A Bride Worth Waiting For. Cara Colter

him, and knew that he couldn’t fail.

      “It must have been very hard for you. Watching him die.”

      “It wasn’t hard at all,” she said stubbornly. Her chin tilted up, and her eyes glittering dangerously. “It was incredible. I didn’t regret one minute of it. It was a privilege to make that journey with that strong, courageous man.”

      Her speech finished, her composure crumbled. Silver tears trickled down her cheeks. She swiped at them impatiently. More replaced them. She covered her eyes, trying to regain control. Her shoulders started to shake. She hiccuped.

      And then she was sobbing. Uncontrollably.

      And a voice deep within him, in his soul, told him what to do. He went and scooped her from her chair, and then sat back down in it, with her cradled against his chest. And while she wept, her hot tears trickling down his shirt, he stroked her hair and murmured words to her that came from some part so deep within him he had not been aware it existed.

      He told her how proud he was of her for being so strong. He told her it was okay to cry. He told her he was going to help her laugh again. All the time aware of how slight she was in his embrace, how good she smelled, how soft her shoulders were under his hands. And all the time aware that she still loved Mark.

      That her love with Mark had been one of those loves that would transcend all obstacles, even death.

      And that was good. He was relieved. His future was safe after all. Kathleen was real and good and eminently suited to him in every way, and he was going to go back to Toronto and lose no time in asking her to marry him.

      They would buy a house somewhere in suburbia, and someday they might have children—two point two, just like the national average.

      “How?” Her voice was small, muffled against his shirt

      For a startled moment he wondered if she was asking how one had two point two children, which he had not exactly figured out.

      “How what?”

      “How are you going to make me laugh again?” she asked somberly.

      “I’m going to take you Rollerblading,” he said.

      She flung back her head and looked at him. Her eyes were all puffy from crying. She seemed to realize suddenly she was in his lap, and she scrambled out of his embrace and onto her feet.

      “You’re not giving up, are you? Just like the old days!”

      “Bulldog Reed,” he agreed. Her robe had pulled apart slightly below the belt, and he tried for a glimpse of her upper thigh.

      “Adam, you have to go away.” She looked down, blushed, and pulled her robe ferociously into place, yanking hard on the belt.

      “Not until I take you Rollerblading.”

      “And then you’ll go?”

      As a lawyer he had mastered a few nuances of lying without actually lying. For instance, you could incline your head a certain way and people took that as assent, when in the letter of the law no verbal agreement had been committed.

      He tilted his head, a gesture one might mistake as preceding a nod.

      She straightened her robe again unnecessarily, and pointed that cute little nose at the sky and spun away from him.

      He waited for the slamming door, the turn of the key, and actually felt relief when it didn’t come.

      He had finished all the coffee in the carafe before she finally returned, her face scrubbed free of tear stains, dressed in some terribly unattractive sweat outfit in the most unbecoming shade of gray he had ever seen.

      Not intending to be the least bit sexy, she was unbelievably so.

      “All right,” she snapped. “You want to go so bad, let’s go.” Covering up her moment of vulnerability with cool dignity. With impatience. In her eyes a vow: never to be vulnerable to him again.

      He sighed.

      

      Tory watched him get up from his chair. God, he was glorious. He always had been. Incredibly handsome, but more. Sure of himself—and that certainty showing up in the way he moved, pure masculine strength and grace in his every move.

      He was dressed casually today, in jeans faded to dusty blue from long and loving wear, and a white denim shirt. It made him look more like, well, him, than the expensively dressed man who had appeared on her doorstep yesterday.

      His hair was falling carelessly over one eye. Beautiful hair, black and thick and silky. Hair that begged to be touched, begged her fingers to reach up and flick it back for him. She had done that all the time. Before. When his face and their friendship had been so familiar to her. When he’d been a part of her life, like the river was a part of her life. Something she had assumed would be constant and unchanging.

      Every woman they saw today would look at him.

      In the old days, he’d rarely noticed. Or if he did, he would grin back at them and then turn and give Tory, or Mark, a puzzled look. Like, What’s with them? or Is that Someone we know?

      And she was dressed in one of Mark’s old sweat suits. It looked absolutely appalling on her, and she knew it.

      She had started out quite differently. She had marched into the house and past his pathetic flowers, which for some reason she had put in her very best vase.

      In her bedroom she had thrown open her closet and scrutinized every outfit she had. And tried on three of them, finally settling on a nice pair of pleated white shorts and a jade-green silk blouse that did the most splendid things to her hair and her eyes. Which, of course, was too ridiculous considering where they were going.

      Next had come black jeans and a flannel shirt. Better. Faintly feminine, but hardly alluring. It showed off her coloring and her trim figure rather nicely.

      A dusting of make-up and then the fist slamming into her stomach.

      What was she doing? Trying to make herself look attractive for Adam! As if her heart wasn’t vulnerable enough to those dark flashing eyes.

      “The idea,” she told the mirror, “is to get rid of him.”

      Who did he think he was, coming here, casually trying to renew an old friendship, commandeering her life, when he’d abandoned her, them, when they needed him most?

      He was a dangerous man. He was dangerous to her heart. A heart that was already damaged almost beyond repair.

      She had never said it out loud. Mark would have been disappointed in her if she had. He might have felt guilty. Like he had done it to her.

      But she said it out loud, now.

      “I am never going to love anyone again.” And, she added to herself, least of all Adam Reed, who had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt he could not be trusted with such delicate organs as hearts and souls.

      And so she scrubbed her face until it shone, and left the freckles and the hollows under her eyes. She combed her hair, but didn’t mousse it so that each curl stood out, separate and shining. And in the very back of the closet she had found an old sweat suit that belonged to Mark, and that she had hated on him and that looked even worse on her than it ever had on him.

      She went back out onto her back deck, defiant, amazed when in his lazy gaze she saw frank appreciation.

      “Unless you want to jump back over the fence,” she told him haughtily, “you’ll have to come through the house.”

      She hoped he’d offer to jump the fence. She did not want Adam to see her house. It was too close to her. Reflected her very soul.

      And somehow her soul felt like it needed to be protected from him.

      He stopped inside her back door, waiting while she slid it shut and locked it

      They were in her kitchen and she turned and tried to see the