A Bride Worth Waiting For

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.”