It Happened One Night
- eBook
- Paperback
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
Sometimes love finds you when you least expect it. Lana Biel has always wanted to shake the dust of Vermont off her feet and see the world, one exotic country after another. But when a lighthearted spring fling changes her life forever, she turns to the one man whose strong shoulders can lighten any burden: her best friend, Eli Ward. Eli has always been there for Lana--after all, that's what best friends do. But Lana isn't the only one hiding something. Eli is keeping secrets of his own that threaten their relationship. Yet as summer turns to fall, new desires awaken between them, even as old fears tear them apart. Then, when another Vermont winter fills the valleys with snow, Eli and Lana are given the chance for an adventure greater than they ever dreamed possible...and a love that will last for all time.
Release date: November 1, 2009
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Print pages: 368
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Author updates
It Happened One Night
Lisa Dale
mountaintops, cathedrals, or under majestic skies. But instead, her whole future hung in the balance here—a place that until now had no significance whatsoever—the tiny cinderblock bathroom of the Wildflower Barn.
“Are you okay in there?” Eli asked through the door.
She stared with desperate focus at her Birkenstocks. She counted the number of forget-me-nots painted on the mirror’s edge,
and she thought of all the countless women who had done this before her. In ancient times, she’d learned, a woman who suspected
she was pregnant would have urinated on fistfuls of barley or wheat, and then she would have watched to see if the seeds grew
faster than normal. Lana had once found this idea to be beautiful—that pregnancy and plants could be so entwined. But it was
hard to get in touch with her inner earth mother when her pregnancy test was a sterile plastic stick and directions ten pages long.
She leaned her forehead on the wall. “Has it been three minutes?”
“Four.”
“I’m afraid to look.”
“Either way,” Eli said. “We’ll get through it.”
“I can’t drag you into this,” she said so softly she thought he wouldn’t hear.
“I’m right here with you. I want to be. I wouldn’t let you go through this alone.”
She touched the center of the door, glad he was just on the other side. The test was little more than a formality at this
point. And yet, she still clung to some small but entirely unfounded hope that the result would be negative. Her future hinged
on nothing but the presence or absence of a pretty pink line. A big red STOP sign would have been more apt.
“Lana.” She heard Eli’s voice through the door. “Come on. It’s time.”
She sighed and wiggled her toes, stalling. She thought: A million women have done this before—this worrying. A trillion women. Some woman just like her was probably doing it right now. But did every woman feel like she was the first? And entirely alone?
Her friend Charlotte once told her that in the Middle Ages an anxious woman could learn if she was pregnant by paying a prophet
to squint into a bowl of her pee. In the last century, a woman’s doctor would inject a rabbit with her urine’s hormones, then
check the animal’s ovaries for change. Today Lana had squatted over a small stick.
Why is it always about the pee? she thought.
Ages of nervous women alone in bathrooms, stalling the inevitable.
The moment had come; she raised her head and looked.
Two Months Earlier…
Dandelion: Taking its name from the French dent de lion (tooth of the lion), the dandelion is a survivor that can withstand even the worst treatment from fickle springtime weather.
Folklore says that if a maiden attempted to blow the seeds off the dandelion, the number of seeds that remained foretold the
number of children she would have.
May 9
Lana stood in the low field that sloped gently behind the Wildflower Barn, her face turned up toward the incredible, storm-mangled
sky. There was work to be done in the barn—a new shipment of seeds to catalog, price, and display—but Lana couldn’t bear the
thought of staying cooped up inside. The first thunderstorm of the spring had swept across the outskirts of Burlington, and
it left in its wake a sky that was wholly spectacular—thick purple clouds torn apart and edged in gold.
When she heard Karin’s footsteps treading softly behind her, she smiled to herself, glad for her sister’s company. “There
might be a rainbow,” she said, twirling the white head of a dandelion in her fingers.
“I hope you’re not planning on blowing those seeds near my newly tilled field,” Karin said.
Lana let her arm drop to her side. “Of course not.” The flower slipped from her fingers to the ground.
“You left these in the stockroom.” She handed Lana a thin stack of glossy colorful brochures. Lana recognized them—a tender
white orchid, a misty cloud forest, a gauzy waterfall, and a smiling guide. Last week she’d been daydreaming over the photographs
on a slow day at work, and she must have left them where Karin could see.
She should have been more careful.
For their entire lives, she and her sister had been a team. Despite their differences, hardship had forced them to move together
like a single unit, soldiers who fought back-to-back. But when Lana was just a first-year student in college ten years ago,
she’d realized that living in their mother’s hometown near Burlington, Vermont, had been Karin’s dream—not hers. Before Lana
settled down for good, she wanted to travel. To have an adventure. Costa Rica had always held a mysterious allure.
The problem was, she loved her sister far too much to leave anytime soon. She and Karin were each other’s only family. Karin
was rooted in Vermont, her heels dug in. And so Lana had made a promise to herself: Once Karin had a family of her own, then she could see the world. In the meantime, brochures and library books had to suffice.
Lana opened a pamphlet; one page showed a white boat on open water, its sail translucent in the apricot sun. The opposite
page offered the orange-pink burst of a blooming hibiscus, its long magenta stamen unfurled like an alien tongue. She closed
it and sighed. “Don’t look so worried, Kari. I’m not going anywhere just yet. I was only looking.”
“I hope you’re not sticking around because of me.”
“Not at all,” Lana said lightly. And she hoped Karin believed her. She stayed in Vermont out of love, and she had no interest
in making her sister feel bad.
Overhead, the clouds were twisting and roiling in blue, violet, and gold. Lana was convinced there would be a rainbow—a good
sign. Come on, she thought. Come on.
“When’s Eli getting back?” Karin asked.
“His flight comes in tomorrow afternoon at 3:12. You know this is the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other in ten
years?”
“I know,” Karin said, as if holding back a laugh. “You’ve said.”
“Oh, did I? Sorry.” Lana tapped her fingers against the side of her leg, twitching with pent-up energy. For the last eight
months, her best friend had been traveling to various conferences, conventions, and universities—though the bulk of his time
had been spent in Australia, where he was working on a large field study. Sometimes they’d been able to talk, but often they’d
been forced to go for weeks using e-mail alone.
“And look at you,” Karin went on. “You’re a mess. Where are the shoes we’d decided you’d wear to dinner?”
Lana looked down at her clunky brown sandals. “I like these better.”
“But where are the heels?”
“On the floor in my closet. Where they belong.”
Karin shook her head.
“What? My sandals are more comfortable,” Lana said. There was no sense in going into the truth: She didn’t like to get overly
dressed up when she had a date. It made her feel uncomfortable, as if she were masquerading in some way when she put on heels
and mascara. She knew she looked a little quirky and not entirely put-together, but she liked that about herself. She wanted
to be seen for who she was—translucent blonde eyelashes and all.
Karin sighed loudly, gazing at the churning sky, and Lana waited for the inevitable nagging to start. Why bother wearing such a pretty white sundress if you’re going to ruin it with ugly shoes? Or, How is he supposed to take you seriously if you don’t take yourself that way? But apparently Karin had bigger things on her mind than fussing over Lana’s love life. She grew quiet, withdrawing into herself.
Lana wished there was something she could do. Karin had been so unhappy for the last year. Everything that Karin wanted from
life was the opposite of what Lana wanted. They were so different it was hard to believe they were from the same womb. Karin
was short with their mother’s Abenaki coloring—a red-brown tinge to her hair, a warm glow to her skin, a strength in her wide
shoulders and limbs. But Lana had taken after their father’s side of the family; she was tall and willowy—almost always the
tallest woman in the room—with Nordic blond hair and the slightly prominent family nose. A person looking at a photograph
of them together would be likely to identify them not as sisters, but strangers.
“Well, I have work to do. I’m going back in.” Karin trudged up the wet hill toward the Barn, and Lana turned to watch her
go.
Suddenly a glimmer of color caught Lana’s eye, and there, high over the mountains, was a rainbow, the brightest Lana had ever
seen. It rocketed skyward before arcing gently and falling back down toward the earth. Heavens, she thought. No wonder God was so often depicted in clouds. “Look! Karin! Look!”
Karin stopped, turned.
“See it? Over those trees? Over there?”
“Yeah. Sure. It’s really great.”
Lana stopped pointing. Eli had told her about rainbows once—that a trick of optics meant that technically no two people saw
the same exact rainbow at the same time. Karin turned her back and started once again to walk away.
Sisters or strangers. She took a deep breath. Today was her twenty-ninth birthday. She had a date tonight. And Eli was coming
home tomorrow. She felt so much promise in the moment, as if she were fast on the heels of a breathtaking future, that it blazed before her, distant but in plain
sight.
She ran her fingers over the image of a white orchid in her hand, imagining the fleshy texture of a petal under her thumb.
Then she glanced once more at the rainbow, its brilliance spreading and diluting like watercolors in a rainstorm, and she
followed her sister back inside the Barn.
The woman smelled of tiger lilies, sweet but musky. He curled around her, pressed his face into the hollow of her shoulder.
Sheets slid along sheets. Skin along skin. Her hair floated like moonlight through his fingers, and he kissed her: throat,
sternum, navel, and down.
Of course Eli knew he was dreaming.
He was dozing lightly, awake enough to know he was asleep. This woman—he knew her. How many times had he dreamed of the turn of her wrist, the cinch of her waist, the sweet, hot secrets of her body?
When he woke from her, he never sighed and stretched and told himself God, what a great dream. Instead, she’d always left him twisted up and sweating and a little disoriented, as if he’d gone to sleep on one side of
the room but woke up on the other.
A faint click in the darkness pricked his consciousness.
He turned his face into the couch pillow, not ready to wake. The woman, she was making little sounds in the back of her throat,
driving him mad.
The door opened and shut—slammed—and his eyes blinked open. Gray flickering light from the television pooled in the dark room. His body felt tight and gnarled.
Where was he? Oh, right. Lana’s living room. Her birthday. He was waiting for her to come home.
He could feel that his cheeks were crimson, that the hair at the nape of his neck was damp with sweat, and he hoped his overheated
body would go back to normal by the time Lana got around to turning on the light. He took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts
and strength.
Over the last eight months, he’d imagined a hundred different ways that he could tell her his life-changing news. Sometimes
he would hold her hand and say, “I have something to tell you.” Sometimes he would confront her, take her by the shoulders
and say, “Enough is enough.” Sometimes he would tell her without saying anything at all—just by reaching out to her with his
gaze, by touching her face, by calling on the language that men and women had been using to say I love you since before civilization invented words.
But now, struck by how normal—how unromantic and entirely typical—it was for him to be dozing off on her couch, he felt suddenly
nervous. In eight months away from her, the longing that he’d thought was merely homesickness had turned out to be nothing
less astonishing than love—knotted up, terrifying, low-down, miraculous love.
And now the emotion choked him. He didn’t want to complicate their friendship and he didn’t want to risk being humiliated
if she rejected him—again. But there was no choice. He loved her. He had to tell her. All of his hope for the future dangled
from the fragile possibility that perhaps, deep down, she loved him too.
He took a deep breath, trying to shake the dream of her body from his waking mind. He waited for her to turn on the light.
Which would happen any second now…
Any second…
He waited. But no light came.
Only breathing. Then more. The metallic thump of car keys hitting the floor. A dropped purse. A zipper. And that—Eli knew
that sound too—a faint whimper, choked by a kiss.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Lana had come home. But not alone.
Not alone.
He heard a low chuckle, a man’s. He dropped his head back down on the pillow, too stunned to think. The man gave a low carnal
growl. And rage made Eli’s head throb and spin, a wire pulling tighter and tighter between his temples.
At last, after they’d stayed in the living room so long that he worried they wouldn’t leave, he heard Lana’s bedroom door
swing closed. The sound was a nail driven into his heart. He had a quick vision of himself kicking down the door and ordering
the man to get out. But he had no interest in histrionics that might make him look like an ass. He was already enough of a
fool—to regress into misplaced love.
Slowly, quietly, he got to his feet, groping in the semidarkness for his jeans, sliding them over his hips and buttoning the
fly, and then searching cautiously for his messenger bag. He didn’t bother putting on his shoes; his feet would make less
noise without them. His only saving grace was that no one would see him like this, sneaking out of his best friend’s house.
That was an embarrassment he could easily live without.
He was searching for the button on the remote that would turn off the television when he heard a door open and footsteps growing
near.
“Lana,” he said softly. Even before he could see her, he knew the sound of her bare feet in the hallway and the whisper of
her fingertips as she dragged them along the wall.
She jumped when she saw him. In the flickering light from the television, he saw her spine go steel-straight, and he heard
the sharp intake of her breath. “It’s me,” he said quickly, holding out his hands. “It’s Eli.”
She pressed her palm to her chest. “Eli! What are you doing here?”
“What am I…?” He was taken aback by the need to make an excuse to see her. “I got back to town early. I thought you’d be pleased.”
“Of course I’m pleased. I’m thrilled! The timing’s a little… uh…” Her voice trailed off. He could feel her looking at him. His heart
was breaking, and he was glad she couldn’t see him in the dark. “How was the trip?”
“Good,” he said casually. “Yesterday I went to a kegger at the Museum of Natural History. Some undergrad showed Neil deGrasse
Tyson her butt.”
“And people say astrophysicists are stuffy,” she said, laughing.
Warmth and gladness rushed over him. “It’s good to see you,” he said. He saw the moment she relaxed, the subtle loosening
of her shoulders, her hand falling from its place over her heart. In the shadows the white of her sundress glowed luminescent
against the light from the television. Her hair, shoulder-length and cut bluntly at the bottom, shone platinum like the moon.
“It’s good to see you too.” She glanced toward the flickering light from her old, boxy television. “I wondered how I could
have left the TV on all night. Glad to know I’m not losing my mind.”
“I fell asleep on the couch. I came to… to give you a present.”
“What is it?” she whispered, her eyes glittery with delight. She looked like she might hug him. But of course she would not.
“Hold on.” He went to his bag and rummaged around until he found her gift. It was a small box wrapped in recycled brown paper
and tied with a polka-dot shoelace. Simple, earthy, and a little silly. Just like Lana.
His hand brushed hers as she took the box, a contact so brief and slight it was barely contact at all, but she snatched her
arm back as if she’d been burned. He acted like he didn’t notice.
“Open it,” Eli said.
She did. The shoelace wound around her index finger as she untied the bow, and the brown paper opened like a fortune cookie.
A small purple box was inside, its hinges creaking as she lifted the lid and saw a large pendant hung from a black leather
thong. It caught the bluish light of the television and gleamed.
“Oh, my… Is it…?”
Eli took out the pendant and laid it on his palm. The gnarly black stone seemed liquid in the shadows, otherworldly and vaguely
powerful. “It’s from the Sikhote-Alin’ Mountains. A fall in Russia, 1947. It reminded me of you.”
“You got this on the trip when you stayed with those old KGB guys?”
“Yeah. The ones with the pet goat…”
She snatched the pendant back from him. She hung it around her neck and covered it with her hand. “I love it. It’s perfect.
Thank you.”
For a moment Eli could only look into her eyes, rapt. She was beautiful, any man could see that. But it was more than beauty
that held him so tightly he couldn’t look away. It was her. Lana. The sheer rightness of standing here with her after so long. He wanted to draw her to him and hold her. To tell her
how glad he was to see her again. How he’d spent the past three days in a kind of giddy haze because he knew he’d be home
soon. How he’d realized something that made his heart want to leap and cower at the same time.
But there was no way to tell her. Not in words.
He knew he was staring. He saw her face change, tenderness slipping into a quiet disbelief, as if she’d heard what he was
thinking and didn’t know what to make of it. They were standing so close that he could smell her floral perfume, and beneath
that, the scent of her warm skin. She ran her hands up the sides of her naked arms as if to fight a chill, and the soft brushing
sound was amplified to excruciating loudness in his mind.
“Lana…” Eli could only stare, grappling with the urge to kiss her. He wanted his hands on her face, in her hair. He leaned
toward her, a fraction of an inch. If they’d been standing across the room from each other, the exact same gesture would have
meant nothing. But this close, where smell and sound were so heightened, his small, almost imperceptible movement caused shock
to flash across her face, as if he’d told her he wanted to make love on the floor.
She laughed a little nervously, stepped back, and frowned.
“Lana?” A man’s voice cut through the moment, breaking the connection between them, and Lana’s gaze darted down the darkened
hallway, panic showing on her face. Quickly, she reached out and flipped on the overhead light, blinding both of them. By
the time Lana’s date came into the room, Eli had grabbed his bag and was heading toward the door.
“What’s going on?” the man said.
Eli paused, caught. Anger and humiliation gripped his gut.
Lana cleared her throat. “Ron, this is Eli. Eli, Ron. Eli just stopped by to give me my birthday present.”
“Right, I’ve heard a lot about you,” Ron said, smiling. His white dress shirt hung open like the flaps of a tent, and his
hair fell to his shoulders in dusty brown corkscrews. He was tall and thick, and he had a strong nose with a bump at the bridge.
On the surface his smile appeared genuine. But Eli could see what Lana could not—the subtle, private menace that passed between
men in moments like this, when a beautiful woman stood exactly between them. “You’re the meteor hunter. Crazy hobby you’ve
got.”
“Actually, it’s meteorites. And it’s a job, not a hobby.”
“But I thought you were a teacher,” Ron said.
“That too.” Eli adjusted the weight of the bag on his shoulder. “And what do you do?”
“Mountain biker. Professional.”
“Ah,” Eli said. “I should probably go.”
Lana crossed the room to stand before him. Her eyes were clear blue—almost aqua—and he didn’t miss the message within them,
meant only for him: I’m sorry.
He blew her off. The last thing he needed was her pity. From the look on her face, she hadn’t felt that spark, that buzzing
of attraction that was more than simple lust. What an idiot he was. “All right. Well, I’m outta here,” he said cheerfully,
pulling at the door handle. “You two kids behave yourselves.”
“Won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” Ron said.
Eli didn’t smile. Poor guy, he thought to himself. Poor, stupid guy. He gave it two months—three tops—before Lana got bored.
“Happy birthday, Lana.”
She glanced down, suddenly shy. Then he closed the door, closed them in and away, and looked up at the stars, which were the
same stars they’d always been, the same stars he’d been studying for his entire adult life. Only tonight they seemed much,
much farther away.
Twenty minutes after she’d closed up the Barn for the night, Karin Palson reached her house in the quiet outer suburbs of
Burlington. She opened the front door of her split-level and walked up the carpeted stairs to the living room. The small television
was dark on its stand and the lampshades were filled with shadows. Apparently her husband was working late at the insurance
office again. The plastic shopping bag in her hand, containing just one small book, felt heavy enough to pull her arm from
its socket.
She sat down on the couch, not taking off her denim jacket, not removing her purse from her shoulder, not turning on a light.
She dropped the bag beside her. The house was as empty and dark as her heart.
Karin had never been the type to put any stock in folklore. The idea that her menstrual cycles followed the pattern of the
moon was a lovely idea, but as far as she could tell, it was bunk. When a woman from her book club said she’d conceived a
son by having her husband wear socks while they did it doggie-style, Karin just laughed. And when Lana proclaimed that the
reason Karin couldn’t get pregnant was because she “wanted it too badly,” she thought her sister was well-intentioned, but
utterly wrong.
And yet for all her distrust of old wives’ tales and rumors, she kept listening. She listened to her doctors, other women,
books, and the Internet. She was familiar with every technique and method of family planning: the calendar-rhythm method,
the standard days method, the sympto-thermal method, the Billings ovulation method. So many methodical methods. Enough to
drive a woman insane. She hoped that if she just kept listening, listening hard to everything, not missing a single bit of
information, then she would find the answer she was looking for.
Unfortunately, while she was lying under the furious white lights in the exam room and trying not to shiver, her doctor told
her the bad news. She wasn’t necessarily infertile, but she wasn’t necessarily fertile either.
In other words, he had no idea what was wrong. Technically everything checked out fine. From the way he’d stuttered and frowned,
Karin could tell he’d felt pressured to come up with a pinpoint diagnosis, a reason for their broken hearts. There was a chance,
he’d explained, that Karin and her husband were two perfectly healthy and fertile people, as unique individuals. But together
their bodies might not be a compatible match.
This was the answer Karin had been dreading. Science had put a man on the moon, had developed “food” that had no calories,
and had discovered a vaccine for cervical cancer. But in the most primal and important process of human life, they just didn’t
know enough to tell her what exactly was wrong or how to fix it.
So other than God—who was keeping mum on the subject—who could help?
She took the book out of the shopping bag and held it in two hands. Though she could barely see the cover in the darkness,
it had been burned onto her retinas: It showed a woman meditating, surrounded by floating orbs of blue-green light. It was
little more than a glorified pamphlet, and in her misery and desperation, she’d read much of it by the light of a streetlamp
in the bookstore parking lot. The author believed that if a couple was having trouble conceiving, it was possible to talk
to the spirit of an unborn child—to reason with it and coax it into life.
The book also said that some babies wouldn’t come into a home that wasn’t in harmony. Karin had banged her fist on the dashboard
so hard that she’d almost made a dent. Wasn’t her house in harmony? How could she and Gene be more in harmony than they already
were? Hadn’t they shown that they were ready?
Now, sitting alone in the living room with the book, she wished she hadn’t bought it. She and her husband tried hard to be
good Christians. They weren’t perfect, but they went to church every Sunday, said grace before meals, and prayed at night.
They’d managed to abstain from sex until two months before their wedding (the priest had chuckled when Karin confessed). And
they’d never used condoms or birth control, only fertility awareness, which had been taught to them by a nun who called Gene’s
sperm “the swim team.”
She and Gene both believed that if God wanted them to have a baby, they would have one the natural way. No hormones, no injections,
no sperm banks, no surgeries, no adoption agencies. And no talking to spirit babies. She’d probably have to confess that too.
She heard the front door open. Quickly she bent and slipped both the book and the bag under the cushions of the sofa. At first
Gene didn’t see her. But she saw him, silhouetted in the light from the porch as he climbed the short flight of stairs to
the living room. Though he was ten years older than her at forty-three, he still had a very strong look about him. She loved
his thinning red-blond hair, his big shoulders and hefty build that she’d always believed were vestiges of Highland kings.
He saw her when he reached the . . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...