Love and Dreams: The Coltrane Saga, Book 6 by Patricia Hagan Page B

inches with the centerboard up. It was one of the finest crafts afloat, furnished with great luxury, and certainly what was expected to be owned and sailed by a member of the prestigious Stevens family, after whom the Stevens Institute of Technology was named, however distant the bloodline. As far back as the early 1800s, John C. and brother Edwin A. Stevens were the first prominent yachtsmen in the New York area.
    The Marnia was equipped with a new internal-combustion engine, still experimental, but Bryan never worried about sailing from New York to his private island near Bermuda. After all, he was no amateur yachtsman, had taken part in a transatlantic race from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to England with three American schooners in ’86, seven years before, when he was only twenty-eight.
    Bryan’s father, Lawrence Stevens, had been a powerful real estate tycoon in New York, and owned valuable land in the city as well as prime sections along the banks of the Hudson River. With investments in gold, silver, railroads, cattle, and, of course, shipping interests, the elder Stevens had left his only son an impressively rich man. Trusted, qualified underlings oversaw the family fortune, leaving Bryan with little to do in life except enjoy it, by pursuing his love of ships and the sea…and the red-haired, green-eyed angel for whom his yacht was named—Marnia.
    Bryan had met Marnia when she began work as a servant for his family. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants; her father was caretaker for the Stevens’ estate. Marnia was beautiful, captivating Bryan from the very first time he laid eyes on her—the summer he was nineteen and she a mere lassie of only fifteen. His parents, particularly his mother, had frowned upon his infatuation with a common servant girl, but Bryan turned a deaf ear to their disapproval. They eloped a year after they met, never knew an unhappy moment or exchanged an unkind word. Their marriage, observed by all who knew them, was surely what God had in mind when He created the hallowed bond between man and woman.
    They were ecstatic, deliriously in love, could not imagine a more perfect life—till the day Bryan Patrick Stevens was born, with thick golden hair like his father and the promise of his mother’s Irish eyes. From then on, Bryan asked himself each morning if such a happy life was only a dream, then gave thanks each night that it was all quite real.
    But now he stared out on that late summer day, not seeing the ocean, nor the sky; not feeling the sun, nor the wind. The luster of joy was gone from his eyes. They were flat, as though unseeing, unfeeling; as dead as his heart.
    Marnia had exclaimed to anyone who would listen that she thought Bryan Stevens was the handsomest man who ever lived. He was tall, slender, broad-shouldered. He had thick, curling blond hair, and robins’ eggs were no bluer than his eyes. He had a firm jawline, a smooth complexion, a dimple in his cheek, and a beautiful Roman nose that gave him a deliciously sensuous appeal to women.
    This day, however, at this hour, Bryan Stevens was a broken man, void of spirit and the will to live.
    He lowered his eyes to the blue-green water, choppy and rough as the ocean always seemed to be, and thought how it might be best to just topple forward and sink to the bottom. Perhaps there he could find peace from the horror his world had become. But not yet. The time was not right.
    At ship’s aft, two of the crew of four stood coiling ropes as they watched their skipper. One of the men was Walt Gibbons, a grizzled old sailor who’d sailed with Bryan’s father and had known Bryan since birth. Worriedly, he told his companion, “He’s gonna do somethin’. I just feel it in my bones. He hasn’t spoke a word, not a word, mind you, since we left New York day ’fore yesterday. Just stands there starin’ all day, then goes below to drink and cry.”
    Monroe Burton was enjoying a mouthful of tobacco, and he paused to spit over the