Wedding Series Boxed Set (3 Books in 1) (The Wedding Series) (68 page)

From the corner of her eye, she saw Grady stiffening.

“Grady? What are you—?” Tris’s voice cut off abruptly.

From the hallway outside Leslie’s office, she looked from Grady to Leslie, and back.

“Tris.” Grady’s nod was nearly as stiff as the one-word greeting.

“How are you, Grady?” Tris didn’t sound too limber herself.

“Fine. You and Michael?”

“Fine, thank you. Uh, well, I better get going.”

“Okay. See you later.”

“Yeah. See you later.”

Leslie waited until they were in Grady’s car, crossing Memorial Bridge to pick up the George Washington Parkway on the way to Mount Vernon before she asked the question.

“What was that all about?”

“Hmmm?”

“Don’t give me that vague noise. I want to know what that was about with you and Tris.”

“Tris?”

“Yes, Tris. Tris Donlin Dickinson, the woman you’ve known for more than a dozen years. Remember her? She married one of your best friends. You were in their wedding. Two months ago. Though you two sounded like people who weren’t real sure you knew each other well enough to say hello. So, I repeat, what was that all about?”

He slanted a look at her, and his eyes were guarded. She stared at him insistently. He sighed.

“It’s no big deal, Leslie.” His tone was very good, but she didn’t believe him. "Tris doesn’t approve of my, uh, spending so much time with you. She seems to think I’ll be a bad influence on you.”

“I see.” And she did, and it made her want to wrap her arms around the strong, golden-haired man next to her, and never let anyone hurt him ever again, including a woman who was a dear friend of his and hers.

Teaching Grady Roberts lessons in friendships was becoming a dangerous proposition.

Shortly before noon Saturday, Grady stepped from Washington’s hazy heat, already intense enough to grill the unsuspecting, into the protection of the air-conditioned vestibule of Leslie’s apartment building and pressed the button above her name.

The answering buzz mildly surprised him. Only that once when she’d been on the telephone with her grandmother had he been up to her apartment.

Upstairs, she met him at the door.

“You had a phone call from your office. They asked you to call back as soon as possible. Said it was the Burroughs account.”

She gestured him toward the phone.

“Damn. It’s been brewing for a while, but I...This could take a while. I can go back to the hotel and come back when I’ve cleared it up.”

“No need. But if you use the bedroom phone, I can run the dishwasher and do some other things in here. Okay?”

More than okay. Being in her bedroom might trigger reactions that were less than comfortable to ignore, but he’d trade that for the potential information to be gained.

While he punched in the numbers of his calling card, he looked from the rocking chair with the sweater draped on the back to the peach, green and white quilt-covered bed to the slice of the moderately neat walk-in closet visible through the partly opened door.

On the mellow wooden surface of a long bureau, he saw a grove of framed photographs. More pictures were sprinkled in front of volumes that packed a ceiling-high bookcase. He scanned the titles, noting a heavy leaning toward history, plus classics, romantic suspense and mystery. On an eye-level shelf, the teddy bear he’d given her at the beach listed against the Man in the Iron Mask. As his call went through, he picked up one picture showing a strong-featured woman with gray hair and eyes that promised both humor and strength. Grandma Beatrice, he thought.

Before he could examine other individual faces, or try to match the children of yesterday with the adults of today, much less separate friends from family, his assistant in Chicago answered and delivered the news that the Burroughs deal had hit a snag. The potential buyers were bickering among themselves, threatening the whole deal.

Grady’s attention zeroed in on the problem. He’d worked too hard and too long on selling Jasper Burroughs’s business not to try his damnedest to untangle the snag. It took nearly an hour, but he was satisfied when he hung up that, if the potential buyers could be brought around, they would be satisfied.

Tempted to continue exploring Leslie’s room, he heard her coming down the hall. So, instead, he hurried her out the door, into the car and on the road to his surprise.

“Have any plans for the Fourth of July?” he asked.

She gave him a mock-suspicious look. “You’re planning on taking me to Philadelphia to view the Liberty Bell?”

He laughed. “I thought something closer to home. I hear there’s quite a celebration on the Mall. People picnicking, then a concert, then watching the fireworks.”

He knew it was a gamble. All their other outings had carried the excuse that he was providing transportation she didn’t have. That didn’t apply here, and her silence made that uncomfortably clear.

“On one condition,” she finally said, and his shoulders eased. Conditions he could deal with. “You let me treat you to the picnic on the Mall.”

“But—”

“That’s the condition, Grady,” she said sternly. “It’s small thanks for all this. Take it or leave it.”

He sighed as if she’d backed him into a corner. “I’ll take it.”

“Good Then it’s settled. Now isn’t it time you told me where we’re going?” she asked as they headed west along I-66.

“Nope.”

She grumbled good-naturedly, and he was certain she was intrigued.

That changed abruptly when they turned south on Route 29. It was as if her mood also changed direction.

She sat straighter, looking intently at the road signs. Her feet were flat on the car floor, her knees together and her shoulders rigid when she faced him.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Grady...” The word packed a load of wariness. He glanced at her, and she smiled, probably hoping he’d believe she was kidding. He didn’t. The smile was as stiff as her posture. “Some people don’t like surprises.”

But she wasn’t one of them. That was something else he knew about her. She’d liked the idea of a surprise just fine until they turned toward Charlottesville. She clearly was familiar with the road, and just as clearly she didn’t like being on it. Was there something in the seventy miles between here and Charlottesville that made her react that way? Or was it her hometown itself? But why on earth would she be so reluctant to go there? It wasn’t as if she was estranged from her family.

“All right, here’s a hint. First we’re going to the home of a man famous for what he wrote and the offices he held, but whose favorite role was gentleman farmer.”

“Monticello.” His heart sank at her hollow tone.

“You don’t like Thomas Jefferson’s house?”

“Oh, I do like it,” she said quickly. “It’s a beautiful spot. And it’s fascinating. Really gives you a sense of the man, and the times.”

“Good,” he said, pretending he had no cause for disappointment at her reaction to his surprise. “Then I thought we could look around the University of Virginia at the part Jefferson designed. We have dinner reservations at a historic inn and rooms for overnight so tomorrow we can get an early start on seeing Ash Lawn, because I read Jefferson’s supposed to have helped design that for Monroe. Then we’ll finish with Madison’s Montpelier.”

She was silent.

“Unless you have a dislike of Jefferson and everything associated with him that you haven’t confided in me.”

“Oh, no,” she said. He believed that.

Grady let her words about Jefferson’s wide-ranging interests and ingenuity slide past and tried to interpret the tone. She meant what she was saying, but it was a smokescreen. A cover-up for her inexplicable discomfort.

It wasn’t with him, because she’d been fine when they started the trip. It wasn’t because she had no interest in Jefferson.

Charlottesville. He kept coming back to that.

“You know,” she started with studied casualness that made him instantly alert. “As long as we’re this close it would be a shame not to give you a better view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Skyline Drive’s not far west of here.”

And Charlottesville wasn’t far south. He recognized delaying tactics. He could confront her, and risk her clamming up. Or he could go along, and hope that if she didn’t open up, she at least let inadvertent clues slip.

“Sounds good. There’s a map in the glove compartment. You can navigate.”

It wasn’t her fault the sky’s floodgates had opened to dump an ocean’s worth of water on them.

It probably would have happened even if they’d kept on the main road to Charlottesville. But the fact that she’d directed them on to roads that couldn’t be considered “main” by any stretch of the imagination didn’t help.

With the wipers going full speed and the car barely going at all, they still only got glimpses of the road ahead. Everything was so waterlogged it was difficult to distinguish where the narrow roadway ended and the dark vegetation lining it started.

She’d had them twisting and turning on back roads for a couple of hours. They had seen some pretty country. And she’d bought herself more time with impulsive requests that he pull over so she could explore first a country store, then a display of handmade quilts.

Time was what she needed. Time to adjust to the idea of visiting her hometown, with all its associations and memories. The idea of returning to UVA’s campus, where she’d received Frank’s marriage proposal. Returning to Monticello, where she’d told him they were expecting a baby. Of almost certainly passing the main intersection where the car accident had taken her unborn baby—and so much else—from her. Of running the risk that the inn Grady had chosen was the one where Frank and his second wife had celebrated the christening of two children since then.

She’d faced these ghosts before. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been back at all since she’d moved to Washington—fled, her grandmother accused her—a decade ago. She had been back. Twice. Each trip carefully planned and emotionally prepared for.

But this time there’d been no time, because of Grady.

Grady . . .

She looked over at him, concentrated and intense, but his driving as confident as ever.

It was just the unexpected prospect of going back to her hometown that had her on edge. It had nothing to do with revisiting those scenes with this particular man.

From his speculative looks and a few leading questions she hadn’t answered, she suspected he’d sensed her reactions. But he hadn’t protested when she directed him into time-consuming byways under the guise of “exploring.”

He hadn’t even complained that she had them on a road the map didn’t show when, after a preliminary rumble of thunder, the rain gushed down. But she felt responsible.

“Maybe we should pull over.”

‘Nervous?” Under the neutral word, she thought his question had an edge that applied to more than the weather.

“It’s getting pretty bad, Grady.”

He said nothing, but his brows drew tighter. From displeasure or concentration?

Nerves and humidity condensed into a chill down her back as they crept along. The dashboard clock said twenty minutes passed, but it felt so much longer she wondered if the storm had affected that, too.

A dip in the road gathered standing water into a mini-lake. Grady slowed to a steady crawl to ford it. That was the only reason Leslie saw the sign, a flash in the instant’s clarity after each swipe of the wiper blades.

She waited until they’d reached relatively firmer ground—here the water sheeted across the road instead of swirling like a tidal pool—before saying, “There’s an inn up ahead. The sign says a mile, on the right.”

He said nothing, but when they reached the turnoff indicated by a sign that probably was white with bright blue lettering when it wasn’t seen through a gray gauze of driving rain, he eased even slower and turned the wheel.

He swore, not with full volume but with plenty of feeling.

The car seemed to slip sideways, as if determined to keep going straight.

“What is it?”

“Power steering’s gone,” he muttered. The muscle in his forearms tightened as he wrestled the wheel around, steering from another kind of power.

A drive, blessedly straight, ended in a paved rectangle with a half dozen or so cars. Beyond stood a solid two-story farmhouse, built to accommodate an era when families and furniture were big. It wouldn’t be as posh as the accommodations Grady’d arranged in Charlottesville, but Leslie found it much more appealing at the moment.

Grady brought the car to a stop, flipped off the lights, wipers and engine and clasped the top of the wheel with both hands as he turned to her.

He looked tired, but his eyes glittered a little. Perhaps with the challenge of battling the elements.

“Ready for a bath, or you want to sit it out here?”

“We might end up floating it out if we stay here, so I’ll take my chances on a bath.”

“Okay.” He twisted to lean over the seat to reach their bags. The rolled-back sleeve of his shirt brushed along her arm, leaving goose bumps in its wake. “You want to try to protect yourself from the rain?”

She shook her head, her voice momentarily unreliable. Taking her bag from him so he could grab his own, she swallowed and said in a moderately normal tone, “There’s no way to avoid getting soaked in a gully-washer like this, so it’s best to save the dry clothes for when we get inside and can change.”

“Shoes, too?” He nodded to where she was unstrapping her sandals.

“Definitely shoes, too.”

She put hers inside the bag, slipped her bracelet watch off her arm and inside a pocket.

He grinned, and she grinned back, exhilaration replacing the tension of those final minutes on the road, and a warm glow of affection covering feelings less comfortable to consider.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

The doors sprung open, slamming closed behind them as they sprinted through the dousing rain. The water was chilled, but couldn’t defeat the accumulated heat of the past few weeks, so the air steamed around them. They zigzagged around parked cars, meeting where a curved path of paving stones led from the parking to the front steps.