Cara Colter (12 page)

Authors: A Bride Worth Waiting For

BOOK: Cara Colter

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He was looking at her with wicked knowing, and she pulled out of the circle of his arms. They no longer felt safe at all. About the furthest thing from it, in fact.

“Stay away from me,” she warned.

He advanced one step closer.

“Adam, I can’t run. You know that.”

“Yes.” He twirled an imaginary moustache. “I knows.”

“Please, don’t”

He stepped closer.

“Adam!”

“I’ll trade you. I’ll spare your toes in exchange for something.”

“What?” she croaked, as if she didn’t already know.
A kiss
. And she wanted it. She wanted him to kiss her and hold her, and tickle her toes and make her laugh. To wrestle her to the ground right here—never mind the dignified woman walking her poodle past them—and kiss her until she was absolutely breathless, until her mind couldn’t think anymore about anything.

And least of all the word
forever.
How that word had betrayed her once already.

“This is the trade,” he said. “You buy me a hot dog from that little hole in the wall downtown, and I’ll leave your toes alone.”

She stared at him, so deflated by that answer that she wanted to cry out in most unladylike terms exactly what he could do with his damn hot dog.

Instead she bit her lip, and tried to look at this as a reprieve from the reckless wanting inside her that would throw everything away, trade him anything, to have him tickle her toes. Preferably with his lips.

“It’s not there anymore,” she said of the hot dog stand.

“You must know where to get a good hot dog.”

“I hate hot dogs.”

“Since when?”

Since just now, when he’d wanted a hot dog and not a kiss.

“Since when?” he asked again. “He used to barbecue them, remember, and you liked yours with fried onions and mustard. No ketchup. No relish.”

“Why would you remember something so silly?” she asked crossly.

“I’m a bachelor. I eat lots of hot dogs. They are not silly to me. One of the great inventions of the nineteenth century.”

This is what she had to remember: he had come here because Mark had asked him to. He had not come to tickle her toes, or kiss her either, because those weren’t on his stupid list.

“Give me that letter,” she said, holding out her hand imperiously.

He looked at her suspiciously, then pulled it from the back pocket of his jeans.

She noticed the folds were nearly worn through. Carefully she opened it, and skimmed it quickly, not letting her heart beat harder at the part about her loving Adam better.

She folded it neatly and gave it back to him.

“Why don’t we just finish this?” she suggested, surprised and pleased with the note of ice she managed to inject into her voice. “We’ll drive to my parents’ cabin at Sylvan Lake this afternoon. Watch the stars come out, and drive home. Then you can leave. Maybe even tonight.”

Then you will be free. And so will I.

“I’ll have to pay extra on the wheelchair if I don’t have it back by three.”

“So we’ll bring it back first.”

He sighed. “Okay. But I get my hot dog.”

All he was worried about was hot dogs, and surcharges on that dumb chair. If it bothered him that by tonight he could be winging home, away from her, forever, that did not show.

His face was a study in indifference. But then lawyers got very good at that, didn’t they? Hiding what they really felt?

She gave herself a mental shake. Why assume he was feeling anything at all? He was good at leaving the people who needed him most.

And sometime this morning, when the laughter had rippled out of her, free and flowing as a little silver mountain brook, she had become one of those who needed him most.

A fact that he was never ever going to know.

It had been a mistake, he decided, thinking about chasing her around the bedroom until she was nearly hysterical with laughter.

It had been a worse mistake saying it, even if he had cleverly disguised his desire by putting it onto some imaginary third person.

Damn, but it was easy to imagine her collapsing on a bed, those wonderful red-gold curls scattered around her face, the laughter dying from her eyes and being replaced with a look so white-hot it could take a man’s soul.

Far, far safer to switch the topic to hot dogs, not that she seemed to appreciate his clever rescue that had kept them from going to dangerous places where they could not go.

Why not?
A voice within him asked. Loudly.

He dared to glance at her. Because.

She had married his best friend.

Because. He had gone on to make a life without her.

Because. The wound had never healed properly. Why rip it open again? She was absolutely right, of course.

Finish it.

And fast.

With the wheelchair loaded back into the trunk of the Viper, her silence chilly and her eyes as angry as they had been that first day, he realized they were right back where they had started. If possible a few squares behind that starting point.

Hot dogs were not “in” food in Calgary, which stubbornly made him want one more. He finally found a hot dog stand at a strip mall, but they were hot dogs at their worst—pale pink, little beads of steam and grease clinging to them.

He wolfed down three of them just to show her he hadn’t even noticed how stiff and chilly she had become.

He envied the little dish of yogurt that she ordered, and tried to look back to the moment everything had changed.

From the exhilaration of that kite disappearing into nowhere, to this.

His own big mouth to blame.

He’d made that awful remark about some guy chasing her around the bedroom—in his mind, of course, it had been him. And then he’d tried to make awkward amends by changing the subject to hot dogs, and she’d gone cold as ice. Could he backpedal safely to the chasing-around-the-bedroom part and take a different turn when he got there?

He studied her features. Nose tilted at the ceiling, freckles brightened from sun, hair a wild, wind-tangled sculpture that begged for his fingers to touch it.

Eyes, averted. Looking at everything but him. Reading a chart on the wall over his left shoulder. He turned and glared at it.

It showed how to properly butcher a pig, all the little sections cut away like puzzle pieces.

Why should he try and repair this terrible mess?

She was right.

Get it over with and go home. Put them both out of their misery.

The pig poster had killed his appetite for hot dogs. He could only hope not for all time.

Her mother was working in her flower bed when they stopped to pick up the key for the cabin. He wished he could just stay in the car, but good manners dictated otherwise.

Her mother made a lovely picture in her wide-brimmed straw hat, her gardening gloves on, the profusion of blooms around her as she worked her front bed. Again he was struck by the realization Tory would one day age like this—with a kind of gentle beauty. Her beauty growing with each gray hair and each crinkle around her eyes.

He reminded himself he was not going to be around to see it.

Even though he could see that hope in Mrs. Bradbury’s eyes as Tory asked her for the key to the cabin.

“The cabin? Of course, though it’s been closed since last year. Oh, if I’d have just known I would have gone and got it ready for you.”

As if they were going there on a honeymoon, a perception Tory had not missed. Color flooded her cheeks.

“Mom, I just need to know where the lawn chairs are. We’re going to look at the stars come out, and then we’re coming home.”

“Tory, you’re an adult woman. You really don’t need to tell me what you’re doing. Your dad and I are always just happy when someone gets some enjoyment from the cabin.”

“No one said one word about enjoyment,” Tory said tersely. “The lawn chairs?”

Her mother shot him a puzzled look. He shrugged.

“Try under the back deck. Oh, look, here’s the cabin key right on this chain.”

Adam took the chain from her and removed the key she pointed to.

“I’ll be going soon,” he told her. “I probably won’t see you again.”

Tears swam in her eyes and made him even sorrier than he already was that he had ever come back here.

Why? Just to bring all these people pain? Tory’s mother wanted him to stay and fix Tory.

Who appeared to hate him.

Tory’s mother blinked back the tears, took off her gloves and hugged him hard. “You come back anytime, Adam. Anytime.”

“Thanks.”

From her mother’s house they progressed to Daniel’s. Out of the corner of his eye Adam watched Tory’s reaction to the dilapidated neighborhood.

The indifference disappeared from her expression, and her brows came down as she studied the broken-down house.

“He’s probably at school. I’ll just drop off the—”

“There he is,” she said softly.

Daniel had appeared on the porch, his hair tousled, in a wrinkled T-shirt.

Adam shook his head and got out of the car. He opened the trunk and then pulled out the wheelchair.

“I thought you were going to try school,” he said, when Daniel materialized at his elbow.

“What’s the point? I haven’t got the money to go to university, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”

That last tacked on with an angry vehemence that spoke volumes.

Tory got out of the car, and Daniel grinned at her. “How’s your leg, lady?”

Adam watched how her smile melted the hardness from Daniel’s features.

“I’ll be running the marathon in no time,” she said lightly.

Adam glared at her. Saving all her charm for this young thug, instead of
him.

“I lost the kite,” Adam said, and braced himself for Daniel’s evaluation of what the kite was worth.

“It was a beautiful kite,” Tory said, absolutely beaming at the boy, who seemed to grow inches under her warm gaze. “You should have seen it fly. When it broke the string, it looked like a wild horse running free, heading right for the clouds.”

“How much for the kite?” Adam asked grouchily. She hadn’t told
him
she thought the kite looked like a wild thing, freed. No sir, for him, the one who had run up and down that hill until his lungs nearly burst—the refrigerator look.

“The kite was a gift,” Daniel said graciously. “For you.” And he took Tory’s hand, bowed over it and kissed it.

She laughed.

“Where’d you get the wheelchair?” Adam asked sternly, reminding Tory subtly they were not exactly dealing with a junior Prince Charming here.

“Says right on it,” Daniel said carelessly.

“The deal was you couldn’t steal it.”

“I didn’t steal it,” he said indignantly, slipping Tory another charming little smile. “I borrowed it. I’m bringing it right back.”

“You’ll probably claim a reward,” Adam said under his breath.

“Hadn’t thought of that. Thanks, Gra—”

“Don’t you dare.”

“You need anything else?”

“No.” But even as Adam said it, his gaze fell upon an old motorcycle on the other side of the hedge. “Is that a Harley?”

“My brother’s.”

Tory was watching him, for a minute something unguarded in her face. She knew that he could not walk away without having a look at it. She gave her head a small shake, but she looked pleased somehow.

Adam went through a gate that was nearly off its hinges. The bike was a beauty. Old. Exquisitely powdercoated and chromed. “Great bike,” he said, an understatement. “A shovelhead. Eighty-three?”

“Eighty-four. My brother’s pretty crazy about it. He’s done most of the work himself. The insurance is up next week, though, so he’s riding it as much as he can this week.”

“Do you think he might like to rent it?”

Daniel’s face lit up, as if he was already calculating his commission. “If it was presented to him in the right way, he might go for it.”

“One afternoon. I’ll bring it back tonight.”
On my way to the airport.

“I’ll go talk to him.”

Daniel went up the rickety stairs and disappeared inside the house.

Tory came through the gate and looked at the bike. “Adam, you’re still crazy about these old hunks of metal!”