Wedding Series Boxed Set (3 Books in 1) (The Wedding Series) (38 page)

He focused his attention to where Bette’s friend Melody was practicing her role as the first bridesmaid in the procession. Then Tris started down the aisle, and he knew what aching was all about.

Tris walked slowly down the aisle toward him. The evening sun sent its last rays through the stained glass, igniting shimmering colors that surrounded her but could not dim her light. Michael felt stunned, immobilized. Tris was walking down a church aisle, and for a moment, senseless but undeniable, he let himself believe she was coming to meet him.

Near enough now to read her expression, he watched her exchange a quick grin with Grady before shifting to a smile as she looked at Paul. Then her eyes met his and he wasn’t ready for the jolt that hit him. He couldn’t bear to look at her, but didn’t have the strength to look away. Only when he saw the uncertain quiver of her lips did he realize what his eyes might reveal.

He jerked his head away, staring unfocused toward the back of the church where he was vaguely aware of Judi starting down the aisle.

Sanity hinged on his ability to count his breaths, making each a little steadier than the previous one, and letting nothing else into his mind. By the time Bette had joined them and they all faced the minister to listen to the plans for the ceremony, he had his lungs under control. But that was about it.

He tried to concentrate on the details of his duties for the next day. But he’d had too much experience at doing that with one level of his mind while another level wrestled different issues. Like how to get through the next forty-eight hours.

Bette and Paul led the way back up the aisle. He turned to offer his arm to Judi as they followed.

“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Judi grinned at him.

No, not so bad. Just hell. But at least he’d been disciplined enough not to look at Tris again.

“Seems pretty straightforward,” he said. As long as he didn’t see, hear, touch or smell Tris Donlin.

“Yeah, Bette and Paul wanted to keep it simple. I like it. Someday . . .”

Absently, he patted Judi’s hand where it rested on his arm. As they reached the back of the church, Paul looked up from whispering something into Bette’s ear and cocked a grin at him.

“Hey, Dickinson, I know you’re not crazy about weddings, but you could look a little more cheerful, you know.”

Michael longed to tell him in no uncertain terms to shut up, but with the Monroes and Whartons gathered around he had to make do with a glare and a muttered, “It was hot.”

“Oh. Oh, dear. Did you think so, Michael?” Mrs. Wharton looked toward the front of the church with concern. “Maybe I should talk to Reverend Siles about turning up the air conditioning tomorrow. We don’t want people to be uncomfortable.”

Guiltily, Michael listened to Bette and Nancy Monroe calm the fears he’d raised. He could practically feel Paul’s unholy amusement at the scene. With some sense of urgency, he used the excuse of bringing the car around to escape. He used his chauffeur role as an excuse again when they arrived at the country club for the dinner, dropping off Paul, Bette and Tris, and saying he’d be in after parking the car.

Instead, he slipped past the room they’d reserved to a quiet patio bordered by garden and overlooking the lush green golf course. Michael pulled in a lungful of twilight air heavy with the scent of just-watered grass and a day’s worth of summer warmth. In a minute or two he’d join the others for dinner and then dancing, but for right now he needed a little solitude and a megadose of equilibrium.

You don’t mind, do you, Michael? After all, you see Judi all the time. This way you and Tris can catch up on old times more. That will be nice for both of you
. This time Nancy Monroe’s innocent words had an inflection of unintended irony.

Right. Mind? No, he didn’t mind. Why should he?

Spend time with her, watch over her, see her walking down a church aisle toward him . . .

“Michael?”

The soft voice accompanied a light touch on his sleeve, but he froze instantly.

Tris jumped at his abrupt reaction. “Michael, are you all right?”

“Fine. I’m fine.”

“I . . . I, uh, thought I saw you come out this way and . . . and I thought I’d make sure you were all right.”

“All right? Why wouldn’t I be all right? I said I’m fine, didn’t I? So I’m fine.”

He turned to face her with pugnacious indignation, but looking into her eyes was a mistake. Dammit, she looked as if he’d just told her that he personally had blown up a historic building in each of the fifty states plus Puerto Rico and Guam.

“All right, Michael. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

Her voice trembled at the edges.

Aw, hell.

“Tris.” He stopped her retreat with a touch on her arm, then couldn’t resist sliding his hand down the soft material, trying not to think of what the skin underneath might feel like. “I’m the one who’s sorry. You were being nice to a friend and I was a jerk.”

A hint of her smile flickered across her lips as she studied him, looking for signs, he knew, that he might really be ill. In a way he supposed he was, and she’d just been treated to a symptom—overwhelming irritability. Right now he was irritated at himself and fate, at the squeak of a door farther down the patio and the sound of a giggle.

“We seem to be apologizing to each other a lot these days.”

“Yeah. We do.”

He felt it then, almost as if she’d spoken the question aloud. She might not even be aware of it herself, but she was beginning to wonder about the odd eruptions over the past few days in a relationship that had been placid for so long. Her probing gaze skimmed over his face. He had to stop her; he couldn’t afford to have the full force of Tris’s perception trained on him. She could see too damn much.

Without much hope, he looked around for a reason to leave her. There had to be some excuse, some explanation she’d accept. Then, over her shoulder, he caught sight of Grady. At the far end of the patio, Grady was in a deep and obviously romantic conversation with a dark-haired woman. Melody. The other bridesmaid. She’d been at the volleyball game this afternoon, too. He should have recognized the signs then, he’d certainly seen them often enough during college—Grady was in the throes of one of his intense flirtations. He reassessed his priorities. Tris came first. The best thing old buddy Michael could do for Tris now was to keep her occupied.

“Just a couple of cranky old-timers, that’s us,” he said with a fair assumption of wry humor. “Guess the job pressures get to both of us.”

“I guess so,” she agreed, but he heard her doubt.

“I really am sorry, Tris. And I promise to be on good behavior tonight and tomorrow. No more moods. I swear.”

He held up his right hand in a botched Boy Scout salute.

She chuckled. “Promise accepted, as long as it includes dancing every dance tonight.”

“Every dance?” he groaned.

“Well, maybe not every dance.” He thought she’d truly relented until he caught an echo of something in her voice, part mischief, but another element not so easily identified. “You can skip some of the fast ones. But you have to dance all the slow ones with me.”

“All . . . all the slow ones with you?”

“I thought, uh, I thought that would be a way to prove for sure that we were—are back to, uh, normal.”

Color streaked into her cheeks and her eyes slid away from him. He wanted to kick himself, hard. His awkward reaction had made her think he’d rejected her—how was that for irony?

Even if she hadn’t seen them together just now, Tris had probably picked up the vibes between Grady and Melody. That was why she’d asked him to dance with her. Dancing with him would prevent her having to sit and watch Grady.

He felt a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. Disappointment, he understood. He was disappointed for Tris’s sake, that Grady still hadn’t woken up to what—or who—was right in front of him. And maybe, yes, just a little disappointed for himself now that he realized why she had asked him to dance. But why relief? Quickly, he pushed the question aside as he turned to her.

“You’re right. We should dance every dance, Tris. We have a lot of years to make up for, right?” He put a hand to her hair, stopping somewhere between the fond ruffling he’d intended and the soft caress he wanted.

She gave him a look with a question in it, but answered firmly, “Right.”

He was going to die. Right here on the dance floor, from the unadulterated pain of not allowing himself to take too much pleasure in the much too pleasurable sensation of holding Tris in his arms.

Remember what this is all about, Dickinson
. A friend needed a partner, that’s all. A friend who might feel a little fragile emotionally right now because the guy she’d adored for years had another woman snuggled up to him as the band played another song about falling in love forever.

Almost as if she’d read the word
snuggled
in his thoughts, Tris slid closer to him. Another inch and a half and there’d be no air between them at all, just his suit and her dress. That dress with its one button.

He backed away a safer inch. He had enough trouble convincing his body not to make its demands all too clear. Not that an inch would do much good. Maybe a plunge into Lake Michigan. His willpower was just out of practice, wasn’t that what he’d said to himself? Out of practice, hell. More like dead and buried.

The band slid effortlessly from one ballad to another. Damn! How much more of this could he take? Involuntarily, he tightened his hold on Tris’s hand. She looked up, her expression half smile and half question.

“It’s another slow dance,” she said.

“So it is.”

“There’ve been a lot.”

Lord, what got into him, reading satisfaction into her voice? “Yeah.”

“Can somebody cut in, or is this a private party?”

Michael turned around to meet Judi’s glinting look of mischief and an identical expression on the face of her dance partner, Paul.

“How about a partner swap, you guys? I haven’t gotten to dance with my cousin all night. Seems somebody’s been monopolizing her.”

Fighting a perverse instinct to tell Paul to go to hell, Michael swung Tris into Paul’s arms as Paul twirled Judi into his. He’d just been wondering how much more he could take, so why did he feel bereft? His eyes followed the progress of Tris’s peach dress, and he watched her laugh up at Paul. Part of his mind knew that Judi had said something to him, but the words didn’t register.

“What?”

Judi’s dramatically gusty sigh finally pierced his fog. “I said,” she stated with pained emphasis, “that it’s pretty rotten of you to make me feel like a wallflower even when I’m actually on the dance floor dancing with you.”

He cocked an apologetic grin at her. “Sorry. I guess my mind was wandering.”

“Yeah, I could see that.” She shot a sideways glance to her cousin and brother. “Guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to hone my flirting skills.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve danced with my father, Mr. Wharton, Bette’s married brother, my two uncles and my brother. That’s a pretty boring lineup, you know. If you take away the guys who are married or a relative of mine or both, the only ones left here tonight are you and Grady. And you both seem thoroughly preoccupied elsewhere.”

She gave another gusty sigh as Michael considered for the first time how onlookers might interpret his dancing so much with Tris. He’d been too busy quashing his own reactions to consider anybody else’s. He hoped nobody said anything to her. If she became self-conscious about what people might be thinking she’d stop dancing with him. That would be better, of course, but all he could think of at this moment were the ways it would be worse.

But he also felt a small stab of guilt for ignoring Judi.

“Maybe the reason I’ve been preoccupied is because Grady’s so preoccupied.”

“Huh? That doesn’t make . . .” Her words trailed off as she looked from him to Tris to Grady, at the moment slipping out the terrace door with an arm around Melody. She raised one speculative brow as her gaze lingered on the door that closed behind them, then swung to Tris and finally back to him.

“You mean, you think Tris is hung up on Grady, so she’s consoling herself with you?”

Damn, she didn’t have to be that blunt about it. He used the movement of the dance as an excuse to duck her searching look. Evasion, however, didn’t do any good.

“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “I don’t think that’s the reason.”

To his everlasting gratitude, the band wrapped up the song with a flourish. He stepped away from Judi— and her probing look—to applaud. That was how he caught sight of Paul passing the keyboard player a bill, just before he escorted Tris back to where Michael and Judi stood.

“Here’s your partner back, Michael. Boy, I sure hope I didn’t take up the last of the slow dances.”

Michael looked from Paul to the band. “Somehow I don’t think you have anything to worry about on that score.” As if on cue, the first strains of a slow, dreamy number started.

Paul’s eyes glinted with suppressed laughter. “It looks like all your slow dances are taken, Tris, but next time there’s a fast one you really ought to dance with my dad. I bet if anybody could convince him to try something more than a waltz, it would be you. C’mon, Judi, I’m going to deliver you back to Dad and track down my bride for a little prewedding slow dancing.” Paul’s tone was airy, but Michael noticed his friend didn’t risk meeting his look.

Michael could feel Tris’s eyes on him, and now he was the one avoiding eye contact.

“They are playing an awful lot of slow dances. And Paul’s probably right that I should dance with Uncle James, and . . . and maybe some of the others. Like Mr. Wharton and my dad. So if you don’t want—”

“Guess it’s the wedding atmosphere.”

He took her into his arms nearly as abruptly as he’d interrupted her. She’d been about to give him an out, an excuse to stop this acutely painful pleasure. But, dammit, he couldn’t let her, not when she sounded so hesitant, so vulnerable.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”