A Bride Worth Waiting For

He had taken a cab, but he decided he’d walk back to his hotel, just across the river. He realized as he went, he was whistling.

And that it had been a very long time since he had whistled.

The hotel room was very posh. For a mechanic’s son he had adjusted to poshness with complete ease.

He glanced at his watch. Nearly eleven Calgary time, which meant it was close to one in the morning Eastern time. Too late to call Kathleen, and he was glad. He hadn’t told her the details of this trip, only that it was business. Which it was. Or had been. Strictly business.

Until he saw Tory.

Now he felt like Kathleen would hear it in his voice.

Hear what in your voice? he asked himself.

The pull of the past. Things that were once certain becoming uncertain.

He’d thought he and Kathleen, also a lawyer, made an excellent couple, and that he was nearly ready to make a commitment to her.

Until the exact moment Tory had opened her door.

And then nothing seemed assured anymore. Kathleen, an ex-model with her raven black hair and sapphire eyes, wavering in his mind like a mirage.

Impatiently, Adam went over to the tiny fridge and investigated the contents. He took a cola even though he knew it would probably chase away sleep until dawn streaked the sky.

When had he become so old and stable that he didn’t drink cola at night because it kept him awake?

He had seen a different man reflected back at him through Tory’s eyes. She still saw in him the man-child, who had delighted in walking close to the wild side.

In truth, not just the soda would keep him awake tonight. A strange energy seemed to be singing through his veins.

He picked up his briefcase, moved to the table and snapped it open. Neat stacks of legal briefs stared back at him, the work of a man who didn’t drink cola at night because it might keep him awake.

Did she know he was a lawyer? She hadn’t asked. Would she ask tomorrow? Would she ask him why?

And would he tell her the truth?

He had contemplated his career long and hard before choosing. He had thought about becoming a doctor, just like her old man.

The thought, unfortunately, made him squeamish. He had always been able to hide his squeamish side from Tory and Mark, who seemed to think he was tough in every respect. And in some respects he had been. He had a high threshold for pain. He liked doing things that were thrilling. He was fearless, almost stupidly so, in the face of authority.

But the day he’d cut open the frog in high school biology he’d known a career that involved blood and body parts was out. He suspected he wouldn’t even be able to handle looking at slimy tonsils. Which meant dentistry, an extremely high paying profession, was unfortunately also out. Mark’s dad had been a vet. Since Adam had never so much as owned a goldfish, and could not even pretend an interest in the plump poodles that he had seen in Mark’s father’s outer office, he knew he wasn’t going to be doing that either.

Mark’s mother had been a psychologist, also a respectable profession, but the money was not as good, and probing the secrets of the human mind when his own was so largely baffling to him left him cold.

Accounting was too dull.

And that seemed to leave law. Nice clean work, for the most part. Though he had seen some slimy things that would put a pair of infected tonsils to shame. Still, he had a good mind for it. He excelled at it. Problem solving. Thinking on his feet. Keeping track of a multitude of different things at once. Butting heads. Maintaining his personal integrity when all about him others were losing theirs. He liked it. It was constantly changing and constantly challenging.

But somehow, even though the workings of his own mind baffled him, he knew becoming a lawyer had been about her.

She had picked Mark because they were from the same world. He had known intuitively that education was the passport to her world.

Education opened doors. Bought nice things. Bought respectability.

He had sworn the next time he was ready to ask a woman to spend her life with him, she would say yes.

The problem was that woman was supposed to be Kathleen. Twice as beautiful as Tory. Ten times as sophisticated.

Tory had already had her kick at this particular can. She’d lost her chance. Picked Mark.

But now Mark was dead.

And Mark had sent him back here.

He closed the briefcase and took the letter back out of his pocket. It was getting soft from so much handling.

He closed his eyes. He really didn’t have to read it again.

Mark’s last request of him. Make Tory laugh again.

Mark. Handsome. Athletic. Quiet. Stable. A good choice if you had to make one. A sensible choice.

That was what they had both been, Tory and Mark. Sensible. He bet they didn’t drink cola at half-past eleven at night.

He took a defiant swig, and suddenly felt so tired he thought he would collapse.

He set the letter on the table, stripped off his clothes and crawled between the soft sheets.

He slept almost instantly.

Chapter Two

Adam awoke in the morning feeling disoriented. Then it came back to him. Calgary. Tory. Mark. A mission.

He groaned, sat up, stretched. He saw the can of cola that he had taken precisely one swig from, and wondered how it was possible to feel like he had a hangover. The letter was beside the cola tin. He picked it up.

Don’t read it again, he ordered himself, and then read it again.

Dear Adam:

I asked my lawyer to wait a year before sending this on to you. Tory will need time. We married before we completed university, and she needs to know she can make it on her own.

But she needs to laugh, too.

I know how much you loved her.

And I know she loved you more than me. When she picked me, even though she loved you best, I began to believe in miracles.

You know, I’ve never stopped.

She was my angel. And now, if things work the way I think they do, I’m going to be hers.

This is my last request, Adam, and only you can do it. Go home. Go to her. Make her laugh. Teach her to have fun again. Rollerblade, and ride bikes with two seats, fly kites, sit out on lawn chairs at the lake and watch for the Big Dipper and Orion to come out.

She was always a little afraid of how you grabbed life with both hands. But she knows a little more about the nature of life, now. She won’t be afraid to take what it offers her.

You were my best friend, besides her. I know why you stayed away. She was mad at you, and probably still is, but I wasn’t. I’m watching out for you. I promise.

The letter was signed, simply, love, Mark.

Every single time he read that letter, Adam felt the same lump of emotion rise in his throat. The last paragraph in particular reminded him with such aching poignancy who Mark had been. Solid. Loyal. Loving. The fact that Mark’s handwriting was wobbly with pain, like the writing of a little old man, always seemed to increase that lump in his throat to damn near grapefruit size.

“This was not a good way to start the day,” Adam told himself, getting up and putting the letter down.

But the words stayed.

I know why you stayed away. Adam wished Mark would have said why. Because he didn’t know himself. A thousand times he had almost come home. A thousand times something had stopped him. And he did not know what that something was.

Pride. Hurt. Anger. Betrayal.

He shook his head. Mark seemed to think it was something else. But then Mark could be wrong. Look at that nonsense about Tory loving him, Adam, better.

When he’d first received the letter he’d known he absolutely could not go to Tory. He had several important trials coming up. Kathleen’s sister was getting married, and he was to be master of ceremonies. He had a 1964 Harley panhead in pieces in a friend’s garage.

He couldn’t just go traipsing across the country to go Rollerblading, for God’s sake!

And then he found he couldn’t not go.

Mark’s last request.

It kept him awake nights. He read over that blasted letter so often that the paper was wearing thin. You would think the lump in his throat would be getting smaller, but it never did.

Tory not laughing? How could that be? Tory was laughter.

Finally, he surrendered. The letter was not going to let him go. If he followed Mark’s instructions precisely, fulfilling his last wish would only involve four things. He could probably be done with it in four days. A week, tops.

And maybe the mystery in that letter would unravel.

I know why you stayed away.

“Great,” Adam muttered, “that makes one of us.”

He went and showered and dressed. What did one wear Rollerblading? He put on jeans and a white denim shirt. Everybody in Calgary wore jeans, even lawyers.

He went out the hotel door at quarter to nine. A girl with tired looking eyes, in a worn dress, stood on the corner with a basket of flowers. On impulse he bought them all, and was rewarded with a shy and lovely smile.

Really, it had nothing to do with romancing Tory, he defended himself as he hailed a cab. If she had one weakness, it was flowers, and he needed to get his foot in the door.

At first he thought she had outsmarted him and escaped, just like the little piggies who left for the fair an hour before their appointment with the big, bad wolf.

He banged on her front door, and when she didn’t come, he sauntered over to her living room window and peered in.

Somehow he had known before he looked in exactly how it would look—lace and antiques, bookcases, sunny colorful prints, scatter rugs, hardwood, wainscoting, wallpaper, framed petit point, flowers, fresh and dried, hanging and in hand-thrown pots.

Homey and charming. The kind of room in which one sat in front of the fireplace with a pipe—unlit, now that he was reformed—and an old dog at foot, the day’s newspaper in hand. It was the kind of room in which one could feel utterly content.

His own upscale condominium was furnished in a look he referred to as modern motorcycle. Black leather and chrome. Somehow homey was not the ambience he had achieved. Or yearned for either.

Until now.

He could hear the faint sound of music and followed it like a dog following a scent, off her front porch and down a narrow swatch of grass in between her house and the one next door. He came to a high fence. No gate. But the music louder.

Vivaldi. Once he wouldn’t have known. Or cared.

He glanced around to see if any of the neighbors were watching suspiciously. The street was quiet. The wall of the other house was windowless on this side.

He spit on his hands, tossed his bouquet of flowers over first, and acknowledged a funny little singing inside of him. And then he caught the top of the fence and hefted himself over it, landing with a thud that was drowned out by the music and a delicate looking shrub that he thought might have been a magnolia, though he had never heard of one growing successfully in Calgary.

He shoved a few broken branches back into place, picked up his flowers and looked around her walled yard with interest.

His offering of flowers seemed redundant.

Her backyard was like an English country garden—flowers and shrubs were everywhere, narrow stone paths going between them. He could hear the gurgle of a fountain. He glanced to his right and saw her deck.

It was a work of art, really, multilayered wooden platforms sporting potted trees and barrels of flowers and water, benches and planters.

On the top platform, connected to her house by a lovely set of French garden doors, she sat at a patio table beneath a colorful umbrella, surrounded by wicker baskets full of dried flowers and baby’s breath. She was bent over something, her pink tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration, the sun on her hair turning it to flame.

He looked for a place to dump the flowers he had brought. The wilted bouquet was a ridiculous offering given the wild profusion of blossoms in her yard.

She glanced up, saw him, and froze. Then she glanced at her watch, confirming his suspicion that she would have been long gone had he waited for the appointed hour. But, by the look on her face, she had meant to be gone by now, and had gotten caught up in something, become lost in the task at hand.

He went up the stairs toward her, holding out his bouquet, a drooping peace offering.

She didn’t reach out to take it, folding her hands instead over her chest, and regarding him with wide brown eyes.

He saw she was working on an arrangement of dried flowers and what looked to be a dried corn stalk twisted into a bow shape. A glue gun was at her elbow. Given the simplicity of the items she was working with, the arrangement was nothing short of breathtaking.

“That’s very good,” he said inadequately.

She shrugged. “It’s what I do. My business.”

He sensed even this short explanation was offered to him reluctantly.

“How did you get in here?” she asked.

“I jumped the fence.”

For the slightest moment just a hint of laughter leapt in her eyes, but she doused it swiftly.

“Then you can go back out the same way.”

He ignored her. “Mark built the deck, didn’t he?”

He watched her eyes soften as she glanced around. “Yes.”

She still loved him.

Uninvited he sat down, placing the humble nosegay on the table. “He did a nice job of it.”

“You know how he loved to build things.”

“Yeah. I know.” The tree house that had been in progress since they all turned thirteen came to mind. Mark had always been the idea man. The result was a tree house that had been the envy of every boy and girl within a hundred miles. Windows with shutters, a rope ladder that wound up and down, a sturdy deck out the front door.

“Is the tree house still—?”

“Still at my mom and dad’s. Being enjoyed by the grandchildren, now. The tree house. This deck. They’re all he ever built. He never became an architect. He got sick before he completed his degree.”

“I’m sorry.” And he was. But the word grandchildren was begging for his attention. He looked around for toys, for signs. Surely he would have heard. “The kids enjoying the tree house aren’t yours, are they?”

She shook her head, looked away quickly. “My sister. Margie’s.”

He remembered her sister, Margie, only vaguely. She had been much older than them. Or so it had seemed at the time. Four or five years now wouldn’t be quite the same chasm.

“Mark got sick very shortly after we got married.”

“Aw, Tory. I didn’t know.”

“Would it have made any difference?”

He didn’t know, so he didn’t say anything. She didn’t seem to expect him to. Unless he was mistaken, she was still in her pajamas, a kind of fuzzy two-piece short suit with pudgy angels frolicking in the pattern of fabric.

Not intended to be the least bit sexy, he found it unbelievably so.

“Is that coffee I smell?” he asked wistfully.

She glared at him.

“I’ll trade you this little posy.” He wagged his eyebrows at the flowers, hoping she would laugh.

“You’re offering those in trade? They look pretty near to death,” she said scornfully.

“The coffee’s an unknown. I tried cookies you baked on three or four occasions before I wised up and fed them to old Brewster.”

“No wonder that dog was so monstrously fat. I suppose it wasn’t just you, was it?”

This was encouraging. She was asking him questions.

“Mark, too,” he admitted, “and your dad.”

“My dad?” She was trying to look outraged, but he thought he could see a bit of smile trying to press out past the prissy set of her lips.

She took the flowers, got up and marched into the house. The shorts were really very short. Her legs were gorgeous. It looked like she could still ride a bicycle fitteen or twenty miles without breaking into a sweat, or shinny up a tree in five seconds fiat.

She glanced back and caught him looking. He half expected her to slam the door behind her, turn the key in the lock and then stick out her tongue at him, but she didn’t.

She came back out a few minutes later, a carafe of coffee in one hand and an extra mug in the other, a long white terry-cloth robe hiding her delectable little knees from him.

She poured him a coffee as the birds rioted in her yard.

“What a beautiful space you’ve created for yourself, Tory.”

She looked at him uneasily. “I grow most of these flowers for my business.”

“What is your business?” He took advantage of the tenuous peace between them.

“I make dried flower arrangements, like this one, and sell them to upscale gift shops like the ones on Kensington and in Mount Royal Square. I have some contracts in Banff, too.” There was a hint of pride in her voice.

She’ll need to know she can make it on her own.

“You’re doing well, aren’t you?”

“Extremely. Better than I ever expected. I call my business Victoria’s Garden.”

He wanted to pull her in his arms and swing her around at the pride he saw shining in her eyes. But that brought thoughts of what her body, wrapped in the fluffy robe, would feel like after all these years.

Now, for the first time, his mind going down a very dangerous path—thinking wayward thoughts of her—

“Adam?” she asked.

“Coffee’s great,” he said gruffly, taking a sip. It really was great Exotic. Like coffee and chocolate and mint all mixed together. “Have your cookies improved?”

“I seem to have better luck with flowers. Adam, what are you doing here?”

“I told you. Taking you Rollerblading.”

“But I don’t want to go Rollerblading!”

Neither do I, he thought. It was not on his list of the one hundred and one things that he most wanted to do in his life.

“Why not?” he asked, sneaking a look at her over the rim of his coffee cup. She looked beautiful. Flustered, her curls scattered around her face, the freckles standing out on her nose. Her freckles always stood out on her nose when she was upset.

Somehow the purpose of this exercise had not been to upset her.

“I’m too old,” she said.

He almost spit out his coffee. “Too old to have fun?”

“Oh, Adam.” she said. “I stopped believing life was fun a long time ago.”

And then, for the first time, he felt committed to his mission. Knew why he was here, knew why Mark had sent him, and knew that he couldn’t fail.

“It must have been very hard for you. Watching him die.”

“It wasn’t hard at all,” she said stubbornly. Her chin tilted up, and her eyes glittering dangerously. “It was incredible. I didn’t regret one minute of it. It was a privilege to make that journey with that strong, courageous man.”

Her speech finished, her composure crumbled. Silver tears trickled down her cheeks. She swiped at them impatiently. More replaced them. She covered her eyes, trying to regain control. Her shoulders started to shake. She hiccuped.

And then she was sobbing. Uncontrollably.

And a voice deep within him, in his soul, told him what to do. He went and scooped her from her chair, and then sat back down in it, with her cradled against his chest. And while she wept, her hot tears trickling down his shirt, he stroked her hair and murmured words to her that came from some part so deep within him he had not been aware it existed.

He told her how proud he was of her for being so strong. He told her it was okay to cry. He told her he was going to help her laugh again. All the time aware of how slight she was in his embrace, how good she smelled, how soft her shoulders were under his hands. And all the time aware that she still loved Mark.

That her love with Mark had been one of those loves that would transcend all obstacles, even death.

And that was good. He was relieved. His future was safe after all. Kathleen was real and good and eminently suited to him in every way, and he was going to go back to Toronto and lose no time in asking her to marry him.

They would buy a house somewhere in suburbia, and someday they might have children—two point two, just like the national average.

“How?” Her voice was small, muffled against his shirt

For a startled moment he wondered if she was asking how one had two point two children, which he had not exactly figured out.

“How what?”

“How are you going to make me laugh again?” she asked somberly.

“I’m going to take you Rollerblading,” he said.

She flung back her head and looked at him. Her eyes were all puffy from crying. She seemed to realize suddenly she was in his lap, and she scrambled out of his embrace and onto her feet.

“You’re not giving up, are you? Just like the old days!”

“Bulldog Reed,” he agreed. Her robe had pulled apart slightly below the belt, and he tried for a glimpse of her upper thigh.

“Adam, you have to go away.” She looked down, blushed, and pulled her robe ferociously into place, yanking hard on the belt.

“Not until I take you Rollerblading.”

“And then you’ll go?”

As a lawyer he had mastered a few nuances of lying without actually lying. For instance, you could incline your head a certain way and people took that as assent, when in the letter of the law no verbal agreement had been committed.

He tilted his head, a gesture one might mistake as preceding a nod.

She straightened her robe again unnecessarily, and pointed that cute little nose at the sky and spun away from him.

He waited for the slamming door, the turn of the key, and actually felt relief when it didn’t come.

He had finished all the coffee in the carafe before she finally returned, her face scrubbed free of tear stains, dressed in some terribly unattractive sweat outfit in the most unbecoming shade of gray he had ever seen.

Not intending to be the least bit sexy, she was unbelievably so.

“All right,” she snapped. “You want to go so bad, let’s go.” Covering up her moment of vulnerability with cool dignity. With impatience. In her eyes a vow: never to be vulnerable to him again.

He sighed.

Tory watched him get up from his chair. God, he was glorious. He always had been. Incredibly handsome, but more. Sure of himself—and that certainty showing up in the way he moved, pure masculine strength and grace in his every move.

He was dressed casually today, in jeans faded to dusty blue from long and loving wear, and a white denim shirt. It made him look more like, well, him, than the expensively dressed man who had appeared on her doorstep yesterday.

His hair was falling carelessly over one eye. Beautiful hair, black and thick and silky. Hair that begged to be touched, begged her fingers to reach up and flick it back for him. She had done that all the time. Before. When his face and their friendship had been so familiar to her. When he’d been a part of her life, like the river was a part of her life. Something she had assumed would be constant and unchanging.

Every woman they saw today would look at him.

In the old days, he’d rarely noticed. Or if he did, he would grin back at them and then turn and give Tory, or Mark, a puzzled look. Like, What’s with them? or Is that Someone we know?

And she was dressed in one of Mark’s old sweat suits. It looked absolutely appalling on her, and she knew it.

She had started out quite differently. She had marched into the house and past his pathetic flowers, which for some reason she had put in her very best vase.

In her bedroom she had thrown open her closet and scrutinized every outfit she had. And tried on three of them, finally settling on a nice pair of pleated white shorts and a jade-green silk blouse that did the most splendid things to her hair and her eyes. Which, of course, was too ridiculous considering where they were going.

Next had come black jeans and a flannel shirt. Better. Faintly feminine, but hardly alluring. It showed off her coloring and her trim figure rather nicely.