The Wedding Gift

by Sandra Steffen

  Her hand went to her mouth.

  She hadn’t thought about her early years in a long time. She remembered the day she’d stopped climbing trees, the day she chose an orderly life over mischief. It was after her parents’ icy pile-up on the freeway that fated February day when she was twelve years old. Marsh had moved back home and he and Reed took over the orchard and raising her and Noah. About that time Aaron took the vacant desk next to hers in homeroom in the seventh grade. What began as a friendship in the fifth grade instantly bloomed into a budding first love.

  She cried harder than ever, raw, wrenching sobs that hurt her throat and her ribs and stomach. She didn’t want her relationship with Aaron to have been the result of her need for something solid. He’d been the love of her life, the other half of her whole. He had.

  Yes, he had.

  She felt the warm body at her side before she saw him. Although the dog made no sound, she wasn’t afraid. He gave her time to adjust to his presence then sidled closer.

  “Did Riley let you out?” she asked on a whimper.

  Smelling of dog shampoo and lake water, he let her put her arms around him, offering his warmth, asking for nothing. As she laid her cheek on the thick fur on his back, she caught a glimpse of Riley retreating from view. He’d done more than let the dog out. He’d sent him to her.

  Another tear fell. It hurt, kindness.

  “If he’s so wise,” she said to the dog, “why won’t he give you a name?”

  Why did it matter so much to her?

  Because. He was alive. And she wanted him to be glad he was. She wanted him to embrace his life and his home and his dog.

  She sniffled and sighed. “I need a tissue. And you deserve a treat.”

  She kissed the dog on the top of his head. Breathing a little better, she stood. It took a few moments to keep her knees from wobbling. Depleted and spent, she slowly walked inside her cottage.

  Riley was at the door when the dog scratched an hour later. He let him in, disappointed to find him alone.

  Damn.

  He’d dealt with females’ tears all his life. The women in his family cried easily, lustily and often. Madeline’s tears had nearly undone him. He’d wanted to go to her, and had reached the place where the properties joined when he’d questioned his right to intrude on something so personal and private. He didn’t want to leave her alone, either. In the end, he’d sent the dog, instead.

  Evidently she’d appreciated the dog’s company. If Riley wasn’t mistaken, there were cookie crumbs in the fur around the old boy’s muzzle. Riley was more interested in the envelope tucked under the dog’s collar. He slipped the note out, opened the flap and removed the paper he hoped didn’t include goodbye.

  Five days. Don’t let it go to your head.

  I’m thinking maybe Miles. Rocket.

  I know. Rex.

  The woman didn’t give up. They had that in common.

  He flattened the note and read it again. She wrote in cursive. Nobody did that anymore. Her handwriting was feminine without being overly ornate. She certainly wasn’t wordy.

  He brought the stationery to his nose, and found that it wasn’t scented. Of course it wasn’t. She wasn’t the pursuer here.

  But she was staying for five days. Five days meant five nights.

  From some place far away came the primitive pounding of ancient drums. The resonating echo started in his extremities, inching through his veins toward the center of him where echo and instinct converged.

  A tentative knock sounded on his back door. He tucked the note behind the coffeemaker for safe keeping and went to the door to let Madeline in. Five days had just begun.

  “Okay, let’s see what’s under this one.” Madeline whisked a dust sheet off another sofa. “Oh.”

  Yes, oh, Riley thought as he added another sheet to the growing bundle in his arms. The sofa she’d uncovered was orange and green and couldn’t have been attractive when it was brand-new. It hadn’t improved with age.

  It had been an hour since Madeline had knocked on his door. “Ready to get started?” she’d asked.

  He’d been ready since he met her, but she was referring to her project. She was organized, he’d give her that. The Duncan Fife dining set had been revealed, along with most of the furniture in the living room and one of the spare bedrooms. There was dust on her sleeve and a hole in the knee of her faded jeans. Her hair was slightly mussed and her blue eyes had a glassy quality.

  He hadn’t mentioned her tears and neither had she. She hadn’t mentioned the note, either, or the fact that her voice trailed off whenever their hands happened to touch.

  “Some of this furniture should probably go.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Don’t you agree?”

  “Agreeable is my middle name.”

  She made a sound through her pursed lips a man could never replicate. Watching her do it reminded him of her kiss. Breathing reminded him of her kiss.

  “Before I risk insulting you, I should ask if any of this was yours before you bought this house.”

  “Now you’re worried about insulting me?” he asked. When she smiled, a weight lifted. It made him feel like a damn hero again.

  Apparently she wanted to talk, to slow this down. Slow wasn’t his preferred speed, but he could be accommodating. They could talk.

  For now.

  “Before I moved here, Kipp and I traveled light. We liked to say neither of us accumulated anything that didn’t fit into a duffel bag. We specialize in large summer houses, mansions and additions that quadruple the living space for the wealthy. Now we keep an office in Traverse City and employ an accountant and office manager. These days we always have two or three projects running simultaneously, but back then we built our reputation one house at a time and lived in whatever city we worked. We spent an entire year restoring two old inns on Mackinaw Island, but our first major success was a nineteenth-century style English manor on the Grand River in Lansing. The most difficult project to orchestrate was the castle we built for an eccentric dot-com millionaire in Kalamazoo.”

  Madeline tried to imagine going from town to town, city to city that way. Summer said there were two categories of people: those who were like tumbleweed and those who were trees. Trees put down roots and reached up. Tumbleweed rolled across the surface of the earth, going where the wind blew.

  She removed another sheet and carefully added it to the heap in his arms. As it started to slide off, he shuffled the whole bundle, but gravity was winning. She tried to help by gathering up the loose ends and tucking them into the folds. The action brought her closer to him, her hands sliding through the flimsy fabric to the solid man underneath.

  His skin was warm beneath her palms, his torso solid, the muscles underneath washboard-strong. Dust particles glittered all around them, and yet he smelled like the outdoors.

  He must have let go of the bundle, because she felt the rest of the sheets tumble down around their feet. Free, his hands went to her upper arms, drawing her closer.

  His body made contact, key contact with hers, arms, chest, hips and thighs. Heat poured through her, unfurling a yearning so intense it shook her in its throes.

  She stared into his eyes, and slowly drew away. “I think that’s enough uncovering for this afternoon.” She pointed her finger at him. “You know what I mean.”

  As one second followed another, his expression changed. He probably disagreed again, but he wasn’t pressuring her.

  “What would you like to do?” he asked.

  “Do?”

  The heat in his eyes hadn’t diminished. It just moved over to make room for whatever risk he was about to suggest.

  “I know just the thing,” he said. “Let’s have some fun.”

  “Fun is my middle name.”

  He chuckled as he took her hand, pulling her along with him to the kitchen. She grabbed her shoulder bag from the hook on her way by. He left the dog sleeping in the corner and she left her blue sweater on the back of a kitchen chair
.

  Outside she had to run to keep up with him.

  “Can you drive a stick shift?” he asked.

  “Have I mentioned that I have three older brothers?”

  He tossed her the keys to his Porsche.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, looking at him over the roof of his silver car.

  “Wherever you want.”

  The idea of going anyplace she wanted sent her imagination spinning. “There’s a lighthouse near Traverse City we visited when I was little. I’ve always wanted to go back.”

  He pointed east. “Traverse City is that way.”

  She got in, moved the seat up, adjusted her seat belt, and turned the key. She backed around and drove to the end of his driveway. She looked both ways before pulling out then ran through the gears, testing the sound of the engine and the feel of the clutch and the gears and the steering wheel.

  “I thought you said you could drive a stick,” he said.

  “I can drive a manual transmission, Marsh’s old jeep and Reed’s speedboat. The only thing I haven’t attempted is Noah’s airplane.”

  “Put some muscle into that gas pedal,” he said. “There’s more than one way to fly.”

  She pushed on the accelerator and the car shot forward, the velocity pressing her deeper into her bucket seat. It did feel a little like flying. Keeping to the speed limit, but barely, she settled in, both hands on the wheel, and drove, just drove. Sometimes they talked, but most of the time they enjoyed a companionable silence. At some point Riley must have put in a CD, for Leonard Cohen’s crooning melodies filled the air.

  The car sat close the ground, the tires hugging the pavement around banked curves and over sun-kissed hills and towering cedars. They glided past mossy walls where the highway cut through solid rock. She followed Sunday drivers, and when it was safe, she passed them, music and glimpses of blue water blending the way her tears and lake sand had, the way loss was being absorbed into this airy sense of discovery.

  She didn’t know how long she drove, but the shadows had lengthened. Traffic had thinned. She didn’t remember when she’d last seen a car.

  She pulled off the road and coasted to a stop near a scenic overlook. “I must have missed the exit.”

  “By fifty miles.”

  For a moment she merely stared, tongue-tied. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “I don’t want to stop you.”

  His eyes were a deep, dark brown, his voice a husky baritone that caused that glorious swooping in the pit of her stomach again. Yesterday she’d felt purged by laughter. Earlier today it had been by tears. This was freedom, and it felt like the greatest risk of all.

  “Where exactly are we?” she asked.

  “We’re not far from Charlevoix. Twenty miles in that direction is St. James on Beaver Island,” he said, pointing across the water. “I didn’t know the ferry ran this late in the day.”

  The dome light flickered as she opened the door. “We’ve come this far. We might as well not waste that view.”

  She was out of the car when Riley’s phone rang. She glanced back as he checked his caller ID.

  “Your L.A. clients again?”

  “No, it’s my mother.”

  Madeline was surprised he didn’t hear the sharp breath she took. If he’d glanced up, he would have seen her face go pale, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at his phone.

  Leaving him to his call, she walked along the curved path to the railing. An uneasy feeling followed her all the way.

  Long yellow rays of sunlight angled through the pine trees, glinting off the lake. In six weeks the entire area would be teeming with vacationers, hikers and boaters and bird-watchers and sightseers. Madeline would be gone long before then.

  She imagined Riley talking to his mother. He was probably mentioning the presumed association with Madeline right now.

  She hadn’t had to explain herself out of a predicament in years. No matter how she’d been as a child, she’d changed. She wasn’t in pigtails anymore, and Riley would never be satisfied with thin excuses.

  The quiet crunch of footsteps on the gravel path let her know she didn’t have much time to decide how best to explain.

  He stopped at the railing a few feet away. Trying to gage his reaction, she studied his profile.

  Nerves knotted her stomach. “Riley, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “I already know.”

  Chapter Six

  It was just as Madeline had suspected. Riley was aware that there was some sort of duplicity here.

  She swallowed.

  This was it, the moment of truth. “There’s something I need to tell you about Aaron—”

  “I don’t want to hear about Aaron.”

  That didn’t sound good at all.

  “I saw you crying for him today,” he said. “I get it. You’ll always love him.”

  Madeline didn’t know what that had to do with his mother’s phone call.

  “Look,” he said. “Your fiancé’s life was cut tragically short, but he was lucky to have been loved by a woman like you, to be mourned by a woman like you.”

  “Riley, Aaron—”

  “This has nothing to do with your Aaron. And everything to do with this.”

  He swung her around and caught her gasp of surprise in his kiss. Her heart jolted, but he didn’t wait for her to adjust to the thrust of his tongue. This time he took, her anguish, her heartache and her sigh. It was the most intimate of kisses, and it sent the pit of her stomach into a wild swirl. She moaned instinctively and tipped her head back, opening for him, softening for him, touching his tongue with hers.

  It wasn’t a kiss to be analyzed. It was a kiss to be experienced. A mating of heat and instinct, it obscured every thought except one.

  More.

  She wanted more, more of him, more of this. She wanted to fit her body so tightly to his she couldn’t tell where she ended and he began. She wanted, for just a little while, to feel good, to feel happy, and to know he felt the same way.

  She wound her arms around his neck, her back arched, her fingers splaying wide through his soft wavy hair. His hands kneaded her back, urgent and exploratory, molding her to the length of him. He moaned, too, the sound of it touching her like some unforeseen knowledge that held the answers to questions she hadn’t asked yet.

  They drew apart slowly, arms, lips and breaths. When she opened her eyes, she saw that his were still half-hooded. A vein pulsed in his neck and his breathing was ragged. He was as dazed as she.

  “See what I mean?” he said.

  She could only shake her head. He was making a point. But what point?

  “Riley,” she said, trying again, “Aaron—”

  This time he placed his fingertip to her lips. “Forgive me for being blunt, but he’s dead, Madeline. You’re alive, and you’re allowed, no, you’re entitled to feel it. And so am I.”

  He didn’t know.

  The realization ran through her mind twice before she grasped it. It was the only possible explanation.

  He didn’t know.

  Perhaps he hadn’t taken his mother’s call. Or perhaps they hadn’t talked about her. Either way, he didn’t know she hadn’t come to Gale to take his pulse for his mother.

  Madeline was back to square one, uncertain how to proceed. “It’s time we were getting back,” she said.

  Riley could have used another minute or two out in the cool air. He’d always heard a man’s sex drive peaked at seventeen. A fat lot the experts knew. He was thirty-two and he felt as rangy and ready as he had at seventeen, only better because he knew a hell of a lot more about sex now.

  He hadn’t planned that last kiss. It had been a male reflex, a caveman staking his claim. He was no saint. Hell, he’d done what any man would do to temporarily wipe another man’s image from a woman’s mind, a woman he had every intention of having in his bed.

  If he hadn’t happened to look through the windshield at Madeline, he would have answ
ered his phone. Instead he’d sat perfectly still, mesmerized by the way the breeze had played with her hair and pressed her shirt against her body, delineating the shape of her breasts. He’d wanted to peel it over her head, to take her breasts into his hands, to bend down to place a kiss on each one, to lay her down and take her then and there.

  By the time he’d gotten his breathing under control, his mother had left a voice mail message. He’d listened to it then hurriedly dashed off a text message.

  Doing well, Mom. In the middle of something. Will call soon. R.

  No, he hadn’t planned to kiss Madeline, but what a kiss. Now she was wrapping her arms around herself again, retreating. Her eyes were round and blue and filled with emotions she couldn’t contain.

  He walked her to the car and opened the passenger door for her. Whether she realized it or not, it was symbolic.

  It was Riley’s turn to drive.

  It wasn’t late when Madeline walked into Sully’s Pub alone.

  She hadn’t lost track of time during the drive back to Gale. Quite the contrary, she’d felt the passing of every second.

  Cigarette smoke curled at the low ceiling. The juke box blared from the back of the room, competing with the baseball game droning from the television over the bar. The pub wasn’t crowded on this Sunday evening. Sissy was waitressing again. The bartender was a younger version of the man who’d served up margaritas Friday night.

  Despite the noise, Madeline could hear Ruby O’Toole yelling for her to join her at the pool table. She finished giving Sissy her pizza order, then strode back to say hello.

  She recognized Todd and Amanda from the other night, and Ruby introduced her to two other men who were with their small group around the pool table. The first was her brother, Connor, the other his friend Jason Horning. For some reason that name sounded familiar.