A Bride Worth Waiting For. Cara Colter
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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.”
“A weakness,” she admitted haughtily.
He laughed.
She wished that he wouldn’t do that. It chased the years from his face and made him back into her Adam. The boy next door. That wild boy that she had loved so madly.
In those simple days, it had been okay to love them both. Mark quietly, and Adam wildly. It had always seemed as if it could go on like that forever.
But, of course, she knew better now.
There was no forever.
She marched him through her living room with her head held high, not inviting his comment. But she saw this room though his eyes, too. Suddenly it seemed cramped and prissy, and like a room an eighty-year-old grandmother would enjoy in the evenings with her knitting and her cats.
“No TV,” he said with a pleased grin, and then, “I like your house, Tory. I like it a lot.”
She held open the front door for him. The doorway was narrow. He brushed her as he went by. She could feel his heat and his strength. He smelled good. She hoped her hand wasn’t trembling as she put the key in the dead bolt to lock the door behind them while he held the screen door open.
“Thank you,” she said tightly. “Your car or mine?”
“I came by cab. I thought we’d just walk. It’s a beautiful day.”
It was a beautiful day. To walk with him along the path by the river would be like strolling toward the past. The river had once seemed like it belonged to them, as familiar as their own backyards.
“Are we going to the island?” she asked.
“That’s where they rent them. The Rollerblades.”
Returning to the old playgrounds of their youth. She did not know if she could stand it
They crossed Memorial Drive and moved down the path. The sun came through the leaves of the giant trees that bordered the path and dappled the earth around them green and gold. The river looked steely gray and cold.
She noticed with relief that they had nothing to say to each other.
And then with less relief that he seemed perfectly comfortable with the silence.
She did not have to chatter, to think of clever things to say to keep him occupied, to fill the silence between them. Had never had to. With him, and with Mark, she could always just be herself.
Against her will she felt something relax within her.
“Out of the way, Gramps!”
A boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, streaked by them on a bicycle. As they leapt out of his way, Adam encircled her with his arms, protectively.
She looked at Adam. And felt warmth in the circle of his arms, strangely like homecoming. She could feel his breath rising and falling, and the beat of his heart. This close she could see the beginnings of dark stubble on his strong chin and on his cheeks. An outraged expression was on his face.
“Are you all right?” he asked, and eased her away from him to look.
“Oh, fine,” she said, dusting an imaginary speck off her sweatpant leg, hating herself for how badly she wanted to go back into the circle of his arms.
She glanced at him. Apparently he hadn’t even noticed their close encounter, was not stirred as physically by it as she had been. Of course, it had probably not been a year since he had come in close contact with a member of the opposite sex!
He was glaring after the cyclist. “Gramps,” he sputtered indignantly. “Did that delinquent call me Gramps?”
She nodded, wide-eyed, trying to repress the giggle inside of her. It would not be repressed.
“What’s so funny?” he demanded.
“The look on your face. That boy—” she was giggling now, and because she was trying not to, it seemed to her the sound coming out of her was most undignified. Like snorting.
“What about that boy?”
“He looked just like you used to look, Adam. Devil-may-care” she was laughing now. Laughing as she had not laughed in years. And then she saw the smile on his face, and remembered how his smile had always had the power to change everything. To turn a bad day into a good one, to make a hurt heart feel better.
“Hell-bent for leather,” Adam said ruefully, watching her, smiling at her laughter, not seeming to find her snorting undignified at all. “I never yelled at people to get out of my way, did I?”
“Oh, you were much worse than that.”
“I was not.”
“Yes, you were.”
Suddenly he was standing very close to her again, and her elbow was in his hand and his eyes were darkly intense on hers.
“You liked it, didn’t you, Tory?” he growled.
And her laughter was gone, replaced by another feeling she remembered all too well around Adam. A kind of walking-on-the-edge feeling, caught somewhere between fear and exhilaration.
“Liked what?” she stammered.
“The rebel in me. The bad boy.”
“It scared the hell out of me,” she whispered.
She didn’t add: And it still does.
Chapter Three
“Adam, why are we doing this?” Tory asked him, closing the latches on the apparatuses now attached to her feet. “I never even liked ice-skating. Neither did you!”
“I know. The only boy in Calgary who never played hockey. Probably in all of Canada. An albatross I have carried around my neck for two decades.”
“Answer the question then. Why?” She wiggled her feet. Even though they moved on command, they seemed strangely detached from her body.
“I’m tired of carrying the albatross?”
She shot him a look. He had never given a damn what the rest of the world was doing, and he didn’t care now. It was written in the supreme confidence with which he carried himself, written in the light that lit those devilishly dark eyes. This expedition was not about whether he had played hockey as a boy.
He rose to his feet, and when his feet scooted out from under him, he grabbed the back