Patricia Potter (2 page)

As if on cue, the lone figure down on the beach lifted his hand, just as Michael had done so many times, and ran it through hair made gold by the sun. Meara’s heart fluttered like that of a wounded seabird as the figure turned in the opposite direction and walked away. She even imagined he had the slightest of limps.

He’s dead, she told herself. Just as Sanders is dead. Why today, of all days, can’t you put him to rest too?

She had met Sanders two days after she’d met Michael. Even in her innocence, she had seen the difference between the two. One reflected calm assurance, the other raw magnetism and vitality and danger.

She had been too sheltered, too naive, to choose the right one.

She had been so young….

Part One

Chapter One

Jekyll Island, Georgia
March 1942

O
N THE DECK
of the sleek cruiser, Meara watched the dark blue ribbon fly from her hair and skim across the water before disappearing under a wave. Her hair, a red-gold she would have changed in an instant if she’d had a choice, whipped around her face in the glorious ocean breeze.

She looked down at her two young charges who were competing to be the first to sight a dolphin, and her heart warmed with affection for them. Peter was eleven and Tara seven, and she had been looking after them during her summers since she was sixteen, five years ago.

This would be her last Easter here, on Jekyll Island, and she felt a bittersweet sadness, even while excitement swelled in her about her first real job this summer. Life magazine. She would be a staffer on the foremost magazine in America.

Of course, she would start as an assistant, a gofer, but she hoped to change that rapidly. Armed with her journalism degree from Columbia and with Irish determination, she
knew
she would crash down the barriers of a predominantly male field, especially now in 1942 when the war with Germany and Japan was draining manpower from nonessential jobs.

But she had these two weeks to be part child, part nanny, part tutor. Meara enjoyed all three roles because the Connor children were bright and unspoiled despite their wealth. And she owed the Connor family much; they had paid her way through college. And they had given her mother, who had come to America as an immigrant and who had been almost immediately widowed, a lifelong job and a home.

A mist started falling, and she lifted her face to feel its cool March touch. She loved the ocean. She loved the island where they were to stay. She loved the elegant club cruiser carrying them all there. She loved life. An explosion of spontaneous, happy laughter burst from her lips, and it made the children start laughing too. Just like sillies, she thought, as other passengers looked on tolerantly.

“Look,” Peter said, as a fish jumped high in the air.

“A dolphin?” Tara asked, her eyes full of wonder.

“I don’t think so, love,” Meara said. She hadn’t wanted to spoil their game by pointing out that dolphins seldom ventured to this side of the island, separated from Brunswick by a river. Leaning down to whisper something in Tara’s ear, she directed their attention to the marshes where tall grass blew in the wind.

When she straightened again, she caught the gaze of a tall man watching her intently, a smile on his lips. He was leaning negligently against the cabin of the cruiser, his body lean, even thin, and his face slightly pale as if he had been ill, but there was nothing at all weak about the blazing dark blue eyes that regarded her with such interest. Her eyes fell to his right hand which clapsed the top of a cane, and she felt an immediate sympathy. She guessed he must be a soldier, a wounded soldier, and her heart went immediately out to him. America had been in the war four months now, ever since Pearl Harbor, and she was hearing more and more about the death tolls and huge numbers of wounded in the Pacific.

His smile suddenly widened as he noted her interest, and it deepened dimples indented in his cheeks. He was sinfully attractive, his features rugged and arrogant, and his eyes magnetic. She knew she had never seen him on the island before. She most definitely would have remembered. It was rude of her to stare. She started to turn her head back to the chattering children as she saw his rueful grin, and realized, much to her chagrin, that he knew exactly what she was thinking.

Meara’s heart raced. In confusion, she stooped down to talk to Tara, and she saw her hands shake ever so slightly.

“When we get there,” Tara said, “will you help build us a sand castle?”

“The best one ever,” Meara promised, grateful for the distraction.

“And deep, deep moats?” Tara asked. She had just read a simplified and romanticized version of the King Arthur legend and had been full of questions about castles and knights and fair damsels.

“The deepest,” Meara pledged.

“Oh, castles,” Peter said scornfully. “We need to build bunkers against the Germans. My father says sometimes you can even see German submarines around here…He says that someone even saw Germans sunbathing on top of one.”

Some of the smile left Meara’s eyes. She had also heard the stories. The Connors, as well as other members of the exclusive Jekyll Island Club, had been warned about the proximity of German submarines along the eastern seaboard. Their obvious target, however, was shipping, both U.S. and British, and despite the warnings, the Connors, as well as the other financial and industrial leaders, had decided to return as usual this season to their private retreat on the Georgia coast, the Germans be damned.

This year, she had been told by the Connors, could well be the last season for the Jekyll Island Club in any event. Gas was in short supply. Transportation was more difficult. Labor was scarce. More and more of the members were thoroughly absorbed in the war effort and had neither the time nor inclination to spend leisurely days in the mild winter sun as they had during the past fifty years of the club’s existence.

This Easter would have been the last time for Meara anyway, but she hated to see the great club, once called the most exclusive club in the world, close, its huge private cottages abandoned, and the elegant, comfortable clubhouse/hotel boarded. The club had claimed as members the Pulitzers, the Goulds, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Marshall Fields, the Vanderbilts, and the Auchinclosses among others. There had always been a magic “other world” feeling about both the club and the island it totally occupied.

Meara had been sixteen the first time she had seen Jekyll Island, and she had promptly called it an “island of dreams.” Lush with moss-draped oak trees and rich in both wild and domestic flowers, it had always remained that for her, a place where dreams came true. Hers had. It was where the Connors had said they would finance her education, where she had spent so many happy hours during the day with Tara and Peter and pleasant sultry evenings with other employees, and even members, of America’s great families. She had never been jealous of the wealthy members but had, instead, always felt privileged to experience a life-style that was rapidly disappearing.

She was so swept up in her reminiscences, she didn’t hear the tap of the cane nearing her.

“Lovely, isn’t it,” a deep baritone voice said, and when she looked up, the tall, attractive stranger was looking straight at her, not at the island ahead, and she had the oddest impression that he meant her, and not the island at all.

For one of the few times in her life, Meara stared fascinated at a man. He was even more handsome up close. Or perhaps handsome wasn’t the word. His features were too strong for mere handsomeness, too stark. His eyes were very dark blue, like midnight velvet cloth. They were framed by devilish angled eyebrows that made him look perpetually amused. His cheekbones were high and even gaunt at the moment, softened only by pronounced dimples when he smiled, as he was doing now. His mouth was wide, sensual, and curved beguilingly in an inquisitive smile. Yet despite all the outward signs of warmth, Meara sensed a reserve about him, a quiet isolation that lay hidden behind a charming surface.

He became more amused as she continued her survey, and Meara, filled with a certain discomfort, retaliated with her very practiced challenging look, one she had perfected over four years of competing with young men in a male-dominated field.

Meara had once been shy, even gawky, but her years as an “almost” member of the Connor family and her schooling at Columbia where she served as an editor of the university newspaper had built her confidence. She also had limitless curiosity, an essential quality, one of her professors once said, of a good reporter. Inherent shyness was usually overcome by her fierce compulsion to know everything about everyone she met.

But under the interested gaze of the stranger’s intense blue eyes, she went spiraling back to those old days when she’d felt awkward and tongue-tied.

Peter saved the day. “Who are you?” he said with interest as he regarded the cane. “Were you wounded in the war?”

The man grinned down at him, a peculiarly boyish grin full of the confidence that Meara so wretchedly lacked at the moment.

“Yep,” he said.

“How?”

“Peter!” Meara protested.

“It’s all right, miss,” he said easily. “I don’t mind. Some shrapnel from an explosion.” There was a barely perceptible accent in the deep resonant voice, one she couldn’t quite place.

She tipped her head questioningly, and he smiled again with a charm which she suddenly felt was very, very practiced. But then warmth flashed in those incredible blue eyes of his, and she dismissed that instantaneous suspicion.

He bowed. “Lieutenant Commander David Michael Fielding at your service,” he said and winked at Tara. “My friends call me Michael.”

“Commander?” Meara queried. “The navy?”

“I’m Canadian,” he explained. “I joined the British Navy when England declared war on Germany.”

So that accounted for the slightly different accent.

It seemed suddenly very natural to talk with him. He was a wounded officer, obviously a gentleman and a very nice one, it seemed, by the way he talked to the children rather than above them.

Meara looked down at the leg he seemed to favor. “Is it coming along well?”

“Well enough. But I’m from a very cold part of Canada, and the doctors thought a bit of sunshine and exercise would help. One of them contacted a member of the Jekyll Island Club and wrangled an invitation.”

“You’ll be staying at the clubhouse?”

He nodded. “And you?”

Peter interrupted happily. “Mother and father have rented the DuBignon cottage.”

“The DuBignon cottage?”

“There’re several private cottages,” Meara answered. “At least the members call them cottages. They’re really more like mansions. One of them, the DuBignon cottage, can be rented by members of the club. It provides a little more privacy than the clubhouse.”

Michael Fielding gifted her with a blinding smile. “You must be their sister.”

Meara couldn’t help but smile back. She didn’t know when she had ever met such a compelling man, and now his easy manner was beginning to make her feel more comfortable. For some incredible reason, she wanted to reach out and touch him, almost as if to determine whether he was real. But instead, she straightened. “No,” she explained, “I’m their…”

She tried to identify exactly what she was. Peter hated the word nanny, thinking it made him sound much younger than he felt he was. And she was not exactly a governess.

“She’s our friend,” Peter explained.

“Then I think you are very fortunate,” the man replied conspiratorially to Peter, and Meara’s heart flip-flopped in an uncommon way. She briefly, and secretly, examined that particular feeling, thinking flip-flop was not a very scientific, or literate, way of expressing exactly what was going on inside her, but then she’d never had much experience with this kind of internal confusion.

“Don’t you think you should sit down?” she said, referring to his leg and seeking to distract attention from herself. She knew she was blushing, and she hoped that the windburn on her face disguised her reaction to him. But she knew it did not when she saw the amusement return to his eyes, to the almost gentle curve of his mouth.

“No.” The answer was simple but it said a great deal more. He was making it very obvious that he wished to stay right where he was.

Once again, Peter raced undiplomatically to the rescue. “Have you killed many Germans?”

“What a bloodthirsty question,” Michael Fielding observed with another grin, but there was a certain grimness behind it this time.

“But did you?” Peter persisted.

“When you’re on a ship,” Michael said, “you never quite know. They lob shells at you, and you at them, but you never actually see the enemy unless their ship blows up and you rescue some of them.”

“I wouldn’t rescue anyone shooting at me, especially not Germans,” Peter grumbled.

“What if your ship sank and they refused to rescue you?”

Peter thought about it. “But if they did, I would be their prisoner.”

“But you’d still be alive.”

Peter shook his head. “My father says Germans don’t take prisoners, that they kill survivors.”