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

by Patricia McLinn

  His words wound down and he wondered what the hell had happened to the times he and Tris had understood each other so well that he never would have had to spell this out. She would have understood halfway through his first sentence, and by now she’d have been saying, “That sounds great, Michael. I’d love to come. It’ll be terrific, all being together.” That was what Tris would have said twelve years ago. So why did she just look at him now with that small, stiff smile on her face?

  “Would you like to join us?”

  “Would I like to?” she repeated as if her likes in the matter might not be the key factor. Had giving in to his desire and making love to her five months ago also made a stranger of her?

  “It wouldn’t be the same without you, Tris.”

  “Thank you, Michael. I’d love to come.”

  Even the formality of the words couldn’t still the triumph that flowed through him for one, ungovernable moment.

  * * * *

  Tris weighed the risks at the same time her arms gauged the heaviness of a shovelful of snow.

  She’d listened to Michael stumble over the invitation last night, and wondered why she didn’t help him out. She’d known what he was trying to say. But she’d also known she needed him to say it. She’d tried to tell herself that her accelerated heartbeat resulted simply from the prospect of being with her favorite group of people in the world once again, that it had nothing to do with knowing that it would guarantee her several more chances of seeing Michael over the next week or so.

  Then he’d said It wouldn’t be the same without you, Tris, and she’d stopped lying to herself.

  So here she was, shoveling snow in the blinding-white of a finally clear early afternoon, and considering the risks to her heart.

  In the months since she’d walked out of his room over the garage last August, she’d accepted that he had realized after making love to her that he could never feel anything but friendship for her. Spending more time with a Michael who saw her only as a friend would be self-punishment of the hardest sort. But what if she could change his mind? Or better yet, his heart? Until yesterday, she hadn’t thought there was a chance of that.

  But, even granted that he had never liked changes, she thought she’d seen signs. The way he’d looked at her in the Metro, the feel of his hand guiding her, his words at her front door, the snap in his eyes at the thought of other men’s clothes in her closet, even his fumbling over the invitation to join everyone for the inauguration events. If she gave him time, maybe the desire he’d certainly felt for her back in August would find its way to the surface again, would convince him of the possibility of more than friendship for the two of them.

  “Leaning on your shovel and staring into space does not constitute shoveling.”

  They’d started off side by side on Mrs. Jenkins’s porch, working their way down her walk and across the front to Tris’s. But Michael had shoveled ahead of her, so now he’d nearly reached the front steps while she lagged two yards behind. Her cheeks burned with more than the chill, because she knew she hadn’t been staring into space, but at the foreground—where Paul’s jeans fit Michael snugly enough to form a fascinating picture as he bent, straightened and twisted with load after load of snow.

  “I, um, was contemplating the glories of the inauguration next weekend,” she improvised, quickly filling and dumping her shovel twice.

  “I hope the snow doesn’t ruin it.” Now Michael had taken up leaning on the handle and staring.

  “It’ll probably be gone by then.”

  His eyebrows rose as he looked around at the nearly knee-high expanse of snow that extended into a street as yet untouched by plow or salt truck.

  “Really,” she answered his unspoken doubt, as she uncovered two more feet of walk. “That’s one of the things about D.C. weather. The snow can catch you off guard, but then it’ll go from winter to spring in a blink.”

  “I’ll take your word for that, since you’re a veteran Washingtonian. You and Leslie were certainly right about how this town reacts to snow, so I’ll count on you being right again. I’d hate for the rest of them to be disappointed. You should have heard Paul on the phone, already planning how he was going to casually let it drop at lunch with one of his highbrow competitors.”

  “Now that’s true friendship, giving him something to brag about.” Of its own accord, her grin softened into a smile. “Really, it was nice of you to invite them all. And it was nice of you to include me, Michael.”

  Close enough now to touch, she couldn’t resist resting one thickly mittened hand on his arm. He’d insisted on coming out with only a couple of layers of Paul’s sweatshirts over his own shirt, but he showed no signs of chill now as she looked into his eyes.

  He shifted slightly, breaking the contact between her hand and his arm, and cleared his throat.

  “I thought it would be . . . uh, fun, all of us here. I realized how much I’d been missing that when we got together for the wedding.”

  “Yes.” Was that all it had been? Fun? A case of nostalgia and old times gone too far? Was that what he was trying to say, in a voice that sounded more uneven and rough than usual? She found a part of her couldn’t believe that any longer.

  “Of course, I know you’ve been seeing Grady since the wedding, but still, I figured you’d enjoy being together next weekend, even though it’ll be a bigger group.”

  “Seeing?” Where did that come from? She blinked against the brightness, trying to see him more clearly. “What do you mean?”

  But he seemed to have gotten up a full head of steam now, and her questions didn’t slow him.

  “I imagine you took him by surprise at the wedding. I think you took a lot of people by surprise.” He flashed a grin at her that didn’t seem to quite fit his face, then quickly looked away and bent to the shovel again. “Seeing you all grown-up and so much a woman instead of the girl we knew. It probably took him a little while to adjust. But nobody’s ever accused Grady Roberts of being stupid.”

  “You think Grady and I . . .”

  “I know he’s visited you here, Tris.” He said the words softly, without looking at her. Then his voice strengthened, though his eyes did not meet hers. “I think it’s great.”

  “Great?” She felt as if the world’s spinning were grinding to a wrenching stop, so that everything went in slow motion, with her mental processes the slowest of all. Did he want her to be with Grady? Because he didn’t want her? But what about what she’d seen in his eyes? The signs she’d seen? “But you . . .you and I—”

  “Don’t worry about that, Tris. I know it’s been awkward, but we have too many years of friendship behind us to let that be permanent. As long as we understand how it happened, so it won’t . . .” He cleared his throat, but didn’t bother to finish that sentence. “It’s pretty natural when you think about it. You thought he was rejecting you, and I was there and we’d always been friends. What shouldn’t have happened is my letting it get so carried away. I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am that I failed you there.

  “Sorry.” That damn word again. She felt the burning cold of outrage settle into her. “You thought I turned to you because I was upset about Grady.” She didn’t question, she summed up.

  “Of course you turned to me,” he said, and she supposed the words were meant to be heartening. “You always had, and I’d always been there. But this time I let you down and—”

  His words broke off as she turned her back on him, stalking up the first three steps to the porch.

  “Are we going in now?” He looked around at the porch and steps still waiting to be shoveled.

  She spun back to face him. “I am. But if I had my way, you could stay out here forever and freeze to death for all I’d care. But I suppose then I’d be arrested for cruelty to idiots.”

  “Tris—”

  She stomped down a step to stand just above him, thumping one multi-mittened hand against his hard chest. “How dare you! How dare you think I would be that,
that cheap?”

  “Tris, I never—”

  “Cheap! Or worse. For months I’ve racked my brain and my heart. I knew, knew that you couldn’t think I still had any feeling for Grady. Because I had made an utter fool of myself making it crystal clear exactly how I felt about you! So I accepted that you just didn’t care for me that way, that in the light of day you realized friendship was all there was for us. And all the time you were thinking this!”

  She pulled in air, trying to steady her breathing, but the cold oxygen only fueled her anger.

  “What kind of woman do you think I am to make love to one man when I was longing to be with another? If that’s what you think of me, Michael Dickinson, you can just go to hell!”

  She shoved with both hands against his chest. His heel caught a slick patch and he toppled back into the snowbank they’d built up from shoveling the walk. She didn’t wait to see how he extricated himself, but stomped into the house and slammed the door behind her.

  Stripping off her snow-dampened clothes haphazardly on her way to the bathroom, she jolted her chilled body with the shower’s warm stream. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes as the steamy moisture enveloped her. She could cry her heart out here and no one would hear. The pounding of the water against the tile would mask any sobs that might escape her, even if someone cared to listen.

  But she wouldn’t cry. She’d cried enough. And this hurt might have gone too deep for tears.

  He didn’t know her at all. Not really, not if he thought she could do that. He thought she was some giddy young girl, perhaps the image he’d formed of her when he first knew her. That hurt deeply. But what frightened her the most was the niggling voice suggesting that maybe he didn’t want to know her—the woman that the girl he’d known had grown up to become. The person she was now.

  It hurt. It hurt terribly. And worst of all was that Michael—Michael, who’d always been there for her—not only couldn’t ease the ache this time, but was its source.

  The water was edging toward tepid before she finally turned off the shower. She dried herself quickly and pulled on a soft sweater and knit pants, her favorite outfit for curling up on the couch and enjoying a three-hanky movie. Even with no such movie to watch, the clothes suited her mood.

  Michael wasn’t in the house. She knew that without looking. Still, she couldn’t keep herself from crossing the hall to the room that already seemed to have taken on some imprint of his presence. She’d been so aware of him lying here in this bed for all the hours of the previous night. She had practically been able to feel him listening when she went downstairs for some late-night water. Even when she’d finally slept, the awareness of his nearness had crept into her dreams, where he’d been so much closer.

  He’d made the bed, but imperfectly. Unconsciously, she trailed her fingers over the rumpled spread where it exposed some of the pillow. She caught herself caressing the material and snatched her hand back.

  If she had to be touching something, she’d be better off cleaning things up. She pulled open the desk drawer and scooped in some earlier drafts of her homeless proposal. No sense in letting Michael see this. He might actually begin to glimpse the real Tris, and heaven knew she wouldn’t want to confuse him that way. She grimaced down at the cleared desk top and wondered if her feeling fell under the heading of bitterness or self-pity.

  Impulsively, she snatched the picture of the four of them off the bulletin board, tearing it a little where the thumbtack wouldn’t let go. How many times had she stared at his face in that picture, telling herself that the emotions were simply a trick of shadow and light, and not totally believing it. Well, believe it now, kid.

  Movement drew her gaze to the window, and she saw Michael, across the street, clearing the walk in front of the Grabowskis’ while young Mikey plied a shovel nearly as big as himself and chattered happily, apparently undeterred by his audience’s grim expression. Good, let him shovel the entire neighborhood for all she cared.

  She spun away from the window and tromped down the stairs. The ringing telephone saved her from having to decide what to do with herself.

  In response to her muttered hello came Paul’s voice, vibrant and amused. “Hey, Tris, how’re you doing in the Great D.C. Blizzard?”

  “Hi, Paul. I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, you sound it. What happened, cousin, get caught in a snowbank overnight?”

  That would have explained the sensation of ice encircling her heart, but it wasn’t that simple. “How’d you know about the storm?”

  “I was talking to Michael and— You did know he was in Washington now, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause followed her syllable. She could almost imagine Paul sitting in his office, chair tilted back, feet propped on the desk. He would recognize her unwillingness to talk. Considering it, he might let his eyes wander to the photo of the four of them he kept in his office, now joined by the more recent edition as well as several pictures of Bette. Then he’d make up his mind, straighten his shoulders and plunge ahead.

  “Yeah, well, I was talking to him on the phone yesterday morning—” her lips tilted up slightly as he spoke right on cue, and some of the tension left her “— and he mentioned it was snowing some. Then it was all over the news last night how our nation’s capital had ground to a halt because of a little white stuff. I’ve been trying to get through all day. You and Michael. All I get are recordings at the offices, and the telephone company saying your phone was out of order until just now. But there’s no answer at Michael’s.”

  “He’s here.”

  “He’s… he’s there? With you?”

  She couldn’t deny a small thrill at nonplussing her unflappable cousin.

  “Yes. With me. Although right now he’s outside with Mikey Grabowski. Still, I think that qualifies as being here with me.”

  “Hot damn! That’s terrific!”

  She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She did neither. She sighed, deeply and wearily, sank down on a stool and rested her elbow on the breakfast bar.

  “I’ve known it for years. Years! I told Bette, and she just said to leave you two alone because—”

  “Oh, Paul.”

  The silence was abrupt and complete for all of three seconds. “Oh, Paul’? That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s not.”

  “You don’t still have a thing for—”

  “Don’t you start, too!”

  “All right, all right. What happened?”

  Telling him came surprisingly easy. And somehow, saying the words out loud, the problems didn’t sound quite so insurmountable.

  “Sounds to me like you just have to talk out this Grady issue, and the two of you will be all set.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “Why?”

  Wondering if she’d imagined an indecipherable note in Paul’s voice, she shifted her shoulders in frustration. “I don’t know. There’s something . . . It’s like there’s something he knows that I don’t, but somehow I’m being held accountable, or judged or . . . Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even know what that means.”

  “What are you going to do about it? Give up?”

  “No.” She hadn’t honestly known what she was going to do until she heard her heartfelt answer. Heartfelt. That was the key. She couldn’t give up, not the way she felt about Michael. Her heart wouldn’t let her. She had to follow these emotions to wherever they led. Even if that meant heartbreak.

  “Cheer up, kid. I seem to remember you telling me over and over how true love could conquer all.”

  “When did I say that?”

  “When Jean Marie Rustin broke up with me.”

  She made a sound of disbelief. “You were a freshman in college and I was a sophomore in high school at the time, Paul. Are you holding me accountable for what I said then? People change, grow up.”

  “Yeah, people do.” Tris thought she caught an echo of something in his voice, but then it disappeared. Ha
d the same thought occurred to him, that Michael didn’t want her to grow up, that he was still stuck on the girl of twelve years ago? “So, what about now? You still think love should automatically be perfect?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you?” He asked the question almost absently, as if his mind had started on another track.

  Did she? Maybe it was a question to consider. Did she expect an easy solution, a painless transition from feeling friendship for Michael to feeling . . . what?

  “I gave the proposal to that contact I told you about last week,” she said abruptly. “He said he’d get it to Joan Bradon this week.”

  Honesty might force her to recognize her blurted words as a detour from considering the proper label for what she felt for Michael Dickinson, but it made sense—a long-distance phone call wasn’t the time to get into such thorny questions.

  “Does Michael know?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I haven’t told him.”

  “That much I’d figured out myself. What I want to know is why you haven’t told him?”

  “It just seemed to complicate things. And he’s got enough to worry about, with getting settled in on the Hill and moving and everything.”

  “Is that really the reason?”

  Was it? The proposal was part of her adult life, far from the Tris that Michael knew in college, the one he might still care for in a way he didn’t care for the new her.

  “I bet your accountant would love to know you’re calling long distance to play Twenty Questions.”

  “My accountant’s thrilled that I’m going to be in D.C. next weekend making important contacts with important people. Although he won’t be half as green-eyed as Judi. She was practically spitting bullets she was so mad. But she’s got some big test coming up in school and can’t get away.”

  “She must be disappointed.” But Tris knew she wasn’t disappointed her young cousin wouldn’t be coming, although that made her feel a little guilty. She’d always liked Judi, but having her around, flirting with Michael, was more than she could take right now. Especially if he flirted back.