Stranger in Paradise (Home Front - Book #2) Read online

  “I’m thirty-five.”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Same as the queen,” he said with that American grin.

  “And there all likeness ends.” She felt off center, suddenly ill at ease and eager to call a halt to this craziness. “I must be off,” she said with a businesslike nod of her head. “I’ve enjoyed the conversation.” Put one foot before the other, Jane. He isn’t for you.

  “The conversation doesn’t have to end, Janie.”

  The way he said “Janie,” as if he liked the feel of her name against his tongue—nobody had ever said her name like that before. Maybe no one ever will again.... “My story,” she said, knowing he would recognize the excuse for what it was. “I have a score of details to investigate before the recessional back to the palace.”

  “So have I.”

  Her heart sank. Tell me I can’t go. Tell me you won’t let me leave.... “I won’t keep you.”

  “I know of a pub not too far from here where we can have a draft and compare notes.”

  “Mac, I—”

  “Say yes, Janie.” He reached for her hand. “Something’s happening. Don’t let it end before we find out what it is. Let’s give it a chance.”

  She wanted to tell him he was crazy, that only mad dogs and fools believed in love at first sight—but then he hadn’t mentioned love at first sight, had he? It was her own thought, her own realization, that had brought about the trembling deep inside her heart. Things like this don’t happen, her usual logical self proclaimed.

  Unfortunately the logical Jane Townsend was no longer listening. “Yes,” she said, putting her hands in his. “Let’s.”

  Chapter Two

  Nancy Wilson Sturdevant spread the morning newspaper of June 2, 1953, out on her shiny Formica kitchen table and reached for her second cup of coffee. Underscored with Mac Weaver’s byline, the bold headline stared up at her from the front page.

  Coronation Ceremony Undampened by Persistent Rain, it read. Largest Crowd Since V-E Day Expected. Leave it to Mac to mention the war. Didn’t men understand that women didn’t care about the size of the crowd? Queen Elizabeth’s smile, her children, the number of diamonds in her coronet—those were the kinds of details most women wanted to know about.

  Of course, there were other things in the paper on that morning in late spring. Not that Nancy cared, mind you, but some people might say the coronation was of less importance than the battle raging on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea. After the excitement of V-E and V-J days, most Americans had assumed their fighting days were over. The United States was the most powerful nation in the world—in fact, with the addition of the A-bomb to her arsenal, it was said she was the most powerful nation in history. Certainly no one had expected to be pulled into a dirty skirmish half a world away less than five years after we’d said goodbye to casualty lists and hello to the GI baby boom.

  The world was a crazy place these days. General Eisenhower was now president of the United States. Truman, the plain-speaking haberdasher from Missouri, had proved too tough for the gentler times and in a paradoxical change of pace, Americans had elected an army hero to lead them. None of it made any sense to Nancy, but then what difference did it make? Now that Russia had the Bomb, it could all be over in the blink of an eye. Basements across the country were being turned into air-raid shelters and school kids learned how to cower beneath their desks in case of an attack. Not that their wooden desks could save them, but it made everyone feel good to know they’d at least tried.

  Allies had become enemies—witness the Russians and the Chinese. Enemies had become friends—witness the rebuilding of Japan and Germany. The only thing you could be certain of was the fact that America was the biggest, brashest, most blessed country ever created, and Nancy Wilson Sturdevant was lucky to be part of it.

  Even if, at the moment, she devoutly wished she were in London to see the queen.

  Sending Mac Weaver to cover the coronation was like sending Mamie Eisenhower to cover the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. Oh, what a job Nancy could have done if she’d been lucky enough to spend this past week in Mac’s oversize shoes. She would have made it her business to get right up close to the young queen and her handsome prince, and before you could say cheese, Nancy would have been able to tell you the sizes of their wedding rings. Grainy black-and-white pictures of the ornate golden coach accompanied the lengthy article, and Nancy wished she had her magnifying glass so she could ferret out every last detail. Princess Elizabeth—no, Queen Elizabeth—had a sweetly pretty face, and, it was rumored, the bluest eyes in the British Isles. Imagine being queen of England at only twenty-seven years of age. Nancy was twenty-seven, too, and the only thing she was queen of was kitchen detail.

  “Twenty-seven years old,” Nancy said aloud to the empty kitchen. “Both of us.” She glanced at the knotty pine cabinets and the freshly waxed white linoleum floor. Gerry was so proud of that floor. “You can see yourself in it,” he pointed out to visitors. “Nance is the best little housekeeper in Levittown!”

  Queen Elizabeth II smiled up at her from her official portrait on page two of the newspaper.

  “How are your floors?” Nancy asked the monarch. “I’ll bet you don’t have dishpan hands, do you, Liz?”

  Not that Nancy was complaining, mind you. How could she possibly complain when she had everything an American woman could possibly want? “It’s a different world,” her mother, Dot, had said the first time she saw the tract house on Robin Hood Lane. “Built-in television, dishwashing machine, laundry room! It’s a dream house, honey!”

  And it truly was. In her most elaborate teenage fantasies during the war, she’d never imagined living with Gerry in their very own house on Long Island with a new Ford station wagon in the driveway and every modern appliance you could wish for lined up all shiny and nice on her countertops. A Bendix washing machine. A Dormeyer electric frying pan for making the best Southern fried chicken in town. A hi-fi stacked with “That’s Amore” and “I Love Paris” and the very romantic “Stranger in Paradise.” They even had an air conditioner poking out neatly from their bedroom window.

  “This is what it’s all about,” Gerry liked to say when the kids were asleep and they were sitting side by side on the couch in the den with Uncle Miltie on the TV for company. “This is why I go to work every day. I want my girls to have everything.”

  They had been blessed with so much. Three beautiful daughters. Lovely furniture. Gerry had a good job with her family’s firm, a solid dependable job where you didn’t have to worry there was a communist working at the desk next to you. They would never want for anything.

  The house was everything Nancy could have imagined, and if having that house meant some of her old dreams had to fall by the wayside, well, that’s the way it was meant to be, wasn’t it? Dreams about going to Hawaii or watching the changing of the guard in front of Buckingham Palace were just that: dreams. When they were first married, she and Gerry pored over travel brochures, plotting and planning the trips they would take as soon as he graduated from college. But marriage inevitably meant children, and children meant responsibilities.

  The truth was, you grew up. You got married. You helped your husband through school—thanking God and Uncle Sam for the GI Bill—and then he bought you a house where you spent your days polishing and waxing and cooking.

  Unless, of course, you were Debbie Reynolds or Elizabeth Taylor or one of the other movie stars Nancy read about each month in Photoplay and Modern Screen. Nancy doubted if they gave their linoleum a second thought. Their lives, no doubt, were the stuff of dreams. Candlelight. Flowers. Perfect smiling children who never cried or got sick or needed new shoes every time you turned around. Husbands who never fell asleep in front of the television set with their mouths open, then blamed their snoring on the dog.

  And she’d bet dollars to doughnuts Queen Elizabeth had never once found herself on the wrong side of a loaded diaper bag.

  Now that’
s the real story, Mac, she thought, spooning sugar into her cup of coffee. Not how big the crowd is.

  “Hey, Nance!” Gerry’s voice pierced the early-morning stillness. “Where are my brown socks?”

  “In the top drawer of your bureau.” Darn, now the kids were bound to wake up before she had a chance to finish the paper. The only chance she had to be alone with her thoughts was in the hours before breakfast.

  “No, they’re not!” Gerry yelled back.

  “Look under your T-shirts.”

  “I looked under my T-shirts. They’re not there.”

  Grumbling, Nancy tossed the newspaper to the floor and stormed up the staircase to the converted attic room they’d turned into the master bedroom.

  “Good thing those socks aren’t alive, Gerry Sturdevant,” she said as she pulled them from the top drawer of the bureau, “They’d bite your nose off.”

  Gerry didn’t even look embarrassed. He grabbed the rolled-up socks and sat down on the edge of the bed, naked except for his boxer shorts, and pulled them on. “What would I do without you, Nance?”

  She leaned against the doorjamb and stifled a yawn. “Run around without your socks, I suppose.”

  He tugged at the cuff of his left sock. “Up early, aren’t you?”

  I’m always up early, Gerry. Amazing how little men noticed about the running of a house. If she lay in bed every morning until the alarm went off, they’d never make it to the railroad station in time for Gerry to catch the 8:05 to Manhattan. “It’s the coronation day,” she said, watching as he pulled on his other sock. “I don’t want to miss a second of it.”

  Gerry glanced at the bedside clock on his nightstand. “Must be in progress, with the time difference and everything.”

  “I’ve been listening to reports on the kitchen radio. Edward R. Murrow said RAF planes are waiting to bring films back to New York this afternoon. The whole thing will be on television tonight.”

  Gerry stood up and reached for his good black suit pants. “Hard to believe how fast things go these days. Remember when we had to wait for the Movietone news clips? Now we get to see all the latest right in our own den.”

  Leave it to a man to sing the praises of technology at six-thirty in the morning. “Scrambled eggs and bacon?”

  “Fried. Two slices of toast. No coffee.”

  She disappeared back down the stairs to set the table before waking the girls. The newspaper had fallen to the floor near the refrigerator. She bent and retrieved it, folded it neatly, then tucked it safely into the bread box to read later. She switched on the Philco radio that rested on the windowsill and tuned it to news about the coronation, then opened the refrigerator door.

  Only two eggs. What good was a new pale pink Frigidaire if you didn’t remember to keep it well stocked with the basics? Just last month Good Housekeeping magazine had run an article called “Ten Ways to Keep Your Husband Happy,” and number one had been running a perfect household. “Men hate disorganized wives.... Keep his shirts ironed, his socks darned.... Stock the refrigerator with all of his favorite foods....”

  “... the splendor and pageantry is awe inspiring,” said an announcer with the unctuous tones of a used-car salesman. “Where else but England, home of the legendary Knights of the Round Table, could you find such grand spectacle and romance?”

  Nancy caught a glimpse of herself in the shiny side of her brand-new pop-up toaster. Her hair was mussed, falling in loose curls over her forehead. Without her foundation, her freckles stood out like stoplights and she had smoky circles under her eyes.

  “... the young Queen Elizabeth is a vision of feminine loveliness...” the announcer gushed. “A monarch who is both wife and mother, as well as a shining example of how the modern woman lives her life....”

  Maybe in London that was how the modern woman lived her life.

  Nancy cracked two eggs into a dish, used her thumbnail to fish out a piece of shell from one of the broken yolks, then remembered Gerry wanted his eggs fried. “Sorry, Gerry,” she said as she lit the fire under the skillet. “Fried eggs tomorrow.”

  In Levittown in 1953, life ultimately came down to fried eggs or scrambled.

  * * *

  Jane was small, curvy, intensely female.

  Mac was big, broad shouldered, extremely male.

  He wanted to throw her over his shoulder and carry her off to his cave—hotel room—and make wild and passionate love to her until she cried out. And then he wanted to do the same thing over and over again until there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that she was the woman he’d waited his whole life to find.

  Unfortunately this was 1953 A.D. not B.C., and caveman tactics were frowned upon in polite society.

  And society, didn’t get much more polite than it did in London.

  He’d known something great was going to happen. He’d felt it all morning long as he waited in the crowd for a glimpse of history being made, a feeling way down in his gut that was too deep for words. Of course there was the small problem of the ticket home on the Queen Mary, which was currently burning a hole in the pocket of his trench coat, but they’d work something out.

  This was what he’d been waiting for, wasn’t it? Why he’d awakened these past few mornings with his adrenaline flowing, filled with the dead-certain notion that his life was about to change forever. Yeah, Mac Weaver was going home, all right, but he wasn’t going home alone.

  * * *

  Was she walking or flying?

  Jane wasn’t entirely sure, because it seemed as if her feet weren’t making contact with the pavement in quite the usual fashion. Mac Weaver—her brash American—had her hand clasped firmly in his as he propelled her up Whitehall and down Pall Mall in search of his mysterious pub.

  Not that she cared if they ever found the pub, mind you. At that particular moment, with her hand in his, she would have been content to spend the rest of her life simply following wherever he led.

  What on earth was happening?

  One moment she’d been Jane Townsend, practical, young Englishwoman, and the next she was Janie, the bewildered object of Mac Weaver’s attentions. Wouldn’t Leo Donnelly laugh if he could see her now, all tongue-tied and giddy as a schoolgirl? She had the reputation of being as peppery as a parsnip, not the sort a man fancied himself going all romantic over. Oh, she knew she was pretty enough. That wasn’t the problem. It was her attitude, her sharp tongue, the quick mind that put off as many men as it attracted. Maybe Mac hadn’t noticed. Maybe American men weren’t as cowed by strong women.

  Maybe it had to do with their cowboy heritage, all that roping and calfing and...

  He put his arm around her shoulder and led her into a dimly lit pub with lots of burnished wood and smoky romantic atmosphere. She had been in such a fog she hadn’t noticed what street they were on. No hail-fellow-well-met chums here, lifting mugs of ale between rounds of skittles or darts. This was the kind of pub a man brought a woman to when he wanted to romance her, charm her, woo her.

  Mac led her to a cozy round table near the back. His hand lingered along her spine as she took her seat.

  “Ale?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Too early. Tonic water.”

  He disappeared for a moment then brought their drinks back to the table.

  She thanked him. “You should have let the serving girl do that for you.”

  “No.” He ignored the seat opposite her and claimed the one next to her instead. “We don’t need company.” Again that gorgeous grin. “Not yet.”

  She took a sip of tonic water. “You’re quite a determined man, aren’t you, Mac?”

  He lifted the mug of ale. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  His words resonated inside her chest. “You’re trying to seduce me.”

  Those green eyes of his met hers. “No.”

  “No?” Get a grip on yourself old girl! You sound disappointed.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Janie. Sooner or later, I intend to seduce you, but first things
first.”

  Her chest was so tight she couldn’t take in a full breath. “Meaning what?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “A courtship.”

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Hearts and flowers?”

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  She considered him closely. The long and narrow green eyes with the thick fringe of wheat-colored lashes. The strong mouth with the touch of sensuality. Prominent cheekbones and chiseled jaw. The slight bump on the bridge of his nose that saved him from being more perfect than he already was.

  “I wouldn’t have imagined you an old-fashioned man.” She took another trembling sip from her glass of tonic water. “I’d believed Americans to be more rough-and-ready.”

  A flash of white teeth in his tanned face. “All in good time, Janie.”

  She looked down at the scarred tabletop. When she was a little girl her father had taken her horseback riding. The groom had overestimated her abilities and seated her atop an animal far beyond her strength, and minutes later the horse had bolted, taking Jane on the ride of her life.

  That was exactly the way she felt right now, sitting there in the rear of a quiet pub, as if she were on the ride of her life with the wind in her face and the laughter bubbling up from a wellspring of delicious fear. That incredible sensation of being at the mercy of something, some force that was bigger and stronger and far more determined than she could ever be.

  She struggled with a wild and violent desire to give herself, body and soul, to this stranger. Right here. Right now. Insane! She knew his name and occupation. Nothing more. Yet the memory of his hands on the curve of her waist seemed more important than anything he could possibly tell her. She made her living with words, and yet right now words were secondary to the sensation of destiny blossoming all around them.

  “I must be mad,” she said, forcing herself to meet his eyes.

  “You feel it, too?”

  She nodded. “I feel it, too.”

  “Scared?”

  “A bit.’’