Authors: A Bride Worth Waiting For

Cara Colter (5 page)

BOOK: Cara Colter

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And her heart had cried yes.

But her head had told her she just wasn’t an adventure-and-excitement kind of girl. She had been the kind of girl who wanted stability. Life the same every day. Flower gardens and picket fences and tricycles to trip over on the walk.

And so she had chosen Mark. A safe life, and a predictable one.

He had been diagnosed with cancer two weeks after they married.

She had never felt like fate laughed at her. Never. But she had felt humbled. She had come to understand there were things people controlled and things people didn’t. That nothing was really safe and predictable at all. Even with the most careful planning.

“Are you okay?” Adam asked, breaking into her reverie, looking at her closely, far too closely, as if he could see into her troubled soul.

She nodded, forced herself to smile brightly. “You know me. Scoffing at pain.”

“Arm around my neck, one, two, three, up.”

She was up, her arm draped around his neck, feeling surprisingly solid.

“Back to my original plan,” he said. “Seeing Eye dog. Hold on tight.”

She held on tight. It was the strangest sensation. Like being thrown a life preserver. When she had been totally unaware she was drowning.

“You’re in your socks,” she pointed out to him.

“Three dollars at the five-and-dime.”

“You don’t shop at the five-and-dime.”

“How do you know?”

“You never even shopped there when you were poor.”

Something flitted across his face, and she was sorry she had said that. He’d always been sensitive about the fact he had less money than her and Mark. She thought he would have outgrown it now that he was so obviously successful.

The look was already gone. “I don’t care if the socks cost fifty bucks. I’m not putting those things back on my feet.”

“Did you see the size of those dogs that went by a few minutes ago?”

“I’ll watch. And if I step in anything, I’ll—”

“Sue.”

They said it together and burst out laughing.

“Are you okay being tugged along like this, or should we take your skates off, too?”

“Nah. I want my money’s worth—out of the skate rental and my socks.”

He cheerfully pulled her back to the booth. Adam gave the kid such a cold, hard look that he retreated behind his comic book with only one small smug snort.

Adam insisted on kneeling at her feet and pulling her skates off and helping her put her shoes back on.

A couple of elderly women went by and gave her a look of such naked envy that she blushed.

“That restaurant is not very far,” he said. “Come on. I’ll buy you a hot dog and get some ice to put on your knee.”

Say no, she ordered herself. It was over now. He’d promised. Rollerblading and goodbye.

“That restaurant doesn’t sell hot dogs. It’s not lunchtime, anyway.”

“It is where I come from. Come on. We’ll have a quick bite to eat, and then I’ll piggyback you home.”

“You will not!”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I weighed about thirty pounds less last time!”

“But so did L”

“It was after that game of scrub when we were in the ninth grade.”

“Maybe I weighed fifty pounds less,” he said thoughtfully. “God, that was a long time ago. I can’t even remember what I looked like.”

But she could. Adam, his hat on backwards lean and muscular for a boy that age, stronger than all the rest of them put together. Adam, who could be counted on for at least one home run every game, who could run like the wind and wing a ball in all the way from the Moore’s back fence. Adam with that light of pure devilment dancing in his eyes.

She looked. It was still there. Buried deeper, but still there. What was he up to?

“Maybe a hot chocolate,” she said reluctantly, and took his proffered hand. It folded around hers, strong and warm, and then he was putting her arm over his shoulder, and she limped painfully along beside him for half a dozen steps or so before he scooped her up in his arms.

“Put me down, Adam. I’m too heavy.”

“You weigh about as much as a soaked kitten. Kind of look like one, too.”

“We look silly.”

“So what? Who knows us?”

He’d always been like that. Other kids worried about what they looked like. Other kids gave in to peer pressure, wanted to be part of the crowd, had to have a certain style of sneakers and jackets. It had only seemed to baffle Adam.

She gave up and nestled into him. Lord, he was strong. “How on earth does a lawyer stay so strong?”

“How did you know I was a lawyer?”

“I heard. Somewhere.”

“I’m not really that strong. I’m putting on a brave front.”

“Then put me down, you ridiculous man.”

“No.”

He said the word with that stubborn tone to his voice and set to his chin that meant nothing but trouble.

She sighed.

“What do you call a hundred lawyers strapped to the tracks with the train coming?” he asked her. He wasn’t really struggling at all, not even breathing hard. Just striding along with one hundred and ten pounds in his arms.

A plump woman went by pushing a baby carriage. She winked at Tory.

“What?”

“A start.”

“That’s awful, Adam. Not in the least funny. Aren’t you proud of what you’ve done with your life?”

He gazed down at her for a moment, his brow knit. “Proud? I never thought of it like that. I mean, Mother Teresa led a life to be proud of. Me? I just make money. Lots of it.”

“You’ve become cynical.”

“I was always cynical.”

“That’s true.”

“I’ve just found a way to get paid for it.”

“Adam, you’re happy, aren’t you?”

He looked down at her. Happy. He thought so, really. He was successful. So busy that there were days he had to decide which meal he could most afford to skip. He was in a pleasant relationship. He was rebuilding a 1964 Harley-Davidson.

Happy?

The happiest he’d felt in a long, long time was right now, with her sweet weight pressed into him, and her huge eyes on his face.

Their shared silliness on those damned skates had made him happy.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Yeah. Sure. I’m happy.”

She was looking at him with a look he could only call cynical. But they were at the restaurant and he settled her in a chair and ignored her big brown eyes by looking at the menu.

“Berenstain Bear furniture,” she said looking around.

The furniture looked like it had all been made out of sticks. “Berenstain bears?” he asked.

“I can tell you don’t have much exposure to kids. You used to love kids. Remember the summer you and me and Mark coached the Hillhurst Hyenas?”

The truth was he remembered it all. Every single time they had laughed together, he remembered.

“Yeah, I remember,” he said gruffly, trying to hide behind a menu he was having trouble making sense out of. She ordered hot chocolate. He ordered salmon, and had to surrender the menu.

“Do you remember Hercules?” she asked him.

“The girl who could pop a foul into the river?”

“Miss Calgary two years ago.”

“No way!”

He had not wanted to do this. Had planned to skillfully detour any walks down memory lane.

“We won every game, didn’t we?” he asked, and he could hear the warmth of the memory in his own voice, remember the kids gathered around them, and her eyes laughing—”

“The male twist on history,” she said, shaking her head. Her hot chocolate arrived.

So did his salmon. It looked raw. He wished they’d had hot dogs after all. “We didn’t win every game?” he asked, surprised.

“Two. We won two games.”

It was a good excuse to spit out the salmon. “No!”

“Afraid so.”

“But why would I remember winning all the time?”

She smiled with such softness he knew what she would say before she said it.

“Mark.”

Mark. Of course. Such a good sport he genuinely never cared if the kids won or lost, and somehow he managed to make them not care either. It was always fun, and that’s what he remembered. The kids gathered around Tory and Mark and him with joy in their eyes. He’d remembered that, perhaps not surprisingly, as triumph.

“He always took the whole damn works of them for ice cream after,” Adam remembered. “Win or lose.”

“You used to help him pay for it. And I think that was the summer you stocked shelves at Safeway.”

“I helped pay reluctantly. A future lawyer, even then.”

“I don’t remember you being reluctant.”

“A guy tries not to let his inherent greed and self-centeredness show.”
Around the girl that he loves.

But for Mark there had never been any reluctance. He’d loved treating those kids. He would have gladly missed fueling up his car for a few days to do it. The better man.

“He was really a special guy, Tory.”

He had to get this over with. Quick. He was feeling lonely and bereft and as if he had missed the most important things in life. He had to get out of here.

Away from her, and her eyes, and her lips touching that mug and sipping the foam off the chocolate.

Instead, he heard himself asking about old classmates and about her mom and dad and Mark’s parents, and listening to her replies like a man thirsty, a man who had crossed the desert without water.

“So,” he said, “are you free to go bike riding? Tomorrow, maybe?”

He could probably whack them both off in one day, the bike ride and the kite thing. That left only the lake. He could be clear of here by the weekend, with any luck.

She was looking at him as if he had lost his mind.

She pointed at her knee.

He suddenly felt sick, and he didn’t think it was the slimy salmon. Tory was not going to be bike riding anytime in the near future.

Or flying a kite, either.

How long? A week? Two?

A week or two back here in the company of all these ghosts? With her so much alive?

He felt like he was being pushed toward some unknown place within himself. A place he had no intention of going. None.

He called for the bill.

She got up, and he saw her face seize up with pain as she put weight down on her knee.

The thing about this island in the middle of the Bow River in the middle of Calgary was that there were no roads on it. That was its charm. No motorized traffic. It was reached by footbridges.

He supposed they could get an emergency vehicle on it somehow, but Tory would kill him if such a fuss was made over her.

He was going to have to piggyback her home after all. And every step was going to just bring him closer to what he used to feel.

“Lawyers don’t have feelings,” he muttered to himself.

“Pardon?” she said.

He looked at her, and for a man with no feelings, his heart nearly seized right up.

He knew he was in trouble. The biggest trouble of his entire life.

He’d never minded trouble before. But the kind of trouble in those dark-brown eyes was the kind he’d never really been prepared for. It was the kind of trouble a man could not really prepare for.

Not even if he had an entire lifetime to try.

Chapter Four

A
dam paced his hotel room. There was actually a trail in the carpet where his footsteps had flattened the nap. He had the ugly feeling that if someone offered him a cigarette right now he’d take it. After four and a half years without one.

He made split-second decisions every single day. He was good at it Some might even say great at it.

So why was this decision so difficult? Go. Or stay.

He’d piggybacked her most of the way home yesterday. She’d insisted on hobbling along beside him for a few steps every now and then, but mostly he carried her, her coltish legs wrapped around him, her arms around his neck, her whole body crunched up against his back.

Her hair smelled like lemons and her breath like hot chocolate. Who would have ever guessed that this would be a combination his poor beleaguered brain would register as erotic?

They had laughed hysterically, like two little kids playing hooky from school and on their way to the candy store. With a buck each in their pockets.

He shook his head, remembering. He’d whinnied at people going by, just because it made her laugh and pound on his back and demand that he stop it at once. Was that any way for a lawyer to behave? Whinnying on a public pathway?

Okay, so she couldn’t go bike riding or kite flying.

He’d made her laugh. That’s what he’d come to do and it was done.

Go or stay?

There was absolutely no point staying. None.

Unless he counted the look in her eyes when he’d made the damn fool mistake of touching her mouth when he’d finally set her down in front of her place. What he had really wanted to do was kiss her. The lemons and hot chocolate and twenty minutes of carrying her laughing had all added up inside him, making him stare at her lips once he’d set her down, thinking of only one thing.

Until he’d thought of one other thing. What if he kissed her and it was like kissing Mark’s girl?

And yet her lips had looked soft and tender and touchable, and so he had given in, in part. He had touched the silky fullness of her bottom lip with his fingertip instead of his mouth, and even though it made no sense at all, the sensation had stunned him with its intensity.

He had kissed many women, long and hard and thoroughly, and the same things had not been stirred in him that the feel of her lip against his finger stirred.

He shook his head.

Not a reason to stay, if he thought about it. One more reason to go.

Except that he had not fulfilled Mark’s last wish. Not to the letter. And somehow back in Toronto, the fact that he had made her laugh was not going to be good enough. The stupid bike ride and kite thing would haunt him. And what was the point of going all the way back if it was going to end up haunting him? He would just end up coming back here to finish it properly anyway.

But what was the point of staying if he couldn’t fulfill the remaining requests in Mark’s letter? There was no way she was going to be riding a bike or flying a kite anytime soon.

Looking at her lips could damn near drive him insane.

He’d thought of asking her out for dinner last night. Over and over he’d thought of it. The lips that taunted him were exactly what stopped him. He ended up ordering room service and eating lukewarm food over some paperwork. He’d called Kathleen and got her answering machine.

He said hi, things were going well.

Only after he’d hung up, did he notice that he hadn’t told her he would be home tomorrow. And that he hadn’t told her he missed her. Or loved her.

He wandered over to the window and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “Aw, Mark,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

If he stayed, he had to deal with her lips. If he left, he had to deal with his guilt.

Early morning rush-hour traffic jammed the street below him. A taxi cut off a Mercedes and a horn blared. And then he saw it. Way down there, at the right-hand side of the road, holding its own with buses and cars and trucks.

A ricksha. A bicycle-drawn ricksha.

Without even stopping for his jacket he raced out his hotel room door and took the steps down three at a time. He burst out the main door. It had been easier to spot that contraption from way up above.

He began running in the direction it had been going.

Even as he ran, he became aware that what had happened upstairs had been a power struggle between his head and his heart. His head telling him to go. His heart telling him to stay.

As a lawyer, he liked to think his heart was an underdeveloped muscle. Thinking. Logic. Those were the powers that won cases. That ruled the world, really.

But his underdeveloped muscle seemed to have a lot of power right now. Why else would he be risking life and limb chasing a ricksha through rush-hour traffic?

Stay
, it told him in no uncertain terms as he caught sight of the ricksha, weaving its way through traffic. He put on a burst of speed, and found out his real heart wasn’t benefitting that much from all the hours behind the desk either. It pumped wildly.

Stay just until you’ve completed what Mark asked of yon, his head told him sternly.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, taking his life in his hands, leaping in front of a car, and into the empty seat of the ricksha.

The driver, pedaling furiously and effortlessly, turned and looked at him. Shocked recognition hit Adam even before the boy spoke, his voice not the least breathless from all his exertion.

“Oh, hiya Gramps. Where to?”

Tory shifted the ice on her knee. An uncomfortably cold wet rivulet ran down her leg into her sandal. She flipped a towel at it and looked at her yard. Her yard in early morning. It always brought her peace.

Even in Mark’s final days, when she had come out here, her soul quieted. Listened. To some voice inside her that said it would be all right. That everything would be all right. The flowers themselves each gave a little lesson in life and death. Growing, blooming, dying. Bringing beauty and joy, and then fading and falling, in death giving nourishment to the next one that would bloom.

But there was no peace in her garden this morning.

Or maybe the peace was in her garden, as it always had been, but it was having trouble penetrating her own frame of mind.

Her knee was sore. She had a zillion projects to complete by Saturday—none that a sore knee was going to prevent her from doing.

So why was she sitting here feeling so resentful of
him?

Because he’d made her laugh. Fool. Whinnying like a horse every time they went by someone on that path yesterday. Until tears were rolling down her face, she was laughing so hard.

But then when he’d put her down in front of her house, there had been something in his face that had chased all the laughter away.

He’d reached out and touched the fullness of her bottom lip with his finger; something in that small touch so full of reverence and longing had made her think he would kiss her.

And her whole insides had glowed warm as fire.

But he had not kissed her. Just shoved the offending hand into his pocket, given her a casual salute with the other one, and walked swiftly away, calling a casual “See you later” over his broad shoulder, a shoulder she knew intimately after holding on to it for dear life for the past half hour. But not as intimately as she would like to know it, a little voice inside her own brain taunted her.

Nonsense. He had left the impression that he might phone and ask her out for dinner.

She’d rehearsed saying no a thousand different ways for nothing, because he had not called.

There were lots of reasons for saying no. She was busy. He couldn’t just expect her to put her whole life on hold because he’d arrived in town.

Plus, it would be disloyal to Mark to want to spend time with the man who couldn’t even find time to come to his friend’s funeral.

And, that finger on her lip had opened a whole new dimension to things. A physical side that she remembered all too well.

When she was with Adam, something
sang
in her. And trembled. And wanted. It had been like that since she was about fourteen. Even after she had said yes to Mark, that restless thing had been within her.

Hadn’t she been relieved when Adam left town? Relieved even when he didn’t come back? Hadn’t that feeling of relief been there all the time? Right beneath the recriminations, and the anger that he had abandoned Mark, had she not been just a little bit thankful?

She limped over to a flower basket and yanked a finished petunia head off with completely unnecessary viciousness.

He hadn’t called and asked her for dinner.
That
was the kind of guy he was. He was probably on his way back to Toronto by now, without even a call to say goodbye.

Even if he wasn’t, she didn’t like this. Questioning her own character. Feeling strangely off balance. Feeling this quivering excitement in her belly every time she thought of him…

And she thought of him far too much. Last night in her bed thinking tormented thoughts of his broad shoulders underneath her hands yesterday, her legs curled around him, his scent, wild and clean, filling her nostrils and making her ache, heat rising within her.

She ripped off another wilted petunia head.

Thump
.

She whirled and hurt her knee. There he was, lying sprawled out on this side of her fence, his face planted in the dirt.

Don’t laugh at him
, she warned herself grimly.

He got up. A smudge of dirt was on his cheek.

“Oh, hi,” he said casually, as if he had bumped into her at the dry cleaners.

Her heart was doing this traitorous little dance inside her chest. And she was smiling. Even though she didn’t want to. At all.

“Oh, hi,” she said, and then added even though she didn’t want to, at all, “Fancy meeting you here.”

He laughed, and came up the stairs toward her, two at a time, all his incredible energy shimmering around him.

“How’s the knee? It doesn’t look great.”

“It doesn’t feel so hot, either.” She looked at the dark head bent over her knee, and shivered.
Don’t offer him coffee
. If she’d been so convinced he was halfway to Toronto, why had she made enough coffee for two this morning?

He straightened, and even though she didn’t want to, at all, she reached up and brushed the dirt from his cheek. Her fingers lingered. His eyes lingered. And then he kissed her fingertips and she snatched her hand away. “Do you want coffee?” she stammered.

He’d kissed her fingers! And she offered him coffee! Instead of telling him to get lost. Instead of telling him to go back to where he came from.

She looked reproachfully at her fingers, as if they were entirely to blame for what had just come out her mouth. They were. They burned pleasantly where his lips had touched them. She wiped them energetically on her kneelength denim shorts. It didn’t help.

“I’ll get the mug.” He went in her house and she could hear him rummaging around in there, whistling.

She sank down on the plump cushion of her patio set. What would it be like to have Adam rummaging around in her house every morning, whistling?

Until she had heard that sound it was like she hadn’t been aware of a space in her life chock-full of emptiness.

Adam’s whistle felt as if it could fill that space, as if there would be no more loneliness. How had she managed to so successfully outrun the knowledge that she was lonely?

Dangerous thoughts. He lived a million miles away. She knew nothing about him, anymore. Nothing. He probably had a girlfriend, or a dozen of them. Maybe he even lived with someone. Isn’t that what everybody did now?

Why did she care? He was leaving. She was staying. Two very good reasons not to care if he had a girlfriend. Two very good reasons not to be planning too much around the cheerful notes of his whistle.

“Adam,” she called, even though she didn’t want to, at all, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

Silence.

“Adam?”

He came out the door and set down his coffee mug, carefully. “I see someone.”

She knew, without having to ask, that they didn’t live together. Somehow that would not be Adam. He had always had such an innate sense of integrity. And she knew something else, and was surprised by how well she knew him, still.

She knew he did not love her, the one he was “seeing,” even if he had told himself he did.

And she felt relieved, and then angry with herself for being relieved.

Adam Reed was simply none of her business. Not his life. Not his girlfriend.

BOOK: Cara Colter

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