Second Chance with the Rebel

“It probably is nothing,” he said, but his voice was uneasy.

“I told myself that, too. I don’t want to believe she’s eighty, either.”

“There’s something you aren’t telling me.”

Scary, that after all these years, and over the phone, he could do that. Read her. So, why hadn’t he seen through her the only time it really mattered?

I could never fall for a boy like you.

Lucy hesitated, looked out the open doors to gather her composure. “I saw a funeral-planning kit on her kitchen table. When she noticed it was out, she shoved it in a drawer. I think she was hoping I hadn’t seen it.”

What she didn’t tell him was that before Mama had shoved the kit away she had been looking out her window, her expression uncharacteristically pensive.

“Will my boy ever come home?” she had whispered.

All those children, and only one was truly her boy.

Lucy listened as Mac drew in a startled breath, and then he swore. Was it a terrible thing to love it when someone swore? But it made him the old Mac. And it meant she had penetrated his guard.

“That’s part of what motivated me to plan the celebration to honor her. I want her to know—” She choked. “I want her to know how much she has meant to people before it’s too late. I don’t want to wait for a funeral to bring to light all the good things she’s done and been.”

The silence was long. And then he sighed.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“No! Wait—

But Mac was gone, leaving the deep buzz of the dial tone in Lucy’s ear.

CHAPTER TWO

“WELL, THAT WENT well,” Lucy muttered as she set down the phone.

Still, there was no denying a certain relief. She had been carrying the burden of worrying about Mama Freda’s health alone, and now she shared it.

But with Mac? He’d always represented the loss of control, a visit to the wild side, and now it seemed nothing had changed.

If he had just come to the gala, Lucy could have maintained her sense of control. She had been watching Mama Freda like a hawk since the day she’d heard, Will my boy ever come home?

Aside from a nap in the afternoon, Mama seemed as energetic and alert as always. If Mama had received bad news on the health front, Lucy’s observations of her had convinced her that the prognosis was an illness of the slow-moving variety.

Not the variety that required Mac to drop everything and come now!

The Mother’s Day celebration was still two weeks away. Two weeks would have given Lucy time.

“Time to what?” she asked herself sternly.

Brace herself. Prepare. Be ready for him. But she al ready knew the uncomfortable truth about Macintyre

Hudson. There was no preparing for him. There was no getting ready. He was a force unto himself, and that force was like a tornado hitting.

Lucy looked around her world. A year back home, and she had a sense of things finally falling into place. She was taking the initial steps toward her dream.

On the dining-room table that she had not eaten at since her return, there were donated items that she was collecting for the silent auction at the Mother’s Day Gala.

There were the mountains of paperwork it had taken to register as a charity. Also, there was a photocopy of the application she had just submitted for rezoning, so that she could have Caleb’s House here, and share this beautiful, ridiculously large house on the lake with young women who needed its sanctuary.

One of her three cats snoozed in a beam of sunlight that painted the wooden floor in front of the old river-rock fireplace golden. A vase of tulips brought in from the yard, their heavy heads drooping gracefully on their slender stems, brightened the barn-plank coffee table. A book was open on its spine on the arm of her favorite chair.

There was not a hint of catastrophe in this wellordered scene, but it hadn’t just happened. You had to work on this kind of a life.

In fact, it seemed the scene reflected that she had finally gotten through picking up the pieces from the last time.

And somehow, last time did not mean her ended engagement to James Kennedy.

No, when she thought of her world being blown apart, oddly it was not the front-page picture of her fiancé, James, running down the street in Glen Oak without a stitch on that was forefront in her mind. No, forefront was a boy leaving, seven years ago.

The next morning, out on her deck, nestled into a cushioned lounge chair, Lucy looked out over the lake and took a sip of her coffee. Despite the fact the sun was still burning off the early-morning chill, she was cozy in her pajamas under a wool plaid blanket.

The scent of her coffee mingled with the lovely, sugary smell of birch wood burning. The smoke curled out of Mama Freda’s chimney and hung in a wispy swirl in the air above the water in front of Mama’s cabin.

Birdsong mixed with the far-off drone of a plane.

What exactly did I’ll be there as soon as I can mean?

“Relax,” she ordered herself.

In a world like his, he wouldn’t be able just to drop everything and come. It would be days before she had to face Macintyre Hudson. Maybe even a week. His website said his company had done 34 million dollars in business last year.

You didn’t just walk away from that and hope it would run itself.

So she could focus on her life. She turned her attention from the lake, and looked at the swatch of sample paint she had put up on the side of the house.

She loved the pale lavender for the main color. She thought the subtle shade was playful and inviting, a color that she hoped would welcome and soothe the young girls and women who would someday come here when she had succeeded in transforming all this into Caleb’s House.

Today she was going to commit to the color and order the paint. Well, maybe later today. she was aware of a little tingle of fear when she thought of actually buying the paint. It was a big house. It was natural to want not to make a mistake.

My mother would hate the color.

So maybe instead of buying paint today, she would fill a few book orders, and work on funding proposals for Caleb’s House in anticipation of the rezoning. Several items had arrived for the silent auction that she could unpack. She would not give the arrival of Mac one more thought. Not one.

The drone of the plane pushed back into her awareness, too loud to ignore. She looked up and could see it, red and white, almost directly overhead, so close she could read the call numbers under the wings. It was obviously coming in for a landing on the lake.

Lucy watched it set down smoothly, turning the water, where it shot out from the pontoons, to silvery sprays of mercury. The sound of the engine cut from a roar to a purr as the plane glided over the glassy mirror-calm surface of the water.

Sunshine Lake, located in the rugged interior of British Columbia, had always been a haunt of the rich, and sometimes the famous. Lucy’s father had taken delight in the fact that once, when he was a teenager, the queen had stayed here on one of her visits to Canada. For a while the premier of the province had had a summer house down the lake. Pierre LaPontz, the famous goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, had summered here with friends. Seeing the plane was not unusual.

It became unusual when it wheeled around and taxied back, directly toward her.