Cara Colter (8 page)
Authors: A Bride Worth Waiting For
He opened his eyes when something wet plopped on his face.
“I don’t have cab fare,” she said proudly. “I can’t walk.”
She was crying on him, but she would have been even madder if he noticed, so he pretended not to. Without sitting up he fished in his wallet and handed her ten bucks.
“Mark forgave me.”
The sound of his own voice stunned him. He had not meant to speak to her. He had meant to let her go. Meant to get on the next flight back to Toronto.
He peered up at her.
“Mark forgave you?” she whispered. “How could Mark forgive you? You never even—”
He fished in his pocket again, handed her the wellworn letter.
She unfolded it uncertainly, glanced at him, and read the letter.
When she was done, she threw it down on him.
“This is why you came back?”
He nodded, but her tone already told him sharing the letter with her had been a mistake.
“Because you felt sorry for me?”
“Because he asked me to!”
“Not because you really cared about me at all! Because he asked you to!”
“Tory—” he started to sit up.
“You couldn’t do the decent thing all by yourself? And I did not love you better! I didn’t!”
An elderly woman going by with a poodle looked over at them, ducked her head uncomfortably and hurried by.
Tory gave him a look that could have stripped paint, and then turned and limped away. A cab came by, and she held up her hand and the damn thing stopped.
He watched her get in it, her nose pointed regally at the sky.
“Buddy,” he told Mark, “we are really blowing this thing.”
Okay, me. I am really blowing this thing.
Okay, me. I am really blowing this thing.
She had always had the temper to go with that hair. Fiery. Quick to ignite. In a few hours, she’d probably feel contrite. That would be the best time to ask her about the kite.
Or maybe tomorrow night at her mother’s dinner which the Mitchells were going to attend. He wondered if they were as angry with him as she was. If they, too, felt he had let Mark down.
Let’s face it. He and Tory were never going to fly that kite.
He wanted to go back to Toronto. Where he’d made this nice boring life for himself and hardly ever even thought about going around the world on a motorbike anymore.
But he knew he wouldn’t.
He’d realized when he’d landed in Calgary that the part of him that wanted to do the right thing was underdeveloped. That the man he’d become would have looked at this mess and just cut and run. Now, only three bloody days later, he knew he couldn’t leave without seeing the Mitchells.
They had been so good to him when he was growing up.
If he had hurt the Mitchells as much as he had hurt her he wanted to tell them he was sorry for that.
It wasn’t quite up there with saving starving children, but it was enough out of his comfort zone for him to send a wary glance heavenward.
But he had no sense of Mark being out there somewhere, looking down at him.
Instead, he had an even more disconcerting feeling—that all that was best about Mark survived. His kindness, his compassion, his courage, lived on.
In him, in some deep and secret place within him, lived all that was best about Mark.
“Because Adam would throw this bike right in the river,” he said. “And the blanket and what’s left of the picnic.” Instead, he folded the blanket He placed it and the remains of the picnic on the seat and began the long push back.
The kid was just closing his rental stand on the island when Adam got there.
“Aw, man, what did you do to it?”
“It’s only a flat tire.”
The boy looked distressed. It made him look younger.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Adam asked.
“Sure. My lucky day. The guy who breaks my bike is the truant officer.”
“I just wondered. The bike isn’t broken. It only has a flat tire.”
“School’s a bore,” the kid told him, getting on his knees to inspect the tire.
“Yeah. Been there. I’ll give you a hand with the bike. Maybe we can get it to the nearest service station.”
“That’s a million miles from here. I’ve got a kit at home for fixing the tires.”
“Okay, so I’ll help you get it home.”
The boy hesitated enough for Adam to know what home was going to look like before they got anywhere near the place.
And then the kid shrugged. “If you want.”
“What’s your name?”
“Daniel. Danny.”
“Mine is—”
“Gramps,” the kids said and smiled with huge delight.
Adam shook his head. “Yeah. Gramps, it is.”
The house was meaner than Adam could have imagined. The front porch looked as if it was falling off. Hungry looking cats kept coming out from under it. The roof didn’t look like it had a hope of keeping water out. One window was boarded up.
“Thanks,” the boy said proudly. “I’ll take it from here.”
Adam hesitated. If he offered to pay for a new tire now, in front of this tumbling-down house, Danny’s pride would be wounded, and the fact that the boy possessed pride was written all over him.
“Do you know where I can get a wheelchair?” he asked, instead.
“For a price you can get anything,” the boy said without hesitation. “What do you want a wheelchair for?”
“I’m going kite flying with an invalid.”
“You want me to provide the kite, too?”
“You have to promise me you won’t steal them.”
“What do you take me for? I’d have to knock over a cripple to steal a wheelchair. I have scruples, you know.”
“I can tell,” Adam said. Sincerely.
The boy looked pleased by the sincerity. “I’ll have them by tomorrow at noon. You can meet me at the skate rental booth. Fifty bucks.”
“Get real.” There was no sense in having the kid thinking Adam was going to be a sap just because he’d seen he lived in a run-down house.
Daniel looked pleased by that, too. “Okay. Twenty-five. But don’t expect much of a kite for that.”
What did it matter? He wasn’t really going kite flying anyway. Not unless there was really such a thing as divine intervention.
“I’ll meet you at five,” he said. “Then you can go to school.”
“Lots of money in that,” Daniel sneered.
“How much do you make at your booth?”
“A percentage of the rentals.”
“That must be a lot on a weekday.”
“Okay, it’s not great weekdays. That’s why I supplement it by driving my ricksha on Electric Avenue. Once the weather gets cold, I’ll head back to school, if they haven’t kicked me out by then.”
“You know the kind of living you could make if you stayed in school?”
The boy tried not to look interested.
Adam leaned forward and whispered a figure in his ear.
“For a day?” Daniel asked, round-eyed.
“For an hour,” Adam replied.
Tory got home and gave the cab driver the whole ten dollars, though the fare was only three. Adam really hadn’t pedaled very far, which seemed like one more good thing to hold against him.
Imagine Mark writing him that letter. She couldn’t believe it. She felt so betrayed and hurt.
By both of them.
Mark said he knew why Adam stayed away. And that he knew she loved Adam better.
Oh, it made her so mad.
In the whole six years they’d been married, they had never had a fight. In all the years she had ever known him, she’d never fought with him.
So different from Adam, whom she recalled scrapping with all the time.
Because he was so maddening.
But Mark. How could he?
She went to retrieve her ice pack. It had melted in the sink, and she had to satisfy herself with frozen peas out of her freezer. Make her laugh, indeed. Get her injured was more like it! Okay, she had laughed a little bit. It wasn’t all that great. There was more to life than laughter.
She thought of Adam lying beside her on that blanket and shivered. Wasn’t that really when she had started to question why she was there?
When his scent had wrapped around her and made her so aware of him. Aware that if she just moved half an inch, she could touch him. Feel the hard length of his body against her own.
She’d turned over on her elbow and looked at him, and been awed all over again by what an incredible looking man he was.
She was fighting something. Something deep and physical, an almost primitive longing.
And she had done her damnedest to turn it cerebral again. Done her damnedest to make the longing go away by finding fault with him, acting as if his becoming a lawyer was some sort of betrayal of himself.
And then she’d rediscovered how much she liked crossing swords with him. It only deepened that sense of wanting something more from him—that part of him that was fierce and untamed had nothing to do with his motorcycle. And everything to do with the uncivilized glitter in his eyes and the wild promise of his lips.
It was a good thing that woman had come along. And brought her right back down to earth.
They weren’t teenagers, anymore, she and Adam, exploring that tantalizing sizzle between them with a certain cautious innocence, both of them scared to death to follow it to where it promised to go.
She had married Mark.
Because she loved him. And from the moment she had said yes to Mark and no to Adam, everything had changed forever and for all time.
Just because Mark had died didn’t mean they could start all over at sweet sixteen. She didn’t want to be as guilty as Adam. To just pretend Mark had never been alive.
It was awful. She was ashamed of herself for having given in and gone skating with him, climbed in the back of that ricksha.
Even if it had been Mark’s stupid idea! Not Adam’s.
That just made everything worse. All the confusion, everything intensified.
She limped down the hall to her bedroom and flung open her closet door. She was going to dress to the absolute nines tomorrow when she went to her parents’ for dinner.
To the nines.
He was going to see that she was not a woman to be pitied.
He was going to regret that it was pity and not passion that had brought him back here.
It occurred to her, given the events of today, she really didn’t have to go to her mother and father’s for dinner.
And it occurred to her nothing, but nothing, would keep her away.
The Bradburys lived where they had always lived. And so did the Mitchells. Adam locked the door of the rental car, the wheelchair folded safely away in the trunk. He paused in the gathering darkness and looked at the houses from his childhood.
Of course they were still here. That was the kind of people they were. They stayed.
His old house had been given a face-lift. New windows and new shingles and great landscaping. And yet the feeling was so strong that if he went and looked over the back fence, there would be a motorcycle there.
And a boy, too. The boy he used to be.
The boy who had envied the stability of these families living on either side of him. Had he known, even then, that they were the kind to stay, and he was the kind to go?
A restlessness in him, back then.
Tory called it wild.
But it had been something else. Searching.
And it was only in looking back that he knew he had come as close as he would ever come, here on this street, to finding what he searched for.
A boy who had lost his mother.
So evident now that what he had searched for was love.
And he thought he had found it. Not just in Tory, but in Mark, too, and their families.
Until the moment she had told him no. She wouldn’t marry him, she wouldn’t travel around the world with him astride a Harley, with her arms tight around his waist and her head buried in the back of his shoulders, the wind tangling in her curls.
What a thing to even ask her, knowing that she was the kind who stayed.
He made himself walk up the narrow walk to the brightly lit house. He had a bottle of a most correct wine under his arm, though he never drank.
He was aware he felt just a tiny bit afraid.
He rang the doorbell, and her mother came to the door.
When he stepped inside the fear went away. It was still Tory’s house, even if she didn’t live there. It smelled wonderful—of pine cleaner and furniture polish and good things cooking.
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