Wedding Series Boxed Set (3 Books in 1) (The Wedding Series) (63 page)

For dinner, they decided to drive up the coast to the next town, which boasted several choice restaurants and a compact boardwalk. The night before, both restaurants and boardwalk would have been packed. But Sunday night had a distinctly laid-back air they all enjoyed.

After a leisurely meal, they strolled the boardwalk often lashed by storms but still surviving. They discussed the merits and difficulties of various games of chance and skill in great detail.

When Leslie showed ability at the “shooting gallery”—at least in comparison to the rest of them—Paul had an explanation. “It’s because she’s from the landed Virginia gentry. Fox hunting, you know. Probably been doing it since she was just out of diapers.”

“Fox hunting is done with a horse, not a gun,” pointed out Michael while the rest of them laughed.

“Same difference.” Paul dismissed it with a wave.

Michael’s picks proved particularly unlucky when they all bet on tiny mechanical horses racing under tiny mechanical jockeys around a slotted metal course. Michael’s choice invariably came in last.

“Dickinson, this finally explains something to me,” Grady said. “I’ve always wondered why they said a horse was dead last—it’s because they look like they’re dead.”

When Michael withdrew from the ranks of the bettors because he was out of change, Paul chortled, “Wouldn’t the tabloids love that—‘Senate aide leaves racetrack without a quarter to his name.' "

“Now there’s a game I want to try.” Tris pointed to a sign advertising Whack-a-Mole.

“How does it work?”

Michael answered Bette while Tris handed over her money. “For a token fee, the player gets a rubber mallet. When the game starts, plastic moles pop up from those holes at random and the player tries to whack them before they disappear again. For each mole whacked you get a point.”

“I’m going to mash ’em all,” Tris declared.

“Your wife sounds damn bloodthirsty, Dickinson. I’d be careful not to leave any rubber mallets around the house if I were you,” advised Grady.

Michael shrugged. “As long as she sticks to moles.”

“But, Tris, you’re a softy, why do you hate moles?”

“Because they dig up my lawn, and my garden. And they won’t go away.”

“It’s a long-standing feud,” Leslie explained to Paul, Bette and Grady. “From the time she bought her row house and started trying to tame that jungle of a yard—”

“A postage stamp,” murmured Michael.

“Maybe a postage stamp, but when I started on it, two-thirds of the mole population of the Metropolitan Washington area was concentrated on that postage stamp!”

“Anyhow,” resumed Leslie, “every Monday at work we’d hear about her travails with the moles. The square footage they’d dug up, how much work they’d undone, the number of bulbs they’d devoured. So one guy went to the hardware store, got a trap and wrapped it as a present for her.”

“Dead moles in traps.” Tris shivered and got a sympathetic look from Bette and grins from Paul and Grady.

“And another guy brought in this article about how you could put fresh chewing gum down their holes and the moles would eat it and then they’d die.”

“They’d
starve
to death,” Tris elaborated. “I didn’t want to kill them, I just wanted them to go away. So then Leslie called an agriculture expert and found out that if you got rid of the grubs they eat, they’ll go away. So that’s what I’ve been doing. But it takes so darn long, and they tunneled through another corner of the garden this spring and it’s so annoying—”

“You’re up, lady,” called the game attendant.

Tris gave it her all, but she had more enthusiasm than technique and when the game ended the population of plastic moles was none the worse for wear.

“They’re crafty critters, aren’t they,” said Paul, pretending to console his cousin with a shake of his head. “Boy, I’m glad we don’t have moles in Illinois.” He stopped abruptly. “Do we? I better check with Charlie.”

“Oh, no.” Bette gave a mock groan. “Grady, do you know what a monster you’ve created with that gift of landscaping for the house? Any second now I expect Paul to turn into Mr. Greenjeans. He and Charlie get together and they start talking this lingo about friability and sun hours and pH levels and root systems.”

“You’ll love it when we’re done, Bette.”

“Yes, dear.”

Paul’s fake swipe at his wife’s bottom turned into a hug.

But Tris’s attention hadn’t strayed from the game. “Darn! I wanted to get more of those little devils.”

“How about you, Michael?” Leslie asked. “That’s your yard they’re digging up, too. You want to take a whack?”

“Not me. I’m the easygoing type.” Tris slanted him a look, and he grinned a little lopsidedly. “Besides, they’ve been there a long time. I like continuity. My wife says I’m not fond of change. Maybe she’s right.”

A look passed between Michael and Tris, and Leslie could almost imagine she saw the electrical charge that bridged the four feet between them. She swallowed, not sure if her throat had tightened at the power of their love or at the reminder of a chasm in her life.

Grady stepped forward and swept Tris a deep bow. “I would be honored, milady, if you would allow me to enter the fray and whack in your stead.”

Tris assumed a serious expression as she gripped the cuffs of her shorts for an answering curtsy. “I accept your brave offer, Knight Whacker.”

Under cover of more flourishes and encouragement from the rest, Grady leaned close to Leslie. “Thursday, Bette said I deserved a knighthood for rescuing her from Whicken. Now Tris. I seem to be everyone’s knight in shining armor except yours, Leslie.”

She didn’t have to answer because just then he was handed a mallet and swept up to the game.

From one side, she watched Tris, Michael, Paul and Bette crowd around Grady, the kidding fast, affectionate and good-humored. They truly were good friends. This was why she enjoyed their company so much. This was what she stood to lose if she were ever foolish enough to let errant thoughts about Grady Roberts lead to foolish actions.

The whoops and hollers of encouragement soon drew a crowd around them as he played a second game, then a third.

From her position, Leslie could see Grady, intent, yet grinning, as well as faces in the half circle behind him. She noticed many of the males first looked faintly contemptuous of Grady’s good looks, then gradually impressed by his performance—even jousting a mole with a rubber mallet displayed his strength and agility.

And she noticed the admiration of the females. It was there from the first moment they looked at Grady, and it only deepened. It should have been comforting to have her earlier thought confirmed that she’d reacted to him the way any woman would. It wasn’t.

She sighed when a college-age girl wormed her way into the front row by the simple method of pushing Leslie back. The attendant gave her a wary look at the intrusion of his territory, but with space at a premium—and crowds good for business—he didn’t object.

From this new vantage point, Leslie looked over the gathering, and something new struck her. Grady was the center of the group, but not really part of it.

He didn’t share jokes with the newcomers the way Paul did. He didn’t share assessments of his progress toward the grand prize the way Michael did. He seemed to detach himself from the people all around him, focusing solely on his objective. A performer vying for the applause of his audience, yet separate from them.

She thought of her observations of how people reacted to him, and Bette’s question of how having people judge only on the outside would eventually affect someone inside.

Another impression struck her with enough force to tighten her throat and sting her eyes. Loneliness. Deep, soul-parching loneliness. A loneliness he hid from himself, as well as others.

The crowd erupted into a roar.

Leslie blinked, adjusting to Grady as he was now. His arms lifted in triumph, a slight sheen of concentration making his face even more appealing, and his eyes zeroed in on her. She shivered with the impact of that look.

“Grand prize,” acknowledged the attendant. “You can have the big ’un.” He jerked a thumb to a man-size rendering of a mole in shaggy brown plush that suggested the creature was molting. “Or five of your choice.”

Calls from the crowd divided equally between the options.

He looked the huge mole up and down, then solemnly told the attendant, “I cannot justify depriving you of such a useful marketing tool. I’ll take the five.”

He made the choices quickly, and just as quickly distributed each. Something that was either a plush football or a toy mole to Tris. A yellow stuffed rabbit with floppy ears to Bette. A smaller version of the same in green to a lady in the crowd in an even more advanced stage of pregnancy. A lumpy hand puppet of a bucktoothed beaver for a little girl in a stroller.

And finally, a teddy bear no bigger than the palm of his hand. This he slipped into the pocket of his shorts as he stepped back from the game, allowing a tide of others in to try their skill. Separated by the flow of the crowd, Grady looked over the tops of heads to her.

“Can you fight your way out?”

“Sure. I’ll meet you over there on the boardwalk.”

In two minutes and fifty “excuse me’s” she caught up with the rest of the group in animated discussion.

“We’re having celebration ice-cream cones, Leslie,” Michael said. “Tris and I are going to go get them, so tell us what flavor you want.”

“Anything with chocolate and nuts.”

“Mmm, sounds wonderful,” said Bette. “A great finish to those crab cakes Leslie and Tris convinced me to try.”

“So far you’ve said everything sounds wonderful. You’ve got to make a choice,” said Paul.

“How can I decide without knowing the options? I’m coming with you guys."

“Then I am going, too. Or you’ll order something outrageous and keep the baby and me up all night.”

Bette turned to Leslie. “You know, I only ate vanilla until I met Paul Monroe, and now all he does is complain about my exotic tastes.”

But the look she gave her husband as they started off with Tris and Michael for the ice-cream shop was so full of love that Leslie smiled, despite another clutch of pain deep, deep inside her.

“Here.”

She turned back from her own thoughts to find Grady holding out his hand to her.

“I considered the puppet for you—that was one cute beaver—but it would be a shame to hide hands like yours. So I got this guy. I hope you like him.”

She looked down to the teddy bear resting in his wide palm. A wise and smiling face looked back up at her.

She shouldn’t take it. She’d be much better off without any whimsical teddy bears around to remind her of Grady. Definitely she shouldn’t take it.

“Thank you, but—” She looked up then. Somewhere under the surface blue of his eyes she thought she saw a shadow of that vast loneliness she’d sensed earlier.

If it had been there at all, it was gone in an instant. Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing. She should still say no thank-you.

“Thank you, Grady. I love him.”

Paul and Bette drove back. The rest of them decided to walk. They followed the shoreline, shoes off. Sometimes single file so each could let the waves wash over their feet before pulling back to the dark ocean to their left. Sometimes they walked four abreast as they talked easily.

Eventually Tris and Michael, holding hands, fell back, leaving Grady and Leslie to walk on as a couple.

Whether she liked it or not, he thought with satisfaction.

But he made no effort to break the silence until the lights of their destination glowed in front of them.

“Looks like Tris and Michael will be a while,” he said, with a nod of his head back to where two barely visible forms sat on a dune looking out to the water.

“Mmm-hmm,” she agreed. “Understandable that they’d want time alone."

An opening like that couldn’t be passed up.

“Paul and Bette, too, probably.”

“What?”

“They probably want time alone.”

Two figures sat close together on the porch swing. No creak reached them over the sound of the waves, but from the movement, the swing was swaying gently.

“How about if we give them some time alone,” he suggested, fully aware of producing time alone for another couple, as well. “We can walk to the other side of the house and sit for a while.”

“Okay. For a while.”

Her easy acceptance surprised him, and put him on guard. So when they found a comfortable natural hollow in the side of a hillock of sand, he was prepared for her opening comment.

“I’m glad we’ve settled this, so we can be comfortable being friends, Grady.”

“We haven’t gotten anything settled.” He echoed her reasonable, even tone precisely.

She arched her brows at him. “But yesterday—”

“Yesterday you said it was impractical for us to get involved for geographic reasons, and I demolished your argument. So there’s no reason—”

“There
are
reasons.”

He shook his head. “Face it, Leslie, I’m going to be in Washington a lot. And I’m going to be calling you a lot. And I’m not going to be calling you ‘friend.’ ”

“Well, even if you were going to be in Washington every minute of every day, there’s nothing you can do about the fact that I’m older than you. Not even Grady Roberts can do anything about birth dates.”

Smug, that was the only word to describe her expression. She’d been waiting to deliver that line. He had all he could do not to laugh at her. But she apparently read his silence as a triumph for her logic.

“How much older than me are you?” he finally asked.

“Let’s just say I could be your older sister.”

He shook his head. “That’s no good. Lots of women could say that. Let’s get down to facts and figures. I’ll be thirty-four in October. How old are you?”

“That is not a question to ask a woman."

“You’re going to have a hard time convincing me you’re too old for me if you won’t tell me how old you are.”

He had a point, and her expression in the soft light of the moon showed that she knew it.

“Let’s just say I have wrinkles.”