A Bride Worth Waiting For

“I’m going to take you Rollerblading,” he said.

She flung back her head and looked at him. Her eyes were all puffy from crying. She seemed to realize suddenly she was in his lap, and she scrambled out of his embrace and onto her feet.

“You’re not giving up, are you? Just like the old days!”

“Bulldog Reed,” he agreed. Her robe had pulled apart slightly below the belt, and he tried for a glimpse of her upper thigh.

“Adam, you have to go away.” She looked down, blushed, and pulled her robe ferociously into place, yanking hard on the belt.

“Not until I take you Rollerblading.”

“And then you’ll go?”

As a lawyer he had mastered a few nuances of lying without actually lying. For instance, you could incline your head a certain way and people took that as assent, when in the letter of the law no verbal agreement had been committed.

He tilted his head, a gesture one might mistake as preceding a nod.

She straightened her robe again unnecessarily, and pointed that cute little nose at the sky and spun away from him.

He waited for the slamming door, the turn of the key, and actually felt relief when it didn’t come.

He had finished all the coffee in the carafe before she finally returned, her face scrubbed free of tear stains, dressed in some terribly unattractive sweat outfit in the most unbecoming shade of gray he had ever seen.

Not intending to be the least bit sexy, she was unbelievably so.

“All right,” she snapped. “You want to go so bad, let’s go.” Covering up her moment of vulnerability with cool dignity. With impatience. In her eyes a vow: never to be vulnerable to him again.

He sighed.

Tory watched him get up from his chair. God, he was glorious. He always had been. Incredibly handsome, but more. Sure of himself—and that certainty showing up in the way he moved, pure masculine strength and grace in his every move.

He was dressed casually today, in jeans faded to dusty blue from long and loving wear, and a white denim shirt. It made him look more like, well, him, than the expensively dressed man who had appeared on her doorstep yesterday.

His hair was falling carelessly over one eye. Beautiful hair, black and thick and silky. Hair that begged to be touched, begged her fingers to reach up and flick it back for him. She had done that all the time. Before. When his face and their friendship had been so familiar to her. When he’d been a part of her life, like the river was a part of her life. Something she had assumed would be constant and unchanging.

Every woman they saw today would look at him.

In the old days, he’d rarely noticed. Or if he did, he would grin back at them and then turn and give Tory, or Mark, a puzzled look. Like, What’s with them? or Is that Someone we know?

And she was dressed in one of Mark’s old sweat suits. It looked absolutely appalling on her, and she knew it.

She had started out quite differently. She had marched into the house and past his pathetic flowers, which for some reason she had put in her very best vase.

In her bedroom she had thrown open her closet and scrutinized every outfit she had. And tried on three of them, finally settling on a nice pair of pleated white shorts and a jade-green silk blouse that did the most splendid things to her hair and her eyes. Which, of course, was too ridiculous considering where they were going.

Next had come black jeans and a flannel shirt. Better. Faintly feminine, but hardly alluring. It showed off her coloring and her trim figure rather nicely.

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.”