Chapter 7

John had been in love three times and in "like"—for want of a better term—more times than he could count. Each romance was different.

There was that first memorable college affair—stormy, chaotic and filled with anguish over whether or not marriage would be the end result. It wasn't. John had never been so perplexed in his life.

His second love, who embodied every quality he'd ever desired in a woman, dropped out of his life without warning when their relationship was at its peak. "I'd rather leave while I'm in love," she explained. John had never been so depressed in his life.

Soon he'd met Charlene. Moneyed and mad about him, she talked him out of his depression and into marriage within six weeks of their meeting. John had never been so happy in his life.

Then he found out that, like Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess,"

...she liked whate'er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

When Charlene's looks, not to mention certain parts of her anatomy, lingered too long on her karate instructor, John walked out. The divorce had been neat and uncomplicated, but he hadn't been in love since, a circumstance that John considered a blessing.

That left being in "like."

He pursued starlets trying to make it in a no-go world, receptionists who'd figured out that the best way to become upwardly mobile was to marry a man like him, and a corporation type who spent a lot of time speculating what would happen to their relationship when she was transferred to Houston.

He'd been invited to coke parties and driven himself home early and alone; to dinner with business contacts who dumped their voluptuous daughters on him; and on a memorable trip to Hawaii with a woman who in midair developed a crush on the male flight attendant and moved into the guy's hotel room in Waikiki, leaving John to hang out morosely in the hotel bar and debate the true meaning of life with a sympathetic bartender.

John's last girlfriend had lived in an apartment tented with bargain batiks, booby-trapped with low-slung fretted tables, and dominated by a huge brass coffeepot in which no coffee ever perked. There had been spears and gourds and other oddities too ominous to mention, many of them situated in uncomfortable places. A wild boar's head, stuffed, fixed any occupant of the king-sized waterbed with a baleful eye, not to mention a well-honed tusk when one got up to go to the bathroom in the dark. John had eased out of the relationship, just short, he was convinced, of being paralyzed by a poison dart and being mounted like the trophy he was.

Which was right before a Mack truck mowed into him on the freeway. His head bashed through the windshield and the glass ground into his eyes, injuring his corneas, the transparent rounded surface that accounts for the eye's focusing power. John's vision was scarred, but he would regain it, according to the doctors, if he would undergo corneal transplants. John agreed, but they'd have to wait for a donor.

John spent the months after the accident lost in denial. He couldn't accept what had happened to him, and his rage over his fate corroded him from the inside out. He'd hated the world and everything in it. If the corneal transplant wasn't successful, he ran the risk of losing what was left of his sight. The realization that perhaps he'd never fly again hit him hard. Some days he drank too much, others he wanted to die. Finally his doctor called with the good news that a donor had been found.

John's benefactor was one K. J. Muldoon, killed in an unspecified accident. His wife had signed the permission papers that allowed Mr. Muldoon's corneas to be used. Within weeks after the operation, John, his eyes made new by another's generosity, could see again. He'd learned the name of the donor from a disgruntled nurse who had been fired and had no respect for HIPAA privacy laws. She passed along forbidden hospital records for the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

John knew he had to speak with Mrs. K. J. Muldoon to convey his heartfelt gratitude. He'd written to her Palm Springs address, but his letters had never been answered. He'd dispatched more letters, and they'd been marked "Return to Sender." Frustrated, desperate, knowing he could not rest until he thanked her, he'd driven to her home in his BMW.

He'd arrived at the big walled retreat outside Palm Springs, immediately noticing the small hangar at the back of the estate. If he'd known there was a runway, he probably would have flown one of his planes instead of driving. He hadn't been able to raise a soul at the house, even though he pushed his way in through an open back gate and pounded on several doors and shouted until he was hoarse. A curious gardener had finally peered around the corner of the house, convinced that he was confronting a madman.

A fifty-dollar bill convinced the gardener to tell the madman where he sent the monthly invoice for his services, and John had driven away with a Century City address in his pocket.

The address had led him to Morgana, eventually, and finally to Cassie.

John was a tenacious man. He had, after all, inherited along with his father's shipping business a small cargo airline that was about to go bankrupt. He'd built it into a multifaceted organization serving cities on the West Coast and Hawaii. He was the kind who perceived a problem, defined the solution, and hung on until the solution was reached. Even so, the self-appointed task of finding Mrs. K. J. Muldoon was more than he bargained for.

When she turned out to be Cassie, a real-life person who touched his heart and his mind and his body in a way no one else ever had, he fell in love with her. He intended to bring her down off the mountain no matter what it took. There was no going back.

He didn't fool himself. From the get-go, he knew that it wouldn't be easy. But he never dreamed that it would turn out to be so difficult.