The Wedding Gift. Sandra Steffen

      “It can take a long time for ribs to heal completely after a surgery like yours,” she said gently. “Especially with the medications you’re on. You are taking your medicine, aren’t you?”

      His eyes narrowed and his voice lowered as he said, “You’re fired, Madeline.”

      Her head jerked up. “You can’t fire me.”

      “I just did.”

      She had to force her gaping mouth closed. Now that she wasn’t simply absorbing the essence of him, she had the presence of mind to take a good look at the man whose name had crept into her thoughts so often these past eighteen months.

      She’d expected his face to be swollen, his jowls sagging, his skin sallow. Instead he was lean and rugged and tan. A muscle moved in his jaw and there was a trace of something not easily identified in his brown eyes. Was it dread? Regret? Or was it a haunting sorrow?

      Cursed with a soft spot for anyone suffering or struggling in any way, she laid a hand on his arm and said, “What you’re feeling is perfectly natural.”

      He drew his arm out of her grasp. “You can’t possibly know what I’m feeling. You have to leave. This is private property and you’re trespassing. Tell my mother—never mind. I’ll tell her myself.” With that, he walked away.

      She watched as he conferred with a burly man who’d just climbed off the earthmover. The other man glanced at her, putting her in mind of a St. Bernard—big, yes, hairy, certainly, loyal, obviously, but not very fierce. Deciding to spare him the discomfort of having to escort her to her car, and spare herself the discomfort, as well, she left of her own accord. She surprised herself when she slammed her foot on the accelerator, but she had to admit the sound of sand spraying behind her spinning tires brought her a certain satisfaction.

      No sense letting Riley Merrick have the last word.

      “Uh-huh,” she said absently into the phone as she reached ahead to wipe fog off her windshield. The hills on either side of the county road were dotted with cherry trees, the branches flexed in anticipation of that elusive signal from Mother Nature to burst into blossom. Madeline understood their wistful impatience.

      “Was Riley anything like you expected?” Summer asked.

      Hunkering down in her seat, she wrapped her jacket more tightly around her to ward off the damp chill while she considered the question. There was a rawness about Riley Merrick, a burning sensuality that had caught her completely off guard. Deciding to keep that perception to herself for now, she said, “He’s fit, healthy and stubborn, and he looks like his photo.”

      “Are you coming home now?” Summer asked.

      Madeline had been sitting along the side of the road for the past forty minutes, thinking about her options. Glancing at the keys dangling uselessly in the ignition, she said, “That would be problematic.”

      “Why? What aren’t you telling me?”

      “What you don’t know the boys can’t badger out of you.” She jolted when a knock sounded on the window. Clearing a spot on the foggy glass, she saw a woman in coveralls hunkered down, looking in.

      “Did you just gasp?” Summer asked.

      Madeline rubbed the tender spot on her forehead where she’d smacked it on the window and nodded at the woman who’d startled her. To Summer, she said, “How do you suppose a two-ton tow truck sneaked up on me?”

      “You called a tow truck?” Summer asked.

      Gesturing to the driver that she’d be with her in a moment, Madeline said, “My car started wheezing as I left the construction site. I managed to coax it a mile before it lunged to the side of the road and surrendered. It’s what I get for having the last word.”

      “I’m not even going to try to make sense of that.”

      She could picture Summer pacing from the front desk of the inn to the French doors with the view of the back garden, always on the lookout, for what Madeline didn’t like to imagine. “They told me they were sending out someone named Red. I wasn’t expecting a woman. I have to go.”

      “You’ll call me if you need me?” Summer asked.

      “You know I will.” With that, she dropped her phone into her bag, unlocked her door and got out.

      “Are you Madeline Sullivan?” the other woman asked.

      Madeline nodded. “You’re Red?”

      “It’s Ruby, actually. Red is my dad.” She touched a ringlet that had escaped the confinement of her ball cap. “Runs in the family.”

      There was a feeling Madeline had when she was exactly where she was supposed to be at the precise moment she was supposed to be there. Some called it an “ah” moment. She called it knowing. She’d described it once to Summer as a shimmering energy that resembled light and felt like warmth. She’d experienced it the day Summer had driven into Orchard Hill six years ago, the day Aaron Andrews took the vacant desk next to her in the fifth grade, and fleetingly when she’d first encountered Riley Merrick today. It was happening again right now.

      “Do I have grease on my face?” Ruby asked.

      Madeline chided herself for staring. “Goodness, no. I was just thinking how much your name suits you. You’re gorgeous. How tall are you?”

      “Five-eleven.” Ruby opened the door and put the car in Neutral. “And a quarter,” she added quietly.

      Ruby may have been shy about her exotic beauty, but Madeline soon discovered she wasn’t shy about anything else. She talked while she hooked the cable to the front axle, while she started the winch and while she pointed them toward town.

      Listening, Madeline learned what it had been like growing up in Gale, a small town twenty miles west of Traverse City, and how Ruby had decided early on that the family business wasn’t for her. Ruby had reached the point in her life story where she’d graduated from the University of Chicago when Madeline noticed the silver car in the side mirror.

      “I took a job with a prestigious marketing firm in L.A.,” Ruby said. “After spending three years going stark raving mad in a tiny cubicle that for all intents and purposes might as well have been a chicken crate on an egg-laying assembly line, I chucked it all and returned to the roots I’d spurned. You’re sure I don’t have grease on my face?”

      This time Madeline smiled. “I’m positive.”

      At the city limit sign, Ruby said, “I’ve done all the talking.”

      Now the silver car in the mirror was close enough to discern the make and year, close enough to see Riley Merrick behind the wheel.

      “I don’t mind,” Madeline said. “Really. My fiancé once told me I have a face everyone talks to.”

      She didn’t miss Ruby’s quick glance at her bare ring finger. “Does your fiancé drive a silver Porsche?” “No.”

      Now they were both keeping an eye on the car in the mirror.

      “But you know somebody who does.” At Madeline’s nod, Ruby added, “A friend then?”

      “Not exactly,” Madeline said as the wrecker crawled through a pothole on its way into the garage’s driveway. “He just threw me off some property and accused me of trespassing.”

      Along with the gift of gab and legs long enough to give Heidi Klum a run for her money, Ruby O’Toole possessed the rare and uncanny ability to move her eyebrows independently of each other. She demonstrated before saying, “I should have let you do the talking.”

      Madeline looked out the side window to see if Riley would follow her into the parking lot. Ruby leaned ahead to peer around her.

      Together, they saw him stop at the curb. He lowered his window and stared at Madeline. Yearning swelled inside her, making it difficult