A Bride Worth Waiting For

A dusting of make-up and then the fist slamming into her stomach.

What was she doing? Trying to make herself look attractive for Adam! As if her heart wasn’t vulnerable enough to those dark flashing eyes.

“The idea,” she told the mirror, “is to get rid of him.”

Who did he think he was, coming here, casually trying to renew an old friendship, commandeering her life, when he’d abandoned her, them, when they needed him most?

He was a dangerous man. He was dangerous to her heart. A heart that was already damaged almost beyond repair.

She had never said it out loud. Mark would have been disappointed in her if she had. He might have felt guilty. Like he had done it to her.

But she said it out loud, now.

“I am never going to love anyone again.” And, she added to herself, least of all Adam Reed, who had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt he could not be trusted with such delicate organs as hearts and souls.

And so she scrubbed her face until it shone, and left the freckles and the hollows under her eyes. She combed her hair, but didn’t mousse it so that each curl stood out, separate and shining. And in the very back of the closet she had found an old sweat suit that belonged to Mark, and that she had hated on him and that looked even worse on her than it ever had on him.

She went back out onto her back deck, defiant, amazed when in his lazy gaze she saw frank appreciation.

“Unless you want to jump back over the fence,” she told him haughtily, “you’ll have to come through the house.”

She hoped he’d offer to jump the fence. She did not want Adam to see her house. It was too close to her. Reflected her very soul.

And somehow her soul felt like it needed to be protected from him.

He stopped inside her back door, waiting while she slid it shut and locked it

They were in her kitchen and she turned and tried to see the room through his eyes. Small and cluttered with dried flower paraphernalia. The top of her old round oak table barely visible under a mound of baby’s breath and pink ribbons.

He was smiling. “This room says a lot about you.”

Just what she feared! “And what is that?”

“The stove looks like it never gets used, but the microwave does.”

She slid a look to her stove. Sparkling clean as the day it arrived. The microwave had a little splotch of something red on it. Spaghetti sauce from her last TV dinner.

“And you don’t eat at the table, so I bet you eat on the back deck when it’s nice out, which is not that often in Calgary. The rest of the time you eat in the living room. Watching TV. No. Not Tory. Music. Listening to music. And watching the bird feeder you’ve got in the front yard. And keeping an eye out on the neighbor’s renovations and decorations.”

She glared at him. A portrait of a lonely and pathetic soul. And accurate.

He’d always been like this, looking and seeing what other people never saw. Incredibly observant and astute, able to take a few telling details and weave out a whole story.

“Did you have to remember that?” she asked grouchily.

“What?”

“That I liked looking at other people’s houses.”

“Little peeping Tory. You used to love to go for walks at twilight, right as people were turning on their lights but before they closed their curtains.”

“A weakness,” she admitted haughtily.

He laughed.

She wished that he wouldn’t do that. It chased the years from his face and made him back into her Adam. The boy next door. That wild boy that she had loved so madly.

In those simple days, it had been okay to love them both. Mark quietly, and Adam wildly. It had always seemed as if it could go on like that forever.

But, of course, she knew better now.

There was no forever.

She marched him through her living room with her head held high, not inviting his comment. But she saw this room though his eyes, too. Suddenly it seemed cramped and prissy, and like a room an eighty-year-old grandmother would enjoy in the evenings with her knitting and her cats.

“No TV,” he said with a pleased grin, and then, “I like your house, Tory. I like it a lot.”

She held open the front door for him. The doorway was narrow. He brushed her as he went by. She could feel his heat and his strength. He smelled good. She hoped her hand wasn’t trembling as she put the key in the dead bolt to lock the door behind them while he held the screen door open.

“Thank you,” she said tightly. “Your car or mine?”

“I came by cab. I thought we’d just walk. It’s a beautiful day.”

It was a beautiful day. To walk with him along the path by the river would be like strolling toward the past. The river had once seemed like it belonged to them, as familiar as their own backyards.

“Are we going to the island?” she asked.

“That’s where they rent them. The Rollerblades.”

Returning to the old playgrounds of their youth. She did not know if she could stand it

They crossed Memorial Drive and moved down the path. The sun came through the leaves of the giant trees that bordered the path and dappled the earth around them green and gold. The river looked steely gray and cold.

She noticed with relief that they had nothing to say to each other.

And then with less relief that he seemed perfectly comfortable with the silence.

She did not have to chatter, to think of clever things to say to keep him occupied, to fill the silence between them. Had never had to. With him, and with Mark, she could always just be herself.

Against her will she felt something relax within her.

“Out of the way, Gramps!”

A boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, streaked by them on a bicycle. As they leapt out of his way, Adam encircled her with his arms, protectively.

She looked at Adam. And felt warmth in the circle of his arms, strangely like homecoming. She could feel his breath rising and falling, and the beat of his heart. This close she could see the beginnings of dark stubble on his strong chin and on his cheeks. An outraged expression was on his face.

“Are you all right?” he asked, and eased her away from him to look.

“Oh, fine,” she said, dusting an imaginary speck off her sweatpant leg, hating herself for how badly she wanted to go back into the circle of his arms.

She glanced at him. Apparently he hadn’t even noticed their close encounter, was not stirred as physically by it as she had been. Of course, it had probably not been a year since he had come in close contact with a member of the opposite sex!

He was glaring after the cyclist. “Gramps,” he sputtered indignantly. “Did that delinquent call me Gramps?”

She nodded, wide-eyed, trying to repress the giggle inside of her. It would not be repressed.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“The look on your face. That boy—” she was giggling now, and because she was trying not to, it seemed to her the sound coming out of her was most undignified. Like snorting.

“What about that boy?”

“He looked just like you used to look, Adam. Devil-may-care” she was laughing now. Laughing as she had not laughed in years. And then she saw the smile on his face, and remembered how his smile had always had the power to change everything. To turn a bad day into a good one, to make a hurt heart feel better.

“Hell-bent for leather,” Adam said ruefully, watching her, smiling at her laughter, not seeming to find her snorting undignified at all. “I never yelled at people to get out of my way, did I?”

“Oh, you were much worse than that.”

“I was not.”

“Yes, you were.”

Suddenly he was standing very close to her again, and her elbow was in his hand and his eyes were darkly intense on hers.

“You liked it, didn’t you, Tory?” he growled.

And her laughter was gone, replaced by another feeling she remembered all too well around Adam. A kind of walking-on-the-edge feeling, caught somewhere between fear and exhilaration.

“Liked what?” she stammered.

“The rebel in me. The bad boy.”

“It scared the hell out of me,” she whispered.

She didn’t add: And it still does.

Chapter Three

“Adam, why are we doing this?” Tory asked him, closing the latches on the apparatuses now attached to her feet. “I never even liked ice-skating. Neither did you!”

“I know. The only boy in Calgary who never played hockey. Probably in all of Canada. An albatross I have carried around my neck for two decades.”

“Answer the question then. Why?” She wiggled her feet. Even though they moved on command, they seemed strangely detached from her body.

“I’m tired of carrying the albatross?”

She shot him a look. He had never given a damn what the rest of the world was doing, and he didn’t care now. It was written in the supreme confidence with which he carried himself, written in the light that lit those devilishly dark eyes. This expedition was not about whether he had played hockey as a boy.

He rose to his feet, and when his feet scooted out from under him, he grabbed the back of the bench where they had sat to put their skates on, and tried to look casual and in control.

For once he didn’t succeed, and it really was quite funny.

“Don’t stand up,” he advised her. “We’ll just sit on this bench and look like we’re having a rest.”

Damn him. She could feel that little smile twitching again.

“He’ll know,” she whispered wagging her eyebrows toward the kid who had rented them the skates—the same boy who had nearly mowed them over on his bicycle.

Adam had given him hell for clearing them off the path, and the boy had grinned at him with a certain impish charm and said, “Sure, Gramps, I’ll watch that next time.”

“I’m not your Gramps,” Adam said in a low, lethal tone that had set the hair on the back of Tory’s neck on end.

“Yes, sir,” the boy had said, not the least perturbed. “By the way, my generation calls them in-line skates, not Rollerblades.”

“I think I defended his brother on a murder rap,” Adam said to Tory, looking over at the little booth where the boy was now happily engrossed in a comic book. “I’m sorry I tried so hard.”

She couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “Well, unless you want to be Gramps forever, you had better let go of the bench.”

“Ladies first,” he insisted smoothly.

Tentatively she tried standing on her feet. “It’s like standing on a plate balanced on top of ball bearings,” she said when her feet seemed to be going every which way from underneath of her. Bent over from the waist, she grabbed the seat of the bench.

“At least I’m maintaining my dignity, Gran,” he taunted her.

She blew a curl out of her way and looked up at him. She let go of the seat, straightened and lunged toward him. She caught him around the waist and held tight.

He stared at her, something darkening in eyes that were already darker than pitch.

Her own heart was quickening within the walls of her chest. It would be a very good idea to let go of him.

But if she did that she’d probably land flat on her fanny in front of him. There was no denying how good it felt to hold him, his muscles strong and sinewy beneath the denim of his shirt, his body throwing off soft heat, like early summer sunshine.

“The little creep is watching us,” he said under his breath.

“Then let go of the bench.”

He did. His arms wrapped tightly around her.

She was not sure if it was an improvement. Her heart seemed happy. Her head was muttering something about pure insanity.

“Turn right,” he ordered tersely.

They inched their way around, and then took a few wobbly steps forward.

“The little creep is laughing.”

“Adam. I’m afraid we’re hilarious.”

A man jogged by, grinned and shook his head.

“Okay,” Adam said, “that’s it for Rollerblading. In-line skating. That looked like a great restaurant we came by. Let’s—”

“Forget it. This was your idea. We’ve got to take at least one turn around the park.”

“Is this park any smaller than it used to be?”

“No.”

“Why are you torturing me?”

“Because I tried to talk you out of this and you wouldn’t listen. You promised me fun. Laughter.”

“Well, they’re all laughing.” He scowled darkly at a herd of cyclists who went by.

“Adam, you can’t lean on me so hard. You’re pushing me over.”

“I’ll take off my skates,” he said, brightening, a lawyer who had just found his way out of an impossible dilemma “No!”

He ignored her. “And you’ll leave yours on. I’ll guide you.”

“No!”

“You can close your eyes. Pretend you’re blind. I’ll be your Seeing Eye dog. A laugh a minute. I guarantee it.”

“No. Absolutely not, no.”

“I hate it when you say that ‘Absolutely not, no.’”

“You haven’t heard me say it for a long time.”

“It doesn’t seem that long.”

“It doesn’t? When did I ever use that expression on you? I never said no to you.”

“Yes you did. The night that I asked you to marry me.”

She actually felt the blood drain from her face. Of course. The only time she had ever said no to Adam.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I really hate this. Much more than I expected to hate it.”

“Are you referring to Rollerblading or something else?” she asked suspiciously.

He sighed, but the melancholy of it was lost when his foot shot off to the right and left him leaning on her drunkenly, threatening to pull them both down. He scrambled to regain his balance.

Adam’s dignity had always been innate in him.

He was like a duck out of water with these foolish inventions on his feet, and she could not imagine what had led him to this moment.

He swore under his breath, a word that was pure Adam.

She started to laugh.

He glared at her.

She started to laugh harder.

“Stop it. You’re making my skates wobble.”

It was the first time she had ever seen Adam so out of his element and so out of control. It was delightful.

She pushed off tentatively.

“Not so bloody fast!”

She pushed with her other foot. “I think I’m getting it.”

“Tory, you are going way too fast!”

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