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Authors: A Bride Worth Waiting For

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“Sheikhs?” Adam had muttered, disparagingly.

But they had listened, both of them, and enjoyed more than they ever let on.

Mark had liked humor—Robert Newton Peck, Mark Twain, Stephen Leacock, O. Henry.

And Adam liked everything.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
. Poetry. History. How-to. And the little book he was holding that had become their all-time favorite, which they had read and reread about a dozen times.

“You can take it, if you want,” she told him now as he took it off the shelf and despite the darkness, flipped through pages, squinting, reading silently, smiling a little bit.

“No.” He put it back. “I’ll leave it for your nieces and nephews to enjoy one day.”

“Enjoy? I used to think that was the saddest book ever written.”

“You used to cry absolute buckets at the part about Southern gentlemen having nothing on Johnny. Have you read a sadder one now?”

She did not say the words.
I have lived a sadder thing now
. Two best friends in the whole world. Mark dead and Adam gone. In the soft gray light of the afternoons they’d spent cocooned here in their private shelter, who could have guessed their future held such things?

She didn’t have to say anything, he read it in her eyes. He came close to her, tilted her chin, looked in her eyes, and then closed his arms around her.

She knew she should not allow this embrace, this intimacy, but her bones and blood and fiber and muscle had wanted nothing else for too long, and they mutinied against her mind.

Her mind said pull away, and she snuggled closer.

Feeling safe. Feeling as if the world might be safe again someday, if she let it. But depending on Adam for that feeling would be a very dangerous thing. He didn’t live here. He wasn’t staying here.

She could probably become addicted to feeling his arms around her, and then he would leave.

Even Mark, Mr. Dependable, had left.

His lips touched her forehead.

Pull away.

But she didn’t. Instead she lifted her face and looked at him. It was true then. The feeling she had since they had come into the backyard was true.

He was going to kiss her.

And he did. He rained small kisses on her cheeks and her neck and the top of her head and the tip of her nose.

Hungry kisses. Kisses that had missed her and could never get enough of her. Kisses that spoke of loneliness and empty nights and thousands of days away.

And then his lips found her lips.

And she answered him. With kisses that spoke of a heavy heart being given wing again, and of a fallen spirit being lifted up on the breath of hope.

Kisses that seemed to catch fire some place deep within her before they even found their way to his lips.

Desperately, she pulled away from him, before kisses turned into something that was harder to take back.

“Don’t ask me to apologize,” he said darkly. “I won’t.”

“I just don’t think that it’s a very good idea.”

“Actually, it’s not bad as ideas go—two lonely people, finding themselves in a romantic setting, sharing a kiss. Big deal. We’re thirty years old.”

She didn’t know what bothered her the most—his accurate assessment that she was lonely, or his assessment that the kiss, which she had a feeling would haunt her into old age, was no big deal to him.

Or maybe it was his own admission of loneliness.

He moved close to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. It was a mistake.”

They went back outside, but instead of going down the ladder, he sank down, his back propped against the wall, his legs bent.

Though she knew she should go, she sank down beside him.

When she shivered, he mistook it for cold and took off his suit jacket and wrapped it around her naked shoulders.

“Where are you, Adam?” she asked softly, when the silence drifted around them, and she could hear leaves, new and vibrantly green, rustling against one another.

His eyes went to her lips, and then he looked away.

“Time traveling. Remembering the three of us and the things we did here. Pirates. Cowboys. Indians. Bad guys and good guys. Cops and robbers. Tarzan.”

“Don’t forget the Three Musketeers,” she told him softly.

“How could I forget the Three Musketeers?” he agreed solemnly. “Those were good days. Full of openness and innocence.”

“Love,” she said simply.

“Yeah. Those were the days that prepared us for the world, Tory. Filled us up. Fueled us. Made us strong enough for all that life would give us.”

“I thought jumping your bike off cliffs was what prepared you for life.”

“I guess I did, too, back then. I thought I needed something else. Speed. Adventure. Age has shown me differently. I had—” his voice cracked, “I had everything I ever needed back then. You. Mark.”

She kissed him again, gently, on his cheek. This time with a blessing. Knowing he needed to go now where all those memories were beckoning him to go.

To do what the rest of them had already done.

She left him in the tree house of his youth, to grieve the passing of his best friend. When she glanced back at him once, from the top of the ladder, she could see the silver tears carving ghostly passages down his rugged cheeks.

Adam set down the phone. Kathleen’s answering machine
again
. He felt an urgent need to talk to her.

Not that he’d be such a cad as to break up with her over the phone, but he had to let her know it was coming. Didn’t he?

Four days and no answer at her place. Not even late at night.

Not that that meant she wasn’t there, only that she wasn’t answering the phone. She was probably immersed in preparation for a case.

“Okay,” he said to himself, “so maybe you are a cad.” Because part of him was glad she wasn’t answering her phone. Uncertain yet of what to say.

Maybe not ready to burn his bridges.

But even as he entertained that notion, he knew it not to be true.

His bridges had been threatened from the moment he had seen Tory again, and recognized within himself the impossibility of ever feeling about anyone the way he had felt about her.

His bridges had gone up tonight. Irrevocably. Irretrievably.

The minute he had seen her in that dress, the bridges had begun to smoulder. And when he had given in to the temptation to taste her lips, the bridges had smoked and then burst into flame.

He’d told her it was no big deal strictly as a defensive tactic. Now, he felt a creeping sense of despondency.

Wanting Tory was like being given a life sentence. Because she didn’t want him or care about him in the same way. She had responded, but she had pulled away. She was hungry. Physically hungry. But not for him. For Mark, still?

And he had to take her kite flying tomorrow, and to the lake after that And not press her for more kisses, not even think about her lips, the sweet wild honey taste of them, if he planned to keep his sanity.

The way he was feeling now reminded him of those desperate days after she had told him she was going to marry Mark.

His world, as he knew it, over. Ended.

For a while, he had tried to stay, to pretend everything would be as it always had been.

When that hadn’t worked, he’d attacked his career plans with a furious energy. He moved into the top position in his university class, had seen Mark and Tory only rarely.

And when that hadn’t worked, he’d tried running. But two thousand miles hadn’t been far enough, and he realized now he could go to the ends of the earth and it would never be far enough.

Time had eventually dulled the pain in his heart, but it had never gone away. When he’d heard Mark was sick, he had applied himself to work with a new and feverish energy.

And when he’d heard Mark had died he had finally allowed that place in him, that belonged to those tree house afternoons, to die, too.

Or so he had thought.

Until he came back here and realized it hadn’t ever died, really. Just slumbered. Waited. His feelings—the whole jumble of them—waited for him.

And she, the main cause of all these tormented feelings, had not let him go. Instead she’d had the nerve to ask him to go kite flying! With something haughty and superior in her voice as if she thought his giving up was just another example of his poor character.

But she’d kissed him like a woman with no reservations about character.

And then she’d proven that after all these years she still knew his heart better than anyone else ever had. Because she had left him precisely when he needed to be left. Left him to grieve for Mark Mitchell and afternoons of shared laughter and quiet companionship in a tiny house among the leaves.

The woman was going to drive him crazy.

If he had any sense of damage control at all, he’d call the airport right now and see what flights were leaving tonight or in the early hours of the morning.

But he didn’t.

He lay down on his bed, folded his arms behind his head, kicked off his shoes. And remembered that moment when her Dad, Frank, had proposed a toast to Mark. He recalled the silence that had come over the room, and the sudden feeling he had of that silence filling up with peace. He had felt it again, in the tree house, after he had wept until the well within him was dry. He could feel it now. A kind of warm, peaceful feeling. He didn’t have to worry about tomorrow, just this moment.

And in this moment, he felt good. As good as he had felt in a long, long time.

He closed his eyes and, fully dressed, he slept.

Tory heard him coming. He was whistling, and he was no better at it than he had been as a teenager, the sound sharp and barely detectable as “Jingle Bells,” the only tune, to her knowledge, that he had ever whistled.

She was on the back deck and when she didn’t hear the doorbell, she turned her attention on the side fence.

The flowers flew over first.

Followed by the scrabble of his legs. She watched as he paused, balanced at the top of her fence, then bounced over, landing on his feet. He picked up his flowers, and took up his tune, looking quite pleased with himself.

“You’re getting pretty good at that,” she said reluctantly.

He grinned, noticing her, that Adam grin. “Practice makes perfect.”

“You didn’t need to bring me those,” she said as he came toward her holding out the flowers. “The other ones aren’t dead yet.”

“Uh, well—”

She studied him carefully. His face looked more relaxed today. He looked refreshed and young and full of mischief. She guessed he had wrestled some demons last night, when she had left him alone in the tree house, and that he had won.

“Where do you keep finding these bouquets so early in the morning?”

“Oh, around.”

“A street vendor,” she guessed. “You feel sorry for someone selling flowers!”

He actually blushed. “She looks all worn out and she’s just a kid.”

“Oh, Adam,” and she buried her face in the bouquet.

“No big deal,” he said.

Just like that kiss last night, she thought, eyeing him. Maybe things were bigger deals than he wanted people to believe.

She had thought she would go to bed last night and be tormented by thoughts of him and that kiss and where things were going, but that had not been the case at all.

She had resolved that they would finish together the things Mark had requested. Be, in some small way, the Three Musketeers once more.

And then she would say goodbye to Adam forever.

Put him in her box of memories along with Mark and get on with her life of making dried out old flowers into something. Puttering around her house. Spying on her neighbor’s renovations and decorations. Perhaps she’d get a cat to keep her company.

“So, how does one fly a kite without running?” she asked, pouring him a cup of coffee.

He took a deep and appreciative sip. “You’ll see.”

And in a while she did. He had rented a car she thought was called a Rattlesnake.

“Viper,” he corrected her.

“Why didn’t you rent a motorcycle?” she asked, a trifle wistfully.

“Because they don’t have trunks.”

“And what did you need a trunk for?”

“The wheelchair.”

“The what?”

“The wheelchair.”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”