Unfinished Business

Now he was just another guy closing in on thirty-five. He checked his watch to see how much longer he’d have to stick with this group before he could escape to their hotel down the street and the decently comfortable bed waiting for him there without having to cart along more than his share of ridicule for being an old party pooper.

The three other guys at the table— Paul, Wallace Mitchell and Tristan Overfelt—had hounded him by e-mail until he’d finally agreed to come this weekend. Culley had nearly backed out at the last minute—there would have been plenty of excuses that held water—but even he had thought it might be good for him to try to start being sociable again.

“This next round has your name on it, Culley.” Tristan helped the hovering waiter pass around the drinks from the tray in his hand, then threw the check across the table to Culley. He pulled a fifty out of his wallet and handed that and the bill back to the waiter who nodded and moved on.

Another hour passed during which they waded through some of their more memorable med-school experiences: the day Paul had passed out when they’d delivered their first baby (he still swore on his mother’s Bible that he’d had a virus; he was an OBGYN, for heaven’s sake, he had a reputation to uphold). The time Wallace had spent their rent money on tickets to an AC/DC concert, and they’d gotten thrown out of their apartment, spending the rest of the semester living out of their cars.

And there was the usual guy stuff. Bad dirty jokes. Boasts from the still-married guys about how their wives wanted to have sex five nights a week, none of which any of them believed. Everybody except Culley ordered another cigar, stage-smokers all. They didn’t actually like smoking them; they just liked the way they looked pretending to smoke them.

“Now there’s one I’d give it all up for.”

Culley glanced at Paul who was doing a dead-on imitation of a balding, sex-deprived, turned-loose-for-the-weekend husband who’d just caught a glimpse of what he’d been missing. His tongue was practically hanging out.

A look at the door revealed why.

She was a knockout. Even Culley, disinterested as he was, would admit that. And he’d barely noticed the fifteen women Paul had pointed out before her. With a seven-year-old daughter, dating just wasn’t worth the complications it inevitably created. He hadn’t been with a woman in—

He didn’t want to think about how long that had been.

Wallace and Tristan were busy agreeing with Paul that the breasts were real. The figure-defining black dress certainly gave ample evidence on which to base their conclusions. A low dip at the front of the dress revealed a vee of cleavage. Something inside him stirred, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt the itch of physical need for a woman.

His gaze went to her face. She didn’t have the expectant expression of a beautiful woman meeting a date or a husband. There was sadness there, disappointment of some kind.

He had a ridiculous urge to ask her if she was alone.

She followed the maitre d’ across the floor, winding through the busy bar past their table.

There was something awfully familiar about her. And then recognition jolted through him. It couldn’t be. No way.

Paul, Wallace and Tristan stared like three men who’d spent the last six months at sea. Culley stared, too, but now for a different reason altogether.

Addy.

Addy!

The woman whose breasts he and his friends had been assessing with clinical horniness was Addy Taylor.

Culley got up from the table as if puppet strings pulled him out of the chair one limb at a time.

“You’re not going over there, are you?” Paul laughed. “We know you’re probably short on goddesses down there in Podunk, Virginia, but this would be ballsy even for the Culley of old.”

“I know her,” Culley said.

“No way,” came back the chorus of three.

“And we thought things had changed. You still get all the hot chicks,” Paul grumbled.

Culley tamped his friend down with a look of disapproval. “I’m just going over to say hi to an old friend.”

“How do you know her?” Tristan piped up, suspicion drawing his brows together.

“We kind of grew up together. She married a friend of mine from high school.”

“Oh, yeah, Mark—” Paul searched for a last name.

“Pierce,” Culley finished for him.

“So where is he? If she were mine, I sure wouldn’t be turning her loose in the likes of this city.”

Culley shook his head. “You always did hold the reins way too tight, Evans. Don’t you know that just makes them want to run faster?”

Paul frowned while Tristan and Wallace laughed, their hoots ripened by the Scotch they’d been drinking like Gatorade.

Culley headed across the room on the crest of their still rumbling laughter. Six paces into it, an extended family of butterflies had taken up residence beside the campfire still smoldering in his stomach. How long had it been since he’d seen Addy? Years. His brain couldn’t seem to wrap itself around a number, but he knew it had been shortly after Mark and Addy had gotten married, definitely not since Mark had stopped keeping in touch, quit returning Culley’s phone calls.

Just a few feet from her table now, he was struck again by the differences in her. He remembered her in her wedding dress, how perfect and…virginal she had looked that day.

He remembered how envy had nearly eaten a hole in him.

The woman sitting at the table in front of him did not look virginal.

She looked…hot. Paul’s word, but appropriate here.

She glanced up then, cutting short his visual assessment.

“Hello, Addy,” he said, his voice sounding like it needed to go home and come back after it had gotten some more practice.

The surprise on her face fit every cliché ever used to describe it. “Culley?”

“Small world, huh?” He tried for a smile, but found it had apparently unionized with his voice, and they were both on strike.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, one hand fluttering to her throat.

“Ah, conference, with those guys,” he said, hitching a thumb back toward his table. He didn’t dare look around; his three friends had lost any nuances of subtle behavior several jiggers ago. “How about you?”

She cleared her throat, looked down, then, “Just here for the night, actually. I’ve been working in the city this week.”

Culley knew about the divorce. His mother had kept him apprised of the details, sparse as they were, despite his reluctance to hear them.

There had been plenty of times over the years when he’d thought about picking up the phone and calling Addy. She’d been his friend first, after all. But her marriage to Mark had shifted the balance of their relationship, redefined it. And then there had been that last, awful scene between Mark and him the night of their wedding. Nothing had been the same after that.

Even after he’d heard about their divorce, it felt as if too much time had passed for him to contact Addy, or maybe he still felt guilty for protecting Mark all those years ago.

“Is someone joining you?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Mind if I do?”

She met his gaze, held it in silence long enough to make him wonder if she might turn him down, then said, “I’d like that.”

“Let me just go tell these guys,” he said, hit with the inexplicable feeling that he was aimed for the edge of a cliff, and his brakes were about to fail.

CHAPTER THREE

HE WAS THE last person in the world Addy had imagined seeing in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel.

She watched him wind his way through the tables to the corner of the smoke filled bar where he’d said his friends were sitting. He looked different, and yet there was a sameness to him that was familiar and somehow comforting.

Culley.

She let the name settle over her, sink into an awareness that had been elbowed out of existence long ago.

They had grown up together, their mothers best friends, both of whom had once nurtured the idea of their children marrying the way some people cultivate prize-winning gardens.

But Addy had recognized early on that she and Culley were different. His bedroom walls had been lined with pictures of a half-dozen stars. Hers had a single picture of Tom Cruise, to whom she had remained faithful until her junior year when Mark started school in Harper’s Mill.

To Addy, Culley had been one of those guys who would never settle down, never be happy with one permanent relationship. Girls left their bras in his locker with their phone number written on a strap. She had teased him mercilessly about it, told herself she didn’t mind. The two of them had been friends since they were toddlers. And she had her own goals. On the day her father had walked out to make another family for himself, she had decided the man she eventually ended up with would be the kind of man who meant it when he said one and only, forever.

“Hi.”

He was back. She didn’t miss the interested glances of the two blondes sitting at the table across from them, both of whom looked as though they would have been all for leaving their bra with a room number written inside.

“Hi,” Addy said. “Sit down.”

He took the chair across from her, and she stole the unobserved moment to notice a few details about him. Short, dark-blond hair. A slash of jaw that, in her opinion, had always been the defining feature of his good looks. He was lean and fit, and she was glad to see that he had taken care of himself. That his need to push life’s limits had never taken him over the edge.

He looked up then, caught her staring. Gripped with sudden awkwardness, Addy anchored her hands around the wineglass in front of her and tried for a neutral smile. She didn’t need a mirror to know she’d failed.

He signaled a waiter who promptly stepped forward to take their drink order.

“What would you like, Addy?” Culley asked.

She tapped the edge of her glass. “I’m good for now.”

“A bottle of water for me, please,” he said to the waiter, who nodded and strode off in the direction of the bar.

His departure left behind another gulf of silence over which Culley’s gaze found hers, serious, a little intent.

“You look incredible, Addy.”

It was not what she’d expected him to say, but she was suddenly glad she’d bought the black dress even though it had no magical powers of transformation. She took a sip of her wine, finding it easier to let the compliment hover, than acknowledge it with a response.

The waiter reappeared with his water. Culley raised his glass and tapped it against the edge of hers. “To two old friends running into one another. A very nice surprise.”

She raised the glass to her lips and took a long sip. “Your mom told you about the divorce?”

He nodded. “I’m sorry.”

Her smile wavered. “Thanks.”

Culley reached across and covered her hand with his. “Are you all right?”

She couldn’t say anything, his touch surprising her, then suffusing her with a simultaneous rush of warmth and something way too close to gratitude. He turned her palm over, squeezed her hand tight, and she held on as if it were a lifeline, sure of nothing except that she didn’t want him to let go.

He didn’t.

He held on while he got up from his chair, and said, “Scoot over.”

She slid across the leather seat, and he settled in beside her. “Just when you think you know someone,” she said.

“So what happened?”

“Imagine the most boring cliché, and you’ll have the picture.”

He considered that, then said, “Were you having problems?”

“I didn’t think so, but looking back from here, I guess we were. I know what all the marriage manuals say. That when something like this happens, the affair isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom.”

“Still hurts.”

She took another sip of wine. “That from personal experience?”

“Yep.”

“So what happened to yours?”

He looked down, but not before she saw the shadow cross his face. “That’s a story for another time.”

Addy’s gaze skittered away from his, settling on the next table over where an older couple had just been seated. In a booming voice, the man told their waiter that he and his wife were celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary.

Culley glanced at them, a cloud of something that looked like sadness in his eyes. Not what she would have expected of the Culley Rutherford she had known in high school, Mark’s opposite, the one whose mission it was to play the field, steer clear of anything remotely hinting at commitment.

Addy pulled her hand from his and said, “Mama told me you took over Dr. Nettles’s practice.”

“Kind of surprised the whole town, I think.”

“No wonder, considering how you egged his car that Halloween.”

He smiled. “You know, he forgave me for that, but I think he tacked on a little extra anyway when I bought him out.”

Addy laughed. And the sound of it chipped away at a chunk of the ice frozen inside her. Simultaneously set up a small stir of appreciation for the presence of the man sitting next to her.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself all these years,” he urged now.

“I graduated from college and woke up one day to find out I’d turned thirty. I think I billed out all the hours in between.”

He smiled. “What kind of law are you practicing?”

“Corporate.”

“Do you like what you do?”

“The rewards are good,” she said, not exactly answering the question.

Which he didn’t let her get away with. “But do you enjoy it?”

“It was exciting at first. I’ve wondered now and then if it’s what I want to do the rest of my life.” She looked down for a moment, suddenly anxious to turn the conversation away from herself. “So what about you? You have a daughter. Tell me about her.”

He nodded, and his face took on an immediate transformation. “Madeline. She’s seven. I’m pretty much a lost cause now. No idea what I’ll do when she’s sixteen.”

Addy smiled. “Some would call that poetic justice.”

“For?”

“All the fathers whose daughters went out with you.”

He put both hands over his heart, looked wounded. “Was I that bad?”

“Close enough.” She smiled. “Madeline lives with you?”

Culley nodded.

“Are you happy in Harper’s Mill?”

“It’s home. Coming back was one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

The words sent up a flare of longing inside Addy. Over the years, she hadn’t let herself think about going back. As far as Mark was concerned, it hadn’t been an option. “Does your ex-wife live there, too?”

He shook his head, his expression suddenly blank. “No.”

Addy wanted to ask more, but felt his reluctance to discuss it.

“Do you ever miss the orchard?”

“Only every time I get a whiff of apples.”

He nodded. “I missed being in a small town. When we were kids, I couldn’t wait to move on to somewhere bigger. Bigger had to be better. But then living in Philadelphia, I actually figured at six minutes a day, five days a week for thirty years, I’d be spending about thirty-two days of my life sitting at this one stoplight. Kind of changed my perspective about bigger.”

Addy laughed, forgetting for the moment everything but the fact that she was sitting across the table from Culley Rutherford, who, since their sandbox days, had been able to make her laugh.

“So what happened between you and Mark? Why did you two stop keeping in touch?”

Culley looked away. “That was his choice, not mine.”

“There must have been a reason.”

“If there was, he’ll have to be the one to tell you.”

“Now you really have me curious.”

He met her gaze then. “People change, Addy.”

“They certainly do.”

Across the room, his buddies were standing, waving for a waiter.

“Let me just tell them to go on without me,” Culley said, sliding out of the booth, looking a little relieved by the opportunity to change the suject.

“I don’t want to mess up your plans with them.”

“You’re not messing up anything. And I’m sure they’re done for the night, anyway.”

She nodded, watching him make his way through the still-crowded bar. He clapped one of the men on the shoulder, laughed at something another said. Gladness washed over her for the fact that she had run into him in this place that was home to neither of them. It was like having a little piece of Harper’s Mill handed to her. Comforting. Familiar.

A memory drifted up. A hot August afternoon, the summer before Mark had moved to Harper’s Mill. She could still hear the melodic voices of the migrant workers in the orchard beyond the pond. The apples she and Culley had given their horses still fresh on their hands as they’d sat there on the dock, feet dangling in the water, the setting sun warm on their faces.

Addy had been garnering up her courage for days. Ever since they’d gone to the movies together the week before and sat in stilted silence while the couple on the screen settled into one of those mouths-wide-open kisses after which they declare undying love for one another. “Okay,” she’d said, “so I want to know what all the fuss is about.”

“What fuss?”

“About kissing. I want you to show me.”

Culley had leaned back, surprise raising his dark eyebrows. “You need to save that for Mr. Right.”

“What if he never comes along?”

“He will. He’ll show up one day, and you’ll change every thought you ever had just so they’ll be like his.”

“Will not!”

“Will to.”

“Not if his thoughts are anywhere near as chauvinistic as yours.”

Culley grinned. “Realistic. Not chauvinistic.”

“I’m not like that Pied Piper posse that follows you all over school.”

“Jealous?”

“Right.”

Silence again, except for the knocking of their heels against the old wooden dock.

“So I’m serious. Kiss me. Just once, and I’ll know what the big deal is. Or not.”

“If I kiss you, you’ll melt into a puddle, and then what will I tell your mama?”

Addy laughed. “How do you drag that ego around with you?”

“It’s a chore,” he said.

They both laughed then. Somewhere in the middle of it, their gazes snagged, and the laughter faded.

And then as if not giving himself time to reconsider, Culley dipped his head, brushing her lips with his, the tail end of the kiss lingering a moment, then ending as quickly as it had begun.

He planted both hands on the edge of the dock, staring down at the water. “Well?”

Addy lifted a shoulder. “It was okay. I haven’t melted yet.”

He looked at her, clearly not pleased with the answer. “Okay?”

“Yeah.” She rubbed a thumb across her lower lip, giving it consideration. “Pleasant, I suppose.”

“Pleasant is a Sunday afternoon drive with your great-aunt Ethel.”

Addy giggled.

Culley’s eyes had gone serious. He looped a hand around the back of her neck, pulled her to him and kissed her again.

No friendly peck, this one.

He opened his mouth and kissed her like he meant to close the deal.

The intimacy of the kiss shocked Addy, sent waves of never before felt feelings tumbling through her. She made a soft sound and opened her mouth to his, following his lead.

He slid an arm around her waist, gathered her closer. All of a sudden, that was the only thing in the world Addy Taylor wanted. To be closer to Culley Rutherford.

They kissed like they’d done it a hundred times, and it was this that Addy thought about years later. How easy and right those kisses had felt.

Maybe too right, because the intensity of what had happened between them that afternoon had set them both back on their heels.

Culley let her go, quickly, as if not giving himself time to reconsider. They’d never before been awkward with one another, but now they couldn’t look each other in the eye. No more joking about whether the kiss had been any good, either. They’d gathered up their things and headed home, both quiet.

They kept their distance from each other for the next few weeks. That kiss had changed the chemistry of their relationship. On the first day of school, the two of them sat in separate seats on the bus. Since kindergarten, they’d sat together, and every kid on their route wanted to know what was up with Addy and Culley.

Addy wished she’d never asked him to kiss her. She wanted her friend back.

She had met Mark on the first day of school that year. He’d transferred to their high school from another county, and Culley’s prediction had proved true. Addy fell in love. Oddly enough, he and Culley had become best friends. And just as Culley had said, she’d changed every plan she’d made for the future to synchronize with his, left the hometown she loved only to wake up one day to discover that the reality in which she’d been living wasn’t reality at all.

“They’re done for the night.” Culley was back, sliding onto the leather seat beside her.

“Are you sure I didn’t mess up your plans?”

“We’d done about all the male bonding any of us could handle. They’re going back to the hotel to call their wives.”

She smiled. “I was just thinking about that afternoon when we were fifteen, and I made you kiss me.”

He raised an eyebrow. “A real hardship.”

The words hung there for a moment, charged the air with something that felt a little dangerous. “That changed everything between us,” she said, surprised by her own directness.

He was silent, and then said, “It scared the devil out of me.”

“You?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“You want honesty?”

She nodded.

“Because after that, I knew we couldn’t be the same kind of friends anymore. Looking back, it all seems pretty innocent. But I never forgot that kiss.”

She thought about her response for several seconds before admitting, “Neither did I. I told myself every girl is a bit intrigued by the guy who makes it clear his heart isn’t up for grabs.”

“And I was one of those guys?”

“I’ll say.”

“Was not.”

“Were, too.”

“On the basis of?”

“Dating in nearly alphabetical order three-quarters of our class.”

“Exaggeration.”

“Barely.” She felt a flutter of something very much like happiness. Were they flirting with each other?

Culley smiled then, sheepish. “That was sure another lifetime.”

“So you’ve changed?”

“The most boring man you’re likely to ever know.”

“Your patients are probably eighty percent female.”

“Ouch. Another arrow to the heart. Totally unjustified.”

Addy gave him a doubtful look, hazy though it was, having been filtered through a second glass of red wine.

Silence hung between them then, while the beginnings of an old connection took hold. They sat there, locked in the moment, while beside them the fortieth-anniversary couple got up and headed for the doorway, arms around one another’s waists.

Warning signals blared in Addy’s ear. Here she sat shoulder to shoulder in the booth of a seductive hotel bar with an alarmingly attractive man who had once been a very big part of her life.

Time to go, Addy.

She glanced at her watch. “Twelve-thirty. I didn’t realize it was so late. I better get going.”

He caught the waiter’s attention, asked for the bill, wouldn’t hear of splitting it. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you up.”

“That’s all right, really. I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, no. I insist. You’ll tell your mama about my bad manners, and then I’ll have to hear about it from my own mom for weeks.”

Addy smiled. “Fair enough, but just to the elevator.”

CHAPTER FOUR

ONE OF THE lobby elevators stood empty and waiting. Addy popped on a polite this-was-really-terrific smile. “Thank you,” she said. “It was great seeing you.”

“I’ll see you to your door.”