Cara Colter (13 page)

Read Cara Colter Online

Authors: A Bride Worth Waiting For

BOOK: Cara Colter
2.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
His lawyer’s mind detected she was speaking to him reluctantly. But she was speaking to him.
“Yeah.”
Proceed cautiously
. “How about you?”
“I never liked motorcycles!”
“Sure you did. You used to beg me for rides, on that odd occasion that I had a bike working.”
A faint blush of pink swept her cheeks. “I guess I did like going for rides. But that’s quite different from the grand passion you always felt.”
He’d always thought his grand passion was motorcycles, too. Until this afternoon, when he’d thought about doing wicked things to her toes.
“You want to take this out to the lake? The motorcycle?”
Did she pale, the pink receding from her cheeks, too rapidly? She looked like she didn’t trust herself to speak.
He was positive she was going to say no. But she didn’t.
She said yes.
And he felt something warm and full of energy surge within him.
Tory could not believe this. They were standing in a yard that looked like something out of a nightmare, looking at a big black-and-silver monster of a bike, and she had just said yes to the suggestion they take it to the lake instead of that plush car he had rented.
It was madness to agree to this. Everything in her had told her to say no.
But she hadn’t.
He was right. She had loved to climb on the back of the big, growling machines that he sometimes had working.
She had loved to put her arms around him, to bury her face in the aromatic leather of his jacket, to peer out past his shoulder and feel the wind in her hair and on her face.
The boy, Daniel, came back outside, his brother with him. The brother was only slightly older and had the same devil-may-care good looks as Daniel.
She could see him sizing up Adam.
She guessed that Daniel had already sized up Adam a long time ago. And in that face that tried for hardness she had seen respect and liking.
Adam had always had that. Something in him that crossed over barriers others could not.
The brother and Adam were now earnestly talking camshafts and carburetors. After they had gone over the bike in minute detail, Adam commenting and offering suggestions, a deal was arrived at, though it seemed more like a moment of kindred spirits meeting.
She realized she had agreed to ride with him. And that they were venturing now into territory far more dangerous than the laughter Mark had wanted them to discover. Now they were going backward along a road, to a place in it where they had clung together in youthful exhilaration.
But sensuality had played an enormous part during that long-ago ride.
Enormous.
She could back out. Except that she seemed powerless to do so.
Daniel brought her out a jacket and a helmet. “I’ll lend these to you,” he said. The jacket was black leather and had a very graphic skull and crossbones on the back. She did not think he was the kind of boy who gave things easily, and yet today he had given her a kite, and now was lending her, no strings attached, possessions he obviously cared about dearly.
Perhaps, she thought, glancing at his house, the jacket and the helmet were the most valuable things he owned.
She was so touched by his generosity she could not say no, despite the gruesome art on the back of the jacket. He held it for her, practicing being a gentleman, and again she was moved. She slipped her arms into the jacket. Daniel had not seemed that much larger than her, but he was, and the jacket swam around her. She put on the heavy helmet, and strapped it securely around her chin.
Adam, too, had been lent a jacket, his in plain black leather. When he shrugged into it, it seemed to her the years fell away from him and he became once more that wild and wonderful boy from her youth. He flashed a smile at her and she felt the bottom drop out of her belly.
He straddled the bike and glanced over his shoulder.
She joined him.
He threw his weight down on the kick start, and the bike coughed to life, the cough melting quickly into a growl. She could feel the throb of power beneath her. Smoothly he pulled it out of the yard, bumped the motorcycle gently off the curb onto the street.
She wanted to hold on anywhere but to him.
And yet when she gave in, it felt so right.
Like coming home.
There were flowers on her kitchen table that needed drying, and there were orders that needed to be filled.
The last thing she should be doing right now was taking a ride through her past with Adam Reed.
And yet she had a sense of nothing being able to stop that which was meant to be.
And she had another sense.
Of life lived under the pervasive presence of a gray cloud, and of little streaks of sun suddenly finding their way through, piercing her soul with their brightness and their promise.
They rumbled to a stop at a light.
“You know,” Adam called over the noise of the engine, “that jacket would be absolutely hideous on anyone but you.”
“It is hideous!”
He laughed. “But not on you.”
“Well, what is it on me?”
“Sexy.”
She didn’t think she had heard him correctly. “Pardon?”
“You don’t say pardon when you ride a Harley,” he said. “You say, ‘Huh?’”
“Okay, then. Huh, what did you say?”
“I forget.”
But she knew he had not forgotten. And she knew she had heard correctly. And she felt a shiver of pure apprehension go up and down her spine.
And the sensation of light pouring through the clouds intensified.
Chapter Eight
“A
dam! You are going way too fast! Adaaaam!”
And then she laughed, and he knew she didn’t mean it.
He felt he was as close to heaven as he was ever going to get. The machine he controlled was powerful. The road was smooth. The day was glorious.
And Tory was holding him tight.
He liked the way she rode with him, shifting her weight exactly when he shifted his, leaning into each corner, her instincts and her balance excellent. Communication was hard because of the helmets and the roar of the engine and the wind, and yet he felt in total communication with her. He had felt the exact moment she began to relax behind him, felt relaxation turn to contentment, and now he could feel her joy, and sensed that she felt his.
Perhaps, between him and Tory, words were something that got in the way.
The highway to Sylvan Lake passed through the rolling farm country of south-central Alberta. They saw red barns and fat cattle, fields freshly turned and planted.
The truth was when he saw the sign that said Sylvan Lake he wanted to bypass it, to go on forever like this. To say goodbye to the world as he knew it. Toronto. The office. The routine. The profession. Everything.
To follow this road where it took them.
Forever.
A foolish word. Because the word existed, but forever itself did not. Nothing was forever. Except maybe the . earth. And if he thought about it hard enough, maybe not even that.
But again he was aware of thought, his ability to analyze things nearly to death, getting in the way of feeling. Because, with her arms wrapped tight around him, he felt like anything was possible. Even forever.
He took the turnoff from Highway 2 to Highway 11X and that took them right onto Lakeshore Drive, the main road through the small town of Sylvan Lake. The summer crowds had not arrived this early in June, but he slowed the big bike to a crawl, and took in the changes. He was delighted to see many of the same old decrepit cottages stood on what must now be very valuable real estate.
The commercial district, across the street from the public beach, was changed, though, newer and glossier.
Tory pounded on his back when he tried to get by the second ice-cream parlor, and he pulled in and silenced the engine.
“How can you not stop for ice cream at a place called Mrs. Moo?” she asked him.
“It used to be a gas station, didn’t it?”
She pulled off her helmet and shook her head.
Despite TV commercials that showed beautiful women taking off their motorcycle helmets and lovely hair cascading out, helmet hair was not attractive. Her hair was flattened to her head, and the shake only unstuck a piece or two.
She should have looked like a little scarecrow, but somehow she looked unbelievably lovely, in her too-large jacket with the skull on the back of it, and with her hair flattened to her head.
“I think it did used to be a gas station. Look. Thirty flavors.”
He knew she would look at every single flavor carefully. She would even ooh and aah over some of the more exotic ones. And then she would pick Maple Walnut.
He took off his own helmet, gave his head a shake, and followed her through the door. The jacket really did do something for her.
Like an angel wearing a devil’s garb.
It was strangely enticing.
Erotic
might be going too far. But not by much.
He watched her study the ice cream, her nose practically against the glass of the long cooler. She oohed and aahed and let the names run off the tip of her tongue as if they were delicious in themselves.
He ordered a cup of black coffee.
After twelve minutes of the most careful deliberations, she ordered Maple Walnut. It made him feel like he had never left. As if he knew her. Heart and soul.
Which, his lawyer’s mind informed him, was quite a lot to read into ice-cream selection.
“You’re not having ice cream?” she asked him with disbelief.
“My weakness is hot dogs and I’ve already. had three of those today.”
It was too nice to stay inside, and so they went out, and leaned their fannies against the bike and looked out across the lake.
He sipped his hot coffee and she licked her cold ice cream, and it struck him that was how they were. Hot and cold. Opposites.
She and Mark had been more alike. Mark had liked ice cream, too. Always chocolate. Not boring, exactly, but predictable. On those rare occasions when Adam ate ice cream he always picked the one with the wildest name. Zucchini Zebra, Leopard Spotted Lemon, Pomegranate Pie.
He suddenly felt a little angry with Mark. For doing the most unpredictable thing of all. Dying. Leaving Tory alone.
Leaving him, Adam, hopelessly unqualified, to pick up the pieces.
And forcing him to recognize that somewhere in those pieces were fragments of his own heart and soul.
He glanced at Tory. She had ice cream all over her lips. With the flattened hair it should have made about the world’s most unattractive picture.
Instead, he felt a sudden desire, scorching hot, to taste her ice-cream flavored lips.
A woman, twice the looker Tory would ever be, in purple Lycra shorts and a cutoff top like a bra jogged by them and smiled at him. It left him cold, though he politely smiled back. Tory was glaring up at him as if he’d answered that smile with an invitation to join them.
And the look on Tory’s face heated him up.
“What?” he asked her.
“Oh! Do you always have to attract so much attention?” she asked exasperated.
He knew he could not win this one. That there was no sense in trying. But he defended himself anyway. “It’s not as if I do it on purpose.”
“That’s the maddening part. You’re too bloody handsome for your own good.”
It was spoken like an indictment, but he heard something else. Tory thought he was handsome. He supposed he had always known that Tory found him attractive. But she had never said it before. And it had not counted in the crunch, after all. It had not been enough to make her say yes to him when he had most wanted to hear it
It made no sense at all that she would be jealous of him smiling at a woman he did not know, and did not want to know. Tory couldn’t be jealous. It was not in her nature, as far as he knew. And certainly not in her nature when it came to him.
He glanced at her again. She was staring out across the lake, her facial features bland, her ice cream down to the cone.
She took an enormous bite, designed to show uncaring, but failing somehow.
His analytical mind sorted through the information and came up with an impossible answer. She had. She had experienced a moment of jealousy when he had smiled at the jogger.
Which meant something.
Something that could change his life for all time. If he let it.
The logical thing to do would be to turn around and go back right now. This road they had traveled today was bringing him face to face with yearnings he did not want to know. Dissatisfactions with his life that he had managed to keep a deep dark secret from himself for a long time.
Go back
, the voice of his self-preservation called to him.
But the letter in his pocket, Mark’s voice, urged him to go forward. Into the ultimate adventure of his own heart?
“Should we go, Adam?” She wiped the ice cream off her lips, missing a speck right at the corner of her mouth, and rubbed her hands on her jeans.
“Yeah, we should go.” But where? Forward or back?
The cabin was both, really. A piece of the past, and a piece of the future.
He could not go back to Calgary now. Not yet. If he could hang on for another few hours, they would go and set up the lawn chairs and watch the stars come out, and then drive the motorcycle back through a star-studded night.
And then it would be over.
His obligation to Mark fulfilled to the letter, his life his own again. Simple. Uncomplicated. Predict—
He saw Tory stiffen beside him and then look sharply around.
“What?” he asked her.
“Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“I thought I heard a man laugh.”
“And?”
She looked at him, her brown eyes huge. “And it sounded just like Mark.”
Of course, the lawyer in him knew absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Mark was not having a laugh at his own puny human efforts to keep everything under control.
But the boy in him, the one who had known Mark as well as he knew himself, was not so sure.
Tory rubbed a circle in the dust on the bathroom mirror and looked at herself. Her hair looked absolutely awful, flattened against her skull in the most unflattering way. She peered closer and saw there was a little smudge of ice cream at the corner of her mouth.
So his eyes straying to her mouth every now and then had meant nothing more than she needed a napkin.
The cabin seemed stuffy, damp, dark and cold. The sun would not set for another hour. The water had not been turned on yet this year, and she did not want to ask Adam to do it just so she could make herself presentable.
For him.
It was bad enough that she had felt that flare of insane jealousy when Miss Canada had jogged by them in her cute little running outfit.
Had he guessed she had experienced that moment of jealousy? Surely, at thirty years of age, she was not so transparent? Surely, at thirty years of age she was beyond petty feelings like jealousy?
“Tory,” he called, “I’m going to turn on the water so that we can make hot chocolate.”
“If you insist,” she muttered.
She did not think agreeing to come here had been a good idea. At all. Maybe it would have been safe enough if they had stayed with the car, but that motorcycle, and the smell of leather, and being in such close physical proximity to him had woven a special kind of magic around them.
Her arms around the broad strength of him, the wind in her face, the utter freedom of it all, had made something within her sing, intensified that feeling that she was bathed in sunlight after a long sojourn through darkness.
For one heart stopping moment, when they had approached the cutoff for Sylvan Lake, she had found herself hoping he would not turn. That he would just keep going.
“To where?” she asked herself grouchily. “Edmonton? How romantic.”
But even as she said it, she knew it was not about where the road would go so much as the longing in her heart that he had fanned to life. And now she had to go sit out there on a lawn chair and sip hot chocolate and watch the stars come out one by one, and pretend.
That she was not feeling confused.
That she was not feeling mixed up.
That she was not feeling jealous of every woman who looked at him and received his smile.
That she was not contemplating him leaving with a kind of dread, her heart feeling hollow every time her mind drifted to what would happen when each of the items listed in that letter had been completed.
It was as if, for five days now, her world had come into spring just as surely as the world around her was doing the same thing. All around her was new turned soil, the vibrant green of new beginning, leaves unfolding, birds singing. Hope was in the air.
And until Adam had come back, she had been comfortably unaware that she lived without hope. That her life had become dull and predictable with not even the remotest chance of an adventure coming along and setting her on her ear.
That was the way she wanted it. After losing Mark she felt an almost insane need to be in control. She went to bed at the same time every night. She ate hot oatmeal every single morning for breakfast. She didn’t even like to move her furniture. She wanted to feel like there were things that would never change unless she allowed them to. She wanted so desperately for the world to be safe and predictable that she had made her own world dull and without excitement.
And then along came Adam and she practically tingled with awareness of life coursing through her veins.
Of all that was
possible.
Of a craving within herself to flirt a tiny bit with danger. To
not
know exactly what was going to happen next.
The pipes screeched and water exploded out the tap, leaving untidy drips all over her shirt. There, she told herself. That was what happened when you didn’t know what was going to happen next—a mess. A big unruly mess.
Which described her hair exactly.
She decided, firmly, that she wasn’t going to fix it. Why? She could never compete with the millions of gorgeous women prepared to throw themselves at his feet anyway. Why should she fix her hair? To impress him?

Other books

Forever Princess by Meg Cabot
Two Bar Mitzvahs by Kat Bastion with Stone Bastion
The Beast Loves Curves by J. S. Scott
Needle and Dread by Elizabeth Lynn Casey
Rhubarb by M. H. van Keuren
Pound Foolish (Windy City Neighbors Book 4) by Dave Jackson, Neta Jackson
Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells