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

by Patricia McLinn

  “Hey, right now I want to lead with my stomach,” interrupted Paul. “C’mon, we’d better get our names in to get a booth.”

  “I put my name in twenty minutes ago. It shouldn’t be much longer,” said Michael.

  While the others thanked him heartily, Tris hung back. Had Michael really become the sort of man he’d just sounded like? He’d always believed in founding goals on reality, but had the years solidified that into something more rigid, less caring, less . . . Michael?

  Or was she being overly sensitive because she’d been burned by a politician doing what was politically expedient recently enough to have the unhealed scars to show for it?

  The hostess announced their booth was ready, and led them single file through the long narrow restaurant. Tris slid in first, followed by Grady and Judi. Directly across a table not much more than a single board’s width, Michael shared a bench with Bette and Paul.

  “Ow! Tris, there’s that damn bag again”

  “Sorry, Grady.” She extracted the bag from between them, then hesitated. Uncertainty turned her voice abrupt when she pushed the bag across the table to Michael. “Here, this is for you.”

  He looked at the Marshall Field’s bag, then back at her.

  “Go on, open it, Michael,” Judi urged. “We want some, too.”

  “Some?” Amusement lit his eyes and echoed in his voice. Tris relaxed. This was Michael.

  He slipped a hand inside the bag and slowly extracted a box, recognition dawning on his face before more than a corner came into view. “Frango Mints!” He smiled, and his dimple appeared high on his cheek.

  “We were in Field’s and I couldn’t resist,” Tris said, absurdly pleased by the appearance of that dimple.

  “My favorite candy in the world.”

  “You going to open your favorite candy in the world, buddy, or are you just going to look at the box?”

  “All right, all right, Monroe.”

  Michael leaned over to pass the box to Paul and, under the table, Tris felt his denim-clad shin through the sheer hosiery covering her legs. The sensation bolted through her like lightning. She couldn’t move. Tingles seemed to run over the surface of her skin, prickling along her legs, arms and neck. Michael abruptly twisted away, and she couldn’t be sure if he meant to tease Paul by pulling back the box or to break the contact with her.

  If it was the latter, he failed.

  In the cramped quarters under the table, his movement put his other leg between hers. Instinctively she tried to close her knees against the intrusion, succeeding only in tightening them around the denim invader that brushed against the soft skin above her knees.

  For an instant not measurable by any clock, she had the strangest sensation that everything else receded, until her friends’ conversation became distant echoes, their faces faded to pale shadows. As if she’d left behind the familiar world and stepped into one more vibrant, more intense. A world that centered on the contact between her legs and Michael’s.

  So fragile, though, was this world that she couldn’t even breathe. The prickling of her skin turned into something pulsing deep in her. She stared at Michael’s free hand, which was clenched on the table in front of her, seeing the straining tendons of the wrist, noting the strength of the fingers, concentrating on the pale slashes of taut skin marking the knuckles.

  Slowly, as the slashes turned whiter, she felt the withdrawal of his knee as a prolonged, gentle friction against her skin.

  Her breath came out in a quick, uneven exhalation.

  Then as quickly as it had started, the feeling of unreality shattered to the sound of Paul’s laughing voice.

  “Hey, Dickinson, you going to let me have some more of those mints or not?”

  “Sure.” She heard Michael clear his throat, then start again. “Sure, everybody have some more.”

  She shook her head at the offer of the candy box, and at her own foolishness. Where had all those thoughts of a private, vibrant world come from? Craziness, absolute crazy.

  Embarrassment, surely that had been the source of the strain she heard in his voice. And that had to be the source of the heat she felt burning her skin.

  For the first time in what seemed hours, she looked at the man across the table. This was Michael, her friend. What had gotten into her? Over an innocent brushing of knees under a table, too. Nothing more. Absolutely nothing more.

  She looked at him more fully and saw the old Michael warmth in eyes tinged with a ruefulness that could only be the result of their mutual embarrassment. She smiled at him, and felt the world kick back into place in time to realize Bette was directing a question at her.

  “Is this the kind of place you save in your business, Tris?”

  Tris considered the polished and mellow surfaces of the old wood and older brick.

  “If we’re lucky they look this good when we’re done, but most are pretty decrepit when we start. You have to see beyond the deterioration to what the builders created and what you hope you can recreate.”

  “Like your place, right, Michael?” Judi leaned around Grady. “You should see it, Tris.”

  “Oh, yes, Paul’s told me about your Victorian in Springfield, Michael.”

  “We all thought he was crazy to buy this dingy, ramshackle place, but he’s turned it into something great.”

  “Yeah, after practically blackmailing his friends into weekends of slave labor,” Paul told his cousin. “At least when you got that row house in Washington, you didn’t expect us to help fix it up.”

  “Only because I couldn’t get you to come out to D.C. Michael was just smarter than me, that’s all. Sweat equity is definitely the way to go.”

  “Especially if it’s somebody else’s sweat.” Paul reached into the candy box.

  “Looks like you’re taking it out in Frango Mints,” said Bette.

  “Damn right. You should have seen the things he had us doing. That’s why I figured he couldn’t refuse to be my best man, even though we all know Michael would prefer a three-week hiking tour in the Sahara to going to a wedding.”

  No movement betrayed him and they no longer were touching, yet Tris somehow felt Michael’s withdrawal. An instinctive defense, she thought. And perhaps also indicative of surprise. They did know how Michael felt about weddings, and she had long ago guessed it stemmed from his parents’ far from successful marital history, but it occurred to her that he’d certainly never volunteered anything on the subject. It was something they’d all seemed to tacitly understand, and avoid.

  She wondered if Paul had broken the taboo on purpose. If so, he either changed his mind or had achieved what he’d been after because he shifted the conversation, and she sensed Michael relax. A glance around the table left her doubting that anyone else had even noticed.

  “One time he left me holding up a wail all by myself. For hours. I thought I was going to choke to death on plaster dust.”

  Paul’s account of the work on Michael’s house started them on a laughter-filled conversation that lasted until the restaurant closed up around them.

  As they slid one by one from the booth, Tris wondered if Michael took special care not to brush against her legs. It was almost impossible not to make contact, but they didn’t. And she quickly dismissed the fragment of thought that tried to label her reaction as disappointment.

  * * * *

  “This has been nice.” Tris settled back against the passenger seat with a pleased sound.

  “Driving on the Tollway at rush hour is nice?” Wry disbelief threaded through Michael’s question.

  She chuckled, but stubbornly maintained, “Yes. It is. As much as I love everybody, it’s been nice to get away for a while. To be alone.”

  “Alone?” He tried to sound wounded. But she hadn’t really hurt his feelings; she remembered his inflections well enough to know that. “If I’d known you wanted to be alone, I wouldn’t have volunteered to drive all the way out to Elmhurst to double-check Bette’s old house before the landlord inspects
it. You could have done it all by yourself.”

  “Volunteer, nothing. You were drafted, because Aunt Nancy knows you’re reliable and she didn’t want Bette to worry about it while they were at the luncheon this afternoon. I’m the true volunteer.” In fact, she’d surprised herself a bit by asking if she could go with him rather than attend the luncheon with the combined staffs of Paul’s and Bette’s offices. But as soon as the words were out, she’d known that was how she wanted to spend this afternoon.

  Driving to Elmhurst, the conversation had been sporadic and easy. They’d stopped at a neighborhood deli, then eaten the juicy sandwiches at a dilapidated picnic table and watched people go by. Once at the house Bette had rented, they’d poked around companionably, double-checking the items on Bette’s list—all of which were already done—but mostly trading home ownership stories and speculating on where and when Bette and Paul might find a house to meet their divergent specifications.

  They’d puttered around so long that their return had landed them in the midst of a steamy summer evening rush hour. She didn’t mind the slow going, though.

  She’d enjoyed herself thoroughly. Not once did she have to stop and think before she spoke. Not once did she have to worry that her words might be misconstrued, or repeated inopportunely. Not once did she think about work.

  Only Michael could do that for her.

  “Reliable?” Michael’s insulted tone brought her back to their conversation. “That’s as bad as describing a prospective blind date as having a good personality.”

  She laughed at that, but she also surveyed the man next to her. He drove with an easy smoothness that belied the alert concentration she knew he gave the heavy traffic. Bette’s assessment of him ran through her head: All that calm good sense on the outside, and inside . . . all sorts of potent things churning around.

  “I think any woman who opened the door to you as a blind date would be thrilled, Michael Dickinson.”

  “Oh, yeah?” His asymmetrical mouth lifted into a grin that seemed to be directed at himself. It made him look very young.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  And even though he changed the subject then, she knew her unpremeditated words had pleased him a little, and that pleased her. What didn’t please her was the peculiarly unsettled feeling that lodged in her stomach at the image of another woman opening the door to Michael Dickinson.

  * * * *

  “You’re an early riser.”

  Tris turned and looked up at him. “Morning, Michael.”

  He almost hadn’t seen her sitting on the end of the small deck over the water. He’d just returned from running and was headed toward his room over the garage when an early ray of morning sun caught a glint of gold in light hair, and he recognized Tris. Since one force behind his run had been the hope of clearing his mind, still fogged by dreams that stubbornly ran to blue eyes and long legs, it would have made more sense to slip up the stairs than to walk over to her. But what the hell, the run hadn’t succeeded anyhow.

  “I must still be on East Coast time,” she continued. “I’ve been up before everybody in the house all week. If I’d known you were up, I would have come over to your room and bothered you.”

  Bothered was the word, all right. Tris in a room dominated by a king-size bed, in the soft light of morning, wouldn’t have done a thing to chase away either old ghosts or his recent, and unwelcomed, reaction to accidental touches such as brushing knees under a table. On the other hand, he hadn’t escaped those by running through the quiet suburban streets, either.

  “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “I’m sweaty. I need a shower.”

  She slanted a look up at him and invited again, “Aw, c’mon, sit down. I’ve had enough of my own company.”

  Against his better judgment, he sat on the edge of the deck, swinging his legs out over the water as she did. The sun had crested the horizon of Lake Michigan and was turning the surface into dazzling fragments. He couldn’t seem to prevent his eyes from going to Tris, to see the effect of that clear, soft light on her. But something in her face and the way she was turning a small stone over and over in her hand caught him in a way he hadn’t expected.

  “What is it, Tris?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not just a matter of early rising, is it? I thought yesterday there was something . . . There’s something on your mind that got you up so early, isn’t there?”

  He saw her prepare to put him off with a denial, but then she sighed and gave a half smile. “I promised a friend at work—and myself —that I’d give it a rest for a week, but my subconscious doesn’t want to cooperate. I wake up every morning with my mind going ninety miles an hour.”

  “What is it, Tris?”

  “There’s a project I’ve been trying to put together at work, taking historic buildings that might otherwise be razed and fixing them up as facilities for the homeless. Last spring, I saw a place in Cincinnati that’s really making it work and I knew I had to try to create more. It’s the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever been involved in, Michael. Do you know how many cities could use something like this? And how many have buildings that are going to waste? But there’s a problem.”

  “Money.”

  She nodded. “As always.”

  Still turning the stone, she described how she’d campaigned for the backing of the preservation association she worked for and how she’d lined up funding for several prototype projects around the country, based on the one in Cincinnati. But a major backer had pulled out— “for political reasons,” she said, with a pointed look at him— even after the first project had been started, leaving both the project and the association in the financial lurch.

  Leading with her heart . He could see exactly why the project appealed to Tris, and how she could have rushed into it without adequate preparation. Going out on a limb, as surely as she had when she’d tried to get from Harris to University Hall all those years ago.

  “If we don’t come up with funding in the next year, it could mean a major retrenching for the association. There could be a lot of buildings destroyed because there’s no money to fight for them. And it’s my fault. I sold the association on getting involved.”

  “You were the only one?”

  “No, not alone.” She gave him another half smile as if she recognized and appreciated—but also dismissed—his attempt to make her see she wasn’t solely responsible. “But I was the driving force. And some others expressed reservations, concerns about exactly what’s happened. I thought they were being too cautious.” She made a soft, scoffing sound at herself, then slung the stone Into the lake. “You know the really frustrating thing? There are federal agencies that could help us fund this, but they can’t decide exactly whose umbrella this falls under, so we’re left standing out in the rain.”

  “That’s a bitch, when other people can’t see the value of what you’re trying to accomplish because they’re looking at their own narrow view. But I know you, Tris. When you believe in something you never give up.” Not even the times when she probably should have, he added to himself. He'd hate to see her hurt by this.

  “No, I won’t give up.”

  Her matter-of-fact tone surprised him, but he had little chance to consider it as she turned and the startling blue of her eyes caught him once again. He jerked away from her look, staring out over the placid water toward the horizon. “Would you help, Michael? Paul tells me that with this campaign you’ve made good connections in D.C. I could use advice from someone with your political savvy. And if Joan wins, she'd be a great ally to have in the Senate. This is just the sort of project she’s been campaigning on.”

  He knew that. It was what had drawn him to Joan in the first place five years ago and it was what frustrated him mightily as she fought for election. He was having enough trouble keeping her campaign geared to the pragmatists in the party without this sort of issue being introduced.

  Two longstanding instincts warred within him—the in
stinct to help Tris Donlin and the instinct to keep Joan Bradon as far as possible from lost causes. Lost causes like the ones Tris invariably backed.

  “We’d look at any official proposal you send us, but not until after the election,” he said. That might have sounded too formal, too harsh. “I have a responsibility to Joan,” he added, hoping to mitigate his first response. “Personally, I’ll help you as much as I can. The thing is, you might want to consider compromising, backing off a little. If you looked at just saving the buildings first, then maybe down the road fixing them up for the homeless, that might be one way to safeguard the association’s investment.”

  There, that was clear. A careful expression of a moderate position, treading between the extremes of his two instincts. He’d kept Joan out, but he’d offered to help her as her friend—even knowing her propensity for hopeless causes—and he’d added sound, practical advice.

  Tris gave him a rather odd look. “I understand. Political issues.” He felt a prickle of discomfort at the look and the flat tone, but then she added, “Maybe we should get back to the house,” and she sounded nearly normal. His imagination must have been working overtime.

  He walked along next to her, feeling more at ease than he had since he’d gotten Paul’s letter. How many times during her freshman year had she come to him for talks like this? He’d done a pretty good job of helping her then and he’d do his best to help her now. He’d also done a good job back then of keeping his feelings under control; surely he could do as well now. The intervening years almost seemed to have slipped away. No, that wasn’t exactly true, because he’d certainly changed with the years. He was stronger. Strong enough not to let feelings run away with him.

  Still, the comfort with each other remained. He felt the mutual acceptance and affection, even in the silence.

  Impulsively, he took her hand.

  “Seven years . . . In some ways that’s a long time, but in some ways it’s hard to believe it’s been seven years,” she said, and he knew her mind had followed the same track. “After that one time you visited me in Washington, Paul told me several times that you had trips planned to D.C. for that law firm you started out with. But you never called me when you were in town. Why?”