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“Would it have made any difference?”
He didn’t know, so he didn’t say anything. She didn’t seem to expect him to. Unless he was mistaken, she was still in her pajamas, a kind of fuzzy two-piece short suit with pudgy angels frolicking in the pattern of fabric.
Not intended to be the least bit sexy, he found it unbelievably so.
“Is that coffee I smell?” he asked wistfully.
She glared at him.
“I’ll trade you this little posy.” He wagged his eyebrows at the flowers, hoping she would laugh.
“You’re offering those in trade? They look pretty near to death,” she said scornfully.
“The coffee’s an unknown. I tried cookies you baked on three or four occasions before I wised up and fed them to old Brewster.”
“No wonder that dog was so monstrously fat. I suppose it wasn’t just you, was it?”
This was encouraging. She was asking him questions.
“Mark, too,” he admitted, “and your dad.”
“My dad?” She was trying to look outraged, but he thought he could see a bit of smile trying to press out past the prissy set of her lips.
She took the flowers, got up and marched into the house. The shorts were really very short. Her legs were gorgeous. It looked like she could still ride a bicycle fitteen or twenty miles without breaking into a sweat, or shinny up a tree in five seconds fiat.
She glanced back and caught him looking. He half expected her to slam the door behind her, turn the key in the lock and then stick out her tongue at him, but she didn’t.
She came back out a few minutes later, a carafe of coffee in one hand and an extra mug in the other, a long white terry-cloth robe hiding her delectable little knees from him.
She poured him a coffee as the birds rioted in her yard.
“What a beautiful space you’ve created for yourself, Tory.”
She looked at him uneasily. “I grow most of these flowers for my business.”
“What is your business?” He took advantage of the tenuous peace between them.
“I make dried flower arrangements, like this one, and sell them to upscale gift shops like the ones on Kensington and in Mount Royal Square. I have some contracts in Banff, too.” There was a hint of pride in her voice.
She’ll need to know she can make it on her own.
“You’re doing well, aren’t you?”
“Extremely. Better than I ever expected. I call my business Victoria’s Garden.”
He wanted to pull her in his arms and swing her around at the pride he saw shining in her eyes. But that brought thoughts of what her body, wrapped in the fluffy robe, would feel like after all these years.
Now, for the first time, his mind going down a very dangerous path—thinking wayward thoughts of her—
“Adam?” she asked.
“Coffee’s great,” he said gruffly, taking a sip. It really was great Exotic. Like coffee and chocolate and mint all mixed together. “Have your cookies improved?”
“I seem to have better luck with flowers. Adam, what are you doing here?”
“I told you. Taking you Rollerblading.”
“But I don’t want to go Rollerblading!”
Neither do I, he thought. It was not on his list of the one hundred and one things that he most wanted to do in his life.
“Why not?” he asked, sneaking a look at her over the rim of his coffee cup. She looked beautiful. Flustered, her curls scattered around her face, the freckles standing out on her nose. Her freckles always stood out on her nose when she was upset.
Somehow the purpose of this exercise had not been to upset her.
“I’m too old,” she said.
He almost spit out his coffee. “Too old to have fun?”
“Oh, Adam.” she said. “I stopped believing life was fun a long time ago.”
And then, for the first time, he felt committed to his mission. Knew why he was here, knew why Mark had sent him, and knew that he couldn’t fail.
“It must have been very hard for you. Watching him die.”
“It wasn’t hard at all,” she said stubbornly. Her chin tilted up, and her eyes glittering dangerously. “It was incredible. I didn’t regret one minute of it. It was a privilege to make that journey with that strong, courageous man.”
Her speech finished, her composure crumbled. Silver tears trickled down her cheeks. She swiped at them impatiently. More replaced them. She covered her eyes, trying to regain control. Her shoulders started to shake. She hiccuped.
And then she was sobbing. Uncontrollably.
And a voice deep within him, in his soul, told him what to do. He went and scooped her from her chair, and then sat back down in it, with her cradled against his chest. And while she wept, her hot tears trickling down his shirt, he stroked her hair and murmured words to her that came from some part so deep within him he had not been aware it existed.
He told her how proud he was of her for being so strong. He told her it was okay to cry. He told her he was going to help her laugh again. All the time aware of how slight she was in his embrace, how good she smelled, how soft her shoulders were under his hands. And all the time aware that she still loved Mark.
That her love with Mark had been one of those loves that would transcend all obstacles, even death.
And that was good. He was relieved. His future was safe after all. Kathleen was real and good and eminently suited to him in every way, and he was going to go back to Toronto and lose no time in asking her to marry him.
They would buy a house somewhere in suburbia, and someday they might have children—two point two, just like the national average.
“How?” Her voice was small, muffled against his shirt
For a startled moment he wondered if she was asking how one had two point two children, which he had not exactly figured out.
“How what?”
“How are you going to make me laugh again?” she asked somberly.
“I’m going to take you Rollerblading,” he said.
She flung back her head and looked at him. Her eyes were all puffy from crying. She seemed to realize suddenly she was in his lap, and she scrambled out of his embrace and onto her feet.
“You’re not giving up, are you? Just like the old days!”
“Bulldog Reed,” he agreed. Her robe had pulled apart slightly below the belt, and he tried for a glimpse of her upper thigh.
“Adam, you have to go away.” She looked down, blushed, and pulled her robe ferociously into place, yanking hard on the belt.
“Not until I take you Rollerblading.”
“And then you’ll go?”
As a lawyer he had mastered a few nuances of lying without actually lying. For instance, you could incline your head a certain way and people took that as assent, when in the letter of the law no verbal agreement had been committed.
He tilted his head, a gesture one might mistake as preceding a nod.
She straightened her robe again unnecessarily, and pointed that cute little nose at the sky and spun away from him.
He waited for the slamming door, the turn of the key, and actually felt relief when it didn’t come.
He had finished all the coffee in the carafe before she finally returned, her face scrubbed free of tear stains, dressed in some terribly unattractive sweat outfit in the most unbecoming shade of gray he had ever seen.
Not intending to be the least bit sexy, she was unbelievably so.
“All right,” she snapped. “You want to go so bad, let’s go.” Covering up her moment of vulnerability with cool dignity. With impatience. In her eyes a vow: never to be vulnerable to him again.
He sighed.
Tory watched him get up from his chair. God, he was glorious. He always had been. Incredibly handsome, but more. Sure of himself—and that certainty showing up in the way he moved, pure masculine strength and grace in his every move.
He was dressed casually today, in jeans faded to dusty blue from long and loving wear, and a white denim shirt. It made him look more like, well, him, than the expensively dressed man who had appeared on her doorstep yesterday.
His hair was falling carelessly over one eye. Beautiful hair, black and thick and silky. Hair that begged to be touched, begged her fingers to reach up and flick it back for him. She had done that all the time. Before. When his face and their friendship had been so familiar to her. When he’d been a part of her life, like the river was a part of her life. Something she had assumed would be constant and unchanging.
Every woman they saw today would look at him.
In the old days, he’d rarely noticed. Or if he did, he would grin back at them and then turn and give Tory, or Mark, a puzzled look. Like, What’s with them? or Is that Someone we know?
And she was dressed in one of Mark’s old sweat suits. It looked absolutely appalling on her, and she knew it.
She had started out quite differently. She had marched into the house and past his pathetic flowers, which for some reason she had put in her very best vase.
In her bedroom she had thrown open her closet and scrutinized every outfit she had. And tried on three of them, finally settling on a nice pair of pleated white shorts and a jade-green silk blouse that did the most splendid things to her hair and her eyes. Which, of course, was too ridiculous considering where they were going.
Next had come black jeans and a flannel shirt. Better. Faintly feminine, but hardly alluring. It showed off her coloring and her trim figure rather nicely.
A dusting of make-up and then the fist slamming into her stomach.
What was she doing? Trying to make herself look attractive for Adam! As if her heart wasn’t vulnerable enough to those dark flashing eyes.
“The idea,” she told the mirror, “is to get rid of him.”
Who did he think he was, coming here, casually trying to renew an old friendship, commandeering her life, when he’d abandoned her, them, when they needed him most?
He was a dangerous man. He was dangerous to her heart. A heart that was already damaged almost beyond repair.
She had never said it out loud. Mark would have been disappointed in her if she had. He might have felt guilty. Like he had done it to her.
But she said it out loud, now.
“I am never going to love anyone again.” And, she added to herself, least of all Adam Reed, who had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt he could not be trusted with such delicate organs as hearts and souls.
And so she scrubbed her face until it shone, and left the freckles and the hollows under her eyes. She combed her hair, but didn’t mousse it so that each curl stood out, separate and shining. And in the very back of the closet she had found an old sweat suit that belonged to Mark, and that she had hated on him and that looked even worse on her than it ever had on him.
She went back out onto her back deck, defiant, amazed when in his lazy gaze she saw frank appreciation.
“Unless you want to jump back over the fence,” she told him haughtily, “you’ll have to come through the house.”
She hoped he’d offer to jump the fence. She did not want Adam to see her house. It was too close to her. Reflected her very soul.
And somehow her soul felt like it needed to be protected from him.
He stopped inside her back door, waiting while she slid it shut and locked it
They were in her kitchen and she turned and tried to see the room through his eyes. Small and cluttered with dried flower paraphernalia. The top of her old round oak table barely visible under a mound of baby’s breath and pink ribbons.
He 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.”
