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Authors: A Bride Worth Waiting For

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And so he said nothing in his own defense as the policeman told him he was obstructing traffic. After all, he was on holidays.
He held out his hand for the ticket, grinning like a schoolboy. The policeman glared at him, and went back to the ricksha, assessing its roadworthiness.
“Ma’am, did you hire this man? Did he solicit your business?”
“He is a solicitor,” she deadpanned. “I think you should arrest him immediately.”
The policeman seemed to figure out they were in it together. It was Adam’s turn to laugh, which earned him a look from the young officer. But rather than being loaded with an authoritarian threat, the look held the beginnings of reluctant amusement.
He remembered Mark’s way was often like this—hostile situations defused. Turned around somehow.
Adam’s way, way back when, would have been to get himself arrested on some point of pride. And he wasn’t sure how much he’d changed. He loved making these guys into mincemeat on the witness chair.
The policeman came forward. “Are you, like, romancing your girl?” he asked in an undertone.
“I’m making her laugh,” he surprised himself by confiding. “It’s been a long time since she laughed.”
The policeman looked back at her. “It looks like you’re doing a pretty good job of it How come she hasn’t laughed in a long time?”
Adam hesitated. He really didn’t have to tell him anything. Mark’s way, he reminded himself. “Her husband died.”
“That’s rough.”
“Yeah. He was a good man. The best.” Adam felt his throat tighten and looked away.
When he looked back, something had softened in the policeman’s young face and he put away the ticket book. “Why don’t you just take it over to the bike trail across the street?”
“I was going over there,” Adam said, “but I didn’t want her to
die
laughing, and I couldn’t get across all the traffic.”
The policeman shook his head. “I’ll stop the traffic for you.”
“Hey, thanks.”
“You a lawyer?”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“Her remark about the solicitor finally sunk in. Remember this next time you’re going to make mincemeat out of a poor working sap like me, okay?”
“You got it.” It occurred to him that when Tory was around love shimmered in the air. It always had. And it changed things. It had always done that, too. That was what Tory and Mark had had in common. A wonderful decency that changed everything they touched for the better.
What had he done lately to change anything for the better?
He didn’t think making the juvenile delinquent who had rented him the ricksha into a millionaire counted.
With Tory waving like a queen, they crossed the four lanes of traffic that the young man stopped for them. The cop pushed the ricksha from behind so that Adam could get it across the grass and up the hill to the wide paved path.
“Try not to push anyone into the river,” the policeman advised, shaking his head, and darting back across traffic to his vehicle.
They rode along for an uneventful mile or two. The river made a swishing noise, and the birds sang.
It occurred to him that despite the fact he was pulling a ricksha that weighed nearly as much as his hotel, he felt stupidly happy.
The tire blew out on the front of the bike and nearly sent them over the bank into the river.
He gave up. “Stay here,” he ordered her.
“Gladly,” she said, and sank back against the bench of the ricksha and watched contentedly as the runners and the river moved by her.
He looked at her. Maybe Mark’s idea was working. She seemed to be happier than she had been yesterday. Much happier. The light seemed to have been switched back on in her.
He dashed across the street to some nifty boutiques and bought a plaid blanket and a basket of goodies from a deli. He spread them out on the grass beside the broken chariot.
“Did you get smoked oysters?” she asked, pretending hauteur.
“Of course. And liver pâté. The caviar didn’t look fresh, though.”
“I can’t stand that when the caviar isn’t fresh,” she said. She went into his arms as easily as if she’d been born to them, and he carried her to the blanket, and set her down. He pulled the cork on the bottle of sparkling water, and offered her the first swig. She took it, wiping her mouth happily, and passing it back. She rummaged through the basket
“Oh! You really did get smoked oysters!”
“Really.” He drained the bottle and pulled out another one. “Jeez, that was hard work.”
“You’re getting soft.”
“I know it.”
But she didn’t think he looked soft at all.
“You’re still crazy.”
“I know that, too.”
Her lip trembled, and she looked away.
I’ve missed you.
But she did not say that out loud.
He moved very close to her, his shoulder touching hers companionably. “Don’t go and spoil it all by looking sad.”
“I just wished Mark could be here with us.”
“Maybe he is.”
Chapter Five
A
dam lay back on the blanket. The sun was warm on his face. He felt full and drowsy. The river ran by. Birds sang. The leaves on the trees seemed to be shiny and new, a vibrant shade of green he felt he had never seen before. June seemed to have a scent of its own—fresh and new and full of promise. It occurred to him he had not taken a holiday, felt this relaxed, in years.
Tory was lying beside him, not quite touching him. It was the inner debate about whether to move that half inch or so closer that kept him from going to sleep. He could inch over ever so casually, and then his shoulder would be touching hers.
It occurred to him he was putting a lot of mental work into a shoulder touch. And it occurred to him he’d rather touch her shoulder than go a lot faster and further with any other woman. Including Kathleen.
She was wrecking him. Tory was wrecking his whole life. And she was doing it without making even the tiniest effort.
He somehow doubted that while she was standing in her shower this morning, she’d been applying that lemon scented shampoo, thinking, “This will drive him wild. He’ll go straight back to Toronto and break up with that someone he’s seeing.”
He supposed he’d have to kiss her to find out what her breath was like. Oyster kisses. Unappealing with anyone else. With her, the very thought, unbelievably appealing.
“You’ve changed in some ways,” she said decisively.
“I dress better?” He edged closer.
She rolled over and regarded him, his quarter-inch gain lost.
“You do?” she teased, sitting up on her elbow. “You always wore jeans and T-shirts.”
“Hey, these jeans cost enough that you were supposed to notice the label.”
“Okay, okay, I noticed the label.”
And then she blushed. Ha. So she’d been sneaking peeks at his backside. Just as he’d been sneaking them at hers. Maybe she did have an ulterior motive when she was shampooing her hair!
“I wasn’t talking about
material
things,” she told him sternly.
“Then in what ways have I changed?”
“The way you dealt with that policeman. Once you would have smarted him off until he was all red in the face and jumping up and down—”
“And I wouldn’t have given up until I got led away in handcuffs,” he agreed dryly.
“So, you’ve matured.”
In the last half hour
. “Don’t we all?” he said sagely.
“Do you remember that time we got pulled over after that school dance? You got so huffy, said it was just because we were young and that they didn’t have any legal right to pull us over.”
“The seeds for my future planted that very night,” he said. “I still get pulled over when I ride my Harley. And they still don’t have any legal right to do it. I hate that. Law-abiding citizens being harassed because they choose to ride motorcycles.”
“The speed limit?” she probed.
“Oh, that,” he groused.
“You always had such a well-developed sense of justice, of what was fair. I shouldn’t have been so surprised that you became a lawyer.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Yes.”
“What did you expect me to become? A drug dealer?”
“Adam! What an awful thing to say. I’ve never even known you to have a beer!”
“A gangster?”
“Adam!”
“I guess I just wondered if you expected something disreputable of me.”
“Not at all.”
“Then what?” he pushed, wishing it didn’t matter to him what she had expected. But it did.
“I expected you to have a life of high adventure,” she said huffily. “You were kind of a wild boy. Completely untamed.”
“Give me a clue. I’m trying to think of respectable jobs for untamed people.”
“Astronaut.”
“I don’t like flying!”
“Cowboy.”
“I’m not too great with horses, either.”
Her look silenced him. “Entrepreneur,” she said, “Safari leader. Spy. Firefighter.”
It seemed to him she had given this some thought. It seemed to him she saw him as a rather romantic figure. He felt momentarily pleased, until he remembered he had let her down.
“I wasn’t that wild,” he said.
“Adam, you skipped 92 percent of grade twelve.”
“That wasn’t because I was wild. I was bored.” He’d still passed. It had hardly seemed like high adventure at the time. Shooting pool at Grady’s. Working on his bike. On the odd occasion he got it running, actually took it somewhere. Perhaps that had seemed wild and risqué to a goody-two-shoes like her.
“You were wild,” she said firmly.
“In what way?” he challenged.
“You rode the chute down Glenmore Dam in a tube.”
“Very stupid. Not necessarily wild.”
“You jumped your bike off the cliff over by where the radio station used to be.”
“It wasn’t a cliff, exactly. Besides, I broke my flipping arm and had to get stitches.”
“You still have the scar.”
He touched his chin. “Do I?”
“And you were jumping your bike off that same cliff a week later, with your arm in the cast!”
“I’d forgotten about that.” But he remembered now. It hadn’t been a cliff. Just a big, built-up ramp of dirt with a pile of sand at the bottom of it on the other side. Sand that appeared softer than it actually was. Still, the hardness of the landing had not prevented him from going at it again, his arm out of the sling but still in the cast.
It must have been a day much like this one, because he could remember with absolute clarity the feeling of freedom as he approached the edge, that wonderful airborne moment when the bike left the earth and joined the sky. He sighed happily.
“Just as I suspected,” she said. “It’s a
happy
memory for you.”
He couldn’t deny it. But he seemed to remember the light in her eyes spurring him on to ever greater heights of daring. “You liked it, too.”
“I did not! It scared me to death when you were reckless and foolhardy.”
But that was not the whole truth, and he knew she knew it by the gentle blush that rose in her cheeks.
“You were spellbound,” he said. He waited for her denial, but it did not come. Instead, she changed direction.
“You smoked.”
“I mistakenly thought it was cool. Not wild. Cool.”
“First one in the river every year, and last one out. First one arrested—the
only
one arrested.”
“That wasn’t really my fault. I didn’t know Murphy had stolen that car.”
“I wasn’t allowed to walk on the same side of the street as Murphy.”
“There you have it. The good girl and the bad boy. Natalie Wood and James Dean. It happens all the time.”
“Are you admitting you were wild?”
It was more like he was trying to get her to see the missed opportunity. “Maybe I appeared a little wild to a girl like you.”
She laughed. “Now you sound like a lawyer.”
“Which I am. Not a wild guy at all anymore. And you seem disappointed.”
“Not disappointed,” she said quickly. “Adam, I just always thought, of all the people I knew, you would grow up and be something different. That you would be free, somehow. Unfettered by convention. Or expectation.”
“I guess I always thought that, too,” he admitted. He wondered how much convention had played a role in the decisions she had made, the man she had chosen to marry.
“Well then, what happened?” She said that with the faintest edge of accusation in her voice, as if he had let her down.
Her
. The one he’d chased respectability for.
“I matured,” he said. “Grew up. Faced the facts.”
“What facts?” she demanded.
That Mr. Respectable got the girl.
“There’s no money in circumnavigating the globe on a Harley.”
“It is not all about money.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve always had it.”
“Well, you appear to have it now. Does it do the same things to your soul that talking about going around the world on your motorbike used to do?”
He glared at her. It sounded like she would have liked him better if he’d stuck to boyhood plan A. Which ticked him off royally, since plan B had had a great deal to do with her. And Mark. And their neat and tidy little worlds with degrees on the walls and picket fences around their yards.
If he’d offered her that, instead of a motorcycle trip around the world, maybe she’d be Mrs. Reed right now.
“Adam?”
He glanced up, shaded his eyes against the sun.
A slender, beautiful blonde stood there smiling at him.
He hoped this freckle-faced little monster beside him noticed how radiant that smile was.
“Shauna?”
“First-year law,” she said, pleased that he’d remembered. “How are you? Still in Toronto?”
“Guilty. Just back for a little R and R.”
“And this must be your wife.”
“No.”
She turned down her motorcycle trip around the world.
“This is my friend, Victoria Bradbury.”
He felt Tory stiffen beside him, and give him a look, before she rose to her knees and offered her hand to Shauna.
“Victoria
Mitchell,”
she said, sending him another look.
Of course he knew she’d married Mark. His head knew. Had his heart never accepted it? Is that why he had never even once thought of her last name being Mitchell now, instead of Bradbury?
“Sorry,” he muttered under his breath.
Shauna chatted for a few minutes, but he didn’t really hear her, aware of Tory’s annoyance with him, aware the picnic was over.
“How could you?” Tory asked him softly, when Shauna had left.
“I just forgot. I’m sorry.”
“It’s just as if he never was to you, isn’t it?”
“That’s unfair.”
“I was married to Mark for six years. You can’t pretend that never happened. Why do you even want to?”
“I said I was sorry, okay?”
“No, it’s not okay,” she said furiously. “None of this is okay. This picnic is not okay. That thing,” she pointed to the ricksha, “is not okay. Skating yesterday was not okay. You betrayed Mark. How could I forget that? Let alone forgive it?”
She hopped up off the blanket. She was shaking she was so mad.
It reminded him of the time he’d told her that her chairing the school charity fund-raiser was a waste of her time. The world was not going to change because their high school adopted one starving kid.
“But maybe
we’ll
change,” she’d cried at him, right in the middle of a hallway teeming with people on their way to classes. Mr. MacKenzie, the math teacher he despised, had had a good laugh over that.
She looked that mad right now, her freckles standing out on her face, her eyes shooting sparks. She turned and began to limp away.
“Does this mean kite flying tomorrow is out of the question?” he called after her, hiding his own fury in an uncaring tone.
She threw him a killing look over her shoulder and kept going. Damn her, was she going to limp all the way home?
Who cared? He’d become a lawyer for her, and she’d told him she would have preferred he rode his bike around the world. Yeah, right. She’d said no to that quick enough.
So, he hadn’t made the grade with her then, and he still didn’t.
Now
he could go back to Toronto. He’d done his best. Made a mess of it, but his best, nonetheless. He wasn’t Mark. He didn’t have his gift for diplomacy, his ability to fix things broken.
And the truth was, Tory was broken.
And in some way, so was he.
And riding bikes, skating and flying kites was not going to fix what was broken between them.
Trust. It was the trust that was gone.
He had trusted her with his heart, and she had said no.
And she had trusted him to do the decent thing when Mark was ill and he had not. There. Unfixable.
That night the police had pulled them over after the high school dance, and he had mouthed off so badly he’d nearly been arrested, Mark had fixed it. With the right word and a friendly grin, by just being who he was.
But Mark wasn’t here anymore.
He closed his eyes and lay back, his arms folded under his head. When she glanced back, she would see a picture of uncaring.

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