Wedding Series Boxed Set (3 Books in 1) (The Wedding Series) (29 page)

“And Juliet was thirteen when she went gaga over Romeo.”

“It’s hardly the same thing.”

“No,” Leslie agreed with abrupt and uncharacteristic seriousness. “I’ve often thought that if Juliet had stuck it out a little longer she would have seen that Romeo really wasn’t the right man for her. But she never had a chance to grow out of it, to find out if she’d really found love, or only infatuation. It’s kind of the same thing for you, Tris. Grady was a major college crush that you’ve never had a chance to check against adult reality.”

Tris said nothing. What could she say? Leslie was right. As a freshman in college she had fallen for Grady Roberts with the depth and breadth of her seventeen-year-old soul. But Grady—a handsome, popular senior and part of the triumvirate, with her cousin Paul and Michael Dickinson, that had adopted her as a little sister—had never seen her as anything but a kid.

The infatuation belonged to the distant past. It had waned even before she left school, and certainly had been over before her brief, ill-considered marriage had knocked the inclination toward infatuations out of her for good.

But some questions about Grady had lingered. What would it be like to meet him now, now that the four-year age difference had narrowed to a blink of experience rather than a gulf of worldliness? Would there be any spark? Not the infatuation of twelve years ago, but perhaps something different. Maybe Leslie had a point. Maybe it was time to get the questions answered.

And it would be wonderful to spend time with Paul and Bette before their wedding.

And to see Michael, of course.

“Goodbye. Enjoy your stay in Chicago.”

As Tris stepped from the airplane, the airline attendant’s professional farewell started her heart pumping fast. She’d spent the flight pushing thoughts of the past few difficult weeks at work from her mind. If thinking about the worries would have solved them, they’d have disappeared weeks ago. She’d done what she could for now; pushing too much too soon could in fact undo her efforts. So she waited and hoped and tried not to worry. She’d promised Leslie that much, and she’d do her best to keep the promise.

But she hadn’t been as successful avoiding thoughts of the coming week. As the plane had circled across Lake Michigan and slipped lower to show her the familiar settings of her college days, she’d played a game with herself, naming the buildings as fast as she could before the campus disappeared from sight and the plane continued west to O’Hare. Much safer than thinking too much about memories.

But as she passed through the walkway connecting plane and terminal, she couldn’t put the thoughts off, because the memories were about to merge with the real-life people who’d created them.

What if I don’t recognize them? The thought hit her with enough impact that she almost stumbled when her heel ticked a metal strip on the corridor’s floor. Eight years. That was how long it had been since she’d seen Grady. Since the day all three of them had returned to campus for her college graduation.

She’d seen Michael only once since then, a little more than a year later. Just before her marriage. But she talked to him at least three times a year—his birthday, her birthday and Christmas. Some years those calls had been oases. And from them she knew Michael was still Michael.

Paul kept her posted on what both Michael and Grady were up to in their lives, the way, she knew, he kept them posted on her. But he never said anything about such mundane items as looks. What if tall, burnished, blond Grady looked totally different?

What if he’d gotten fat?

What if he’d gone gray?

Or bald?

That image pulled a chuckle from her tight throat, shaking Tris out of her momentary panic and propelling her through the entryway and into the glass-arched waiting area.

A strong hand took her carry-on case from her and an equally strong arm wrapped around her shoulders, corralling her out of the stream of passengers.

“How are you, Tris?”

“Michael?”

The voice was familiar but, without the telephone’s distortion, deeper than she remembered. And the hard band of arm around her, surely that was different.

She tipped her head to look up at the eyes just a few inches above her own. Michael’s eyes. Oh, yes. With a faint creasing at the corners as they smiled at her. The pleasure not quite masking signs of weariness and— And what? A shock quickly masked? She dismissed the puzzled surprise in his eyes to focus on the light of warmth and friendship in their hazel depths. Definitely Michael’s eyes.

Michael with his slightly unruly, thick, dark hair, his little-boy’s grin, his reliable salt-of-the-earth nature. Michael with his generous heart.

“Michael! It’s so good to see you!”

She stopped their progress to throw her arms around his neck. “It’s been too long, Michael.”

She felt his arms tighten around her, drawing their bodies into firm alignment. His voice sounded even deeper when he said, “Yes, it has been too long, Tris.”

Her blood gave the most peculiar lurch through her veins. Almost as if his hug had set off some sort of shock wave. She started to pull away from him with a vague feeling of discontent. Over his shoulder, she saw three figures hurrying toward them.

As burnished and blond and handsome as ever, Grady definitely hadn’t gotten fat. Or gone bald. Fleetingly, she wondered if she’d sensed his presence without even knowing it. That could explain that odd surge in her blood.

“Tris!”

Paul’s arms formed a vise around her ribs for an intense second. Bette Wharton’s more gentle embrace gave way to a hug from Grady. How many times had she dreamed all those years ago of these long, muscular arms around her?

Maybe after all those dreams, this feeling of anticlimax was normal. Especially with everyone else around her discussing the mundane subject of getting lost in the airport.

“Should have known you’d get here first, Dickinson,” grumbled Paul.

“I thought you were going to park the car,” said Grady over the top of her head. He still had his arms looped around her waist, but it seemed almost absentminded.

“I did. Then I came straight out here. Where were you guys?”

Identical looks of embarrassment came over Paul’s and Grady’s faces, and Tris had a sudden impulse to hug them all again. It was all so familiar. Count on Michael to be the organized one.

“I knew I should have stayed with Michael,” said Bette with a long-suffering sigh.

“Whaddya mean?” demanded her fiancé with a fine show of huffiness. Which none of them believed. “I got us here, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Bette acknowledged. “You got us here. By way of the international terminal and just under thirty-two miles of walking.”

Grady gave Tris’s shoulders a final squeeze. “Aw, c’mon, Bette, it wasn’t that far out of the way.”

“No, and certainly not without its rewards,” she said.

Paul guffawed and Grady looked ever so slightly abashed. But neither did any explaining.

Tris sent a raised-eyebrows look toward Michael, He responded with a small shrug and a half grin that indicated he didn’t know what they were talking about, either.

“Tell, Bette,” she demanded of the most susceptible of the trio.

Bette Wharton cast her a searching look that rather surprised Tris. On the way to a Caribbean vacation late last winter, Paul and Bette had stopped in Washington for three days—to get Tris’s approval, Bette teased. If her approval had been required, Tins gave it wholeheartedly. The two women had hit it off immediately, and Tris had seen how well Bette and Paul complemented each other, sharing basic values but with enough surface dissimilarities to keep the mix interesting.

Now Tris wondered at the appraising look being sent her way, a much more serious look than the topic seemed to warrant. And, if she wasn’t mistaken, a look that Bette had been careful would be unobserved by any of the three men.

Bette’s deep blue eyes abruptly changed from thoughtful to mischievous, but her face stayed neutral. “Oh, it was just another of Grady’s conquests.”

A spurt of laughter escaped Paul.

“Aw, Bette . . .” Grady made the appeal with little apparent expectation that it would be heeded.

Another of Grady’s conquests.
Tris waited for her smile to freeze to stiff discomfort. It didn’t happen.

Catching Michael’s frowning glance at her, she nudged the smile another notch brighter without any effort to reassure him. Of course Michael had known immediately how that casual comment would have hurt the old Tris. How many times had he soothed those old hurts? But this time, there was no need. Amazing what eight years of maturity could do for you.

“Only this conquest informed Mr. Roberts—after he’d graciously helped her translate the directions to downtown from English to her oh-so-native French—that she was a nun. You should have seen the look on Grady’s face when he finally got that bit of information!”

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” complained Grady amid his friends’ laughter. “She didn’t have on one of those nun uniforms. How’d I know there was a nun convention in Chicago this weekend?”

“Oh, poor Grady,” Tris got out between giggles, “all that charm going to waste . . .”

She saw surprise in Michael’s face as he looked at her. She felt rather surprised herself. She didn’t mind. She really didn’t mind. She felt like doing a cartwheel down the long, straight expanse of O’Hare Airport hallway. Only there were a lot of people in the way, and some might wonder what she’d found to celebrate. Even if she told them, they wouldn’t understand how it felt to finally know, really and truly know, that she was no longer little Tris Donlin, waiting for a scrap of attention, of approval, of interest from the great Grady Roberts.

Leslie had been right. It was time. Well past time to shake off the adoring girl and the distant idol and replace them with the people they’d become—a woman and a man.

“Thanks for the sympathy, Tris. I knew I could count on you,” said Grady. But his voice didn’t sound as certain as his words. He looked a little puzzled as he met her smile.

A man and a woman, Tris thought. And who knew what might happen when a man and woman got together.

She looked to Michael to share the moment, but he had turned away.

“Luggage ought to be at the baggage claim by now,” he said, apparently focusing on a plane backing away from the opposite terminal.

Another pang of anticlimax slid through Tris. Probably natural. Despite her efforts to keep her thoughts off the reunion, she must have built up unreasonable expectations.

“Yeah, we’ll get the luggage and get you settled at Mom and Dad’s, and then we can go see the campus,” said Paul. “Show Bette all our old haunts. She's been asking to see them.”

“Begging to see them,” concurred Bette, deadpan. “You know how Paul hates to dwell on the past. But for my sake he’s willing to relive some of the moments from his four horror-filled college years. The sacrifices the man makes for me.”

She was still shaking her head, when her husband-to-be wrapped an arm around her waist and started her down the corridor toward the baggage claim. “That’s right, woman. Horrible sacrifices.”

Looking at the way they fit together, Tris felt surprisingly alone as she followed, walking between Grady and Michael.

Michael welcomed the details of getting the luggage, loading the car, paying the parking fee, maneuvering through the toll-road traffic, following the route to the Monroes’ Lake Forest home. All the details that kept him from dwelling on what had happened when Tris walked into his arms.

He checked the rearview mirror before changing lanes and caught sight of her in the back seat next to Paul and Bette.

Little Tris had grown up.

Her legs, once coltish and invariably clad in jeans, now stylishly filled a pair of sheer stockings beneath a pale float of a skirt.

Her hair, once a waist-length, sun-streaked tangle, was pushed from her face in casual sweeps that turned under just above her collar, leaving a tantalizing sliver of nape exposed and framing ears decorated with oblong gold earrings.

Her Wedgwood-blue eyes, once vulnerable and shy, now studied the world with self-confidence tempered by good humor.

Her body, still as youthfully slim as it had always been, now moved with graceful assurance . . . and had fit against his for one instant as if it belonged there. The way he used to dream it would. Long ago. Before he knew better. Before he realized that unlike the world he’d grown up in, there were worlds where some things didn’t change. Some people who didn’t shed their loves with each season’s wardrobe. People like Tris.

That very stability of heart—so different from what he’d grown up with—was part of what had drawn him to her in the first place, all those years ago. Even while part of him had longed for her to have a change of heart. But Tris Donlin—girl or woman—still looked at Grady Roberts with dazzled eyes. Looked at Michael Dickinson as friend and buddy.

The damnable surprise was to find that his feelings hadn’t changed, either.

He’d been so sure he was over her years ago, that the spell was in the past. Ancient history. He sure as hell
should
have been over her. Good Lord, he’d fallen for a seventeen-year-old girl who was now a twenty-nine-year-old woman. How could he still feel the same way about her?

But the instant she had come through that doorway, framed by the opening and with the light slanting sun highlights into her hair, he had felt a slam to his chest like he’d been tackled by the Chicago Bears’ defensive line.

Great, the guy renowned for seeing the tiniest of flaws in a plan hadn’t spotted a weakness in himself the size of the San Andreas Fault. He’d plunged headlong into a pit he would have sworn he’d long ago escaped—wanting Tris.

Those first few minutes hadn’t helped any. The little jolt of surprise in her eyes when she looked at him, as if she were seeing him anew. The way she melted against his body, the rightness of the feeling. The glances exchanged that said their old communication still operated.

Then he’d seen the smile she focused on Grady.