Joan Pickart - Plain Jane Macallister

He went to the box in the corner, snatched up the magazine lying on the top of the pile and looked at the cover.

“Across the USA,” he read, then sat down again and flipped it open.

Taking the last bite of eggs, Mark turned a page in the magazine and stiffened, every muscle in his body tensing as he stared at the story headline.

“Ventura, California, Cousins Marry Royal Cousins in Romantic Fairy-Tale Fashion,” he read aloud.

His heart thundered as he looked at a color picture of a multitude of people whom the caption identified as being the two families…the royal one from the Island of Wilshire and the one from Ventura.

And there she was.

She was standing in the row behind the two recently married couples.

It was her.

Mark got to his feet so quickly, the chair fell to the floor with a crash he didn’t even hear, his gaze riveted on the photograph.

This was creepy, really weird, he thought frantically. He was fighting an emotional battle over her and now her picture was staring him in the face?

Get a grip, he told himself, setting the fallen chair back into place and sinking onto it. Maybe this wasn’t weird. Maybe this was a…yeah…a sign, a directive, telling him that the only way to be truly free of her was to see her one last time, making it possible finally to close the door on what had happened so very long ago. Then he’d be able to move forward, find his soul mate, fill his life with love and laughter, hearth, home and babies, and erase the chill of loneliness consuming him.

He’d sleep on this concept, he thought. But if it still had this much merit when he was well rested, he was going back to Ventura, by damn. He would fly to the opposite end of the States and get his heart back because somehow, somehow, she’d managed to keep it.

Mark picked up the magazine and stared at her picture, seeing the smile he knew so well, the blond hair and big, brown eyes, those lips…oh, those lips that tasted like sweet nectar.

She was so damn beautiful, he thought. She was a mature woman now, not a child of seventeen. She’d gained weight over the years, but it suited her and…she was really, really beautiful and…

He smacked the magazine back onto the table and pointed a finger at her smiling image.

“You are going to have a visitor,” he said, a rough edge to his voice. “It’s payback time, Emily MacAllister.”

“Grandma,” Emily MacAllister called as she crossed the sunshine-filled kitchen. “I’m here with the flowers as promised, and they’re gorgeous. You’re going to love them. You can sit on the patio and supervise while I stick them in the ground. Grandma?”

“I’m in the living room, dear,” Margaret MacAllister answered.

Emily went through the formal dining room and on to enter the living room, a smile of greeting for her beloved grandmother firmly in place.

Then she stopped dead in her tracks, feeling the color drain from her face and her breath catch as her heart thundered.

In that second, that tiny tick of time, as she stared wide-eyed at the tall man who had risen to his feet when she appeared, her life as she knew it ceased to exist.

She wasn’t thirty-one-years old, she was eighteen.

She wasn’t a pudgy woman with fat cheeks and a hint of a double chin, she was a slender teenager with a figure to be envied.

She wasn’t wearing clothes that looked as though she’d borrowed them from a bag lady, she was dressed in the latest designer jeans with a well-known brand name stitched across the pocket on her trim, tight bottom.

A wave of dizziness swept through Emily, and she gripped the top of an easy chair with one hand as the room spun around her.

This, she thought frantically, was not happening. It was a nightmare, and she was about to wake up and start her day in a normal manner.

Mark Maxwell was not, not, not, standing on the other side of that room, looking at her with no readable expression on his face. No.

“Isn’t this a lovely surprise, Emily?” Margaret said pleasantly. “Mark is here to visit us after all these years.”

No…he…isn’t, Emily thought. Oh, why didn’t the alarm go off and wake her up? No, no, no, Mark Maxwell is not here.

“Hello, Emily,” Mark said quietly.

Yes, he is, she thought, pressing one hand to her forehead. But this wasn’t skinny, gangly, endearingly geeky, Mark Maxwell. Nope, not this one. This Mark was at least six feet tall, had drop-dead-gorgeous rough-hewn features, broad shoulders and was wearing perfectly tailored dark slacks.

Where was the adorable plastic pocket protector jammed full of pens he always wore in his shirt pocket? Where was the cowlick in his light-brown hair that formed a cute little curlicue on the crown of his head? Where were the arms and legs and enormous feet, all of which were much too big for his still-developing body?

“Emily?” Margaret said. “Aren’t you going to say hello to Mark? I realize that you two parted on, shall we say, terms that were at best confusing to the rest of us but, my stars, that was years ago. Old news. History, as the young people say. And you’re not being very polite.”

“Oh.” Emily drew a much-needed breath, only then realizing she’d totally forgotten to breathe. “Sorry. Yes. Polite. Hello…Mark.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why on earth are you here?”

“Emily, for heaven’s sake,” Margaret said. “That was extremely rude.”

“That’s all right, Margaret. I’m sure that my arriving unannounced like this is a bit of a shock to Emily.”

Emily, Mark’s mind hummed. There she was. He could hardly believe he was here with only a matter of feet separating them.

There was that silky blond hair he used to sift his fingers through, now worn in gentle waves to just above her shoulders.

There were those classic MacAllister brown eyes that could sparkle with merriment, turn smoky with desire, shimmer with glistening tears when she was very happy or terribly sad.

She was dressed like a walking rummage sale, weighed a lot more than when she was a teenager, didn’t appear to have on a speck of makeup and one toe was actually poking through a hole in her about-to-fall-apart tennis shoes.

Oh, yes, there she was.

Emily.

And she was absolutely beautiful.

He wanted to cross the room, pull her into his arms, kiss her senseless, then…

Hold it, Maxwell, Mark thought. This was Emily MacAllister, who had somehow managed to keep a stranglehold on his heart and he was there in Ventura, by damn, to get it back.

“Mark just returned from a year in Paris, Emily,” Margaret said, “where he was part of a carefully selected team of medical researchers. His position in Boston was filled when he went to Paris but before he decides where to work next, perhaps even leaving Boston, he’s taking a much-deserved vacation, which included stopping in Ventura to say hello. Isn’t that nice?”

“Just too nice for words,” Emily mumbled, then inched around the chair and sank onto it as her trembling legs refused to hold her for another moment.

Mark sat back down on the sofa and propped one ankle on his other knee. Emily’s gaze was riveted on the taut muscles visible beneath his slacks as he completed the masculine motion. She blinked and redirected her attention to the fingernails of one of her hands as though they were the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen.

“There are a couple of reasons that I stopped over in Ventura,” Mark said. “One of them is to extend an apology to you and Robert, Margaret, for not keeping in better contact with you. Sending a Christmas card once a year just doesn’t cut it.

“If you hadn’t taken me in, welcomed me into your home when my father was killed in that accident when I was a senior in high school, there’s no telling what grief I would have come to in the foster-care system. I owe you a great deal, and I feel as though I’ve been remiss in expressing my gratitude.”