Leslie had been right. It was time. Well past time to shake off the adoring girl and the distant idol and replace them with the people they’d become—a woman and a man.
“Thanks for the sympathy, Tris. I knew I could count on you,” said Grady. But his voice didn’t sound as certain as his words. He looked a little puzzled as he met her smile.
A man and a woman, Tris thought. And who knew what might happen when a man and woman got together.
She looked to Michael to share the moment, but he had turned away.
“Luggage ought to be at the baggage claim by now,” he said, apparently focusing on a plane backing away from the opposite terminal.
Another pang of anticlimax slid through Tris. Probably natural. Despite her efforts to keep her thoughts off the reunion, she must have built up unreasonable expectations.
“Yeah, we’ll get the luggage and get you settled at Mom and Dad’s, and then we can go see the campus,” said Paul. “Show Bette all our old haunts. She's been asking to see them.”
“Begging to see them,” concurred Bette, deadpan. “You know how Paul hates to dwell on the past. But for my sake he’s willing to relive some of the moments from his four horror-filled college years. The sacrifices the man makes for me.”
She was still shaking her head, when her husband-to-be wrapped an arm around her waist and started her down the corridor toward the baggage claim. “That’s right, woman. Horrible sacrifices.”
Looking at the way they fit together, Tris felt surprisingly alone as she followed, walking between Grady and Michael.
* * * *
Michael welcomed the details of getting the luggage, loading the car, paying the parking fee, maneuvering through the toll-road traffic, following the route to the Monroes’ Lake Forest home. All the details that kept him from dwelling on what had happened when Tris walked into his arms.
He checked the rearview mirror before changing lanes and caught sight of her in the back seat next to Paul and Bette.
Little Tris had grown up.
Her legs, once coltish and invariably clad in jeans, now stylishly filled a pair of sheer stockings beneath a pale float of a skirt.
Her hair, once a waist-length, sun-streaked tangle, was pushed from her face in casual sweeps that turned under just above her collar, leaving a tantalizing sliver of nape exposed and framing ears decorated with oblong gold earrings.
Her Wedgwood-blue eyes, once vulnerable and shy, now studied the world with self-confidence tempered by good humor.
Her body, still as youthfully slim as it had always been, now moved with graceful assurance . . . and had fit against his for one instant as if it belonged there. The way he used to dream it would. Long ago. Before he knew better. Before he realized that unlike the world he’d grown up in, there were worlds where some things didn’t change. Some people who didn’t shed their loves with each season’s wardrobe. People like Tris.
That very stability of heart—so different from what he’d grown up with—was part of what had drawn him to her in the first place, all those years ago. Even while part of him had longed for her to have a change of heart. But Tris Donlin—girl or woman—still looked at Grady Roberts with dazzled eyes. Looked at Michael Dickinson as friend and buddy.
The damnable surprise was to find that his feelings hadn’t changed, either.
He’d been so sure he was over her years ago, that the spell was in the past. Ancient history. He sure as hell should have been over her. Good Lord, he’d fallen for a seventeen-year-old girl who was now a twenty-nine-year-old woman. How could he still feel the same way about her?
But the instant she had come through that doorway, framed by the opening and with the light slanting sun highlights into her hair, he had felt a slam to his chest like he’d been tackled by the Chicago Bears’ defensive line.
Great, the guy renowned for seeing the tiniest of flaws in a plan hadn’t spotted a weakness in himself the size of the San Andreas Fault. He’d plunged headlong into a pit he would have sworn he’d long ago escaped—wanting Tris.
Those first few minutes hadn’t helped any. The little jolt of surprise in her eyes when she looked at him, as if she were seeing him anew. The way she melted against his body, the rightness of the feeling. The glances exchanged that said their old communication still operated.
Then he’d seen the smile she focused on Grady.
Yes, Tris was definitely a woman. But she still wanted the man that the girl Tris had longed for, so hard and so long.
With his grip on the wheel only slightly tighter, he eased into the left lane to pass an overloaded van, the move so smooth no one else in the car noticed. But beneath the disciplined muscles, anger surged through him. Silently, he swore to himself, at himself. He’d be damned if he’d let himself go on this way any longer.
In this world of inconstancy, he’d always valued the things that didn’t change. But his feelings for Tris didn’t have to count among the unchanging. He would get over her, once and for all.
Chapter Two
“Everything looks different. That building wasn't here, was it?”
Bette put a consoling arm around her fiancé’s shoulders and linked her other arm with Michael’s. “Things change, Paul. It’s natural.”
“Yeah, but why didn’t they leave any of the old things?”
Tris grinned inwardly at the plaintive note in his voice. From the parking lot where they’d piled out of the car, it did look as if the once familiar campus had been transformed. “We just haven’t gotten there yet, Paul,” she said. “Newer buildings are usually built around the core of older ones, like the rings of a tree.”
“That’s right,” said Bette. “And we just have to go all the way back to prehistory to get to the buildings you’ll remember.”
Paul got halfway to a scowl, but his chuckle disrupted it as, three abreast, he, Bette and Michael led the way down a tree-shaded path between new buildings.
“By the way, how goes the building-saving business these days, Tris?”
At Grady’s offhand question, she glanced at him, and the way the blue of Lake Michigan formed a backdrop for his sun-glinted golden hair caught her attention. He really was a hunk. And he’d just asked about her job, her life. She should welcome this opportunity to introduce him to the grown-up Tris.
“It’s fine, Grady. Busy and challenging.”
“Not a whole lot of money in it, though, is there?”
“No. Not a lot. But I hear from Paul that you’re hip-deep in million-dollar deals these days?’
He grinned at her. “Yeah, the business is going great guns. But we can talk business later. C’mon, we’re getting left behind.”
Tris let out a long breath as he hurried her after the others, then wondered fleetingly whether it resulted from the warmth of Grady’s hand around her elbow or an ignoble relief that he hadn’t gone into a detailed explanation of his thriving business brokerage company.
“Now here’s a building you should save, Tris.” Paul stood, hands on hips, considering a century-old pseudo-Gothic structure.
“Oh, Lord! University Hall. Do you remember—?”
“That night we put up the banners—”
“For the Phantom Party—”
“It was the last building to do—”
“Tris climbed across from Harris—”
“I was the only one who could get in the window—”
“And then when she twisted her ankle, she couldn’t get back and—”
The four-way words and laughter tumbled over one another until Bette begged them to stop.
“Wait! One at a time. This is one story I want to hear. Michael, you tell me. That way I’ll get the straight story.”
“We’d planned a party for this campus service group we all belonged to. It gave tours and welcomed new students, things like that. The four of us were assigned to come up with a fund-raiser. We decided on a Phantom Party.”
He spoke seriously enough, but Tris noted a dimple high o
n his left cheek. How could she have forgotten how that single dimple would appear, so unexpectedly, to leaven his otherwise solemn face?
“What’s a Phantom Party?”
“It was a ploy, that’s what it was,” said Paul. “We figured nobody’d come if we just advertised another fund-raising party. So we made it a Phantom Party. We started wearing T-shirts saying Phantoms and put ads in the paper saying ‘The Phantoms Are Coming.’ ”
“Then we decided to string up banners around campus,” resumed Michael. “The idea was to have all the banners show up overnight, adding another mystery. Getting people so curious they had to go to the party.”
“And it worked. We raised a bundle,” said Grady.
“Which Tris wanted to give to the bums down on Maxwell Street,” Paul interposed.
“That would have been a lot more of a service than chair cushions or whatever we bought for the student union.
“Yeah, just think of all the cheap wine they could’ve bought with that money,” Paul answered.
“You can’t know they would have—”
“You were always coming up with these wild ideas to solve the problems of the world overnight, Tris. Admit it. Giving money to some derelicts in a one-shot deal doesn’t solve anything.”
“It’s better than buying chair cushions!”
“Trees,” murmured Michael.
“What?”
“Trees. We bought trees with the money. If I’m not mistaken, these trees.” He pointed to the tree-lined path.
“Hah! Trees help the ozone layer, so the money was put to good use.”
“Quit gloating, Paul,” said his fiancée. “And tell me the rest of the story, Michael.”
Tris crossed her arms at her waist and leaned against the stone balustrade, remembering how they’d refused to listen to her back then. She’d wanted to do something meaningful with that money. Sure, her idea hadn’t been practical, but she’d wanted so badly to better the world. She looked down the path canopied by trees bought a decade ago.
Turning back, she met Michael’s eyes, and saw that light in them that had always made her feel he looked right into her. Her mood mellowed in familiar comfort. She had been rather naive back then, thinking she could help people so easily. And trees weren’t a bad investment.
“So what happened with the banners, Michael?” Bette prompted again.
Tris watched the dimple reappear before he turned away to answer Bette. “We’d gotten into the other buildings—”
“What that means is Michael had finessed the janitors into letting us in.”
“And hung the banners,” Michael continued without any indication he’d heard Paul. “But we had one building left—this one—and no way to get in.”
“Because the University Hall janitor had gone home by the time we got here,” explained Paul.
“Tris said she could get in through an open window on the third floor by climbing out of Harris into that tree and across to that other branch.”
Tris followed Michael’s gesture to the venerable oak. It had seemed so simple that night, looking out from Harris to the beckoning open window a few yards away. Now, standing on the ground, looking up at the tree and looking back in time, she wondered if she’d been crazy.
“Good Lord,” said Bette, obviously following the same line of thought.
“Michael, of course, said she shouldn’t do it,” said Paul.
Tris suddenly remembered how stern Michael had seemed that night and how she’d thought he didn’t have much faith in her to think she couldn’t reach the other building. She’d waited until he’d gone to the door to check on a noise, then she’d slipped out of the window and started across before he could stop her.
“But I made it,” she said, half to that long-ago Michael, half to herself.
“Yes,” Michael confirmed, with no sign of the dimple. “You made it. And she hung the banner. Only when she tried to climb back out to the branch, she got her foot caught.”
Tris remembered how the old-fashioned steam radiator had seemed to grab at her, the pitching sensation as she lost her balance, the endless moment of teetering on the windowsill, then collapsing into the room with a sickening twist of her ankle. She also remembered the three shocked faces staring at her—Paul, Grady and Michael—framed in the window across the way.
“I had to haul Michael back in from the tree branch,” said Paul with a half chuckle. “We would have had him splattered on the sidewalk. That branch never would have held his weight. But we sure were glad to hear Tris’s voice coming from that other window—even if it was just to complain how much her ankle hurt.”
“I’d sprained it, but I could hop around,” she told Bette. “Only the doors to the lecture room I’d gone into were all locked from the outside, so I couldn’t get out.”
“And we couldn’t figure out how to get in,” said Paul.
“I thought Michael would throttle that poor janitor when he told us he didn’t have keys to University Hall. We were really getting worried.”
“Oh yeah? I don’t remember you seeming too worried, cousin dear. I remember you standing over there, laughing.”
“It was pretty funny with you hissing at us from the window to get you the hell out.”
“How did you get her out?” Bette asked.
“Michael wormed it out of the janitor that the buildings were connected by an underground venting system. So he crawled through, found the master key, unlocked the room Tris was in, helped her down the stairs and they walked right out the front door.” Paul gestured dramatically at the carved panels of the heavy wooden door. “Actually, Michael walked. Tris hobbled.”
She grimaced at him. “I hobbled all right. I needed crutches for two weeks. Didn’t get to dance once at the party.” Instead, she’d perched on a table with Michael bringing her drinks and munches, and making her laugh even while she watched Grady dance the night away with his latest date.
“Poor Tris,” Paul said with fake sympathy. “Didn’t get to dance and didn’t get to give the money away to one of her causes. Tris was always trying to change mankind and save the world then.”
Tris thought Michael muttered something about “leading with her heart” and “impractical.”
“Now I’m just trying to save an old building or two,” she said, laughing and patting her cousin on the arm. “So old geezers like you will have something to remember—if you’re not too old to remember.”
“Hey, who’re you calling old? I’m no older than--” Paul started to wave his arm, but stopped when his broadly encompassing gesture included a couple of apparent summer school students, one a boy who looked as if he’d never shaved and the other a girl with go-on-forever legs beneath barely-there shorts. The stunned look on his face drew unstifled laughter as his friends shepherded him along the path.
“We were never that young, were we?”
“Tris was.”
She made a face at Grady, not caring if it wasn’t the most mature reaction. Of all the world, these people would accept her as she was. Feeling Michael’s eyes on her, she grinned at him. It didn’t matter anymore that Grady had thought of her as a kid. She’d grown up.
“Oh, good. Here’s the spot. Now I want you all to line up for the same pose as that picture,” announced Bette.
“What picture?”
“You know, the picture of the four of you together. Paul has a copy in his office, and so does Grady. I know Tris has one m her house and I bet Michael does, too. So don’t try to tell me you don’t know what picture I’m talking about.”
Tris knew exactly what picture, and from the slightly sheepish grins of the others, so did they. They’d had it taken on the library steps the day before the three guys graduated, when they were all feeling more than a little wistful about the end of their wonderful year together.
“I keep it in my office to disarm unsuspecting clients into thinking I’m approachable and nice,” said Paul.
“Baloney,” disputed Bette affect
ionately. “You keep it in your office so you can look at it all day, and you’d break anybody’s arm who tried to take it away. Here, Michael, you sit there, and Tris, you were up behind him. You know, Tris, I think the main reason your cousin is marrying me is so he has an excuse. Now he can say I’m the one who likes all the sentimental stuff and pretend he’s just indulging me, when he really loves it.”
Paul looked away from the knowing grins of his three companions on the front steps of the old library.
“Aw, c’mon, Bette. I don’t get all misty-eyed about Christmas tree ornaments.”
Tris caught the look he exchanged with his fiancée, and had no doubts about the love their banter covered.
“No, but you’re the one who spent three hours searching your mom’s attic for the box with the ones you’d made in grade school, so I could get misty-eyed. Now, you sit there beside Tris and, Grady, you get a little behind.”
Bette assessed the grouping through her camera lens. “Something’s not right.” She lowered the camera. “I know. Tris, you had your arm around Michael from behind.”
Tris complied. Beneath her arm, his chest felt familiar and yet different. This was Michael, her friend, her confidant, her companion. Yet his shoulders were broader than she remembered Michael’s being, his chest harder underneath the thin shirt. And hotter. So much hotter.
“That’s right. Now lean forward a little over his shoulder.”
She could smell the soap on his skin, and the scent of the sun in his hair. A wholesome scent so much like Michael she found herself leaning closer.
“That’s great!” Bette clicked a shot.
Michael shifted immediately, bringing his right hand up to where Tris's rested on his upper chest as if he were about to remove it.
“No, wait. Everybody hold still and let me get another, just to be sure.”
Wedding Series Boxed Set (3 Books in 1) (The Wedding Series) Page 23
