Book Summary: Lone Eagle by Danielle Steel

LONE EAGLE BY DANIELLE STEEL
Book details:
Paperback, 480 pages
Published January 29th 2002 by Dell (first published 2001)
Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press

It takes courage to let someone you love fly free.

Prologue

The phone call came on a snowy December afternoon. Kate was certain it was Joe, her soulmate since they’d met thirty-four years before – but what she got was the call she had never wanted. It was a Joe’s new assistant, told her the most frightening news in her entire life. It was like the sound of time running out, the feeling of falling through space into a bottomless abyss. A life without Joe was unimaginable, unthinkable. Kate had felt him in her bones. Over the years, he had become part of her soul. He was a major part of her, and had been for a long time. There had been clashes over the years, and explosions, peaks and valleys, mountaintops, sunrises and sunsets, and peaceful times. He had been Everest to her. The Ultimate. The place she had always wanted to reach. From the every beginning, he had been her dream. It took her mind back to the moment when she and Joe first met, when she was just seventeen and he was young, powerful, dazzling and different from any man she’d ever known.

Chapter 1

Kate Jamison saw Joe for the first time at a debutante ball in December of 1940. It was the most beautiful party she’d ever been to. In the elegant reception rooms and exquisite mirrored ballroon when she first time saw him. She didn’t know why, but there was something mesmerizing about him. He was noticeable tall, had broad shoulders, sandy blond hair, and a chiseled face. He sensed her watching him and with a serious air, their eyes met. He had never seen anyone like her, as beautiful as vibrant. There was something fascinating about her, like standing next to something very bright at very close range. He stopped moving for a minute, as they watched each other, and when she smiled at him, their first conversation flow through the air. Joe talked about his involvement in aviation who do fly to test planes and design them for high speed and endurance. Kate talked about her excitement to go to Radcliffe University in few months. They talked about war in Europe. Kate seventeen and Joe twenty-nine. It was flustered to find them had been sitting together for nearly two hours and matter their age range, but Joe thought that she seemed perfectly at ease talking to either women and men. For Kate, there was something very rare and remarkable about him. His power, his strength, his gentleness, even his awkwardness had touched her in a way no one else ever had. She knew at that very moment, without question, that he had taken some part of her with him and what was troubling her that she had no idea if she’d ever see him again.

Chapter 2

After eight months didn’t hear from Joe Allbright, she met him again in a barbeque beach party whose Kate and her parents usually attended every year. It was the last weekend of the summer, the Labor Day weekend. They obviously looked happy to see each other and instantly rapport between them with long conversation as they walked side by side down the beach for a while, with nearly full moon shining brightly on the water. As the conversation run through so honest and open, Joe told about how he like flying so much and how it can get him so high above the world no one could touch him even the thought about marriage and having a kids. He like quite and simple life, and freedom. Then she realized that Joe dedicated his life to flying, he was off in his own world, too far from hers. While Joe actually got into her and wanted her more than a great friend. But he wasn’t going to let that happen and give in to his feelings. He was in no position to do that, he never be there. He was too busy flying. And in his eyes, she deserved better than he had to give. With all her ease and beauty, she seemed far out of his reach.

Chapter 3

Kate accepted in Radcliffe University in Boston and Joe won races from time to time. He had broken several records in California and had won acclaim for the latest plane he’s designed with his mentor. In some ways, they started exchange letters from time to time talked about what had happened in their life. Then Joe joined thanksgiving dinner with Kate’s family in Boston. Joe and Kate were almost sure it was all a friendship type. Kate’s mother, Elizabeth knew it was not. They were attracted to each other. She started concern about that. There was something about him that frightened her. She was willing to believe he was a good man but his life full of danger and risk, which wasn’t what she wanted for Kate. Elizabeth was the only one who realized-even Kate and Joe wasn’t, they fell in love to each other. Her concerned was already too late. All Elizabeth could do now was pray.

Chapter 4

Something terrible had happened while Joe was back to California for Aviation thing and Kate just started her college. Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japanese. A number of ships were sunk and a lot of men were killed and wounded. The President announced to the nation that America had officially entered the war in Europe. An entire nation was as shocked as they were. In cities and towns and backwaters everywhere, young man were facing the fact that they had to leave their families, dropping anything in midstream and going to war to defend their country. Joe flew east to met Kate before he had to fulfill his duty to be flying fighter pilot. There’s always a chance that he might not come back, and he wanted to meet Kate. Kate couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to Joe. Their last minute together were excruciatingly painful. She told him she loved him. He had try so hard to stem the tides for their love but he couldn’t bear it anymore. He told her he loved her too. This might be their last chance, for a very long time at least, or worse yet, the only one they’d ever have.

Chapter 5 and 6

After ten months of his duty, Joe was flying constant missions, and the one he flew over Gibraltar made history. He and three other Spitfire pilots shot down twelve German Stuka dive-bombers. The mission had been a huge success. Joe back to Washington to receive the United States Distinguished Flying Crossmedal from the president and this time Kate had ample warning of his return. Kate took the train from Boston to Washington and went to the ceremony at the White House with him.
He looked every bit as happy as she did and they continue to took long conversations with her in his hotel room after ceremony. When she wanted to comeback, Joe kissed her. It was a long, slow kiss filled with all the sadness and longing they had both felt for so long, and the joy they both felt to be together. They couldn’t get enough of each other. Kate had never felt as overwhelmed by desire for him, nor had Joe. She wasn’t even thinking to started the pulse even further. They had been so restrained for so long, and this time they let it free. They found each other and soared to new heights. New places had opened in their life together, and new feelings had been born. From that moment she knew that he owned her. Her soul and the deepest part of her were his.

Chapter 7

Joe back to fly his missions again. Kate missed him so unbearably, she couldn’t even imagine waiting months or years to see him again, or worse, if something terrible happened. She was just no longer just a girl in love with a man. She was part of a larger whole, and she felt as though she could not function without him. Before she aware what happened, she was pregnant. She didn’t want to tell her parents and she couldn’t make herself call him too. She had told no one. She knew it would ruin everything if she had a baby. She had almost get an abortion but she decided to go ahead with the pregnancy. She was almost three months pregnant when she lost it because of accident. No one had any idea what had happened to her. And as the weeks went by, she quietly put it behind her. She never told Joe.

Chapter 8

After her miscarriage, and a few months to recovered, Kate was busy with school again until one day Joe appeared in the house where she lived during college. They had so little time before Joe should back and they didn’t waste it even just a second. They were living each day as though it were going to be their last. And it was. After few months of their time, Kate heard a dreaded news that Joe was shot down over Germany. His plane go down and they have a rough idea of where he landed. He may have been killed or he may have been captured by the Germans. No one had heard anything about him since nine months he was shot down, both Washington and the RAF had finally agreed that he was dead. She was like a disembodied soul with no spirits of life but she refused to let hope die. She still waited for Joe. She hadn’t even been on a date since he died. Several of the boys had asked her out, but she turned all of them down. Her mind and heart were too full of Joe.

Chapter 9

After several years seems endlessly, the war was over. Finished. Done. Everyone cheered and embraced each other. There were tears in her eyes knew that Joe didn’t make it. Until the day when she heard the news from her parents. Washington and the RAF found Joe. He was alive. He was just shot down just west of Berlin, he had a problem with his parachute and badly damage both his legs. He had been hidden by a farmer at first but then had simply hung on to life while in prison, until he was found. She was crying so hard when she met him. He was in worse condition but she was extremely grateful that he was alive.

Chapter 10 and 11

Joe spent two months in the hospital to recovered and one second after that he thrown himself to airplane again. His mentor Charles Lindbergh wanted to start a company in New Jersey with him, to design and build the most advanced airplanes. They not only wanted Joe to design and test the planes but to run the whole operation. They wanted to put up the money. He would be the brains. He got fifty percent ownership.
But by the time he was running the job and he worked very much, Kate’s mother Elizabeth couldn’t help her concerned and pressed him to marry her. It had been 5 years since Kate and Joe met. Kate had waited during war until it was over and loved him for years, long enough, but they not even engaged. For Joe, marriage still didn’t make sense. He didn’t want to get married until he had time for her. Marrying her was exactly what he feared most. A leash. A cage. A trap. No matter how much he loved her, the marriage itself was an enormous threat to him. More than anyone could ever suspected.

Chapter 12

She had been patiently waiting for the right time for him, for two years after he’d come home. And she had suddenly understand that there was no right time. Marriage in no longer an option for him. He was destroying everything she’d hoped for, and all her dreams with him. It was the business he was in love with now. And always the planes. Joe also believed that marriage couldn’t changed everything, all the matter was they love and have each other. The piece of marriage license meant nothing to him but it meant a lot to her. And she was done. She was twenty-four-year-old girl, she wanted babies and a husband and a real life while he didn’t want the same thing like she did.

Chapter 13

Kate’s parents could see how much pain she was in when she had come home from living with Joe in New Jersey. Kate spent three months going for walks and crying thinking about Joe. He never called her after their broke up. She thought of calling Joe a thousand times and she desperately wanted to, but she didn’t.  She did anything to forget him but everything reminded her of him. Talking, living, moving, even eating and cooking. He had become part of her essence.
She never went on dates until Andy. He had crush for her years before when Andy still in law school and it still seems wasn’t over. For the next six weeks, they saw a lot of each other. Dinners, movies, parties. He had more time for her. All she wanted with Joe. By the time they were together, Andy proposed Kate and she accepted it. Kate like him enormously. She realized that she loved him. Not as she had Joe. She never would have that again. This was different. It was comfortable and easy and fun, it had none of the fire and passion and irresistible pull she felt toward Joe. But her mother insisted that she made the right decision to marry Andy.

Chapter 14

Kate and Andy married in June, four month after Andy’s proposed. Kate never had so much excitement in her life. She knew she’d have a good life with Andy, he was a kind man and treated Kate well. They had baby Reed nine months after that. She was happy, loved, married, had a great husband and handsome baby. She felt as though she had waited an entire lifetime for this time in her life.

Chapter 15

Reed was two and half months old when Andy told Kate he was being invited to participate in the war crimes trials as a commission in German. He had to be there three or four months. While Andy was in German, Kate made an effort to keep herself busy with the baby to not feeling lonely without Andy and she found blue eyes of Joe Allbright in one afternoon. He still looked incredibly charming. They hadn’t seen each other in nearly three years, but they looked no different. There was the same electricity between them as he looked into her eyes. She had the same odd clutch in the pit of her stomach. He had always had that effect on her. She wondered if those feeling ever went away.

Chapter 16

Joe took Kate to lunch a few times, went to hers apartment and even played with Reed. she had uncomfortable feeling about it, as tough she had betrayed Andy but Joe convinced that it was a friend thing. She knew she couldn’t be just a friends with him because she still love him. She was beginning to feel overwhelmed by him, he was so strong  and so powerful and he wanted to marry Kate after all this time. He was working too hard that time, wasn’t thinking about Kate but only himself. He felt so inadequate and so guilty that Kate loved him so damn much. He never called her because he knew she was right to left him. But now he wanted Kate back. It touched her heart that what he was saying but it would never worked. She still wanted a regular life with a husband and a baby while he needed power, success, excitement and airplanes.
Deep in the depth of her she didn’t want to lose him again, she didn’t want to have left him, she didn’t want to hurt Andy or their son but the force of what tied them to each other was stronger than they were. And she gave in to the feeling. She let it ran deeper became an affair.

Chapter 17

Joe and Kate enjoyed the time they had. They still had time to stop before they destroyed everything and everyone. But she couldn’t bear losing him again. It was already too late. When Andy finally home, he knew something happened while he was gone. Kate tried to told him about her affair, she wanted a divorced. But he didn’t let her. He seemed didn’t want to heard anything from Kate. Andy had instantly surmised it was Joe. He didn’t wait any longer and showed up in Joe’s office and manipulated Joe. He told Joe that Kate was a dependant women who needed someone available all the time and it wasn’t Joe. He told Joe how desperate and insecure she was, how unstable that she had attempted suicide when she felt abandoned by Joe before. It terriefied Joe he’d drive her to it again if he ever did anything wrong or hurt her again. But he didn’t know it was all lies. Andy was playing all Joe’s worst fears like keys on a piano. And Joe did what he knew best. He ran. He had lost her again.

Chapter 18

The atmosphere between Andy and Kate was tense for months. They barely spoke to each other. Eventhough Kate didn’t know what had happened between Joe and Andy in Joe’s office. All she knew was Joe told her that he couldn’t drag her out of marriage and Andy kept her prisoner, he had forced her to stay with him and blackmailed her with her son. But no matter how long he kept her prisoner, he would never change what was in her heart. He could force Kate to stay married to him, but he couldn’t force her to make love. Their marriage was an empty shell until one night when they were drunk in New Year’s Eve party, they made love again. But the next morning, she was profoundly upset what had happened the night before. It was lust. She was so lonely, the champagne had unleashed a torrent of desire that had gone for too long. The next month she realized he got her pregnant. He hoped it would bring them closer to each other, but it drove them further apart. He couldn’t live that way anymore.  He had made the decision to moving out after the baby comes. He gave up. He knew now that he could no longer keep her like a bird in a cage. She was married to a man, she felt nothing for. Kate had never been Andy’s. She was always Joe’s.
Called it destiny, when Stephanie -Kate’s second child- was five weeks old, she saw Joe again at the mall. She just took Reed to buy a Christmas tree and there he was. Their paths crossed and then disappeared, separately, and then suddenly crossed again. She told Joe she was divorced. They knew, just standing in there that nothing had changed. And it seems the right time for both of them. They won’t waited twelve years again to married. Now she was Mrs. Joe Albright at last.

Chapter 19

Kate and the children moved into Joe’s apartment a month after they got married. Their marriage were blissful and exactly what they’d each expected to be. They talked about a lot of thing. Even talked about Andy’s betrayal of them both. It was horrifying to Kate, worse yet to thing that Joe had believed what he’d said, and in using Joe’s guilts and frailties so brilliantly. It had made her hate Andy more because he had nearly cost her her happiness with Joe. It was a miracle that they had found each other again.
Months after they got married, Joe came back to his business again. He was doing a million things at once. He wanted handle everything because he was better than anyone else. He didn’t want to risk having someone else destroy what he’d built. But it had been very hard for Kate. She went to dinner parties without him, spent thanksgiving and even Christmast without him. Went to sleep alone at night and had to explain to people who wanted to see them that her husband wouldn’t be there. She needed him, and he was hard to find. She was disappointed but when he finally home, the look in his eyes instantly melted her heart. Joe was irresistible to her, and always had been.

Chapter 20

By the time Kate and Joe had been married a year, at the beginning of 1954, they had settled into a routine of his being away much of the time, and she was at home with the children. She started doing something to keep occupied  while he was gone. On October, he was home for most of that year, which was rare for him. He seemed in such a good mood when Kate brought up sensitive topics. She wanted another baby. But he looked annoyed that she’d even brought up the subject. He didn’t want kids. But she was pregnant all the way. The doctor thought she was growing so fast that it might be twins. She didn’t had an abortion as he had wished her to, but he loved her so much so he had decided to let her have the babies, if it meant so much to her.

Chapter 21

Joe had never seen Kate during any of her pregnancies, and he was uneasy at times being with her. He was always worried that she’d faint, didn’t feel well, or might get hurt. He didn’t want her to drive, scolded her when she danced, and didn’t think she should swim. He was always worried with everything even though sometimes he was miles away from Kate. Kate was five months pregnant, and she was felt fine when she drove to Andy’s home – his ex husband, and supposed to deliver Reed to there. When she was on the way back after delivered Reed to his dad, she got an accident. Joe was in Madrid when he heard the news. She had had a serious concussion and been in coma for five days. She was barely alive, but she’d lost the babies.

Chapter 22

She was so upset when she realized she’d lost the twins. Even after a long recovery, she came home from the hospital with tired and depressed. All she did was cry. It felt like she was not Kate, the one he had married. It was as though the bright light he had always seen shining from her soul had gone out. He had no idea what to do for her, she hardly talked to him, seldom spoke, was completely disinterested in everything he said. It was as though she blamed him to not being there when she got an accident, and the lost twins. Joe tried to build her spirit again and again. But she was lost somewhere. He knew she was upset about the twins, but she was killing him. And the worst part was that she wanted him desperately, needed him to make it better for her, but she was so lost in her own miseries, she didn’t know how to reach out to him. He was tired with everything he knew for months to cheered her up. He couldn’t take it anymore. It was too hard being with her so he took every trip he could. He escaped with his planes and his business again. All they did was argue when he called home and they felt like strangers every time he came home. The more he stayed away, the worse Kate got. And it made him more guilty. They couldn’t find each other anymore. So they stopped. It was not like they stopped loving each other. She was always loved him enormously, so did he. She just had had enough of his being gone, and he had had enough of hearing complaints from her, and being made to feel guilty. In the end, it was easier for him to leaving Kate, to be alone and on his own.

Chapter 23

All Kate could think about was what she had lost when he left, and for months her own panic grew worse. She cried herself to sleep at night, and loneliness she felt was overpowering. But as the months drifted by, she slowly found her feet again. It was slow, arduous winding path up a mountainside toward maturity and growth. And as she climbed the mountain day by day, she grew strong. Her children were the first to see the change in her, she laughed more often and cried less easily. It had been nearly a year and Joe called to see how they were, then he heard something different in her voice. Joe wanted to see the kids at first, but Joe and Kate ended up seeing each other more often. It was all different. It was no longer Kate who terrified and desperate about being alone. She already understood that the more she kept grabbing at him, the more he wanted to run away. She was no longer hunger or guilt or pain or need, but warmth and peace with him and herself. And after a long time or probably for the first time since they’d met, Joe felt safe with her. They had never stopped loving each other. This time, it worked, and felt like a miracle to them. They were happy together, happier than they had ever been. They had quitly canceled the divorce as soon as he moved back in. The strom had raged, and the house they had built stood strong. One final, final chance, and there was no doubt in either of their minds, right to the end, that they had won. They had found not only love, but peace.

Epilogue 

Joe’s funeral had all the pomp and circumstance that was due to him. Kate had put it together in every detail. It was her final gift to him. As she stepped in to the funeral, she felt panic begin to clutch her soul. What would she do now with the rest of her life? What would she survive without him? Thirty four years time they’d shared seems hard to get rid of. There would never be anyone in her life like Joe. He had taught her all of life’s important lessons, healed all her wounds, as she had healed his. He had touched deep into her soul. He had taught her not only about love, but about freedom and letting go. And this was his final freedom, his last flight away from her. He would fly, as he always had, in his own skies. She had to let him go again. But this time, she had learned just how to do it for him. How to stand back. How to let him be. How to love him. When she loved him most, she had set him free, and eventually he had always come home. She knew without question that he would always love her, just as she would always love him.

THE END