“Hey, writers always draw on what they know.” She played the words back in her head when he grinned at her. “No pun intended.”
He felt as if he’d been watching her life for the past three years. For the most part, it had been amusing. Like Traci. But now, something senous was about to take place. Something he’d found himself not quite ready or willing to accept. “So, are congratulations in order?”
He’d acquired an unnerving way of skipping around conversations since she’d last spoken to him. “What do you mean?”
“Your engagement. To the doctor.”
“Dentist,” she corrected. “And I’m not.”
“Oh?” he asked a tad too innocently. “I thought he gave you a ring.”
She wondered if he had picked that up from the strip, or if her mother had told his. “He did. I just haven’t given him an answer yet”
That was interesting, he thought. Very interesting. “I see.”
She had no idea what he thought he “saw,” but she knew what she wanted to see. Her room.
“I doubt it.” Turning her back on him, Traci opened the door and stepped into the small guest room.
3
“You got rid of the bureau.”
Traci went straight toward the new piece of furniture that stood in its stead and looked at it as if it were an intruder. If she tried hard, she could visualize the old one—a honey-colored triplechested bureau that gave the room a crammed, homey quality. Coupled with her double bed, it had turned the place into her own tiny kingdom when she had been growing up. The new bureau was sleeker and took up far less space.
She hated it on principle.
Morgan followed her into the room and shrugged casually. “It was old.”
That was the beauty of it, but she doubted if Morgan could understand. Sighing over the loss, Traci ran her fingertip along the dark wood.
“It had a dent in it, right here.” She rested her finger on the uppermost corner closest to him. “Where you chipped your tooth.”
He remembered the incident vividly. His manhood had been shaken that day. Thin and wiry, two years younger, Traci had easily gotten the best of him. He’d persuaded his parents to buy him his first set of weights that autumn.
“Where you chipped my front tooth,” he corrected. He knocked against the side in a rapid tattoo. “Somehow, my parents didn’t think refurbishing the bureau was a high priority.” The bureau was fairly falling apart when they had finally gotten rid of it.
Traci shifted her attention from the bureau to Morgan. She’d completely forgotten about his chipped tooth until this moment.
“Let me see,” she said suddenly, catching him off guard.
As he stared at her, Traci placed her thumb on the edge of his chin and pulled down lightly with the familiarity of a maiden aunt or annoying sibling. Or the girl he had partially grown up with.
She nodded at the gleaming white crown. If she hadn’t known which one was chipped, she wouldn’t have been able to guess which was the false tooth.
“Nice job.”
Morgan pulled his head back. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a thoroughbred whose teeth you can check out”
The choice of words tickled her. “Thoroughbred?” Traci echoed. “If I was passing out labels, I would have said an old firehouse plug.”
She crossed to the bed. By the way it sagged slightly in the middle she could tell it was the same one she’d slept on all those hot summer nights. If Morgan hadn’t been in the room, she would have jumped on it for old times’ sake. “Firehouse plug?” He laughed. Who talked like that anymore? “You’re dating yourself.”
She glanced at him, bemused at the way he was watching her. Was he expecting her to do something weird? “I’m dating my research.”
With Traci, it was always difficult to tell if she was being flippant or sincere. He had a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right “Is that how you met?”
The view from her window was as stirring as she remembered. But the lake looked as if it was going to be blotted out at any minute by the dark clouds that were rolling over it with the intensity of an oncoming express train.
“Who?” she asked, preoccupied.
“You and the dentist?”
She turned around slowly and looked at Morgan. It took her a moment to make sense of his words. She couldn’t read his expression. What was he up to?
“No, and his name is Daniel. I meant I was giving a date to my research.” She touched the curtains. They were the same. Light, filmy. They suited the room, and now, ultimately, her. They hadn’t when she was younger. She’d been a tomboy through and through when they’d first begun to take their vacations here and had jeered at the curtains and blue eyelet comforter. “I’m watching old cartoons—”
He could see her, Morgan thought. Sitting curled up on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn in her lap, fascinated by silly little animated characters doing absurd, impossible things in the space of seven minutes. It was a scene directly out of his past, one he’d ridiculed countless times.
Now it just made him feel oddly nostalgic.
“Aren’t you afraid they’re above you?”
She purposely ignored him. Idly, she opened the nightstand drawer. A spider skittered away, vainly seeking sanctuary. She shut the drawer again. Traci didn’t know what she expected to find, maybe a memento from years gone by.
“To see what made some of them special and gave them longevity,” she finished, her teeth clenched. “You are as irntating as ever.”
He laughed at the expression on her face. His answer held no malice. “Right back at you.”
“‘Right back at you’?” she repeated incredulously. “A Harvard graduate and that’s the best you can do?” Traci shook her head. “Boy, they must have really lowered their standards for you.”
They both knew that he’d been an honor student in high school. His studiousness was one of the things she’d used as ammunition when she teased him.
“It was Yale,” he corrected patiently, “and the standards were quite high.” His eyes washed over her. He wondered if this Daniel character knew what he was letting himself in for. And if he deserved her. “It seems that every time I’m with you, I regress.”
She couldn’t resist reaching up and mussing his too-perfect hair. “Or loosen up.”
Morgan ran both hands through his hair, attempting to smooth it back down. “Trust me, no one wants to be that loose.”
Made no difference to her. “Have it your own way. You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Traci ran her hand over the new bureau again. It felt too sleek to her, too benign and devoid of character. The old one had had nicks and scrapes awarded by time all over its surface. Some of the nicks, of course, had been awarded by her.
She smiled to herself, remembering, feeling the room’s ambience. For a moment, Traci closed her eyes, letting it all return to her. She’d been five when they had started coming out here. Or maybe even four, she wasn’t sure.
Standing in her old bedroom now, feeling the years all melting away, it was as if nothing had really changed. But of course it had. She’d grown up and so had Morgan. An awful lot.
He watched the way her lashes, so much darker than her hair, swept along the swell of her cheeks, resting there like silken kittens reposing on a satiny cushion.
And wouldn’t she laugh if he voiced that thought aloud, he thought to himself. Traci was far too earthy to stand still for sentiments like that.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Her eyes remained closed. “Remembering.” And then they fluttered open and she turned them on him. “Whatever happened to her?”
“Who?” Morgan was thoroughly convinced that there were short circuits throughout the entire surface of her brain. How else could she possibly think her disjointed statements made any sense?
“Miss Shallow of 1985.” When Morgan still didn’t seem to comprehend, Traci batted her lashes at him coquettishly. “Cynthia.”<
br />
He really didn’t feel like discussing Cynthia any further. She was a mistake he wanted to leave buried in his past. A mistake that had made him hesitant to put his heart up on the block again.
“She found someone else. With more money.” He stood with his hand on the knob, impatience creasing his brow. “Are you done in here?”
He wasn’t impatient with her, Traci thought, but with the subject. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that.
“Not yet.” She paused. Though she didn’t often admit it, even to herself, there was a small, soft spot in her heart when it came to Morgan. After all, he was rather like the big brother she’d never had and, while they might fight constantly, she didn’t like the idea of anyone else hurting him, no matter what she might profess verbally to the contrary.
Traci placed her hand on his arm. It felt hard to the touch. She ran the tip of her tongue along her upper lip before she managed to force the words out. “I’m sorry.”
She was, he thought. He could see it in her eyes. The last thing in the world he wanted was pity, especially hers. That wasn’t what they were all about, he and Traci. It added a dimension he didn’t want.
“About what?” he asked a little too innocently. “You’ve got so much to be sorry about, you’re going to have to narrow that down a little for me.”
She stiffened, dropping her hand. That’s what she got for being nice to Morgan. “I was going to say about Cynthia, but—”
He relented. There was no point in closing off this new avenue between them. It just might lead somewhere. “You were?”
Too late to take her words back now, she thought. “Yes.” The admission came grudgingly.
Morgan studied her face, trying to ascertain a reason for this change in attitude. He failed.
“Why?”
She shrugged. She’d never cared for having to explain herself. And feelings were a great deal harder to explain than anything else. “I don’t like seeing people get hurt.”
That might be true enough, but he wasn’t “people.” He was Morgan. Someone she had taken delight in teasing and torturing. She was throwing away a perfect opportunity to crow and say “I told you so” in every way available to her. It wasn’t like her.
“I would have thought the idea would have made you overjoyed, seeing it was me.”
For a moment, she stood and looked at him, seeing both the boy she’d known and the man she merely assumed she knew. Maybe they both deserved the truth. Although they both probably wouldn’t understand. Men rarely did. She’d learned that one the hard way.
“No, I can rag on you all I want, but that doesn’t mean I want to see your heart pierced with a lance. She really didn’t deserve you, you know.” Traci bit her lip. The last sentence had just slipped out.
His eyes narrowed. She couldn’t have surprised him more than if she’d announced that she was harboring a secret crush on him all these years.
“Are you being nice or is there a hidden barb in there that I’m missing?”
She let out a long sigh. Cast ye pearls before swine… “I’m being nice,” she snapped. And then her sense of humor returned. “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.”
Something small and warm stirred within him. “I won’t.”
Ushering her out of the room, Morgan closed the door behind them. Even so, he could hear the wind picking up, mourning low like a choir beginning to rehearse a rousing spiritual. He hoped the storm would hold off until the night.
“Want some coffee?” he offered. “I just put some up before you arrived.”
“I’d love some. There’s a real chill in the air.” Almost reflexively, she ran her hands up and down her arms. The thin sweater she was wearing wasn’t nearly warm enough to ward off the cool turn of the weather. “It was always so hot whenever we were out here.”
He followed her down the stairs, enjoying the gentle sway of her hips. She had certainly filled out since he last saw her. Something about being a late bloomer stuck in his mind. It was a phrase his mother liked to use. He’d never understood it until now.
“That’s because you just spent summers here,” he reminded her.
Traci stopped at the landing and turned toward him. “Did you ever come out any other time?” It had never occurred to her that he might have.
He nodded. “A couple.” The look in her eyes told him she wanted details, so he stopped to consider. “Once for Thanksgiving. And then once over the Christmas holidays.” That time he remembered more vividly. It was actually the last time he’d been here, until this month. “Mother and Dad were in Europe that year.” A thin, humorless smile curved his mouth. “One final hurrah before tightening their belts.”
Once in the kitchen, Traci crossed to the cupboard where the dishes had always been kept. It surprised her to find only a few pieces left. But then, of course there wouldn’t be many. No one stayed here anymore.
She took down two mugs, rinsed them out and then set them on the counter beside the coffeemaker.
“And you were here alone?”
He might have known she’d probe. “No, not quite alone.”
“Oh.” Something in his voice had alerted her. “Cynthia?” She knew the answer to that would be yes before he said anything. She just didn’t know why it bothered her so much.
It was easier answering Traci with his back to her. “Yes. That was when I asked her to marry me.”
“You actually—” She hadn’t known that it had gone that far. Maybe because she’d refused to think about Morgan and Cynthia together in any more intimate a situation than sitting beside each other on the dock. Traci realized that her mouth had dropped open. “Well, your bad taste was your business, I guess. I take it she turned you down.”
That must have stung. Compassion stirred again within her.
He took two spoons out of the drawer and then shoved it closed a little harder than he intended. Feelings long dead resurfaced and did a little war dance within him.
“Not at first.” Morgan turned around. “At first she said yes. It was when she was planning our life together in very lavish terms that I told her about Dad and what the stock market had done to his investments.”
Traci knew that the Brighams’ financial woes had begun in October. That left a gap of two months.
“You hadn’t told her until then?”
He slowly shook his head. Morgan remembered rehearsing in the mirror the way he would break the news to Cynthia. Stupid way for a man to behave. He’d never felt that unsure of himself again. “It wasn’t something you wanted to take out an ad about.”
She didn’t understand. “But this was the kind of thing you would share with someone you were close to.”
Morgan shrugged again. In typical blunt fashion, Traci had gotten to the crux of it. “Maybe that was the trouble. Maybe I was never really that close to her.” He sighed, remembering the way moonlight caught in Cynthia’s hair. Hell of a criterion to pick a bride by. “Just dazzled and wildly enamored.”
Enamored? “God, I haven’t heard anyone talk like that since—” Traci’s mouth curved. “The last time I was here with you.”
Morgan’s story only confirmed her own argument that she should be overjoyed at finding someone as steady, as dependable and loving, as Daniel. Look what being head over heels got you. Nothing but disappointment.
There, that settled it. She’d made up her mind.
But her heart…
Morgan took no offense at her words. Lifting the coffeepot, he took it off the hot plate and brought it over to the table.
“Still take it with a ton of cream?” he asked, pouring the dark liquid into her mug. He placed the carton of cream in front of her.
He took his black. Had he bought this especially for her? The thoughtfulness behind the small action surprised and pleased her.
Traci nodded. “And sugar.”
Morgan filled his own mug, then set the pot down. He still had a few packets of sugar in his pocket from when he’d gotten a cont
ainer of coffee at the diner. Digging them out, he tossed the white packets on the table beside her mug.
“This is all I have. I forgot about the way you liked to rot your teeth.”
She tore open one envelope, then another. White crystals rained into the mug. “Hey, I still have all of mine.”
He shook out one for himself. “Mine didn’t rot,” he reminded her. “It was punched out.”
“Not technically,” she was quick to retaliate. “I hit you in the stomach. You were the one who hit your mouth on the bureau.”
She remembered how frightened she’d been when she’d seen all that blood. Morgan had been teasing her and she’d only meant to get him out of her room, not maim him. He’d surprised her when he’d taken the blame and told his parents that he’d tripped on the scatter rug in her room. She’d never been able to figure out why he had passed up that perfect opportunity to get back at her. It was almost chivalrous.
Maybe that tiny, warm spot in her heart for him had been created that day.
Mug cupped in his hands, Morgan regarded her quietly. “You would have made a hell of a lawyer, you know that?”
Since he was one himself, she took it as a compliment. And returned it in kind. Remembering the incident had her feeling rather magnanimous toward him. “You were the one who kept me sharp.”
“I take no credit for that. You were born sharp. With a sharp tongue to match. Hell, you were probably born talking.”
He was one to throw rocks. She lifted her chin slightly. “I’m not the one who could talk the ears off a brass monkey.”
“No,” he admitted agreeably, then his eyes crinkled with a smile. “But you’re the one who could make the monkey run off, holding his ears and screaming.”
Just like old times. Traci grinned at Morgan over the rim of her mug. A cozy feeling nestled in her chest. “Nice to know nothing’s changed.”
There he had to disagree. Again. A whole world had changed since they had sat here like this the last time. “But it has. We’re older. Reasonably successful—”
“Not to hear your mother talk about it.”
He knew what she meant. His mother heralded every win in court as if he had just singlehandedly preserved justice. “Or yours.”
Traci On The Spot Page 4