Wedding Series Boxed Set (3 Books in 1) (The Wedding Series) (66 page)

"I suppose that’s one way of seeing it.”

Leslie went into the building without succumbing to the urge to check if the sensation skittering down her backbone was because Grady was watching her.

But let’s face it, that’s about the only thing you didn’t succumb to.

In the end she’d agreed to another outing the next weekend. He hadn’t balked when she’d first said she wasn’t sure if she had other plans. He simply offered to call during the week to find out when she’d be free. They’d work around her schedule, he’d said.

Which had made her feel ungracious, to quote Grandma Beatrice’s most dire criticism—and yucky, to quote April’s all-purpose description.

She grimaced at her pink face in the mirror as she prepared to shower. She was going to look like a scoop of raspberry sherbet for her date with Barry tonight.

If you could call it a date.

Barry Kerken had been a regular escort; following his bitter and stressful divorce. About a year ago, nearly healed, he’d indicated he was ready to intensify their relationship.

When he accepted her firmly, gently repeated declarations that that would never happen, they settled into a comfortable friendship of sporadic dinners, lunches and telephone conversations. Several months ago, he’d started talking about a woman he was seeing.

When he’d called and asked Leslie to the theater for tonight, she’d learned Susan was out of town. Leslie expected a lot of tonight’s talk would be about Susan.

With the right nudge, Leslie suspected Barry Kerken would propose to his Susan. Standing in her slip, applying light foundation in hopes of toning down her skin. Leslie decided this was a night for nudging.

Her deep sigh as she slipped her silk dress over her head surprised her. She was beginning to sound like April, martyred inflection and all.

And there was absolutely no reason. She didn’t begrudge Barry to Susan. Barry was one of her successes.

Though others might not understand or approve, her relationships with men like Barry filled a need in her. The need to help, to nurture. To watch someone grow, then to let them go.

“Lapdog,” Grandma Beatrice had pronounced on the few Leslie let her meet. “He seems nice enough,” her more tactful friends would say. Tris was not among the tactful. “You’ve got to change your outlook,” she’d say. “If a guy’s safe enough for you to agree to see him regularly, Leslie, he's too safe to be interesting.”

Grady wasn’t likely to draw any of those responses. But it did look now as if he was safe enough for her to see. By his own promise, he’d removed himself as a danger.

She was the one who’d recognized Grady needed tutoring in the art of being friends with someone of the opposite sex. She had the experience, and now, after clearing away the confusion of physical attraction between them, she had a willing pupil.

How could she possibly feel anything but pleased?

Some habits form quickly.

By the end of the next weekend, Leslie was in the habit of mapping out trips with Grady and planning her weekend around them. She was also in the habit of relaxing her guard around him. She had no need of a guard because he stuck to his promise faithfully.

That next weekend, they couldn’t decide whether to go to Fredericksburg, which offered both Colonial and Civil War history an hour’s drive south, or to Gunston Hall. They compromised by going to both—Fredericksburg on Saturday and Gunston Hall on Sunday.

She insisted on being home by six on Saturday, still wary he might try to extend the day into dinner. He didn’t, and she felt rather foolish, especially since her deadline meant she had to cut short her exploration of James Monroe’s law office. She’d gotten into conversation with a guide who’d been perfectly happy to show her several items too fragile for general display. Because of her deadline, though, they had to leave before she’d gotten to see all there was to see. Talk about hoist on her own petard!

Then she spent the evening at home, restlessly alone.

So Sunday, after they’d toured the spare loveliness of George Mason’s home, with an on-site expert showing them renovation research, then enjoyed the peace of sitting above the Potomac amid two-hundred-year-old boxwoods and a resurrected flower garden, she suggested they stop for dinner in Old Town Alexandria.

If it was a test, he passed with flying colors. They ate in a casual seafood restaurant near the water in an area that predated the capital across the river, as easy in conversation or silence as two friends could be.

Still, she’d felt a disinclination earlier that day to have him come up to her apartment, so she’d met him at the street door.

But this Saturday morning, that wasn’t to be.

The phone rang as she was stowing a guidebook to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, into her bag. She considered letting the machine take it, but it might be Grady saying something had come up and the trip was off.

Instead, it was Grandma Beatrice—not a woman to be cut short when she had something to say. And she had a good deal to say.

She buzzed the door open when she heard Grady’s voice. By grace of a long cord, she opened the door to his knock and waved him in. She gestured to the phone, shrugged and signaled an invitation to sit.

“I agree,” she said into the phone. “It’s a bad situation all ’round. And I hate to see it. I had hoped that visit would help, but there wasn’t a sign that it—”

Grady straddled a chair, his arms rested on the back, his chin on top of his arms and his eyes on her.

Leslie listened to her grandmother describe signs of improvement in April after her trip to D.C.—faint, perhaps, and not long lasting, but there nonetheless—but every other sense was attuned to Grady. His gaze never wandered.

“In that case, I’ll invite her back...I know I don’t have to do it. I want to.” She heard the familiar lecture about having her own life to attend to and sidestepped it with the ease of practice. “I know that, too. But I want to do it. I’ll check on dates, and call Melly—no, I think I’ll call April directly. It should be her decision.”

She wrapped up the conversation then, promising to keep her grandmother updated on the possible visit.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Grady.” She gathered her tote bag and sweater, adding, by way of explanation, “My grandmother.”

“The one you talk about? Grandma Beatrice?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to meet her.”

Looking up from locking the door, she surveyed him, but his expression remained bland. "Not right now you wouldn’t. She’s on the warpath.”

“With you?”

Had she imagined he sounded as if he’d take issue with anyone on the warpath with her? “No, not with me. With my cousin, Melly, and her daughter, April.”

“What’s their problem?”

She sketched Melly and April’s history as they walked down to the street door. “So I’d say April’s problem is a case of teenitis drastically compounded by her father’s death and the fact that her mother doesn’t stay put for more than three weeks at a time.”

“That can be tough on a kid.”

His voice was almost too bland. As he opened the car door for her, she got a better look at his face, but it told her nothing, except his eyes had that protective veneer.

“Yes, it can.”

“Nice of you to try to help out.” He paused before closing the door. “Letting the kid decide if she wants to come or not is smart. Shows you understand she’s a person.”

She wondered if he’d seen only one side of the issue. But he’d shut the door, so she waited until he was in the driver’s seat to address the other side.

“I do see that April’s a person, and that she has some cause to be unhappy. But I can understand Melly, too. She’s always craved adventure and excitement. And April is so sullen. She’s not very easy to be around. All she wants to do is sit around all day and watch television.” Grady swung his head away from her, as if checking for oncoming traffic, but he didn’t pull out of the parking spot. “It’s like she tries to be a black cloud, blocking out the sun. And it’s such a waste. She’s really bright—”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes adults don’t want kids around who see too much.”

Leslie thought about her reaction to April’s uncomfortably acute observations when the gourmet basket arrived. The teenager had recognized—and voiced—some issues Leslie hadn’t wanted to hear, or to see for herself. Yes, Grady definitely had a point.

“And that kind of kid would be bright enough to pick up on the adults’ reactions,” she said, thinking out loud.

“Stands to reason.”

“So where does that leave them?”

“It probably leaves them two choices. Either the kid stops seeing, or at least stops letting the adults know about it. Or else the kid does let the adults know, and that probably makes the adults real uncomfortable.”

Leslie shifted the conversation then by saying how much she was looking forward to seeing Harpers Ferry. It didn’t seem fair to take up the whole afternoon with her family’s problems.

Grady cooperated, teasing, “You might not have seen it before, but I bet you know all about it.”

“As a matter of fact,” she answered deadpan, “did you know that Harpers Ferry is where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers come together, and where the states of West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia come together.”

He laughed, and April, Melly and their problems were mentioned no more.

But Leslie wondered about that insight to April, and about the man who’d provided it.

After a sumptuous lunch the next afternoon at the Red Fox Inn in Middleburg, Virginia, renowned as the heart of hunt country, Grady went along with Leslie’s demand to walk through an area that retained vestiges of an eighteenth century village. It was the “brisk” part he objected to.

“Too hot.”

“It’s not that hot. It’s not even out of the mid-nineties.”

“That’s plenty hot enough to melt this boy from the shores of Lake Michigan, my dear Southern belle.”

She kept her mouth straight, but her eyes glinted. It was a very appealing expression, especially with a faint breeze ruffling the wisps that had escaped from the loose way she’d pinned her hair up. The reactions he’d kept a firm clamp on for longer than he cared to think about stirred stubbornly.

“In that case, you can set your own pace,” she allowed, “but I intend to leave you in the dust.”

“No dust.” He shook his head. “If I try to move fast, wherever I go there’ll be mud from all the sweat.”

Laughing, she walked ahead, leaving him to his more leisurely pace. And to a very lovely view as the pale green skirt of her sundress gently swayed with her movements. The stirring deepened, and he grimly turned away.

He caught a glimpse of something that made him stop, then back up.

There, perfectly framed between not-quite-straight brick exterior walls of two shops, was a building of the same vintage, on the next street. But this building had a split personality—the left side painted in sparkling yellow with every speck of trim highlighted in bright blue, the right side in staid tan with white shutters.

Leslie would love it.

He opened his mouth to call to her and raised his arm to wave her back.

But his arm dropped to his side unwaved and his mouth closed without speaking her name.

He’d made it his business, or at least his pleasure, to know what women would love. Women loved flowers, perfume, jewelry and other indulgent gifts.

Oh, yes, he knew what women, in general, loved. But a specific woman’s specific tastes? Never.

Until now.

But he did know Leslie’s. He knew exactly what her reaction would be if he showed her this vignette. He knew the expression of her pleasure, in detail and color.

He knew what made her happy. He knew what made her sad. He knew she liked to eat the inside of cake first, saving the frosting for last. He knew she fingered the links of her bracelet watch when she was worried. He knew she sipped her coffee until it was nearly cool, then drank it down. He knew she was loyal and caring. He knew she listened and counseled, but didn’t unburden herself to others. He knew how much she gave to others, and how little she allowed them to give back.

He knew she was like no other woman he’d ever known before. No, not “known,” because he hadn’t really known those women. He’d merely encountered them in brief and intense explosions of interest that left only a rubble of memories. But Leslie he truly knew.

That certainly brought a reaction as varied as the colors that made up her hazel eyes. Besides many he couldn’t identify, he recognized a few. A kind of satisfaction—he’d set out to get to know Leslie Craig, and he was succeeding. A warmth he’d always reserved for the small circle that included Paul, his parents and sister, Michael, Tris and more recently Bette. And a restless kind of confusion he didn’t like at all.

Because what he didn’t know was what to do with his knowledge of Leslie Craig.

He couldn’t use it to—what? His mind boggled at filling in a word. Seduce, Tris’s term, held a sharpness he didn’t like. Woo? An old-fashioned word, and bottom-line, what he meant was as old-fashioned as humanity. But
woo
included a tangle of implications. Win? That made Leslie sound like a trophy, and at his worst he’d never felt that way about any woman, much less her.

There wasn’t a word; there was just a feeling. But even if he could describe it, he couldn’t pursue it because he’d promised Leslie.

Use his knowledge of her to deepen their friendship. Sure, but what about the sensations when he looked at her? The recurrent urge to touch her? The dreams he woke from knowing she had visited them—and not as a friend?

He suddenly realized he’d stared at the half-and-half building long enough to draw the attention of passersby. He headed after Leslie, walking fast.

But not fast enough to outstrip the persistent, edgy question in his head: So where was this going? Or the answer: He didn’t have a damn clue.

Grady grew uncharacteristically quiet as the afternoon waned. Now, sitting in Sunday-evening returning-to-the-city traffic stopped dead by an accident, Leslie watched him rub a palm across his eyes, then his mouth, as if to wipe away the lines that bracketed them.