Wedding Series Boxed Set (3 Books in 1) (The Wedding Series) (32 page)

She didn’t know why it seemed so important to wait for his soft “okay,” but she didn’t move until she had it.

“I thought we were going to leave all the packages in the car.” Grady grimaced as the sharp edge of a smallish box banged into his leg for the third time.

“Sorry.” Tris shifted the bag to her other hand. They’d parked several blocks from the restaurant and the narrow sidewalks provided little room. “It’s for Michael.”

“All the more reason to leave it in the car.” And away from my poor leg, his tone seemed to add. “He probably won’t come up for air from that political stuff for days, so you could have waited to give it to him back at the Monroes. Unless he’s already left.”

Annoyance seeped into Tris. Michael wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye -- he’d promised. And he’d be at the restaurant if he could. And if he were there, she wanted him to have a piece of the day all the rest of them had spent together, to feel included, to know he’d been missed. But she wasn’t about to say any of that to Grady, because he wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t. . . .

She stopped in midthought. She had just found Grady lacking. Grady Roberts. Gorgeous Grady.

She would have found that unthinkable twelve years ago. Now she had an irrational urge to giggle.

“There’s Michael,” Paul announced from just ahead of them.

Tris transferred the urge to giggle into a welcome as Michael met them at the short flight of steps that led to the half-basement restaurant. Exchanging greetings and questions, they effectively clogged the entrance. Noticing a couple trying to pass, Tris hooked her hand through Grady’s arm and tugged, trying to clear the sidewalk at the same time she asked Michael if he’d solved the problems.

His grin evaporated. “This one. But there’ll be others.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, a little startled by his grimness.

“Joan’s got one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever encountered, but sometimes she leads with her heart instead of her hard political head. That’s where the problems come in.”

Remembering he’d used that same phrase – “leading with her heart” -- about her, she bridled at his tone. “That’s also where compassion and caring come in.”

“Compassion and caring don’t do a whole lot of good if you don’t have the wherewithal to implement them,” he shot back.

“So it’s better to forget your heart and just lead with your head? Until perpetuating your power becomes more important than using that power to accomplish something? Isn’t that exactly the sort of end-justifies-the-means thinking that has earned politicians the rotten reputation they have now?”

“Hey, right now I want to lead with my stomach,” interrupted Paul. “C’mon, we’d better get our names in to get a booth.”

“I put my name in twenty minutes ago. It shouldn’t be much longer,” said Michael.

While the others thanked him heartily, Tris hung back. Had Michael really become the sort of man he’d just sounded like? He’d always believed in founding goals on reality, but had the years solidified that into something more rigid, less caring, less . . . Michael?

Or was she being overly sensitive because she’d been burned by a politician doing what was politically expedient recently enough to have the unhealed scars to show for it?

The hostess announced their booth was ready, and led them single file through the long narrow restaurant. Tris slid in first, followed by Grady and Judi. Directly across a table not much more than a single board’s width, Michael shared a bench with Bette and Paul.

“Ow! Tris, there’s that damn bag again”

“Sorry, Grady.” She extracted the bag from between them, then hesitated. Uncertainty turned her voice abrupt when she pushed the bag across the table to Michael. “Here, this is for you.”

He looked at the Marshall Field’s bag, then back at her.

“Go on, open it, Michael,” Judi urged. “We want some, too.”

“Some?” Amusement lit his eyes and echoed in his voice. Tris relaxed. This was Michael.

He slipped a hand inside the bag and slowly extracted a box, recognition dawning on his face before more than a corner came into view. “Frango Mints!” He smiled, and his dimple appeared high on his cheek.

“We were in Field’s and I couldn’t resist,” Tris said, absurdly pleased by the appearance of that dimple.

“My favorite candy in the world.”

“You going to open your favorite candy in the world, buddy, or are you just going to look at the box?”

“All right, all right, Monroe.”

Michael leaned over to pass the box to Paul and, under the table, Tris felt his denim-clad shin through the sheer hosiery covering her legs. The sensation bolted through her like lightning. She couldn’t move. Tingles seemed to run over the surface of her skin, prickling along her legs, arms and neck. Michael abruptly twisted away, and she couldn’t be sure if he meant to tease Paul by pulling back the box or to break the contact with her.

If it was the latter, he failed.

In the cramped quarters under the table, his movement put his other leg between hers. Instinctively she tried to close her knees against the intrusion, succeeding only in tightening them around the denim invader that brushed against the soft skin above her knees.

For an instant not measurable by any clock, she had the strangest sensation that everything else receded, until her friends’ conversation became distant echoes, their faces faded to pale shadows. As if she’d left behind the familiar world and stepped into one more vibrant, more intense. A world that centered on the contact between her legs and Michael’s.

So fragile, though, was this world that she couldn’t even breathe. The prickling of her skin turned into something pulsing deep in her. She stared at Michael’s free hand, which was clenched on the table in front of her, seeing the straining tendons of the wrist, noting the strength of the fingers, concentrating on the pale slashes of taut skin marking the knuckles.

Slowly, as the slashes turned whiter, she felt the withdrawal of his knee as a prolonged, gentle friction against her skin.

Her breath came out in a quick, uneven exhalation.

Then as quickly as it had started, the feeling of unreality shattered to the sound of Paul’s laughing voice.

“Hey, Dickinson, you going to let me have some more of those mints or not?”

“Sure.” She heard Michael clear his throat, then start again. “Sure, everybody have some more.”

She shook her head at the offer of the candy box, and at her own foolishness. Where had all those thoughts of a private, vibrant world come from? Craziness, absolute crazy.

Embarrassment, surely that had been the source of the strain she heard in his voice. And that had to be the source of the heat she felt burning her skin.

For the first time in what seemed hours, she looked at the man across the table. This was Michael, her friend. What had gotten into her? Over an innocent brushing of knees under a table, too. Nothing more. Absolutely nothing more.

She looked at him more fully and saw the old Michael warmth in eyes tinged with a ruefulness that could only be the result of their mutual embarrassment. She smiled at him, and felt the world kick back into place in time to realize Bette was directing a question at her.

“Is this the kind of place you save in your business, Tris?”

Tris considered the polished and mellow surfaces of the old wood and older brick.

“If we’re lucky they look this good when we’re done, but most are pretty decrepit when we start. You have to see beyond the deterioration to what the builders created and what you hope you can recreate.”

“Like your place, right, Michael?” Judi leaned around Grady. “You should see it, Tris.”

“Oh, yes, Paul’s told me about your Victorian in Springfield, Michael.”

“We all thought he was crazy to buy this dingy, ramshackle place, but he’s turned it into something great.”

“Yeah, after practically blackmailing his friends into weekends of slave labor,” Paul told his cousin. “At least when you got that row house in Washington, you didn’t expect us to help fix it up.”

“Only because I couldn’t get you to come out to D.C. Michael was just smarter than me, that’s all. Sweat equity is definitely the way to go.”

“Especially if it’s somebody else’s sweat.” Paul reached into the candy box.

“Looks like you’re taking it out in Frango Mints,” said Bette.

“Damn right. You should have seen the things he had us doing. That’s why I figured he couldn’t refuse to be my best man, even though we all know Michael would prefer a three-week hiking tour in the Sahara to going to a wedding.”

No movement betrayed him and they no longer were touching, yet Tris somehow felt Michael’s withdrawal. An instinctive defense, she thought. And perhaps also indicative of surprise. They did know how Michael felt about weddings, and she had long ago guessed it stemmed from his parents’ far from successful marital history, but it occurred to her that he’d certainly never volunteered anything on the subject. It was something they’d all seemed to tacitly understand, and avoid.

She wondered if Paul had broken the taboo on purpose. If so, he either changed his mind or had achieved what he’d been after because he shifted the conversation, and she sensed Michael relax. A glance around the table left her doubting that anyone else had even noticed.

“One time he left me holding up a wail all by myself. For hours. I thought I was going to choke to death on plaster dust.”

Paul’s account of the work on Michael’s house started them on a laughter-filled conversation that lasted until the restaurant closed up around them.

As they slid one by one from the booth, Tris wondered if Michael took special care not to brush against her legs. It was almost impossible not to make contact, but they didn’t. And she quickly dismissed the fragment of thought that tried to label her reaction as disappointment.

“This has been nice.” Tris settled back against the passenger seat with a pleased sound.

“Driving on the Tollway at rush hour is nice?” Wry disbelief threaded through Michael’s question.

She chuckled, but stubbornly maintained, “Yes. It is. As much as I love everybody, it’s been nice to get away for a while. To be alone.”

“Alone?” He tried to sound wounded. But she hadn’t really hurt his feelings; she remembered his inflections well enough to know that. “If I’d known you wanted to be alone, I wouldn’t have volunteered to drive all the way out to Elmhurst to double-check Bette’s old house before the landlord inspects it. You could have done it all by yourself.”

“Volunteer, nothing. You were drafted, because Aunt Nancy knows you’re reliable and she didn’t want Bette to worry about it while they were at the luncheon this afternoon. I’m the true volunteer.” In fact, she’d surprised herself a bit by asking if she could go with him rather than attend the luncheon with the combined staffs of Paul’s and Bette’s offices. But as soon as the words were out, she’d known that was how she wanted to spend this afternoon.

Driving to Elmhurst, the conversation had been sporadic and easy. They’d stopped at a neighborhood deli, then eaten the juicy sandwiches at a dilapidated picnic table and watched people go by. Once at the house Bette had rented, they’d poked around companionably, double-checking the items on Bette’s list—all of which were already done—but mostly trading home ownership stories and speculating on where and when Bette and Paul might find a house to meet their divergent specifications.

They’d puttered around so long that their return had landed them in the midst of a steamy summer evening rush hour. She didn’t mind the slow going, though.

She’d enjoyed herself thoroughly. Not once did she have to stop and think before she spoke. Not once did she have to worry that her words might be misconstrued, or repeated inopportunely. Not once did she think about work.

Only Michael could do that for her.

“Reliable?”
Michael’s insulted tone brought her back to their conversation. “That’s as bad as describing a prospective blind date as having a good personality.”

She laughed at that, but she also surveyed the man next to her. He drove with an easy smoothness that belied the alert concentration she knew he gave the heavy traffic. Bette’s assessment of him ran through her head:
All that calm good sense on the outside, and inside . . . all sorts of potent things churning around.

“I think any woman who opened the door to you as a blind date would be thrilled, Michael Dickinson.”

“Oh, yeah?” His asymmetrical mouth lifted into a grin that seemed to be directed at himself. It made him look very young.

“Oh, yeah.”

And even though he changed the subject then, she knew her unpremeditated words had pleased him a little, and that pleased her. What didn’t please her was the peculiarly unsettled feeling that lodged in her stomach at the image of another woman opening the door to Michael Dickinson.

“You’re an early riser.”

Tris turned and looked up at him. “Morning, Michael.”

He almost hadn’t seen her sitting on the end of the small deck over the water. He’d just returned from running and was headed toward his room over the garage when an early ray of morning sun caught a glint of gold in light hair, and he recognized Tris. Since one force behind his run had been the hope of clearing his mind, still fogged by dreams that stubbornly ran to blue eyes and long legs, it would have made more sense to slip up the stairs than to walk over to her. But what the hell, the run hadn’t succeeded anyhow.

“I must still be on East Coast time,” she continued. “I’ve been up before everybody in the house all week. If I’d known you were up, I would have come over to your room and bothered you.”

Bothered was the word, all right. Tris in a room dominated by a king-size bed, in the soft light of morning, wouldn’t have done a thing to chase away either old ghosts or his recent, and unwelcomed, reaction to accidental touches such as brushing knees under a table. On the other hand, he hadn’t escaped those by running through the quiet suburban streets, either.

“Why don’t you sit down?”