Three Wishes (28 page)

“Why?”

“Because it frees me to be and do whatever I want. For years I couldn't.”

It sounded so sensible and unbizarre that Bree took the opening it offered. No hopes up, she told herself. Just curious. “Where did you live before you came here?”

“Atlanta.”

“Have you ever lived in California?”

“No.”

It was possible that Bree's father might have been either wrong or misled. “Have you ever been to Chicago?”

“Once. Fifty years ago. I was ten. We were visiting relatives there.”

That would make her sixty, not the fifty-three that Bree's mother would be. In that, too, Haywood Miller might have been wrong or misled. “Do you have any children?”

“No. My husband wouldn't share me that much.”

What if she had run away, had an affair with Haywood, and conceived Bree? What if that was the only way in the world she could have had a child? What if, years later, she had come to Panama to watch Bree grow? That didn't explain why she had never revealed herself to Bree. But what if Haywood had forbidden her to? What if that had been part of the deal? What if she had changed her looks so that Haywood himself hadn't recognized her?

Trying to stay calm, she asked, “What brought you to Panama?”

“I closed my eyes and pointed.”

“Pointed?”

“I needed to leave the South. So I opened a map of the North, closed my eyes, and pointed.”

“Did you know anyone here before you came?”

Verity shook her head. Then she tipped it and gave a small, knowing smile. “I thought you thought the woman in the diner was your mother.”

Bree felt a stab of embarrassment. Throwing it off, she raised her chin. “I don't know that for sure. When I wished for heat, I got a fire. So I moved to Tom's, where I have heat. I got my wish, but in a roundabout way. My seeing the woman at the diner led to my confrontation with Tom, which led to my coming here.”

Gently, Verity said, “I'm not your mother.”

“Would you tell me if you were?”

“Yes. I believe in telling the truth.”

“Verity.”

“Yes?”

“Your real name?”

Her eyes twinkled. Her accent thickened. “It is. Right on my birth certificate.”

Bree couldn't argue with a birth certificate. “Do you really think that God is bowling when it thunders?”

“Do you know otherwise?”

“When hot air hits cold air, there's lightning. The sound comes from that”

“Does air make noise? Do clouds?”

“Scientists say so.”

“Does it make sense?”

Bree saw her point.

“Think back,” Verity went on. “Did I ever say for sure that God bowled? Or did I say it was
possible?”

Bree was caught. “Possible.”

“Is it?”

“I guess.”

Verity's smile was wide. “See? You do have an open mind, just like me, though not because we're blood kin. Both of us experienced a life threat. That freed us up.”

Freedom was one thing, lunacy another, was what Bree was thinking.

Verity said, “Freedom is relative. So is happiness and reality and risk. Sometimes, in order to be free, we have to take risks. Sometimes, in order to be
happy,
we have to take risks. As for what's real and what isn't, it's like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. Reality is one thing for one person, and another for another. We make our reality. It can be what we want, or what we need.”

“What if my reality is different from Tom's? What if he really is that other person, the famous one who lives in the fast lane?”

“And if he is? What would you lose?”

“The most wonderful thing in my life.”

“Well, there you have it.”

“Have what?”

“Your answer. The thing that brought you here, what's real and what isn't. If Thomas Gates is the most wonderful thing in your life, why question it? You're an optimist. Deep down inside, past that old inbred cautiousness, you believe in possibility. It doesn't matter if a
thing
is real. If the
possibility
is, that's what counts.”

 

Bree's spirits rose higher with each jolt of the truck during the return trip on Verity's rutted path. At its end, the forest's darkness gave way to a near-blinding light that Bree took as her special being's approval of the visit. Waiting only long enough for her eyes to adjust, she turned onto the main road and, ebullient, headed for Tom.

The house was so quiet when she reached it that for an instant she feared she had waited too long. After searching the rooms on the first floor, she ran up the stairs.
“Tom?”

“In here,” came his voice from the end of the hall.

She went to the door of his office. He had yet to unpack the cartons there, but they were pushed aside, which was an improvement, and there was a lamp on the desk. He sat in its light with his computer open, gestured that she should wait, tapped at the keyboard. After reading from the screen, he jotted something on a long yellow pad, tossed down his pen, and pushed himself back.

There was an instant's hesitancy when he looked at her, an instant's reminder of their confrontation. Then came a slow grin and the sexiest “Hey” she'd ever heard, but he didn't leave the chair.

So she went to him. “Hey yourself.” Stopping between his legs, she looped her arms around his neck and kissed him once with her lips, a second time with her teeth, a third time with her tongue.

He circled her waist. “Must have been one hell of a shopping trip.”

She smiled down into his smiling face. “It was. Whatcha been doing?”

“Exploring the feasibility of obtaining a waiver of the ban on federal subsidizing of nonregulated growth material for the Allsworthys' farm down the road.”

The only thing she could understand of his answer was the bottom line. “Another case?”

He shrugged, but his smile remained. Every few days something new popped up, some legal problem that Martin Sprague didn't know how to handle. Tom refused to take credit for the work, but the whole town knew what was what.

“I love you,” she said.

He drew in a deep breath. It came out ragged. “I was hoping you'd say that.”

“Let's get married.”

He rolled his eyes.

She was more specific. “This weekend.”

Slowly, he straightened. “Do you mean it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This weekend is three days off,” he warned, but she felt his excitement.

“We don't need printed invitations.”

“Are you sure?”

“About printed invitations?”

“About the date.”

“Positive.” She was making her own reality, tying Tom down, then giving him a last chance to escape. “Unless you'd rather wait.”

The eloquent look he gave her was followed by another kiss. This one was longer and deeper than the three that had come before and tasted of commitment. Odd, but it made Bree feel free.

She smoothed his hair back and studied him, trying to see the brash and successful man whose face was on the books on the shelf. But there were no traces of that man here. This one was more handsome, more honest, more decent. His hair was longer and his coloring more healthy. He had a scar on his cheek that lent character, and wonder in his eyes. This one was the man who loved her enough to believe in her fantasies and wait through her doubts.

“You are the most wonderful thing in my life,” he said, in a voice that was hoarse with emotion. They were the very same words she had used not so long before at Verity's house, and would have erased the last of her qualms if those hadn't already been gone.

All that remained was a world of possibility, one so large and bounteous that Bree couldn't have explored it all in an hour, a day, a year. But she tried. She touched Tom's face and his neck with her hands, then her mouth. She unbuttoned his shirt and touched his chest, unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans. She touched everything inside, stroked until she had created a new reality that was larger, harder, and so much more exciting than the old that she slipped to her knees.

Tom jerked at the touch of her lips. “Christ, Bree.”

She didn't stop. The idea that anything in the world was possible gave her a certain freedom, which gave her a certain power. That power meant taking the thickness of him into her mouth while she held his thighs apart with her hands. It meant milking him to the point of release, then rising up, pushing aside her blouse and bra, and offering him her breasts. It meant watching his wonderful long-fingered hands knead them, then lifting her nipples to his tongue, and if there was brazenness in that, she had no regrets. The power was hers, the freedom, the possibility. All these were her reality with Tom.

With a sudden tousling of hands, clothes, and breath came the desperate drive toward consummation. There was Tom's hoarse “That's it, baby . . . lift . . .”

And her own breathless “Wait . . . there . . . oh, my . . .”

“Higher . . . wrap your legs . . . yessss . . .”

“Touch me . . .
there!”

“You're so hot . . .”

“I can't . . . hold back . . . Tom!”

Her last conscious thought before her climax consumed conscious thought was that this was a reality she could live with.

The next morning, riding high on Bree's love and knowing that he would never feel bolder, Tom called his father. The older man's gruff “Hello” had him gripping the phone more tightly.

“Dad? It's Tom.”

Silence.

“Dad?” His heart was beating up a storm, but nothing at all came from the other end of the line.

So he tried “How are you?”

When that didn't evoke a response, he jumped in with, “Something's happened here, something really exciting. I've been wanting to tell you about it for a long time—” He thought he heard a click. “Dad?” he tested, fearful. “Dad?”

When a dial tone came on, he let out a disappointed breath and quietly hung up the phone.

 

If Bree hadn't believed that anything was possible, she would never have believed the kind of wedding that occurred three days later. When she set the date with Tom, she had envisioned something small, a simple church ceremony with a brief reception at either the diner, an inn in a neighboring town, or even Tom's house. That was before the townsfolk got wind of her plans.

Flash, who was the first to know, insisted that he was catering whatever, wherever. Jane, who agreed to be Bree's maid of honor, insisted that the whole of the town should be invited, since the whole of the town loved Bree. Jane called Dotty, who called Emma, who called Eliot and Earl, and before lunchtime of that very first day, the entire town was involved.

The pastor, who was thrilled with the idea of having a large and captive audience, promised to set up folding chairs in every available space in the church and perform the most beautiful ceremony Bree had ever seen. The organist secured a list of Bree's favorite songs and, insisting that the organ alone wouldn't do, called for a choir rehearsal that night. Emma, being as close to a mayor as the town had, insisted that the reception be held in the town hall, which had been newly painted in anticipation of the March town meeting anyway and was, after all, “the only suitable place for a town-wide event.”

Volunteers began calling Flash to offer help in preparing the food. The owners of the Sleepy Creek Brewery pledged kegs of their best sellers. The owner of the local bread company announced plans for a huge four-tiered wedding cake.

By the time Bree dropped by the shop to talk flowers with Julia Dean, Julia had already gathered buckets of imported blooms. “I have people out collecting greens enough to decorate the church and the town hall,” she said, with satisfaction. “All you have to do is tell me what flowers you want to carry, and I'll make up a bouquet. What are you wearing?”

Bree was feeling slightly breathless. “I don't know yet. I'm going shopping later. I don't think I can get a gown so late, but I should be able to find a pretty suit or a dress.”

Julia set the stems she was clipping in a pail of water. Coming out from behind the counter, she stood back and studied Bree, up and down, for a quiet minute. Then, even more quietly, she said, “I have a gown you could wear.”

Bree's heart tripped. “A wedding gown?”

“Can I show it to you?”

Too touched to refuse, Bree followed her out the back door and across the drive to the small house where Julia lived. Once inside, they climbed two flights of stairs to the attic. There, hanging in a small cedar closet, covered with wrapping that Julia carefully removed, was the wedding dress of Bree's dreams. It was ivory in color and Victorian in style, with a high neck, long sleeves, and a hem layered with ruffles and lace. Delicate beads dotted the bodice, right down to the fitted torso.

Bree swallowed. “It looks so slim.”

“You're slim. Do you like it?”

“I
love
it.”

“Try it on.”

Bree tore her eyes from the gown. “Really?”

Julia nodded, looking pleased.

“Right now?”

“It'll save you a trip to the mall.”

Bree knew that she could look for weeks and weeks and not find anything half as beautiful as this gown. Without another word—and only a brief thought to the scars Julia might see—she slipped off her jeans and shirt. By that time, Julia had tiny buttons unbuttoned and the back zipper down. Bree stepped carefully into the dress. Just as carefully, she drew it on. Julia helped her straighten the fabric and secured the zipper.

It fit. Perfectly. Amazed by that, and awed by the dress, Bree smoothed her hands over her stomach while Julia did up the tiny buttons, adjusted the shoulders, gently pulled at the sleeves. When Julia came around to the front and stepped back to look, Bree held her breath.