Читать книгу A Bride Worth Waiting For - Cara Colter - Страница 9

Chapter One

“Go away.”

They weren’t exactly words that should make one feel cheerful, Adam thought. Especially given the fact he had traveled over two thousand miles to hear them.

But he did feel cheerful. Probably because this insane mission was over before it had even started.

It wasn’t, he told himself firmly, because he was seeing her again, after a space of nearly seven years.

“I told you to go away,” she said again, resolutely.

He regarded her thoughtfully. She was on the other side of her screen door, her arms folded over her chest, her foot tapping impatiently, and if he was not mistaken, with fire in her eyes.

She had not been beautiful all those years ago, and she had not matured into beauty.

In fact, she was remarkably unchanged. On the flight here he had picked out women of his age and hers, and studied them. And been reassured. That she would have changed. That she would be plump and frumpy. Or that a smooth veneer of sophistication would have chased away the elfin charm that had made him call her “cute,” a description she had always reacted to with chagrin, which only made her cuter.

But she was still cute. Not plump. Certainly not frumpy. No veneer of sophistication. Though he knew her to be his own age, thirty, she looked astoundingly like the first time he had seen her in sixth grade—her baseball cap on backward, that same riot of red-gold curls scattered around her face, those same freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her little snub nose, a pointed chin, little bow lips. Except now there was no baseball cap and that chin was lifted at him in defiance, the bows of her lips faintly downturned in disapproval.

That first time she’d had on a too-big Stampeders jersey, and rolled up jeans that showed a Band-Aid on her knee. She had been smiling, though. A smile so full of mischief and warmth it had melted his twelve-year-old heart in a way it had never been touched before. Or since.

Today she wore a too-large man’s shirt over a pair of black bicycle shorts. Silly, but he checked the knees, his eyes drifting over the rest of her on the way down. She’d mourned her boyish build all through adolescence, and as far as he could tell it was unchanged. She was willowy and slender as a young tree.

“I’ve got about as many curves as a ruler,” she used to lament.

By then she was already the ruler of his heart. It had made him blind for all time to the attractions of fullerfigured women.

He found her knees, finally, and peered through the screen.

She tucked one slim leg behind her, but not before he saw the smudge that struck him, foolishly, as being utterly lovely.

“I was out back in the garden,” she said defensively.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Anyway, you’re leaving.” She reached out and snapped the lock on the screen, as if he was some sort of barbarian, who would enter her house without an invitation, barge by her, sit on her sofa and demand tea. No. Beer.

Did she really think of him like that? Of course she did. That was why he’d been overlooked for someone with a better pedigree.

Of course if she really thought of him like that, she would know the flimsy screen door, with its fancy heritage scrolling in the corners, wouldn’t keep him out. Probably couldn’t keep a determined kitten out.

“I’m not leaving.” The words came from his mouth, all right, but they really surprised him. Because he didn’t want to be here in the first place. All the way here he had hoped and maybe even prayed for a reaction like this from her. So he could turn on his heel and catch the next flight back to Toronto. That would be enough to soothe his conscience. He’d flown all the way here, hadn’t he? Who could say he had not tried his hardest? Not made his best effort?

“If you don’t go away, I’ll call the police.”

He wondered if he should tell her the truth. About the letter in his pocket. Something told him the time was not right.

“No you won’t,” he said. “You won’t call the police.”

She glared at him. Her eyes were dark brown, shot through with gold. Immense eyes. They had always been her best feature, dancing with the light that was inside of her.

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“We could always talk about the dirt on your knees.”

She glared at him, tossed her head and slammed the inside door. The beveled glass insert rattled.

Not something a man who had just traveled two thousand one hundred and twenty-five miles should find amusing.

But he did.

It wasn’t, he told himself firmly, seeing her again that was causing this sensation inside him—like a light had been turned on in darkness.

He shoved his hands in his pockets, and rocked back on his heels. He turned slowly from her door. She lived only a block or two from where they had grown up together. Her, and him. And Mark.

The community of Sunnyside. A beautiful old part of the city, bordering the banks of the Bow River. From here, on her covered porch, he could look south up her street, and see the park that ran parallel to the river for most of its journey through Calgary. A couple of runners enjoyed the paved path under huge trees.

He noticed she had a swing on her porch, full of plump gray and pink pillows and he went and sat on it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a curtain twitch angrily into place.

He rocked slowly with one foot. He liked Calgary. He’d been struck by that an hour earlier when the plane circled. That he liked this city. Had missed it.

This neighborhood was changing so rapidly. Young professionals were snapping up the dignified old houses just across the river from the downtown core and doing incredible renovations on them.

That trend had actually started when he and his dad had moved here years ago. He’d been in the sixth grade.

Her father, Tory’s, was a doctor, and had owned the beautifully kept old house on one side of his. Mark’s parents, a psychologist and a veterinarian, owned an equally beautiful one on the other.

His house, a ramshackle rental, was right in the middle. Him and his dad, a mechanic with grease under his nails, doing their best to make it after the death of his mom.

He heard the window squeak open behind him.

“Get lost!” she snapped.

“No,” he said.

The window slammed shut.

He sighed with something like pleasure. Tory in a temper.

Her name was really Victoria. Victoria Bradbury, a good name for a heroine in an old English novel, but a terrible one for a tomboy who climbed trees and had perpetually scuffed knees. And a temper like a skyrocket going off.

He looked around her porch with interest. The house was probably sixty years old or more, well kept, nicely painted—yellow with gray trim. He noticed she had a gift with flowers, just as her mother had had. The window boxes around the porch rioted with color, which was an accomplishment in the first week of June in a city with such a short growing season.

Her house, back then, had always had flowers. And Mark’s parents had had beautifully landscaped nomaintenance shrubs and bark mulch. His own yard had sported the hulks of cars.

He supposed that’s why he was staying. To show her what he had become. A lawyer now, the shoes he was wearing worth more than his dad used to pay for a month’s rent on that old falling down house.

The thing was, he remembered, she had never seemed to care what he had come from.

And neither had Mark.

They had taken him under wing from the very first day he’d moved in. They had become the three musketeers—ridden their bikes up and down these very streets, built tree houses, walked forever along that path by the river. Their doors had always been open to him, both of their mothers treating him like he was one of their families.

He felt the strangest clawing sensation in his throat.

Remembering. Those bright days so full of laughter and kinship.

Love.

That was not too strong a word for what the three of them had shared, for what passed in and out of the doors of those three side-by-side houses.

Of course, the inevitable had happened.

They got older and the love changed. He and Mark had both fallen in love with her.

And she had chosen Mark.

The swing was squeaking outrageously. The sun was sinking and had bathed the street and its gorgeous huge trees and old houses in the most resplendent light.

He took the letter out of his pocket, opened it and began to read it again. For at least the hundredth time.

Tory inched the curtain back, and looked out. He was still there, sitting in her porch swing, seeming not to care that it had grown quite dark out.

And probably cold.

“Don’t you dare care if he’s cold,” she muttered to herself.

Adam.

She had nearly fainted when she had opened the door and he had been standing there.

The same and yet very different, too.

The same since he was so recklessly handsome that it took a person’s breath away.

His hair, though shorter now, was black and faintly wavy and still fell over one eye. Obsidian dark, those eyes, glinting with hints of silver laughter, of mischief. A straight nose, a wide sensuous mouth, clean sparkling teeth, that scar was still on his chin from the time he’d split it open riding his bike over a jump neither she nor Mark would try.

He had laughed, devil-may-care, when her mother had insisted on taking him to the hospital for stitches.

The next week he’d broken his arm going over the same jump.

It didn’t look like he laughed quite so much these days. The line around his mouth seemed firm and stern, and the light in his eyes, when she had first opened the door, had been distinctly grim. A man with a mission.

When she’d told him to go away, that old familiar glint of humor had lit somewhere at the back of his eyes. And then it had deepened when he had spotted the dirt on her knees.

She shivered involuntarily as she thought of those black eyes drifting down her with easy familiarity, his gaze nearly as powerful, altogether as sensuous, as a touch.

He had always had that in him. Magnetism. A place in him that could not be tamed, his presence electrifying, making other boys seem smaller, infinitely less interesting, as if they were black-and-white cutouts, and he was three dimensional and in living color.

Even Mark.

Tory had always thought Adam would mature to be the kind of man with a wild side. That he would end up in black leather, jumping canyons on those motorcycles he had loved so much as a teenager. Or traveling the world in search of adventure—crocodiles to wrestle, damsels to rescue.

There was nothing ordinary about him, so she had thought he would do extraordinary things. Become a secret agent Climb Mount Everest. Sail solo around the world. Explore outer space.

When she’d heard he was a lawyer, she couldn’t believe it. Had felt disappointed, almost. Adam, a lawyer? It seemed unthinkable.

Until she saw him standing on her porch, oozing self-confidence and wealth. Of course, the self-confidence he had always had in abundance.

But somehow she never would have imagined him in those shoes, the silk shirt with the tie slightly askew, the knife-pressed pants.

She looked out on her porch again. He used to smoke, but somehow she knew he wouldn’t anymore.

The wild boy banished.

But still there, lurking in those eyes and that smile.

“Go away,” she whispered.

The swing creaked.

He wasn’t going away.

She knew he would be a good lawyer. Better than good. He’d always had a talent for reading people. He always knew what they would do. He was so smart that sometimes she and Mark had exchanged awed looks behind his back. And at his core, he had a toughness, that neither she nor Mark had. A toughness that had less to do with being a mechanic’s son than his deep certainty of who he was and what kind of treatment he would accept at the hands of the world.

She knew he thought she’d give in and go out there. Lured by old affections or curiosity.

But she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Let him sit out there all night.

She went into her bathroom and slammed the door, regarded herself in the mirror with ill humor. She looked like a little kid. And felt like one, too. She reached down and rubbed the dirt off her knee. With spit.

He looked so sophisticated now. She bet he dated lacquered ladies who could wear sequined gowns and look dazzling instead of ridiculous. He probably took them to the opera.

Adam Reed at the opera.

When had he become that kind of guy instead of the boy who took his motorcycle apart in his backyard, looked over his fence into hers, grinning, the black smudge of motor oil across his cheek making him look more wildly appealing than ever?

No boy left in him. All man out there on her doorstep. At least six foot one of it, the adolescent promise of broadness through the chest and shoulders now completely realized. Easy animal strength lingering just below the surface of those well-cut clothes. Oh yes, that wild side still there, glittering dangerously just below the surface of dark eyes, serving to make him mysterious. Intriguing. Dangerously attractive.

Had she reached out and locked her screen door to keep him out, or herself in?

She wondered if he was married. In the mirror she watched the blood drain from her own face making her freckles stand out like random dots from a felt pen. She almost felt like she had taken a bad blow to the stomach.

“Oh, what do you care if he’s married?” she chastised herself. She told herself she only cared about the woman. Married to an insensitive cad like him.

But she knew she was lying to herself, and that’s why she knew she absolutely had to ignore him until he went away.

She tiptoed out of the bathroom. The house was in darkness now. She looked out the window.

He was still there.

And if there was anything of the old Adam in him he would still be there in the morning. Next week. Next month.

She could not outwait him. She knew that She had only been able to say no to him once.

Why was she so afraid of him? Let him have his say, and be on his way. She sighed, and went and got an afghan from off the back of her couch. Because of Calgary’s proximity to the Rocky Mountains there was almost always a nip in the air at night. Not that Adam had ever seemed to feel it!

“Don’t do this,” she told herself. But she knew that she would. And she knew he knew she would.

She opened the front door and slipped out into the darkness of her porch.

The swing stilled.

She went and sat beside him, pulling the blanket around her shoulders against the chill in the air, a small but comforting barrier against him.

“You’re the most stubborn man I ever met,” she said.

He smelled heavenly. Of sunshine and aftershave and cleanliness.

He reached out and unerringly found a hand, her hand, in the folds of the afghan. His hands were surprisingly warm considering how long he had sat out here in the cold.

She ordered herself to pull her hand away. Her mind mutinied.

Instead, she turned and looked at him.

His eyes were dark and full of mystery. And something else as he looked at her.

“It’s like time rolling back seeing you all wrapped up in that blanket.”

“Like a sausage,” she said dourly.

He showed her his teeth, straight and white and strong. “More like the Indian princess in Peter Pan. You were always the first one cold.”

“Cold hands, warm heart,” they said together.

He laughed, but she felt angry with herself, drawn into the past against her will.

“You can’t roll back time,” she told him, and this time she did snatch her hand away, tucked it safely inside the fold of her blanket, and studied her neighbor’s window across the street. New drapes. Horizontal. She decided she hated them.

“I know,” he said, and she heard something in his voice that crumpled her defenses. Weariness. Regret.

“You never came,” she whispered.

He was silent. And finally, his voice hoarse, he said “I’m sorry.”

“He was your best friend, and you never came when he died.” She turned and looked him full in the face. It was his turn to look away. “You never came. All the time he was sick.”

He didn’t apologize again.

“Why are you here now?” she demanded, sorry he was here, sorry she was so bloody glad he was here, sorry for how she had loved the feel of her hand in his.

Sorry for the way the streetlight made his features look so damnably handsome.

“I’m just back for a visit,” he said softly. “I hoped we could spend some time together.”

“I don’t think so,” she said stiffly, which, his lawyer’s mind noted, was quite different than an out and out no.

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever gone Rollerblading, have you?” Rollerblading, he thought. She’s going to think I’m crazy. But he had the agenda memorized and that was item one. He would break the other three—kite flying, a ride on a bicycle built for two, and a trip to Sylvan Lake to watch the stars from lawn chairs—to her later. Once he had his foot in the door.

She was looking at him incredulously, as if he’d lost his mind, which seemed like a distinct possibility. Seeing her under the glow of the streetlight like this, having felt briefly, the soft strength and warmth of her hand in his, he could feel time shifting, pulling him back....

“Are you crazy?” she asked.

“I think so,” he answered. Her eyes were different after all, he realized. Back then they had always had a smile in them. Now they looked angry, and a bit sad.

She didn’t look like that person who used to laugh so hard she had worried about wetting her pants.

Where did that side of a person go to?

“Look,” she said, her voice suddenly hard, “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but don’t bother. I needed you—Mark needed you—a long time ago. It’s too late, now.”

She got up in a single flounce, the blanket swinging regally around her, and fixed him with a glare that turned her from Tory to Victoria Bradbury in an instant. “Go back to where you came from. Don’t bother me anymore.”

He got up too, looked down at her, into her blazing eyes and then at the soft fullness of her lips.

He had kissed those lips. And the sweetness of them had never left him.

He gave himself a mental shake.

She was giving him a way out.

Take it and run.

He had a busy life back in Toronto. He couldn’t afford to take a week off right now. He had a gorgeous, classy girlfriend who would say yes in a minute when he got around to asking her to marry him. He wondered now what he’d been waiting for.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said softly. “Around ten.”

And he went off her porch, to her sputtered, “Don’t bother.”

He knew, just like the big bad wolf, he’d have to come at nine to catch her.

He had taken a cab, but he decided he’d walk back to his hotel, just across the river. He realized as he went, he was whistling.

And that it had been a very long time since he had whistled.

The hotel room was very posh. For a mechanic’s son he had adjusted to poshness with complete ease.

He glanced at his watch. Nearly eleven Calgary time, which meant it was close to one in the morning Eastern time. Too late to call Kathleen, and he was glad. He hadn’t told her the details of this trip, only that it was business. Which it was. Or had been. Strictly business.

Until he saw Tory.

Now he felt like Kathleen would hear it in his voice.

Hear what in your voice? he asked himself.

The pull of the past. Things that were once certain becoming uncertain.

He’d thought he and Kathleen, also a lawyer, made an excellent couple, and that he was nearly ready to make a commitment to her.

Until the exact moment Tory had opened her door.

And then nothing seemed assured anymore. Kathleen, an ex-model with her raven black hair and sapphire eyes, wavering in his mind like a mirage.

Impatiently, Adam went over to the tiny fridge and investigated the contents. He took a cola even though he knew it would probably chase away sleep until dawn streaked the sky.

When had he become so old and stable that he didn’t drink cola at night because it kept him awake?

He had seen a different man reflected back at him through Tory’s eyes. She still saw in him the man-child, who had delighted in walking close to the wild side.

In truth, not just the soda would keep him awake tonight. A strange energy seemed to be singing through his veins.

He picked up his briefcase, moved to the table and snapped it open. Neat stacks of legal briefs stared back at him, the work of a man who didn’t drink cola at night because it might keep him awake.

Did she know he was a lawyer? She hadn’t asked. Would she ask tomorrow? Would she ask him why?

And would he tell her the truth?

He had contemplated his career long and hard before choosing. He had thought about becoming a doctor, just like her old man.

The thought, unfortunately, made him squeamish. He had always been able to hide his squeamish side from Tory and Mark, who seemed to think he was tough in every respect. And in some respects he had been. He had a high threshold for pain. He liked doing things that were thrilling. He was fearless, almost stupidly so, in the face of authority.

But the day he’d cut open the frog in high school biology he’d known a career that involved blood and body parts was out. He suspected he wouldn’t even be able to handle looking at slimy tonsils. Which meant dentistry, an extremely high paying profession, was unfortunately also out. Mark’s dad had been a vet. Since Adam had never so much as owned a goldfish, and could not even pretend an interest in the plump poodles that he had seen in Mark’s father’s outer office, he knew he wasn’t going to be doing that either.

Mark’s mother had been a psychologist, also a respectable profession, but the money was not as good, and probing the secrets of the human mind when his own was so largely baffling to him left him cold.

Accounting was too dull.

And that seemed to leave law. Nice clean work, for the most part. Though he had seen some slimy things that would put a pair of infected tonsils to shame. Still, he had a good mind for it. He excelled at it. Problem solving. Thinking on his feet. Keeping track of a multitude of different things at once. Butting heads. Maintaining his personal integrity when all about him others were losing theirs. He liked it. It was constantly changing and constantly challenging.

But somehow, even though the workings of his own mind baffled him, he knew becoming a lawyer had been about her.

She had picked Mark because they were from the same world. He had known intuitively that education was the passport to her world.

Education opened doors. Bought nice things. Bought respectability.

He had sworn the next time he was ready to ask a woman to spend her life with him, she would say yes.

The problem was that woman was supposed to be Kathleen. Twice as beautiful as Tory. Ten times as sophisticated.

Tory had already had her kick at this particular can. She’d lost her chance. Picked Mark.

But now Mark was dead.

And Mark had sent him back here.

He closed the briefcase and took the letter back out of his pocket. It was getting soft from so much handling.

He closed his eyes. He really didn’t have to read it again.

Mark’s last request of him. Make Tory laugh again.

Mark. Handsome. Athletic. Quiet. Stable. A good choice if you had to make one. A sensible choice.

That was what they had both been, Tory and Mark. Sensible. He bet they didn’t drink cola at half-past eleven at night.

He took a defiant swig, and suddenly felt so tired he thought he would collapse.

He set the letter on the table, stripped off his clothes and crawled between the soft sheets.

He slept almost instantly.