While she ran the gamut of indignant thought, Web stood back and studied her, and for the first time in hours he felt he might have something special. Moving that way, with her hair billowing softly, she was the girl he remembered from that summer in Maine. She was direct and honest, serious but free, and she exuded the aura of power that came from success.
He caught his breath, then quickly raised his camera and prepared to shoot. “That’s it. Oh, sunshine, that’s it….”
Her movement stopped abruptly.Sunshine.It was what he’d always called her at the height of passion, when she would whisper that she loved him and would have to settle for an endearment in place of a returned vow.
It was the final straw. No longer able to stem the tears she’d fought so valiantly, she covered her face with her hands and, heedless of all around her, began to weep softly.
Chapter 2
Marni Lange was on top of the world. Seventeen and eager to live life to its fullest, she’d just graduated from high school and would be entering Wellesley College in the fall. As they did every June, her parents, brother and sister and herself had come to their summer home in Camden, Maine, to sun and sail, barbecue and party to their hearts’ content.
Ethan, her older brother by eight years, had looked forward to this particular summer as the first he’d be spending as a working man on vacation. Having graduated from business school, he’d spent the past eight months as a vice-president of the Lange Corporation, which had been formed by their father, Jonathan, some thirty years before. Privileged by being the son of the founder, president and chairman of the board of the corporation, Ethan was, like his father, conducting what work he had to do during the summer months from Camden.
Tanya, Marni’s older sister by two years, had looked forward to the summer as a well-earned vacation from college, which she was attending only because her parents had insisted on it. If she’d had her way she’d be traveling the world, dallying with every good-looking man in sight. College men bored her nearly as much as her classes did, she’d discovered quickly. She needed an older man, she bluntly claimed, a man with experience and savvy and style.
Marni felt light-years away from her sister, and always had. They were as different as night and day in looks, personality and aspirations. While Tanya was intent on having a good time until the day she reeled in the oil baron who would free her from her parents and assure her of the good life forever, Marni was quieter, serious about commitment yet fun-loving. She wanted to get an education, then perhaps go out to work for a while, and the major requirement she had for a husband was that he adore her.
A husband was the last thing on her mind that summer, though. She was young. She’d dated aplenty, partying gaily within society’s elite circles, but she’d never formed a relationship she would have called deep. Too many of the young men she’d known seemed shallow, unable to discuss world news or the stock market or the latest nonfiction best-seller. She wanted to grow, to meet interesting people, to broaden her existence before she thought of settling down.
The summer began as it always did, with reunion parties among the families whose sumptuous homes, closed all winter, were now buzzing with life. Marni enjoyed seeing friends she hadn’t seen since the summer before, and she felt that much more buoyant with both her high school degree and her college acceptance letter lying on the desk in her room back at the Langes’ Long Island estate.
After the reunions came the real fun—days of yachting along the Maine coast, hours sunning on the beach or hanging out on the town green or cruising the narrow roads in late-model cars whose almost obscene luxury was fully taken for granted by the young people in question.
Marni had her own group of friends, as did Tanya, but for very obvious reasons both groups tagged along with Ethan and his friends whenever possible. Ethan never put up much of a fight … for equally obvious reasons. Though his own tastes ran toward shapely brunettes a year or two older than Tanya, he knew that several of his group preferred the even younger blood of Marni’s friends.
It was because of the latter, or perhaps because Ethan was feeling restless about something he couldn’t understand, that this particular summer he made a new friend. His last name was Webster, but the world knew him simply as Web—at least, the world that came into contact with the Camden Inn and Resort where he was employed alternately as lifeguard, bellboy and handyman.
Ethan had been using the pool when he struck up that first conversation with Web, whom he discovered to be far more interesting than any of the friends he was with. Web was twenty-six, footloose and fancy-free, something which, for all his social and material status, Ethan had never been. While Ethan had jetted from high-class hotel to high-class hotel abroad, Web had traveled the world on freighters, passenger liners or any other vehicle on which he could find employment. While Ethan, under his father’s vigilant eye, had met and hobnobbed with the luminaries of the world, Web had read about them in the quiet of whatever small room he was renting at the time.
Web was as educated as he and perhaps even brighter, Ethan decided early on in their friendship, and the luxury of Web’s life was that he was beholden to no one. Ethan envied and admired it to the extent that he found himself spending more and more time with Web.
It was inevitable that Marni should meet him, nearly as inevitable that she should be taken with him from the first. He was mature. He was good-looking. He was carefree and adventurous, yet soft-spoken and thoughtful. Given the diverse and oftentimes risky things he’d experienced in life, there was an excitement about him that Marni had never found in another human being. He was free. He was his own man.
He was also a roamer. She knew that well before she fell in love with him, but that didn’t stop it from happening. Puppy love, Ethan had called it, infatuation. But Marni knew differently.
After her introduction to Web, she was forever on Ethan’s tail. At first she tried to be subtle. She’d just come for a swim, she told Web minutes before she dived into the resort pool, leaving the two men behind to talk. But she wore her best bikini and made sure that the lounge chair she stretched out on in the sun was well within Web’s range of vision.
She tagged along with Ethan when he and Web went out boating, claiming that she had nothing to do at home and was bored. She sandwiched herself into the back of Ethan’s two-seater sports car when he and Web drove to Bar Harbor on Web’s day off, professing that she needed a day off too from the monotony of Camden. She sat intently, with her chin in her palm, while the two played chess in Web’s small room at the rear of the Inn, insisting that she’d never learn the game unless she could observe two masters at it.
Ethan and Web did other things, wilder things—racing the wind on the beach at two in the morning on the back of Web’s motorcycle, playing pool and drinking themselves silly at a local tavern, diving by moonlight to steal lobsters from traps not far from shore, then boiling them in a pot over a fire on the sand. Marni wasn’t allowed to join them at such times, but she knew where they went and what they did, and it added to her fascination for Web … as did the fact that Jonathan and Adele Lange thoroughly disapproved of him.
Marni had never been perverse or rebellious where her parents were concerned. She’d enjoyed her share of mischief when she’d been younger, and still took delight in the occasional scheme that drew arched brows and pursed lips from her parents. But Web drew far more than that.
“Whoishe?” her mother would ask when Ethan announced that he was meeting with Web yet again. “Where does he come from?”
“Lots of places,” Ethan would answer, indulging in his own adult prerogative for independence.
Jonathan Lange agreed wholeheartedly with his wife. “But you don’t know anything about the man, Ethan. For all you know, he’s been on the wrong side of the law at some point in his, uh, illustrious career.”
“Maybe,” Ethan would say with a grin. “But he happens to know a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot. He’s an extension of my education … like night school. Look at it that way.”
The elder Langes never did, and Web’s existence continued to be viewed as something distasteful. He was never invited to the Lange home, and he became the scapegoat for any and all differences of opinion the Langes had with their son. Starry-eyed, Marni didn’t believe a word her parents said in their attempts to discredit Web. If anything, their dislike of him added an element of danger, of challenge, to her own attempts to catch his eye.
She liked looking at him—at his deeply tanned face, which sported the bluest of eyes; his brown hair, which had been kissed golden by the sun; his knowing and experienced hands. His body was solid and muscular, and his fluid, lean-hipped walk spoke of self-assurance. She knew he liked looking at her, too, for she’d find him staring at her from time to time, those blue eyes alight with desire. At least she thought it was desire. She never really knew, because he didn’t follow up on it. Oh, he touched her—held her hand to help her from the car, bodily lifted her from the boat to the dock, stopped in his rounds of the pool to add a smidgen of suntan lotion to a spot she’d missed on her back—but he never let his touch wander, as increasingly she wished he would.
Frustration became a mainstay in her existence. She dressed her prettiest when she knew she’d see Web, made sure her long auburn hair was clean and shiny, painted her toenails and fingernails in hopes of looking older. But, for whatever his reasons, Web kept his distance, and short of physically attacking the man, Marni didn’t know what more she could do.
Then came a day when Ethan was ill. Web was off duty, and the two had planned to go mountain climbing, but Ethan had been sick to his stomach all night and could barely lift his head come morning. Marni, who’d spent the previous two days pestering Ethan to take her along, was sitting on his bed at seven o’clock.
