The Wedding Gift. Sandra Steffen

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СКАЧАТЬ a terrible liar,” she said dazedly.

      He finally released the stethoscope. “Keep that away from me. Who are you, anyway?”

      “I’m Madeline Sullivan. As I told you before, I’m a nurse, but—”

      “So my mother sent you to play nursemaid. That’s so typical. No doubt she expects you to check my pulse and report back to her.”

      Since she still didn’t know what his mother had to do with her, she said, “I think we should keep your mother out of this.”

      “At least we agree on one thing.”

      “Do we also agree that walking on narrow beams fifty feet off the ground is a risk you have no business taking?” Why was she so breathless?

      Angry, he was having trouble breathing, too. His next attempt made his nostrils flare as he said, “I was wearing my safety harness.”

      Eyeing the harness dangling from the end of a yellow rope, his hard hat upside down on the plywood floor directly beneath it, she shook her head. He could have broken his neck. He could have died, and it all would have been for nothing.

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ