The Wedding Gift

A fat raindrop landed on her forehead while she was wondering why this stranger was sharing Riley’s personal information with her. Within seconds the sky opened up, just as Red O’Toole had predicted.

Kipp got out of his vehicle and wrestled her suitcase from her. After tossing it into the back of his aging Land Rover, he said, “Riley has friends, too, who have his back. We’re worried about him.”

She stood ten feet away in the pouring rain, uncertain what to do about Kipp Dawson and his offer.

“Riley thinks his mother sent you,” he said, getting soaked, too. “I talked to Chloe a few minutes ago. She didn’t mention you.”

Madeline could have blurted the truth, but if she told anyone the reason she was here, it had to be Riley. And she had no right to tell him unless he asked. What had she gotten herself into?

“Maybe having a nurse around isn’t such a bad idea,” Kipp said.

“Are you saying you think he needs a nurse?” she asked.

“I’m not saying anything. I’m just offering you a ride to the motel because Riley asked me to. Do you want it or don’t you?”

Kipp Dawson looked as rough and unkempt as his dented old Land Rover. He was probably right about weighing one-seventy. Men didn’t often lie about their weight. His hair appeared darker now that it was wet and his whisker stubble was too straggly to be a fashion statement. Beneath his exterior was a vein of something earnest.

That didn’t make him her friend.

She tossed his wallet back to him and continued on her way. Walking faster now that she wasn’t weighted down by her cumbersome suitcase, she heard him swear and close his door. Then he was following her again in his car.

The little motel was exactly where Ruby had said it would be. Kipp parked under the portico beneath a lighted vacancy sign that was missing the C, then hauled her bulky suitcase out of the backseat. After setting it heavily on the pavement next to her, he got back in the driver’s seat without uttering a word.

For some reason she felt compelled to say, “Riley made it clear he doesn’t need a nursemaid, as he put it.”

Kipp lit a cigarette before replying. “Riley doesn’t talk about what he needs. You ask me, a good roll between the sheets with a pretty nurse might be just what the doctor ordered.”

Madeline was left staring at his taillights as he drove away, wondering how many more times she would have to consciously close her gaping mouth today.

Sully’s Pub began its existence as a boarding-house for lumberjacks in the mid-1800s. The ax and saw marks on the rough-hewn beams over the bar were as evident today as they were in the black-and-white photograph that immortalized Ernest Hemingway having a beer here in 1948. The waitress was a brown-eyed young woman named Sissy. She wore her dark hair short and her T-shirt tight, the words Yale is for thinkers—Gale is for drinkers stretched across her chest. According to her, the fine folks of Gale have been hoping to lure someone famous to town ever since. Other celebrities had reportedly purchased property in the area, but if they drank, it wasn’t at Sully’s.

Madeline hadn’t come to Sully’s to meet anybody famous. She came because she was starving and the desk clerk at the motel said it was the only place within walking distance that served food this late during the off-season.

The bar was surprisingly crowded on this Friday evening in April. It had a simple menu, small tables, mismatched chairs, paneled walls and one pool table in the back where Madeline and Ruby were losing to a petite brunette named Amanda and her clean-cut accountant boyfriend, Todd.

“You’re really going to make me do this, aren’t you?” Ruby sputtered to Amanda after scratching on an easy shot.

Amanda didn’t let the fact that she was nearly a head shorter than Ruby intimidate her. Crossing her arms stubbornly, she said, “You’ve been my best friend my entire life and I’m not attending our ten-year high school reunion without you.”

Without her ball cap to subdue it, Ruby’s wavy red hair fell halfway down her back. Even in flat shoes, her legs looked a mile long. In fact, everything about her was long—her eyelashes, her silences, her sigh before she said, “Pete’s going to be there.” “So?” Amanda asked.

“Pete,” Ruby said with obvious disdain. “You know. Peter. As in Cheater Peter?”

“You guys finished here?” somebody asked.

After relinquishing the pool table to a group celebrating a twenty-first birthday, Todd said, “Just take a date.”

As if it was that easy. “Ugh,” was all Ruby said.

Obviously accustomed to these conversations, Todd excused himself and ambled over to talk to someone on the other side of the room. Now that it was just women, Amanda explained Ruby’s dilemma to Madeline.

“Sure she could ask Jason Horning, but he’s practically eye-level with the girls here.” She gestured in the vicinity of Ruby’s chest. “And Ruby’s always had a thing about short men. I mean, a thing. A few years ago, a man escaped from the Benzie County Jail. Every hardware store within fifty miles sold out of dead bolts and buckshot the first day. And do you know what Little Red Riding Hood here said? ‘I wonder if he’s tall.'”

Even Ruby smiled at the memory, until she said, “Buckshot. Now, there’s an idea.”

Madeline was so intrigued she didn’t notice Sissy’s approach until she’d plunked a beer down next to Madeline’s right hand. “It’s from that sulking Adonis at the bar.”

The celebration at the pool table was getting rowdier and the pub more crowded, and yet Madeline found Riley Merrick as if she had a radar lock on him. He’d exchanged his khakis and brown bomber for jeans and a crisp cotton shirt, and sat on a stool facing the mirror behind the bar, his back to her.

“Mr. Porsche, I presume?” Ruby said.

Sissy practically swooned. “He first came in about a year ago. Every month or so he returns. He orders a beer at the bar, talks to whoever happens to be sitting next to him, then leaves. I’ve seen him propositioned, but I haven’t seen him take a woman up on it. The guy couldn’t be sexier if he tried. I’m telling you, when a man like that buys a girl a drink, he’s either apologizing or interested.”

“Which is he?” Amanda asked, scooting her chair closer.

“Maybe both,” Ruby said. “He accused Madeline of trespassing and practically threw her off some property earlier.”

Ruby, Amanda and Sissy were brimming with curiosity.

“He looks tall,” Amanda said. “If you don’t go talk to him, Ruby here will.”

“Would you stop with the height references already?” Ruby sputtered.

Madeline laughed out loud, and it surprised her. She wanted to grasp these young women’s hands and thank them for failing to soften their voices around her. They didn’t handle her with kid gloves. Of course, they didn’t know her history. That anonymity felt breathtakingly liberating. “Would you excuse me?” she asked, surging to her feet.

She’d changed into boots with heels, snug jeans and a black knit shirt. Several people watched her as she made her way to the bar, but she kept her gaze trained on the man watching in the mirror.

“What are you doing here?” she asked after she’d taken the stool next to Riley.

“I thought it was obvious. I bought you a drink.”

Oddly, that gruff tone was as refreshing as Ruby’s, Amanda’s and Sissy’s curiosity had been. Eyeing the drop of condensation trailing down her bottle, she said, “I don’t drink.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

In the mirror she saw Todd slip his arm around Amanda’s shoulder. It was such a pure and simple gesture of intimacy it sent an ache to her chest. “I just lost a game of eight ball and it wasn’t pretty.”

“Losing never is.”

Riley was a study in contrasts. He was a risk-taker who didn’t like to lose, a wealthy business owner who worked alongside his crew. Practically every guy in the bar had at least a few days’ whisker stubble on his face. Riley was clean shaven. His shirt had a designer logo; the beer bottle held loosely in his right hand didn’t.

“You shouldn’t be drinking,” she said.

“You even sound like my mother. I hope she paid you in advance.”

Riley seemed accustomed to interference from his mother. It might have annoyed him, but Madeline got the distinct impression it didn’t intimidate him. “I told you,” she said. “She didn’t pay me anything. Are you this distrusting of everyone in the medical field?”

She noticed an easing in his expression and a warming in his eyes, and it occurred to her that he was enjoying himself. Some men puffed up their chests or swaggered in order to be noticed. Riley’s self-confidence was more subtle.