was better to clarify. “I missed. But my aim did the job. He dropped the lamb and trundled off.”
We were moving into our sector of the island now, and the breakers became audible. I tried not to notice them or to have any flashbacks of how they looked below the cliffs. We had fox-saving work to do, and we didn’t need me to require a straitjacket.
“What I want to know is why didn’t anyone tell me a fox hunt wasn’t a fox hunt?”
“Well, you’re the one who’s been living here, not me. I assumed you knew.” He laughed. “I’m just chuffed you wanted to spend time with me enough to come along anyway, despite the fact you thought we were out to kill, how did you put it? God’s innocent creatures?”
“I can be quite strident when provoked. Like a rattlesnake.”
“No, not the snake. You, Elizer, are like the bear. A mama bear.”
I wasn’t sure I was in love with that description. My mistake and subsequent freak-out left a heat at my neck of shame.
“I’ve always loved foxes. I’m just kind of protective of my loved ones.”
“Clearly. Look at lucky Sylvie. I’ve never even met the wee one, and I’m practically jealous of the tot, the way you’re so caring about her. It’s beautiful.” He rode closer to me. “Just like you, Elizer. Honestly, when I left Cherrington Downs to come to America and hike the Grand Canyon before meeting with Dr. Smith about the cattle breeding, I didn’t think I’d meet a girl like you. Kind, caring, with a beautiful, beautiful soul.”
His compliments showered over me like sparks off a welding torch against steel. They prickled against my skin all over, then warmed me. I could barely concentrate on the other things he was saying about his reasons for being here. I filed them away and just focused on the feeling of Henry Lyon’s praise.
“I really don’t think I’m as caring as all that. I mean, look what I’ve been dragging you through.” Mo-No, the dress-ups, the forced fakery. “From the moment you told me you were in distress, in need of a phone, I should have handed you mine and said to call whoever you needed to. Instead, it’s been a full week of manipulation and using others.” And worse. “I’m not really worthy of any of that praise, least of all from you.”
We had to duck under a low-slung limb of a pine to stay on the trail. Pungent sap stickied my arm.
“Are you kidding?” he asked. “Do you have any idea how hungry I was? Or how dirty? You gave me the best snags and mashed spuds dinner I’ve had this side of my late mother’s cooking at Cherrington Downs Station. You offered me a hot bath and clothes to wear. Plus the poshest place to sleep there is, unless you count under the stars.”
“With the coyotes?”
“The coyotes do make the stars less posh. I’ll give you that much.”
The helipad area opened up in front of us, spreading right to the cliffs. Friday morning, a full week ago we’d stood here, collecting Chachi under the wintry blue dome of the sky. It felt like a lot longer than a week because of the huge transition that had taken place inside me in such a short time.
I had fallen for the king of the bus station. Hard. And it felt like there would be no turning back ever.
We rode up to the east of the helipad, over the rocks, our horses at a slow gait, threading between granite boulders and dodging spiny cactus.
“Keep your eyes out for the fox,” Henry said. “When I got our assigned area, the organizer told me this is their main hideout every year, so chances are good we’ll spot one, if not several.”
“Really?” That prospect made me tingle almost as much as Henry’s touch. “I’ve been here a hundred times to pick up Sylvie or Chachi, and I’ve never seen one.”
“You should have been looking. It’s amazing what you can see when you look.”
I looked over at Henry. Something was in his countenance that I’d only seen in romance movies. It was the way Jim Craig, the man from Snowy River, had looked at Jessica when he said, “I’ll be back for the horse—and whatever else is mine.”
It looked like…love.
I had to look away. This wasn’t real. I couldn’t let myself believe that what I felt for him could be requited. The time had been too short. I still didn’t know anything about his past. Well, at least nothing that made much sense. But I wanted to. I wanted to know everything, and to let him know everything there was to know about me. I wanted to be part of Henry. I wanted my life to be The Henry and Eliza Show.
“That sounds good.”
“What does?”
“The Henry and Eliza Show.”
What! I’d said that out loud? What other mortifying clues of my internal dreaming had I muttered? I could melt right off my horse into a mud puddle of shame.
Thank the heavens above for a tender mercy that rustled in the brush nearby, providing the one change of subject that could possibly wipe away that last humiliating topic: I spotted a Channel Island Fox.
“Look. What’s that?” The shady side of the chaparral stirred again, revealing more than one of the silver-furred creatures. “Did it have pointed ears, or was it—?”
“I think you spotted one. No, three. Good eye.” Henry grinned over at me. “And we don’t even have to shoot them. Except with our cameras. Pull out your phone and take your best shot.”
I did. It was terrible. I haven’t taken a good photo in my entire life.
“I don’t think the biologist will even be able to tell they’re there in the picture.”
“Mostly they need us to mark their location and number on the map.”
“I saw three in there. A big one and two smaller.”
“Mother and kits, eh? Good on ya, Elizer.” His grin and compliment warmed me.
We scoured the rest of the area, sleuthing out a half dozen more foxes and their holes. Henry spotted four himself, and I stumbled across the last one when Trafalgar and I scaled a small incline. Its eyes met mine, and the fox didn’t look away. I was one with the fox.
“It’s getting late. Do you think we’ve covered the area fully?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I hate to quit, though, because with every find I feel more and more like Elizer Galatea, Protector of the Weak, and you’re Henry Lyon, Champion of the Endangered. It’s a rush.”
Henry tugged Chantilly’s reins so he was right up next to me. His leg pressed against the side of my calf muscle.
“We make a good team, Elizer. We should have our own show.”
Oh, so he hadn’t forgotten. Shame sent tendrils of heat up my neck and singed my cheeks. A gust of wind whipped my hair, then it switched direction. It brought the sound of the breakers on the cliffs crashing into my ears.
“You won’t mind if I go take one last look at the waves below the cliffs, would you? Don’t know when I’ll get to see them again.”
Already at the mere memory of the drop-off of the cliff, I was shaking and sweating, my hands gripping the reins on Trafalgar as tight as a vise.
“Go ahead. Yeah. I’ll wait here.”
Henry eyed me.
“You ought to come and take a look, Elizer. They won’t reach up and grab you, I promise.”
“I’m more of an inland California girl. Or an open ocean type of girl. Not a looking-down-from-heights-at-powerful-water type of girl.”
“Yeah, but it’s gorgeous. And not dangerous if you just look. Please? I don’t want you to miss out on this beautiful thing. You don’t have to let fear be the controlling factor.”
Those words struck me. I’d let fear control me a few times in my life—like not aiming for getting a job in my field, or not standing up to Mo-No when she was being outrageously callous toward Sylvie.
“You’re right. I’ll at least try. But you have to stay right by me.”
“I promise.” His words felt like a down comforter, nestling all around me. I dismounted, and we tethered Trafalgar and Chantilly to a tree.
Hand in hand, we paced to the edge of the cliff. The ocean was louder than usual today. Usually I’d see its smashing power against the rocks as angry, but today they felt like a mixture of terror and giddy excitement, mirroring the slamming of my emotions around in my chest as I gripped the hand of the coolest guy I’d ever known, ready to attempt a second time to peer down at the scariest sight I’d ever experienced in my life.
Having my hand firmly in Henry’s gave my legs fuel to propel me forward, but my breath came in hiccuppy gasps.
“I think” —hic— “this is close enough.” Hic, hic.
However, Henry led me gently, a step at a time, taking me to a good vantage point. Good being a debatable adjective.
“We really can see much better up here.” He drew me in, like a fisherman with a rod and reel. “And if we’re lucky we can catch a bit of the cold spray on our faces. There’s nothing better, I say.”
Each of my steps was smaller than the one before, but progress happened anyway.
“You’re doing great. You’ll make it.” Henry’s little prompts kept coming. “I’ve got you. I’ll keep you safe.”
He wasn’t laughing at me. He wasn’t being condescending. He was supporting me, making me face an irrational fear.
“I’m good right here.”
“And you’ll be good right up here, too. See? I have such a strong grip on you. You’re not going to fall anywhere.” He pressed his cheek close to mine, where I could feel the muscle working in his jaw, and smell the scent of his toothpaste. “I won’t let you fall.”
At those words, I closed my eyes. Behind them, I was falling, free-falling, an exhilaration that stemmed from Henry’s nearness. The sensation of flight radiated out from the center of my chest to my fingertips, stopping my breathing, curling my toes.
Free-falling into deep affection for Henry Lyon.
“You’re right, Henry. I am going to be okay.”
“You’re more than okay.” He stood behind me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders as we both looked out at the scene. “Look, you’re at the edge and tasting the saltwater.”
When I parted my lips to take in a breath, I found he was right: the sea spray made the air savory. Each successive attack from the sea charged with fury against the rock of the island, but in this moment, I didn’t picture myself plummeting into its violence. All I thought of was the freedom of falling, falling, falling in Henry’s strong embrace.
Yes, my pulse was pounding, but it had very little to do with the breakers on the rocks below.
“At the center, the ocean looks so calm, serene. It’s just at the edges where it gets messy,” I said, thinking deeply. My plan to get Henry Lyon, bus station king, to fool the snobbiest woman on earth into falling for him, had looked so perfectly reasonable on the main surface. It was just here, at the edges—where I was standing—that it frayed apart. Because who had done the real falling?
“Henry?”
“Hmm?” He was nuzzling the hair behind my ear. “Yes, Elizer?”
“Henry?”
He took me by the shoulders and turned me to face him. I looked up at the gray of his eyes, the same color as the churning sea beneath us. I’d expected to see a wry grin or a triumphant, I did it, I cured her fear look on his face, but nothing like that awaited me.
Instead, I saw desire. And I recognized it because it churned in me as strong as the waves beneath us.
“I’m going to kiss you now.”
“You should,” I whispered, with a frantic little nod.
Henry’s lips brushed mine, a tender, tentative touch. I inched closer to him, my arms reaching around his neck, my fingers threading into the softness of his hair, the wind whipping my hair against both of us. He pressed his saltwater-tinged mouth on mine more firmly, and he took me in his arms like I belonged to him and would never belong to anyone else.
This kiss turned my future into a series of open doors. Whether they were crazy, senseless doors, I didn’t care, so long as they were with him.
Would he let me be part owner of the bus station with him? We could take turns going to the tour bus and asking for dehydrated stew for lunch. We could sleep under the stars with the coyotes. We could hail helicopters whenever we saw them while we were looking down the deep ravines for the river. I didn’t care. So long as I was living it alongside Henry Lyon, I was pretty sure life could be as amazing as this soul-bending kiss.
“That” — his breathing came quick and happy— “was amazing.”
“You’re amazing. How do you do it?”
“Do what? Kiss like that? I’m here to tell you, it takes two to kiss like that.”
I let my hands slide down into his.
“No, you know, charm everyone. Help everyone feel like they’re the only person in the room with you? Because that’s what you do, you know.”
“Not sure. I’ve spent quite a bit of time alone. For work at the station. So when I get the chance to actually be with people, I really try to value it.”
Work. He had a job, then? I’d never asked that specific question, which should have been on the duh, obvious first question level. Geez. This was getting to be a pattern with me, like not asking about the fox hunt really being a hunt.
“What kind of work?”
“You know. I told you—the station.”
Oh, right. The bus station. My heart turned to led and fell into my stomach. I wished to heaven above that he was the lucid, amazing man he seemed to be at every second he didn’t talk about his homeless kingdom fantasy as though it were his reality. However, the new me refused to let a bomb like that just lie undetonated. I had to explode it with further questions. I wasn’t going to stay in the dark any longer about Henry Lyon. I needed to know.
“You didn’t learn to play tennis at the station.”
“No. You’re right.”
“And not golf, either. There’s no golf course at the station.”
“Not with fairways and things, although that might be an idea. There’s enough room out there, now that you mention it. Upkeep would be a nightmare, though. I’ve got very little time for landscaping, especially intense level like you’d need for a golf course.”
Good point. It would never work in a station. Not even a big train station, like they had in downtown L.A.
Oh! What was I doing? I was getting sucked into his web of fantasy here.
I had other, more probing questions to ask. Focus.
“And then there was yachting. You were impressive, I hear. Threading the gap between the two haystack rocks without wrecking the Bainbridges’ boat.”
“Now that, my dear, was dumb luck.”
“Dumb luck with a million-dollar yacht.”
“True. But I’d been whitewater rafting, and how different could it be? Besides, you have to take chances. You have to go to the edge and look over and see what’s there, and whether you can conquer it.”
I stood at the edge. With Henry.
“You’re a continual surprise, Henry.”
“So are you. I’m pretty chuffed at how brave you were today. First being willing to put yourself between the fox and whoever was hunting it in your imagination, and now this. Pretty impressive stuff, Elizer.” He smiled now, and I caught a glimpse of the teeth, and in their blinding glare, I didn’t care if he was considering putting in a few holes of a golf course in downtown L.A.’s rattiest bus station. He was gorgeous, he was caring, and he had a kiss that could melt the cartilage in my knee. I was all his.
But he was leaving, and I’d kissed him, against the express orders of my boss. Plus, in kissing him, I’d just made a ridiculous mess—because now that I’d tasted it, how could I ever go a day without it again?
***
“Nine foxes at the cliffs, was it? Well done.” The current but retiring mayor of San Nouveau placed a medal around Henry’s neck. “That’s second most of anyone else in the hunt. Silver medal.”
We’d been the last to return to the stables and report our finds, and everyone was ready to get going on lunch and drinks.
“Thank you for this, Mayor Jamley,” Henry said, patting the medal speaking into the microphone. “But I couldn’t have done it without Eliza Galatea here. She’s got a natural talent for it. She spotted six of the nine herself.” He took off the medal and put it around my neck, allowing his hands to linger at my shoulders and suffusing my body with the physical equivalent of a sigh.
“That’s nice. If ever there’s an opening in the Channel Islands Conservation Authority we’ll keep her in mind, since she’s already been security cleared. Now—lunch.”
The stable yard emptied faster than a chapel after Sunday school. Henry reached down and took my hand. I let him, even though he’d been all over San Nouveau with Monique-Noelle for the past week, and people might notice my supplanting her in her absence.
The Mayor, though, called Henry over to him one more time, and then, speak of the devil, apparently there wasn’t any Mo-No absence after all, because here came my boss riding up in the Bainbridge golf cart, her gigantic blond hairstyle haloing the angriest face I’d ever seen her sport—and that was saying something.
“What, exactly, is going on here, Eliza?” Her shrill tone spooked a horse, and whinnying erupted all through the stables. “I let you out of my sight for one minute, allow you to stop watching Chachi for one morning, and what do you do but move in on my boy toy. Are you out of your ever-loving mind?”
“Hi, Monique-Noelle.”
“Don’t you hi me.” She climbed out of the cart and shoved her hands onto her hips, the better to aim the nails she was spitting. “Do you not know that I hold your very future in my hands?” She held out her fingers, pinching her thumb and index finger together as if she dangled something by a thread: implying my whole world. “I employ you. That means I can fire you. Like that.” Monique-Noelle snapped her fingers, aiming them at me like a weapon. “Third strike, Eliza. You’re out.”
“I’m fired?”
“You heard me. Get off the island.” She shoved a package into my arms, heavy, addressed from Polly. I nearly dropped it until I remembered it was probably my laptop.
And Henry’s international phone.
Henry walked up. He must have heard some of the conversation, because Mo-No’s face warped through three different emotions: horror, embarrassment, and then a fake-looking flirt-face.
The flirt didn’t work.
“Wait a minute, Monique.” Henry stepped in front of me, a human shield against the nail-spitting. “She loves your daughter far too much for you to make a snap decision like that.” Kudos to Henry for using the word snap, above and beyond the fact that he had come to my defense. “You’re not going to find anyone who loves Sylvie more or will take better care of her.”
“Sylvie is enrolling in boarding school.”
“She’s a toddler. There’s no such thing.” I found my voice and my spine at the same time. “It’s time you stepped up and took an interest in your daughter. She’s a gorgeous baby. She needs a mother.”
Monique-Noelle’s fiery tone iced over.
“I have no intention of letting you tell me what to do with that child. Just like I have no intention of letting you get in the way of my relationship with Henry Lyon here.” Her eyes narrowed at me, aiming like lasers. “The hot, rich husband having an affair with the nanny is so common it’s almost a proverb, so I propose the clear solution of getting rid of the nanny—and getting rid of the child.”
I gasped so loud my throat and lungs hurt.
“You wouldn’t hurt Sylvie!”
“Unless you think giving her to her father completely would hurt her, no. I’m divorcing him, and when I do I’m severing parental rights. He and his nanny—who he’s been carrying on with all these months on the mainland, going to dirty theme parks and public beaches and taking the urchin—can have her. See? I don’t need you. And neither does Sylvie.”
That last barb pierced me to the very core.
“Now, shoo, Eliza. Take your things from the bungalow behind the Banbridge mansion tout de suite. Henry and I have things to discuss. Like where we should get married. Here on San Nouveau? Or a destination wedding? Iceland? New Zealand? See, Henry, honey? I don’t mess around. When I want something, I get it.”
She strode toward him, a she-panther with a water buffalo in her sights.
“He thinks he owns the bus station!” It came blurting from my lips before I could stop it. I jumped in front of him now, returning the human-shield favor. “He’s a homeless man.”
This badly expressed fact didn’t seem to register with her at all.
“Of course he’s homeless. He’s house hunting.” Her slow, predatory glide toward him bore down, and she reached out with the flat of her hand, as if to shove me aside. “I’m going to show him what his new home looks like. Come along, Henry. Don’t waste time. I’ve already filed my divorce papers. Bainbridge won’t dispute. I’m practically an unmarried woman, so you can give me what I’ve been waiting for.”
Now she did push my shoulder, and I toppled a little, but I didn’t lose my footing. Fear and disgust propelled more words from my lips, words I’d never intended to hurl at her this way, especially not in front of Henry. I’d never meant to shame Henry. But they came from a deep place of pain in me, erupting out like a long-dormant volcano of hurt.
“Monique! He’s a hobo! I picked him up at the bus station a week ago. He was homeless and dirty. I cleaned him up, got him some fancy clothes, and told him to tell you he was rich.”
She jerked to a halt.
“You’re not rich?”
Henry didn’t answer.
“In certain moments he might think he is. He’s not always lucid. Like so many homeless, fact and fantasy blur for him.” Even as I spoke the words, I knew they weren’t nice to be saying right in front of Henry, as if he weren’t there, and as if he hadn’t been lucid for the entire day he’d just spent with me. Nevertheless, they churned out.
“Monique, he thinks he owns the bus station I found him at. He even gave it a name: Cherrington Downs.”
“That’s a nice name.”
“It would be, but it was actually the nastiest bus station in East L.A.” I still remembered the fetid smells there. “You wouldn’t like it.”
“But Henry has a family. I heard him talk about them.”
“Yes,” I said, knowing Mo-No was right. “He was raised by a good family, I’m sure, but the first day I met him, he told he me owned the bus station, that he needed an international phone, and that he was afraid of helicopters who wouldn’t come down and pick him up to save him from the coyotes.” I hated myself so much for this spew of terrible facts. But it was my only choice.
Monique, who had been eyeing me with skepticism, now whirled on Henry.
“Is it true?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of helicopters. But I was a little fizzed that none would pick me up when I was walking through the desert. And yes, I did lose my international phone, and I agreed to come help Elizer here in exchange for one.”
“Help her what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Teach you a lesson, I guess. About valuing people. About loving your child.”
“That child has nothing to do with this, with you and me.” But she caught herself. “You told everyone you’re a cattle baron. I read it in the tabloids. You told the San Nouveau islanders that you were here in the United States on business for cattle breeding, from Australia.”
The magnitude of my fib started to settle on me, like a lead blanket.
Now Monique-Noelle turned her venom on full blast.
“And now you’re telling me that sexy British guy isn’t Daniel-Craig-Two-Point-Oh?”
“He’s Australian.” It was weak, especially since I didn’t know whether it was accurate, although in the past few days, I’d never once heard his accent slip. He must have at least spent a lot of time in Australia. I could tell that now.
However, I didn’t have any idea what was true and what was fantasy when it came to Henry. All I knew was this whole exchange had to be hurting him at least as much as it was me.
“Whatever. It’s all places where they eat stuff that’s not avocadoes, so I don’t care.”
That strangely made sense.
“In fact, I don’t care if you’re foreign or from a bus station. You’re a liar and a hustler and a peon. You’re probably just dating Eliza for her connections here on San Nouveau and for the piles of cash she’s making for babysitting, because there’s nothing else that could possibly be attractive about her.” Her scowl of scorn could fry electronics.
“She’s a nice girl, Monique. And you’re not.”
“Well, I never claimed I was nice.” Smugness dripped from her words. “Frankly, I don’t need you, Henry Lyon. I’m still divorcing MacDowell and trading up, which direction you definitely are not, and you’ll be the one suffering if you mistakenly decided to care about her.” Next she swiveled her gun sites at me. “Because I’m not just going to fire Eliza Galatea and make sure she never gets another job as a nanny—or a dogsitter.” Mo-No’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I’m going to make sure she never makes it as a linguistics expert, either.”
“That’s persecution!” Henry stepped forward, squaring his shoulders and placing himself between me and the witch. “You can’t possibly stop her from becoming a linguistics expert.”
“How did you even know I’m a linguist?” It was probably the wrong question for the moment, but it was the one I wanted to know most. Mo-No knew nothing about me, cared nothing about me. It seemed impossible she could identify how to skewer me where it would hurt most.
“From your résumé when you applied to be Sylvie’s nanny, of course.” Malice dripped from her words. “I know who I employ, of course.”
I wish I didn’t know who employed me. I knew her far too well, the fake she was, and the stunts she’d pulled to get to her current standing. Up to now, for Sylvie’s sake I’d never mentioned what I knew, but she might be forcing my hand.
“If I can’t block your career alone, trust me, I can pay enough people to do it. You’re toast,” she spat. “Without avocado slices.”
She pulled out her phone and started dialing, but Henry reached over to stop her. She jerked her phone away from him.
“It’s no use trying to stop me.” Monique’s eyes zeroed in on Henry, and she gave a hard, dry laugh. “You did this charade? For a phone?”
He gave a single-shoulder shrug, as if to say, what of it? Monique-Noelle sighed one of her huffs of exhaustion that I’d heard ten thousand times during my stint in her employ.
“I could have given you a phone, Henry. With shoulders like yours, I would have given you everything.” When that didn’t create the desired pathos from Henry, she aimed her guns at me—a fifty-gauge. “Guess who I’m calling. My lawyer.”
“For a rush on your divorce?”
“No. To get him to file two lawsuits against you, Eliza Galatea.”
“Lawsuits!”
“You, young lady with the stupidly long legs and face devoid of makeup, are being sued for fraud. How much is that worth these days? One million? Two?”
That was the last thing I’d expected to hear from her. However, knowing Mo-No, it should have been my first leap of logic, if I’d been considering her personality at all.
“Oh, and not just for fraud.” Oh, dear. She wasn’t finished dragging me behind her speeding car of doom yet. “In bringing your dirty hobo pal to this island, you’ve no doubt violated contractual confidentiality agreements that you signed. With your name. On the dotted line.” Mo-No hung on the word line.
And I’d had it with her threats, with her belittlement, with her snide comments. I’d had it with Monique-Noelle.
She was going down.
“Put that phone away, Monique. Or should I say, Tammy? That’s your real name.” I’d known this for months. Thanks to Polly’s dad’s criminal background checks via the Navy, I’d been fully aware of the background of the woman I was working for right up front. San Nouveau might not want to take any risks with who they let come aground, but Polly hadn’t let me start working in close proximity with an unknown quantity, either. “There’s nothing less French than Tammy. Be the all-American girl you should have been. You’re the one who needs to quit perpetuating a fraud.”
Mo-No’s face melted into a look of horror, reminiscent of that painting where the ghostly-headed, white-faced figured is screaming.
“That. Is not. My name.” The words came out like they were being ground with a mortar and pestle. “Not anymore. Nobody says the name Tammy. Not around me.”
“Tammy Berkowitz. From Van Nuys.”
“No. No!” Mo-No stomped her kitten-heeled foot on the dirt of the stable yard, a puff of dust floating up all around her and coating her legs in their white jodhpurs. “Shut up. I am not that person. I’m not. I legally changed my name. But, if you tell anyone, and I mean anyone—”
My mind kept ping-ponging back to what she’d said about MacDowell Bainbridge leaving Mo-No for his other nanny. Would that nanny love Sylvie? My soul stretched into a thread of longing for the poor little girl whose mother cared nothing for her.
That sorry excuse for a mother deserved to be strung up. My volley had struck where it hurt.
“If I tell anyone, what?”
“I’ll take you down.” She set her jaw like she was holding a gun at me and needed to brace for its kickback. “You’ll go so far down that you’ll never see light again.”
“Whatever. I’m already down, Tammy. I’ve got nowhere to go but up. Never threaten a woman who already has nothing to lose. I gave all this to help your Sylvie. And you’ve removed her from the equation. Rookie move.” Channeling my inner Polly Pickering, I aimed my own gun—a full-on bazooka—right back at her. I knew just which silver bullet to forge as a comeback, one that would stop her dead in her tracks from seeking retribution against him.
“Fine. Then I’ll—” She looked back and forth between us, her eyes hardening further. “I’ll sue both of you. You’re the ones who tried to defraud me. I’m on solid ground. I’ll take down both of you.”
Suing both of us? Hot terror peppered my chest—until I chased it away with anger. Okay, enough was enough. I’d had it with her threats and games and ridiculous selfishness. The last thing I would let her do was take Henry Lyon to court. He was innocent in this, and Monique-Tammy-Noelle-Bainbridge-Berkowitz-Whoever was the one going down.
“Are you saying you’d describe putting yourself in the tabloids solid ground?”
“What tabloids?” A sudden twinkle in her eye showed the idea intrigued her. Oh, but it wouldn’t. Not for long.
“Yes, the tabloids. All of them, with your big, blond mane splashed over the front covers on the grocery store check stands all over the country.” I could see my line of attack clear as day. My aim centered on where she was most vulnerable: her vanity. “I can see the headline now: Uber-Rich Cheating Wife of Billionaire Sues Homeless Man Over Fraud Romance. Oh, Tammy. You’ll be the laugh of the week.”
“That’s not what it’s going to say,” she hissed through gritted teeth.
“Oh, yes it is. You’ll be reduced to a one-liner joke across all social media platforms. But hey, if that’s the route you want to take, it’s up to you.”
Mo-No stomped her little foot with a growl.
“And then I’ll have no choice but to tell the world about Tammy.”
If instant petrifaction were a thing that could happen to a human face, it occurred to Mo-No now. She became a stone.
Henry jumped into the fray now.
“Don’t do it. Any of it, Monique. Or Tammy. Be yourself. It’s the only way to find true love.” He tipped his hat at her, and then, for some reason, he shot me a look. When our eyes connected, a string inside the instrument of my soul plucked and resonated, and for a moment its resonance was all I could hear.
Did he mean he thought of me as his true love?
Mo-No shuddered, her fists tight and the veins on her neck sticking out. Were they actually pulsating? She stomped her foot again, a little puff of dust coming up from it. I thought she might spontaneously combust, but instead she let out a primal shriek.
“Who am I supposed to marry now?”
***
Monique-Tammy-Noelle skimmed off in the electric golf cart’s ironic silence. The roar of a muscle car’s muffler would have reflected her rage better, but the golf cart’s nearly soundless whir was more fitting, I thought. My battle with her died with a whimper, not a roar.
When the dust settled, I stepped closer to Henry. I exhaled, relieved that it was over.
“Well, that didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.”
With the sun at its apex, all the insects had gone quiet. The only sounds were the occasional bluster of a horse’s sigh; the only smells the pungent stable and rocky earth.
“It might be for the best,” he said. We cut across the dirt toward the gates of the stable. “At least you won’t have to protect Sylvie from that…Thing.”
Mo-No seemed a more appropriate name than ever for her. The Thing. The Thing that Ate Sylvie’s Potentially Charmed Life. The Thing that Stomped On Others. The Thing that Might Never Be Happy No Matter What.
The Thing I could do nothing to help.
Residual worry for Sylvie rippled through me, in among the waves of concern for how I was ever going to afford tuition for the upcoming semester, in among the giant rogue wave of fear that Henry would resent me for what I’d put him through. A whole week in the presence of that woman was a resentable experience.
I resented myself for it already.
True love. What had he implied? I hated myself for how fascinating I found those words.
“You gambled.” He led me through the gate, leaving the dusty stable yard behind us. Just as we had when we were atop Trafalgar and Chantilly earlier, I fell in beside him. Our paces matched. “You bet big, just like in that My Fair Lady movie. There was a wager involved there.”
“For the life of me, I can’t remember if the gambler wins or loses in it.”
Henry gave a little shrug, one that said he didn’t recall the outcome either.
“It doesn’t really matter now, does it? Let’s keep in mind, my payment was simply a phone, while you were playing for the happiness of that baby girl. Now who’s looking like the loser? Me, for being selfish.”
“You weren’t selfish.” I pulled open the package from Polly. “Here.”
Inside the box lay the phone Henry had requested. I handed it to him.
“What’s this?” He rested a hand on my arm and watched me pick at the packing tape. One trillion nerve endings in my body activated at his touch: hot, cold, fire, ice, desire, despair.
“I ordered it the day you agreed to come out to San Nouveau. Today was the soonest I could get it here. Sorry. I shouldn’t have put you through this.”
“Me?”
“Well, maybe not Mo-No, either.”
“Naw, we’re adults. Instead, think of Sylvie. It seems like without her mother in her life, now she has a fighting chance—despite the questionable genetics she’s been saddled with, as daughter of that…” His kindness left that noun’s space blank.
Well, that was one way to think of it. Maybe my efforts, rather than bringing Mo-No into a realization that Sylvie meant everything to her, had instead propelled her out of Sylvie’s orbit. And perhaps that was, as Henry had implied, a good thing. Maybe?
I didn’t know.
“Speaking of genetics,” I said, “did you want to try to call that geneticist?”
I handed him the phone. It was charged up and ready to dial, just as I’d requested from the company that sent it.
We headed away from the stables and down the path toward my final hours at the Bainbridge estate, because I’d be packing up all of Henry’s things along with mine this afternoon. This evening I’d be shipping myself and my life away from San Nouveau, away from its beautiful cliffs, its memories made with Sylvie and with Henry, away from Trafalgar, the beautiful horse I’d never ride again.
A pang of regret made me look back toward the stables where Trafalgar rested. I missed horses. I needed them. I needed to be outside, feeling the wind against my skin and breathing the mountain air. I needed altitude and high country vegetation. I needed the animals—and not the kind obsessed with greed and vanity that surrounded me daily in my life on San Nouveau.
At least working for Mo-No there had been Trafalgar, or at least the hope of riding Trafalgar, now and again. Now, not only would I have to leave the horse I’d just fallen in love with, I would also have to give up hope of paying tuition to prolong the agony of getting my Ph.D.—because I could never afford to tether things along until the committee actually approved an idea I came up with.
I sighed, heavy with regret. Now I couldn’t even follow up on Polly’s dubious but approved idea since Henry was no longer going to be part of my life’s landscape.
And I didn’t want to dig up any other Australian, or wannabe Australian, to take his place. No one could take his place.
Henry was staring down at the screen of the phone.
“Go ahead. Call that doctor. There’s no sense waiting any longer. I’ve already delayed your meeting for a full week.”
“Well, yeah.” Henry’s mouth tugged to the side in a smirk that made me ache to kiss him again. “I would call him right away. In fact, I probably would have taken you up on your offer to let me try him using your phone; however, I don’t have his contact number.”
“Oh.” The fishiness started to reassert itself again. I tried to bat it away.
“Could we look it up once we get onto the mainland?” I said, and then hated myself for it. People who are lying or spinning a fantasy life don’t really want to get caught. They want to be left to dwell in their pretty, cotton-candy haze. I thought again of my great uncle with dementia.
“That’s the problem. His name’s David Smith. Does a name get any more generic than that?”
“No. You’re right. That’s the pinnacle of typical names, at least in America.”
“What’s worse, for the life of me I can’t ever seem to recall the city he’s in. California has too many ‘San’- and ‘Santa’-type names.”
“That’s for sure.” A common name like David Smith in a city that started with San? There could be ten thousand of those to filter through in California. Maybe more. No wonder he hadn’t pursued looking it up.
“But wait.” He stopped walking. I stopped too. “That’s genius of you, Elizer.” He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I can just get it from Jonno.” He started texting as we walked back toward the car I’d be turning in the keys of soon.
Who was this Jonno he kept mentioning? He’d spoken about his brother Frank once before, but not since. And it sounded to me from his stories like his parents and grandpa had passed away some time ago. Did Henry have some kind of friends or family who could have been helping him through his rough time? Maybe Jonno was his sponsor at one of those twelve-step organizations.
“Ah, got it.”
“Already?”
“Sure. Jonno is very efficient. I asked him to help me with a ride home, too. You won’t have to worry about that.”
“Uh—from L.A.?” Because San Nouveau wasn’t exactly a stop on Uber’s radar. “I can get you back to Los Angeles. And to the bus station, if that’s where you’d like to go.”
“I’ll arrange for the trunks of clothing to be either returned or else paid for. I can pay Burt directly, or the studio. Which do you think would be better?”
“Uh, returned?” Paid for? What? “We’ll just return them. I can manage that.” My brain was like one of those computers in 1960s movies, when it got overloaded with information it started smoking and saying, Does not compute.
“Got it.” Henry sent another text. “I’d like to head up to the cliff overlook one last time before I take off. I know we were just there, but I liked it a lot. Plus, it’s close to the helipad.”
Again with the helicopters.
“Of course, I’d better call Dr. Smith immediately, so it will be a few minutes. I feel bad for making the geneticist wait all these days without word from me.” Henry’s demeanor had changed the second he’d texted Jonno, or whoever. The transformation took him from beta male to alpha male, with a side of contagious enthusiasm. He was all action and drive. If I liked previous Henry, this one was positively irresistible.
Henry was going on about David Smith, the geneticist as he dialed.
“He’s worked so hard to help me identify whether our genetics research is going to be patentable in the American breeding market, I’d hate to leave him hanging.”
Genetics research? In the American breeding market? Boulders of confusion slammed into me. It felt like my brain was banging on a closed door behind which lurked all the answers to a puzzle I couldn’t solve over the past week.
“I hope he’ll understand.” As the phone on the other end began to ring, Henry cupped a hand over the receiver and said to me, “Jonno wasn’t half sorry to hear from me, either. He said once I get home they’ll kill the fatted calf, and all that. Probably literally.”
He then held the phone up to his ear. The ringing continued. We altered direction. We’d been walking toward the Bainbridge house, but if Henry wanted to see the breakers again, I didn’t imagine Mo-No would countenance our borrowing any of her cars. It was quite a way from here, but we could walk it and take the shorter path than we’d used to ride Trafalgar and Chantilly earlier and get there in twenty or thirty minutes. It would give me more time to try to figure out Henry and who he really was—and maybe sort out this thing that was going on between us.
The tingles from his true love comment came prickling back through me again momentarily.
“Hi, Dr. Smith. Yes, this is Henry Lyon. Right. Cherrington Downs Station. Or, yeah. I forget. We say station in Oz, and you’d say ranch, over here in the States. Yes, I’m sorry about the delay. I met with a little hiking accident in the Grand Canyon on my way to California to meet with you.”
Hiking accident!
I hung back as we walked and gave him the polite physical distance etiquette required while someone made a phone call. All the stuff he’d just said swirled in my mind—particularly the blitz that lit my mind with his words station—or, you’d say, ranch. He owned a ranch? Was that some kind of Australian lingo I’d never bothered to sleuth out?
I was the dumbest linguist on the face of the earth. Possibly if there was life on other planets, I’d beat their linguists out too.
It made sense, though. Marbling, as in the way beef has fat running through it to give it flavor. Patents and geneticists and DNA, as in cattle breeding. Even the mutants thing made sense, when I thought about it as a genetic mutation that would allow beef cattle to grow in a certain way based on a given type of grazing.
I blinked in an effort to comprehend it all. Henry had even referred literally killing a fatted calf. Well, as the daughter of a church-going cattle rancher who thought veal was morally off-limits, I sort of hoped no one would be killing a baby calf, fatted or not. However, the things he was saying about research and markets and…
If he had a big ranch in Australia, maybe he did have an assistant, like a ranch foreman, named Jonno. And maybe he did have a plane. And a helicopter. Of his own.
I staggered and had to grab onto a low-hanging tree branch for a second to keep myself steady.
Despite my step away, Henry’s voice still came to my ear loud and clear. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on his business, but he made it impossible for me not to.
“Right. Yeah, I know it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow, but if you could spare an hour today, I have a really decent proposal for you. Really? You’d do that? Well, that’s right kind of you, Dr. Smith. We’ll be talking Simmentals and Murray Gray—plus, what my dad and granddad have done to improve the genetic cross.”
He paused, and I found myself listening with brand new ears. Simmentals and Murray Gray were two breeds of cattle I’d heard my dad talk about at the Circle G. We mostly had Black Angus, because that was what sold best around here, but my dad liked to know about what the latest herd research said. He even consulted a freelance geneticist named Dr. Smith from time to time, a guy who came around and talked to the ranchers in the inland ranching areas of the state.
“Yes, it has, actually. Right. Exactly. It’s revolutionized the beef market in Australia, and I am dying for my granddad to get credit for it worldwide. The top six stations in Aus have completely switched over to the Lyon breed, but we are wanting to take it to the world. It’s exciting. Yeah, well, you’re right. It wouldn’t hurt if it takes a multi-million dollar operation into the billion-dollar zone.” He gave a jolly laugh, almost like the gut-busting guffaw of earlier. Meanwhile, I had to put a death grip on a nearby jutting boulder just to keep myself upright.
Henry was a millionaire? On the cusp of billionaire?
The treetops above me started spinning in wild, kaleidoscopic patterns.
“Right,” Henry said, signing off. “Two hours. See you then.”
Two hours! How could he get from San Nouveau to anywhere in two hours? That question crowned the one zillion questions now blossoming in my mind.
Before I could process any of them, though, Henry came walking back toward me.
“Great news. Dr. Smith is good to meet, and Jonno texted that my ride is on its way.” He was grinning. “You want to come along with me, seeing as how you’re all full-up on strikes and all out of jobs?”
This was a newly relaxed Henry, as if he was in his element and in possession of, well, the world. His kingdom. No more was he the Woo Mo-No with the lines guy, or the one who made everyone on San Nouveau fall for his act anymore; instead, here stood a more mature, real, settled, confident guy.
The skyrocketed confidence propelled him to fifty times the dangerous attractiveness he’d had before.
Man, I should have gotten him a phone days ago.
All my pistons were firing, and I found myself nearly saying yes to his invitation to…whatever it was.
“I’d better not. It’s Christmas in a couple of days.”
“Right. You going home?”
Home for Christmas. Yes. That was a good idea. Home to the parents, to the horses, to the outdoors and the ranch and the love.
“Now that I won’t be in charge of Sylvie’s holiday cheer, maybe I could spread some out at my parents’ ranch. I like baking, and they like eating.”
“Ranch. Your father’s in the cattle business! It just dawned on me,” he said as he dialed and put the phone to his ear, “he might be up on the genetics of cattle as well. Or have an interest in it.”
“Definitely. He always wants the top breed, whatever it is, even though he puts them on the range, rather than massaging them and feeding them mash and beer in Japanese stables.”
“You’re talking about Wagyu beef, sure.” He rolled his eyes about the meat that cost several hundred dollars a pound in some places. “But what we’ve developed at Cherrington Downs makes Wagyu taste like yesterday’s hamburger from Macca’s.”
“Macca’s?”
“McDonald’s, you Yanks say.”
Oh. If only I had just asked questions at any point during this week, even merely along the lines of what’s Macca’s, I would have been so much less dense about all this. It wasn’t like Henry had been hiding things from me. I’d been jumping to erroneous conclusions, obviously from day one. I’d seen the signs; why hadn’t I trusted any of them?
“Who’s your Dr. Smith? Is he really a geneticist? My dad’s ranch has a herd health consultant by that name, I think.”
“Oh, right. I’m sure he does some of that on the side. Consults with the ranchers, as you’d call them. Don’t tell me you know him.”
“Well, like you say, there are probably a thousand Dr. David Smiths around, but it does sound like the name of a guy my dad knows, one who comes to our ranch now and then.”
Henry tipped his hat back. “Well, how about that. I guess in this business the world shrinks. The experts will be known everywhere across the world.”
“So you’re in this business, Henry? Don’t tell me you really are the cattle baron we told everyone at the Frogs in the Sand premiere you were.” A lump the size of Australia was forming in my stomach. “So, we didn’t lie?”
We’d walked a long way and were standing at the rocky cliffs now, and he took me by the hand toward the breakers. They crashed below, and for a moment, I felt my pulse rise. But with Henry’s hand gripping mine with its firm strength, somehow, the roar of the waves didn’t bother me. In the dappled sun coming through the clouds, I could appreciate the foaming white of each successive crash against the gray-black rocks. Power, strength, majesty—those were all I felt.
And Henry’s solid presence. He had cured me.
“Back when we first met and you gave me dinner, I told you about the Lyon family’s station, Cherrington Downs. It’s not the largest cattle operation in Victoria north of Melbourne in the Alps there, but it has by far the best beef, and every larger station—including MaryAnn Downs, the largest cattle operation in the world by acreage—has bought into the Lyon breeding stock. My brother Frank and I are poised to bring it to America, which was one reason I left Jonno in charge and came over here.”
“When you said station, I thought you meant the bus station, as I’m sure you divined from my outburst with Mo-No a few minutes ago.” That tirade flowed back to me in all its murky horror. “I told myself you were delusional and that you thought you owned that bus station where we met you in downtown L.A. Why didn’t you stop me? Why didn’t you just slap me awake?”
“I’d never slap you awake. You look pretty when your eyes are closed. I’ve seen them flutter shut, like when you kissed me this morning.” He grinned, an infectious quirk of his lips that showed all those beautiful white teeth. “Besides, we do call them stations in Oz.”
Oz. No wizards required. If it wouldn’t make me look even stupider than this conversation was already making me look, I would have slammed my palm into my forehead.
“Of course you do. In Australia.” That was Australia, as he’d said before. And no, if he called it Straya, it still wasn’t anything to do with Strayer College, like I’d mistakenly believed when we were first putting together a back story for him.
Henry Lyon was everything he ever said he was. None of it was pretense—from the Aussie accent to the claim of being a big-time cattle baron who owned the station, possibly down to the story of riding a horse through the snow, à la Man From Snowy River.
Waves of confusion and shame and attraction and fear and excitement as well as an earth-shattering crush on Henry Lyon all converged on the cliffs of my soul and broke at once. Dizzy and trying not to pant, I had to stop walking and take a seat on a rock.
“Did you ever actually ride a horse down a nearly vertical incline through snow to rescue a stray calf?”
A low chuckle rose up in his chest, vibrating in my own heart. “You heard that?”
All I could do was nod and watch in melting dazzlement as his grin pulled back to reveal those excellent teeth again. The teeth that caught me in his net from day one.
“Elizer, I will admit—that little yarn I invented based on a movie I’d watched as a kid.”
I knew it! “I saw that movie, too.”
“You caught me red-handed. Or, would that be red-tongued?”
Suddenly I found myself staring at his mouth. Thrills sailed through all my extremities as I remembered how delicious it had been to kiss this man. My skin tingled and pulsed with longing to experience that again.
One last time, before he left me here. Without him.
However, the biggest question of all remained. It had to be asked, and much as I hated to find out the real reason, for fear it might not coincide with the secret wish of my heart—that he’d come along because of an interest in…me, I had no choice but to clear it up once and for all.
“Henry—why did you ever agree to help me with—?”
But before I could ask the rest of my question, a low pulsing cut through the wind, and I glanced up to see a helicopter approaching, quite close, and aiming for the landing pad.
“I think that’s the ride Jonno sent.”
His…ride…was a helicopter. I might have felt my jaw scrape the rocky ground beneath us.
The sound grew deafening, and we had to shout, and even then we couldn’t hear each other. I tried again to ask him—why, why did he go through with it? But with the extreme noise, he couldn’t hear me.
Instead, he took me by both shoulders and looked down into my face. In spite of my alternating emotions of shock and wonder and embarrassment, I let him lift my chin, then cuff my ear to press back the wildly blowing strands of my hair, and kiss me—kiss me until I floated up above the breakers and the cliff and the vast ocean and the foes and the whole of San Nouveau and the world.
I let him kiss me goodbye.