“Michael, I’ve known you for over twenty years,” Piers said.“Where’s the chap I knew running round the pitch, coaching up others, life of the party, top of his class, winning the awards and top honors?And all so effortlessly.I hated you when we met our fresher year.I’m ashamed to say it, but I truly did.Then you offered to help me pen a paper, and I learned of your kindness, not to mention your wit and brilliance.Don’t get me started on the lasses giving you looks everywhere we went.Seriously, just saying all this now makes me loathe you again.Are you real?The lads wanted to be you.The ladies, well, they simply wanted you.To be Mrs.Michael Cross, I say, was their dream.”
“Piers, leave it out,” Evan said.
“Why?Michael is an ace.Top drawer.Even in Her Majesty’s Special Forces you blew off the doors.”
“I said leave it out, Lord Atterbery.”Evan stood between Michael and Piers.“Have you no heart?He just lost his fiancée a year ago.You speak as if he’s a partying playboy without a soul.”
Piers looked stricken.“Oh, Mick, mate, so sorry.I’m a bum.We all loved Purnell.Such a sweet and kind lass.Please…” He rested his hand on Michael’s shoulder.“I wasn’t thinking how you must miss her.”
Michael glanced away, never sure how to respond to sympathy.He blamed himself.Gunner and Piers were simply being good mates.
But last year was a blur.Everything happening so fast.One day Purnell was fine, healthy, and happy.The next, falling ill, leaving him on the sidelines to watch, helpless, and unable to save her.Then came the attempt on Prince John.The moment he spotted the man’s weapon, one thing and one thing only came into his mind: save the prince.
“Dad, you coming?”An irritated Marcus leaned out the passenger side window.“I’m starved.”
“We were like that at his age?”Piers wondered with a laugh.“Coming, lad.Keep your knickers on.Ring Mum, tell her we’re on the way.”He turned to Michael.“A piece of advice?You’re a splendid chap, Mick, so don’t let death steal the life in you.I cannot know how it feels to lose the woman I love, but I do know letting death defeat you is not the answer.You’re a champion, Michael.Remember that, please.Get on with your life.Fall in love.Raise a family.”
“He’s right, Mick,” Evan said.“Purnell said as much to you when she was in hospital.”
Michael nodded.“I’ll take it under advisement.”
Though he didn’t mean it.At least not in this moment.Maybe next year.He might be an inch or two closer.What he wanted more than anything was to sense, feel, even hear Purnell one last time.To say what he needed to say.
For a long while, Michael sat behind the wheel of his car, motor idling.The wipers had dusted away the thin, wet snowflakes, and sunlight broke through the scattering clouds.
He wanted to be the chap Piers bragged on.But that was easier said than done.
Chapter Three
Scottie
Under a spring cottonwood, Scottie sat alone on a Gardenia Park bench with a brass dedication plate.
In loving memory of Merle and Hattie Lerner.Sixty-seven years of wedded bliss.
Sixty-seven years.She happened to know Merle and Miss Hattie Lerner made it to seventy years of wedded bliss before Hattie died in her sleep.Merle lasted two more weeks.The legend around town was ole Merle couldn’t breathe without Miss Hattie.
Up on the park stage, a crew worked under a bright light as they dismantled the sound equipment.Scottie watched them a moment, then returned to the memory of Merle and Miss Hattie.
More and more benches with brass plates dedicated to enduring love had popped up around the park.When Miss Jean-Ann died last year, six months after her husband, their daughter, Dolly Tuggle, wept at her funeral saying, “Mama warned us if Daddy went first, she’d not be long behind.He was her joy and light, her one true love.”
There’d been so much emotional vibration in her words, Scottie actually began to believe in the fairy tale of a “one true love.”Something she’d not observed often in her thirty-eight years.
She certainly didn’t observe it tonight during her Fry Hut dinner-in-the-park with Cap Henderson.But his unusual demeanor in her office this afternoon finally made sense.
Did Scottie believe in true love?Yes, of course, the world was too big and beautiful not to believe.It was just, with the greatest of all doubts, she wondered if true love would ever aim its arrow at her.
Her grandparents, Shug and Fritz, were examples of solid, lasting love, but as the kid of a single dad with a supposedly deceased mother, true love seemed like a Disney movie.In real life, a couple like Shug and Fritz were the lucky strike.
Her whole life, Dad had lived with a broken heart beating in his chest.He loved Kate Rein, the girl he’d spied across Lauchtenland’s Haxton University campus his sophomore year.He hurdled benches and bushes to chase the “vision of beauty” before him.(Dad was as confident as he was corny in his twenties.) Right then and there, he determined to marry her.Being a brash American, little did he know she was the Crown Princess of Lauchtenland.
Yet Dad being Dad, he’d won her heart.They fell in love.Conceived a child.Kate assured him the modern ways of a royal family in the 1980s would not hinder their relationship.But she was wrong.Dead wrong.
Her father, King Rein IV, dropped a bomb on their relationship that left shrapnel in Dad’s heart for years.Kate had been forced to choose between the man she loved and her country and royal duty.Duty won out.
Kate delivered a daughter, left the child in her father’s care, and never looked back because everyone agreed—it was for the best.
Dad’s crushed heart never loved deeply again.Except for his baby girl, to whom he gave everything.He modeled a life well-lived with a solid work ethic, family loyalty, and friendship with the community.But he never modeled heart melding, you’re-my-soulmate, committed and devotional love.
