About the Author
M. L. Buchman has over has over 40 novels in print. His military romantic suspense books have been named Barnes & Noble and NPR “Top 5 of the year” and twice Booklist “Top 10 of the Year,” placing two titles on their “Top 101 Romances of the Last 10 Years” list. He has been nominated for the Reviewer’s Choice Award for “Top 10 Romantic Suspense of 2014” by RT Book Reviews. In addition to romance, he also writes thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction.
In among his career as a corporate project manager he has: rebuilt and single-handed a fifty-foot sailboat, both flown and jumped out of airplanes, designed and built two houses, and bicycled solo around the world.
He is now making his living as a full-time writer on the Oregon Coast with his beloved wife and is constantly amazed at what you can do with a degree in Geophysics. You may keep up with his writing by subscribing to his newsletter at www.mlbuchman.com.
Where Dreams Are Born (excerpt)
Russell locked his door as the last of the staff finally went home and turned off his camera.
He knew it was good. The images were there, solid. He’d really captured them.
But something was missing.
The groove ran so clean when he slid into it. The studio faded into the background, then the strobe lights, reflector umbrellas, and blue and green backdrops all became texture and tone.
Image, camera, man became one and they were all that mattered; a single flow of light beginning before time was counted and ending in the printed image. A ray of primordial light traveling forever to glisten off the BMW roadster still parked in one corner of the wood-planked studio. Another ray lost in the dark blackness of the finest leather bucket seats. One more picking out the supermodel’s perfect hand dangling a single, shining, golden key. The image shot just slow enough that they key blurred as it spun, but the logo remained clear.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on it…
Another great ad by Russell Morgan. Russell Morgan, Inc. The client would be knocked dead, and the ad leaving all others standing still as it roared down the passing lane. Might get him another Clio, or even a second Mobius.
But… There wasn’t usually a “but.” The groove had definitely been there, but he hadn’t been in it. That was the problem. It had slid along, sweeping his staff into their own orchestrated perfection, but he’d remained untouched. Not part of that ideal, seamless flow.
“Be honest, boyo, that session sucked,” he told the empty studio. Everything had come together so perfectly for yet another ad for yet another high-end glossy. Man, the Magazine would launch spectacularly in a few weeks, a high-profile mid-December launch, a never before seen twelve page spread by Russell Morgan, Inc. and the rag would probably never pay off the lavish launch party of hope, ice sculptures, and chilled magnums of champagne before disappearing like a thousand before it.
He stowed the last camera he’d been using with the others piled by his computer. At the breaker box he shut off the umbrellas, spots, scoops, and washes. The studio shifted from a stark landscape in hard-edged relief to a nest of curious shadows and rounded forms. The tang of hot metal and deodorant were the only lasting result of the day’s efforts.
“Morose tonight, aren’t we?” he asked his reflection in the darkened window of his Manhattan studio. His reflection was wise enough to not answer back. There wasn’t ever a “down” after a shoot, there had always been an “up.”
Not tonight.
He’d kept everyone late, even though it was Thanksgiving eve, hoping for that smooth slide of image, camera, man. It was only when he saw the power of the images he captured that he knew he wasn’t a part of the chain anymore and decided he’d paid enough triple-time expenses.
The single perfect leg wrapped in thigh-high red-leather boots visible in the driver’s seat. The sensual juxtaposition of woman and sleek machine. An ad designed to wrap every person with even a hint of a Y-chromosome around its little finger. And those with only X-chromosomes would simply want to be her. A perfect combo of sex for the guys and power for the women.
Russell had become no more than the observer, the technician behind the camera. Now that he faced it, months, maybe even a year had passed since he’d been yanked all the way into the light-image-camera-man slipstream. Tonight was the first time he hadn’t even trailed in the churned up wake.
“You’re just a creative cog in the advertising photography machine.” Ouch! That one stung, but it didn’t turn aside the relentless steamroller of his thoughts speeding down some empty, godforsaken autobahn.
His career was roaring ahead, his business fast and smooth, but, now that he considered it, he really didn’t give a damn.
His life looked perfect, but—“Don’t think it!” —but his autobahn mind finished, “it wasn’t.”
Russell left his silent reflection to its own thoughts and went through the back door that led to his apartment, closing it tightly on the perfect BMW, the perfect rose on the seat, and somewhere, lost among a hundred other props from dozens of other shoots, the long pair of perfect red-leather Chanel boots that had been wrapped around the most expensive legs in Manhattan. He didn’t care if he never walked back through that door again. He’d been doing his art by rote, and how God-awful sad was that?
And he shot commercial art. He’d never had the patience to do art for art’s sake. No draw for him. No fire. He left the apartment dark, only a soft glow from the blind-covered windows revealing the vaguest outlines of the framed art on the wall. Even that almost overwhelmed him.
He didn’t want to see the huge prints by the art artists: autographed Goldsworthy, Liebowitz, and Joseph Francis’ photomosaics for the moderns. A hundred and fifty more rare, even one of a kind prints, all the way back through Bourke-White to his prize, an original Daguerre. The collection that the Museum of Modern Art kept begging to borrow for a show. He bypassed the circle of chairs and sofas that could be a playpen for two or a party for twenty. He cracked the fridge in the stainless steel and black kitchen searching for something other than his usual beer.
A bottle of Krug.
Maybe he was just being grouchy after a long day’s work.
Milk.
No. He’d run his enthusiasm into the ground but good.
Juice even.
Would he miss the camera if he never picked it up again?
No reaction.
Nothing.
Not even a twinge.
That was an emptiness he did not want to face. Alone, in his apartment, in the middle of the world’s most vibrant city.
Russell turned away, and just as the door swung closed, the last sliver of light, the relentless cold blue-white of the refrigerator bulb, shone across his bed. A quick grab snagged the edge of the door and left the narrow beam illuminating a long pale form on his black bedspread.
The Chanel boots weren’t in the studio. They were still wrapped around those three thousand dollar-an-hour legs. The only clothing on a perfect body, five foot-eleven of intensely toned female anatomy, right down to her exquisitely stair-mastered behind. Her long, white-blond hair, a perfect Godiva over the tanned breasts. Except for their too exact symmetry, even the closest inspection didn’t reveal the work done there. One leg raised just ever so slightly to hide what was meant to be revealed later. Discovered.
Melanie.
By the steady rise and fall of her flat stomach, he knew she’d fallen asleep, waiting for him to finish in the studio.
How long had they been an item? Two months? Three?
She’d made him feel alive. At least when he was with her. The image of the supermodel in his bed. On his arm at yet another SoHo gallery opening, dazzling New York’s finest at another three-star restaurant, wooing another gathering of upscale people with her ever so soft, so sensual, so studied French accent. Together they were wired into the heart of the in-crowd.
But that wasn’t him, was it? It didn’t sound anything like the Russell he once knew.
Perhaps “they” were about how he looked on her arm?
Did she know tomorrow was the annual Thanksgiving ordeal at his parents? That he’d rather die than attend? Any number of eligible woman floating about who’d finagled an invitation in hopes of snaring one of People Magazine’s “100 Most Eligible.” Heir to a billion or some such, but wealthy enough on his own, by his own sweat. Number twenty-four this year, up from forty-seven the year before despite Tom Cruise being available yet again.
No.
Not Melanie. It wasn’t the money that drew her. She wanted him. But more, she wanted the life that came with him, wrapped in the man package. She wanted The Life. The one that People Magazine readers dreamed about between glossy pages.
His fingertips were growing cold where they held the refrigerator door cracked open.
If he woke her there’d be amazing sex. Or a great party to go to. Or…
Did he want “Or”? Did he want more from her? Sex. Companionship. An energy, a vivacity, a thirst he feared that he lacked. Yes.
But where hid that smooth synchronicity like light-image-camera-man? Where lurked that perfect flow from one person to another? Did she feel it? Could he… ever again?
“More?” he whispered into the darkness to test the sound.
The door slid shut, escaped from numb fingers, plunging the apartment back into darkness, taking Melanie along with it.
His breath echoed in the vast darkness. Proof that he was alive, if nothing more.
Time to close the studio. Time to be done with Russell Incorporated.
Then what?
Maybe Angelo would know what to do. He always claimed he did. Maybe this time Russell would actually listen to his almost-brother, though he knew from the experience of being himself for the last thirty years that was unlikely. Seattle. Damn! He’d have to go to bloody Seattle to find his best friend.
He could guarantee that wouldn’t be a big hit with Melanie.
Now if he only knew if that was a good thing or bad.
# # #
JANUARY 1
If you were still alive, you’d pay for this one, Daddy.” The moment the words escaped her lips, Cassidy Knowles slapped a hand over her mouth to negate them, but it was too late.
The sharp wind took her words and threw them back into the pine trees, guilt and all. It might have stopped her, if it didn’t make this the hundredth time she’d cursed him this morning.
She leaned into the wind and forged her way downhill until the muddy path broke free from the mossy smell of the trees. Her Stuart Weitzman boots were long since soaked through, and now her feet were freezing. The two-inch heels had nearly flipped her into the mud a dozen different times.
Cassidy Knowles stared at the lighthouse. It perched upon a point of rock, tall and white, with its red roof as straight and snug as a prim bonnet. A narrow trail traced along the top of the breakwater leading to the lighthouse. The parking lot, much to her chagrin, was empty; six, beautiful, empty spaces.
“Sorry, ma’am,” park rangers were always polite when telling you what you couldn’t do. “The parking lot by the light is reserved for physically-challenged visitors only. You’ll have to park here. It is just a short walk to the lighthouse.”
The fact that she was dressed for a nice afternoon lunch at Pike Place Market safe in Seattle’s downtown rather than a blustery mile-long walk on the first day of the year didn’t phase the ranger in the slightest.
Cassidy should have gone home, would have, if it hadn’t been for the letter stuffed deep in her pocket. So, instead of a tasty treat in a cozy deli, she’d buttoned the top button of her suede Bernardo jacket and headed down the trail. At least the promised rain had yet to arrive, so the jacket was only cold, not wet. The stylish cut had never been intended to fight off the bajillion mile-an-hour gusts that snapped it painfully against her legs. And her black leggings ranged about five layers short of tolerable and a far, far cry from warm.
At the lighthouse, any part of her that had been merely numb slipped right over to quick frozen. Leaning into the wind to stay upright, tears streaming from her eyes, she could think of a thing or two to tell her father despite his recent demise and her general feelings about the usefulness of upbraiding a dead man.
“What a stupid present!” the wind tore her shout word-by-word, syllable-by-syllable and sent flying back toward her nice warm car and the smug park ranger.
A calendar. He’d given her a stupid calendar of stupid lighthouses and a stupid letter to open at each stupid one. He’d been very insistent, made her promise. One she couldn’t ignore. A deathbed promise.
Cassidy leaned grimly forward to start walking only to have the wind abruptly cease. She staggered, nearly planting her face on the pavement before another gust sent her crabbing sideways. With resolute force, she planted one foot after another until she’d crossed that absolutely vacant parking lot with its six empty spaces and staggered along the top of the breakwater to reach the lighthouse itself. No handicapped people crazy enough to come here New Year’s morning. No people at all for that matter.
The building’s wall was concrete, worn smooth by a thousand storms and a hundred coats of brilliant white paint. With the wind practically pinning her to the outside of the building, she peeked into one of the windows. The wind blew her hair about so that it beat on her eyes and mouth trying to simultaneously blind and choke her. With one hand, she grabbed the unruly mass mostly to one side. With the other she shaded the dusty window. The cobwebbed glass revealed an equally unkempt interior.
No lightkeeper sitting in his rocking chair before a merry fire. No smoking pipe. No lighthouse cat curled in his lap. Some sort of a rusty engine not attached to anything. A bucket of old tools. A couple of paint cans.
A high wave crashed into the rocks with a thundering shudder that ran up through the heels of her boots and whipped a chill spray into the wind. Salt water on suede.
Daddy now owed her a new coat as well.
Cassidy edged along the foundation until she found a calmer spot, a bit of windshadow behind the lighthouse where the wind chill ranked merely miserable rather than horrific on the suck-o-meter. Squatting down behind one of the breakwater’s boulders helped a tiny bit more. She peeled off her thin leather gloves and blew against her fingertips to warm them enough so that they’d work. Once she’d regained some modicum of feeling, she pulled out the letter.
She couldn’t feel his writing, though she ran her fingertips over it again and again. His Christmas present. A five-dollar calendar of Washington lighthouses from the hospital gift store and a dozen thin envelopes wrapped in a old x-ray folder with no ribbon, no paper.
In the end he’d foiled her final Christmas hunt. It had been her great yearly quest. The ultimate grail of childhood, finding the key present before Christmas morning. There was no present he could hide that she couldn’t find. Not the Cabbage Patch Kid when she was six; the one she’d had to hold with her arm in a cast, from falling off the kitchen stool she’d dragged into her father’s closet. Not the used VW Rabbit he’d hidden out in the wine shed thinking that she never went there anymore. And she didn’t, except for some reason the day before her eighteenth Christmas.
A part of her wanted to crumple the letter up and throw it into the sea. It was too soon. She didn’t want to face the pain again.
Too soon.
The rest of her did what it supposed to do. The dutiful daughter opened the envelope and pinned the letter against her thigh so that she could read the slashing scrawl that was her father’s. Even as weak with sickness as he must have been, it looked scribed in stone. His bold-stroke writing gave the words a force and strength just as his deep voice had once sounded strong enough to keep the world at bay for his small girl.
Dearest Ice Sweet,
He’d always called her that.
Icewine. The grapes traditionally harvested on her birthday, December twenty-first. “The sweetest wine of all, my little ice sweet girl.” By the age of five she knew about the sugar content of icewine, Riesling, Chardonnay, and a dozen others. By eight she could identify scores of vintages just by the scent of the cork and hundreds by their logos though she’d yet to taste more than thimblefuls of watered wine at any one time.
Cassidy stared at the waves digging angrily at the rocks. Spray slashed sideways by the wind dragged tears from her eyes even as she struggled to blink them dry. She hadn’t cried in a long time and she was damned if she was going to start now simply because she was cold and there was a hole in her heart.
Seven days. She’d looked away for a one moment seven days ago and he was gone. Christmas morning. He’d hung on long enough to tell her of his last present, hidden in plain sight in the used X-ray folder on the side table. A long list of crossed-out names had shuttled films back and forth across Northwest Hospital. Last used by someone named Barash. No meaning for her whatsoever.
I bought this calendar the day you moved back to Seattle. Marked in all the “dates.” Now I know that I won’t get to go with you. I’m sorry to leave you so young.
“I’m twenty-nine, Daddy.” But it felt young. Her birthday gone unremarked because he’d never woken that day so close to his last. The hole in her heart was so broad that it would never be filled.
He’d only been gone a week. Cremated, waked, and ashes spread on his beloved vineyard by the permission of the new owners. They’d owned his vineyard for five years, but still, they were the new ones. It still wasn’t right, them living in the place where her father belonged. She could still picture him striding among the vines, rubbing the soil in his palm, showing his only child the wonders of the changing seasons, the lifecycle of a grapevine, and the nurturing of honeybees.
For our first “date” I will just tell you how proud I am of you. My daughter took a vintner’s education and turned herself into the best food-and-wine columnist ever.
He always believed in her. Always rooted for her. Always cheered her on. He’d been the same way with her boyfriends. Always welcoming them when they arrived. Always consoling her when they were gone. No judgment, not even on the ones she should have avoided like a bottle of rotgut Thunderbird.
The wind rattled the paper sharply, drawing her attention back to the letter.
You are so like me. You figure out what feels right and you just go do it, damn the consequences. I could never fault you for leaving. I always did what I wanted, too. Saw it and went right for it, no discussion needed. All the while wearing perfect blinders that blocked out everything else. You got that from me. You come by your whimsical stubbornness honestly, Ice Sweet.
She wasn’t stubborn, years of careful planning had led her this far. Even her move to Seattle to be with him had been calculated, though she never told him about that. She shifted on the hard rock that was in imminent danger of freezing her butt.
Her father kept apologizing for all the wrong things. Seattle had ended up being a great career move, or was becoming one as she’d hoped. In New York, she had worked as one of a thousand food and wine reviewers. Okay one in fifty, maybe even one in twenty-five, she was damn good, but there were only three women at that level. The other twenty-two were members of longstanding in the old boys’ club.
“We’re looking for someone with a more refined palate.” Read as someone who was “male.”
She’d let go of her sublet in Manhattan when she’d found out he was sick. Bought a condo in Seattle to be near, but not too near him on Bainbridge Island. Helped him move into the elder-care by Northgate when he couldn’t care for himself any longer, and from there to Northwest Hospital where she’d lived out his last two weeks in the chair by his bed.
The Village Voice dropped her the day she left Manhattan. That had hurt as they’d run her first-ever review, a short piece on Jim and Charlie’s Punk and Wine Bistro. Jim and Charlie’s was still there, partly thanks to that review that was still framed and hung in the center of the bar’s mirror.
But in Seattle she was rapidly rising to the very upper crust of the apple pie. Her reviews ran in every local paper. The San Francisco Chronicle had picked her up for their Travel section the following week making it difficult to stay grumpy about the loss of The Voice. Then AAA took her national with their magazines. From there, it hadn’t been a big step to national syndication. Six more months in New York and she’d have still been grinding her way up from the twentieth spot to the nineteenth. She was going to bypass the lot of them by skipping right past the de rigueur hurdles and sitting at the head table herself.
Her father’s cancer had brought at least that much good. Now if only it hadn’t taken him with it.
And she wasn’t whimsical, no matter what he thought. Her dad had always described her mother as the organized one. And Cassidy had done her best to be just like her. You didn’t become a topcolumnist by following the wind all willy-nilly.
If she didn’t hurry, she was going to freeze in place. She chafed at her legs with one hand and then the other, but it didn’t help. She was cold past any cure less than a piping-hot tub bath. She peeked ahead, just two and a bit pages. She turned to the second sheet.
I started the vineyard after my tour in Vietnam. Got signed off the base and walked out of San Francisco right across the Golden Gate. No home, no job, no one to go back to. Headed up into the hills, don’t even know why or where I was. Walked and hitched ‘til dark, slept, woke with the light, and kept moving.
One morning, I woke up in a field, leaning against a rotting, wooden fencepost, looking at the saddest little vineyard you could imagine. Poor vines dying of thirst. I found an old bucket and started watering them from a nearby stream. Old man came out to lean on the fence. Watched me quite a while, a couple hours maybe. I didn’t care about him. Those vines were the first thing I’d cared about in a long, long time.
“You want ‘em?” the old guy asked. “Five hundred bucks and they’re yours.”
I don’t even remember how it happened. One minute my final pay was in my pocket, then his. Other vets drifted in. I charged them fifty bucks to join. Five of us worked the land, recovered the vines. That was the start of the thirty acres of Knowles Valley Vineyard.
She’d never heard how his first vineyard started. Didn’t even really know where it was, somewhere in the hills of northern California.
Though he might have ambled all the way to Oregon for how much she knew.
Walk the year with me. Let’s take our time. My past is mine, but your future is not. That’s only up to you. I leave you to walk alone, it is a rough trail often over rocky soil. But keep your head high and you’ll go far.
Whatever happens, know that I love you. I’m so proud of you.
Love you Ice Sweet,
Vic
Vic. He always signed his letters “Vic.” Never what she’d always called him. “Daddy.”
“I could never fault you for leaving.” Yet between the lines that’s just what he did. Nothing on the backs of any of the pages. She worked to refold the pages in the wind.
“No, you’re imagining things, Cass. You think too much. Get your head out of your own butt.” And she mostly did. One of the many gifts Vic Knowles had given her, the ability to be clear about her own actions and reactions.
He’d financed her dreams of getting away from the rain capital of the Pacific Northwest. He’d paid for her college in full and cooking school after that. It was only cleaning up his papers this last week that she saw how close it had come to breaking him. He’d just made it a natural assumption that she’d go to college and he’d pay. Just like her Mom who had a degree in economics from Vassar. He’d always talked about how smart Cassidy’s mother was. How beautiful. How much he missed her.
He hadn’t gone to college himself, not even high school. His past was little more than a few facts she’d winnowed over the years. His dad had left before he could remember. He’d dropped out of third grade to help his mother run the grocery store. They were desperately poor when she died. Then he’d gone to Vietnam at eighteen as the only way to make a living wage. And walked to a vineyard. But he gave Cassidy that gift of education as if it was no sacrifice to him.
Did he now begrudge her that past? The future he never had.
No. That didn’t make any sense. He hadn’t thought about the money, he’d invested in his dreams for her. She was just going nuts from missing him so much and angry at him for being dead.
“Useful, Cass, real useful.”
To prove her sanity, she forced the rumpled letter back into the envelope, as neatly as possible in the midst of the maelstrom, and she forced that back into her leather pack.
Her father, the self-educated man, also the most well-read man she’d ever met. But she’d learned early on to do her math and science homework before he came home from the fields. His frustration at being unable to help her with them had always been a strain.
Cassidy’s mother was a single solitary memory. She’d been standing in the open doorway of the house, leaving on a stormy night to answer a call to the hospital. The wind at the door blew her hair across her face as she leaned on her father’s arm. Cassidy’s only memory of Adrianne Knowles, a woman with no face. Then Bea Clark rushing in from next door to sit with her.
She and Daddy did talk about the books though. He had sharpened her mind as they puzzled out the books together. Ayn Rand piled next to Shakespeare, Heinlein and Hugo, Dickens and a biography of Jimi Hendrix. Their house was always awash in books. And the massive collection of wine books, thumbed again and again by both of them, the only books to have a proper bookcase, had sat in the place of honor in the living room. Everything else jumbled into stacked wooden crates, mounded on tops of dressers, and enough on the dining table to make it a battle to find room for two plates.
The chill spray of a particularly large wave spattered her with a few drops and the next with a few more.
The tide must be coming in.
She scrambled from her hiding place and rose back into the wind which threatened to topple her down into the roaring waves. She forged her way back up the hill. The wind tore at her backpack and thumped it against her spine. The camera. Right.
She squatted to get out of the wind and pulled out her trusty point-and-shoot. The wind nearly blinded her when she turned back into it. Her hair swirled about her head.
A sailboat.
Two lunatics in a sailboat were off the point of land. A cobalt-blue hull climbed out of one wave, pointing its bow to the sky, and then plunged down and buried its nose in the front of the next wave before rising again in a great arc of spray and green water. Huge, maroon sails snapped in the wind, loud enough to sound like a gunshot above the roaring surf.
Whoever the captain was, he and his buddy were crazy. They must both be male because no woman in her right mind would ever go out into a storm like this. But if they wanted to sail right into her picture, she wasn’t going to complain; it was a beautiful boat. At the perfect moment she snapped the photo then turned for the woods and the long trail home.
Copyright 2013 Matthew Lieber Buchman
Published by Buchman Bookworks
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form
without permission from the author.
Discover more by this author at: www.buchmanbookworks.com
Cover images:
Helicopter over Baghdad © U.S. Army | Flickr
Pakistani Chengdu J-7 © Michael B. Keller, U.S. Air Force [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
A young and sexy brunette woman on a foggy background © Maksim Shmeljov | Dreamstime.com
White House and the National Christmas Tree
© Robert Crow | Dreamstime.com
Man and Woman Couple In Romantic Embrace On Beach
© Darren Baker | Dreamstime.com
Red and Green Candy cane over white © Lucie Lang | Dreamstime.com (back cover)
Other works by this author:
Angelo’s Hearth
Where Dreams are Born
Where Dreams Reside
Maria’s Christmas Table
Where Dreams Unfold
Where Dreams Are Written
The Night Stalkers
The Night Is Mine
I Own the Dawn
Daniel’s Christmas
Wait Until Dark
Frank’s Independence Day
Peter’s Christmas
Take Over at Midnight
Light Up the Night
Christmas at Steel Beach
Bring On the Dusk
Target of the Heart
Target Lock on Love
Christmas at Peleliu Cove
Zachary’s Christmas
Firehawks
Pure Heat
Wildfire at Dawn
Full Blaze
Wildfire at Larch Creek
Wildfire on the Skagit
Hot Point
Delta Force
Target Engaged
Deities Anonymous
Cookbook from Hell: Reheated
Saviors 101
Thrillers
Swap Out!
One Chef!
Two Chef!
SF/F Titles
Nara
Monk’s Maze