Torchlight (27 page)

With that, he bent down on one knee and brought out his own ring for her, a simple antique band of gold.

Miles, furious, made a move toward Trevor, but Jake held him back with a firm grip on his forearm and shoulder. “My sister needs to make a decision,” he said. “And you need to let her do it without interfering.”

Julia looked from Trevor to Miles to Trevor again, blind to her family and friends. Everyone held his or her breath as she contemplated her decision.

“I’m sorry, Miles,” she said as she looked up at him, genuinely apologetic as she slipped off his ring and pressed it into his palm. “I never should’ve let it get this far.”

“I’ll say.” He threw the ring to the ground as if it were plaster and stomped off. He paused for a moment, turned, and shook his finger at her. “You haven’t heard the last from me,” he said.

She ignored him. Her eyes were on Trevor, who remained on bended knee in front of her. The crowd was silent as they waited for the rest of the scene to unfold, but Julia concentrated only on the handsome man in his brown leather bomber jacket and white T-shirt. Here was a man who truly loved her. Here was a man who had the potential of being what Shane was to Anna. Here was the love of her life.

Julia reached out and took the worn band from his hand.

“It’s about the same age as Anna’s would have been,” he said.

“An appropriate engagement ring,” she said. She leaned down to stroke his strong, square jaw line gently. “I’m so glad you came back for me,” she said.

He rose and, lifting her veil, kissed her soundly. “So am I. So am I.”

C
ome on, Bryn. Come out in the canoe with me. You haven’t been out of this cabin for two days. And it’s summer. You can study later.”

“No thanks, Dad,” she said, turning her back to him and trying to concentrate on her anatomy textbook. The longer she could bury herself in her studies, the faster this trip would be over.

She heard her father, Peter Bailey, walk to the front window. “Come on, honey,” he said, a slight begging tone to his voice. “The rain’s let up. We haven’t even been over to the Pierces’ to say hello.”

Thoughts of Eli Pierce flashed through her mind. People thought that Californians were snobbish. Eli wouldn’t give her the time if he had the last watch on earth. They’d played together when she was at Summit Lake with her dad the year she was ten, but when she’d arrived over her fifteenth summer, the guy had avoided her like a bad case of barnacles on a barge. Sure he was handsome, but Bryn had better things to do than get snubbed by a small-town jerk. “I’m just fine where I am,” Bryn said.

“Suit yourself,” he said. She could hear the shrug of defeat in his voice.

She wondered what her dad saw in this place. It took hours to fly to Anchorage from Southern California, and a couple more to drive to Talkeetna. Then they had to take still another hour to get
the floatplane loaded with their gear and fly in to Summit Lake. Bryn heard the door shut behind her father.

All day to get here.
She turned over and looked at the two-room log cabin, built by her father twenty years before. Her eyes floated over the hand-hewn logs and white, crumbling chinking. She lay in the bedroom in back, which held a bunk bed on either side. The front room was reserved for a tiny kitchenette and sitting area. It was dark, with no electricity, and it smelled musty, like an old basement blanket at her Grampa Bruce’s in Boston. Bryn had to read by the light of a kerosene lamp when it rained during the day. No wonder her dad hadn’t been able to get Bryn’s mother, Nell, to come all these years.

She closed her eyes as the hollow, scraping sound of her father dragging the canoe off the rocks and into the water reached her ears. She wished she were home working a summer internship at the hospital, heading to the beach, catching a movie with friends—anywhere but here. In two years she would be twenty-two, a graduate from college with a degree in premed. And she would finally tell her father that their days at Summit Lake together were to be no more. She would, after all, be an adult, no longer compelled to please her dad, despite her own desires. He’d have to accept that.

A pang of loss pierced her heart and she frowned, then sighed. Probably guilt pangs. The guy just wanted some quality time with his daughter. She could at least make the most of this trip with him. Appease him, share with him, make the proverbial memory together. Dutiful daughters did such things all the time.

Bryn tossed aside her textbook and shoved her feet into shoes, hurrying to catch him before he was too far out. Bumping her head
on the top bunk, she grimaced. “Dad, wait!” she called, hoping he would hear her from outside. She rubbed the top of her head and rushed out to the front room, then out to the lakeside where her father was already nearly fifty feet out. “Dad, wait! I changed my mind!”

Her father turned and flashed her a white-toothed grin. He was dark and handsome—Bryn’s roommate, Ashley, referred to him as “the sexiest man alive,” which always made Bryn’s skin crawl. No matter how others saw him, he was still just Dad to Bryn.

“Oh good, Bryn Bear,” he responded, using her childhood nickname. “I was already missing you.” The warmth and welcome in his eyes made her glad for her decision. It seemed his eyes were too often full of sorrow and longing these days, although she couldn’t think of a reason for such emotions.

Bryn turned and ducked her head in the cabin door, grabbing her parka from the hook inside. Summers in Alaska were notorious for turning suddenly cold, so she always kept the warm coat at hand. She walked back to the shoreline, pulling her long hair out and into a quick knot. Her hair was the same color as her father’s—Indian black, Peter called it—and they shared the same dark olive skin. Her nose was his too, straight and too long. But her eyes were her mother’s—wide and a bit tipped up in the corners. Smoky brown, a boyfriend once told her. “Just like the rest of you,” he had whispered. “Smoky.”

He was long gone. She had seen to that. Keeping a straight-A average at the University of California at Irvine was no small deal, and he had been in the way, always wanting to party and go out rather than study. But she wanted to graduate and go on to Harvard, at the top of her class all the way. It took discipline and
concentration to accomplish that. And vision. No man was going to get in the way.

The canoe crunched to shore again. “Push us off, Bryn Bear.”

“Okay,” she said, wrinkling her nose a bit when her boots got wet and the cold lake water seeped through her socks and to her toes. While they glided backward, Bryn balanced on the bow, then carefully climbed in.

“There’s a jacket and paddle beneath the seat,” Peter said from behind her.

“Thought I was goin’ on a ride,” she tossed back.

“If you ride, you paddle,” her dad responded. “Can’t make an Alaskan out of you if you sit up there like a Newport Beach priss.”

She pulled out the life jacket, pausing to flick off a rather large spider, then put it on and reached for the paddle. Just then a bald eagle swooped low, his long wings spread wide, almost touching the surface as his thick talons clutched a trout from the waters across the lake. “Wow!” Bryn said.

“Isn’t it something here?” Peter replied. “I never get tired of seeing things like that. If only your mother would share it with me …” His voice trailed away, as if the admission were too painful to tell his daughter.

“You always wanted to live here, didn’t you, Dad?”

“Summers anyway. Your mother wouldn’t hear of it. Wouldn’t even come and see it.” There was a shiver of anger in his tone, frustration, as well as pain.

“It is a bit … isolated,” Bryn said, wondering why she felt compelled to defend her mother. She considered her father’s words as she dug her paddle into the water. She had to admit that it felt good to be out on the lake, out from the dank little cabin.

“The solitude is part of what I love,” Peter said, finally breaking the silence. “The first day Jed brought me here, I knew it would be a part of my life forever.”

Bryn looked about them at the small, shallow lake, edged here and there by thick, swampy areas full of reeds, with thick-treed snow-covered mountains that shot up on all three sides. A river fed into Summit from the mountain streams to the south. “This place is
wild,”
she said, shivering. “Mom would not like it.”

He was quiet for a moment, paddling. “I know. There’s something about being here—it’s so … primary, basic. Not your mother’s style at all. Reminds a person of who he is and who he wants to be.” He dug in his paddle again, and Bryn remained silent, waiting for him to go on. “Jedidiah said to me once, ‘The bush teaches a man about what he wants and what he needs, and the difference between them.’ Every time I come here, I remember. And I leave rededicated to discovering it in Newport, too.”

Bryn’s mind flew from this thin-aired, low-maintenance hideaway to their rather ostentatious home in Newport. Her mother had made a career out of volunteering with the Junior League and decorating their home with only the finest furnishings and accessories. “How did you and Mom ever get together?” She looked over her shoulder to see his rueful smile.

“We were more alike once. In college, I thought …” His words drained away like the water off of his paddle. “At some point, your mother changed. I changed.” He halted, as if trying not to say too much.

“She’s been pretty mean lately,” Bryn said, digging her paddle into the water again. “Are you two okay? I mean, your marriage and everything?”

He was silent for a long moment. “Sure, Bryn. We’re fine.”

Bryn licked her lips and kept paddling, searching the approaching shore for the Pierces’ cabin. The sounds of sharp axes cutting through soft wood carried across the lake, as they had since morning, and she caught sight of Eli and his father as they stood around an old, dying tree. Built the same year as the Baileys’, the Pierces’ cabin had been completed first, then Jedidiah and Peter had moved on to finish the Bailey abode. All in one summer. “We were young then,” her father would say wistfully. But there was something in his eyes, in the way he held his shoulders slightly back, as if still proud of the accomplishment, that made her ask him to tell the story again and again.

Peter Bailey had met up with Jedidiah Pierce, born and raised in Alaska, in the summer of ’62, backpacking through Europe. In Germany, the pair had stayed at a youth hostel overnight and went out the next day to try the locals’ fabled Gewürztraminer. Frequently wineries set up tents along the road, and the duo stopped at the first one they saw. It was only much later that they learned they had crashed a wedding party, and the father of the bride had them tossed out.

From then on, the men were like blood brothers, and Jed, having spotted the pristine site on a hike years before, brought his new friend to Summit Lake the following summer. Both purchased several acres from Ben White, who owned much of the land surrounding the water. Ben was an older man who had been living alone on Summit since 1953, when he was discharged from the army. His home was at the northern tip of the lake. No one else owned land on the lake or lived in the small mountain valley.