The Groom Came Back. Abby Gaines

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СКАЧАТЬ her sky-blue tank—she’d grown breasts since she’d last seen him, too—and swooped down her short blue-and-white skirt to her ankles, then back up to her face. There was nothing as blatant as admiration in his gray-green eyes—more a keen observation.

      You didn’t get to be a top neurosurgeon without developing powers of observation, Callie supposed. Even if his memory was somewhat deficient.

      “Hi,” he said. “I hear you’re the best florist in Parkvale.” Had his smile been that sexy eight years ago?

      Of course not. At seventeen, she’d viewed Jack’s twenty-six years as a source of comfort, of protection. Besides, those hadn’t been happy days.

      “Good morn—uh—afternoon.” Callie’s attempt at formality to mark this one-sided reunion fizzled as she struggled to remember if it was past twelve yet; she closed at twelve-thirty on Saturdays. She finished arranging stems of gerbera—orange and crimson and pink—in a galvanized steel bucket set on an iron stand. Then she stepped forward, brushing her hands against her skirt, in case Jack had actually recognized her and planned to shake her hand or…something. “I like to think I do a great job for my clients—not that Alice at Darling Buds isn’t very talented,” she added hastily.

      She totally lacked the killer instinct she needed for Fresher Flowers to flourish on the scale her loan officer demanded.

      Jack’s smile turned confiding. “I’m in a hurry. I need—” he glanced around in the blankly searching manner common to most men who walked into Callie’s store “—some flowers.”

      She might be short on killer instinct, but her sense of mischief was in full working order. “Are they for your wife?”

      He recoiled. “I’m not—”

      She saw in his frown the sudden uncomfortable realization that here in Parkvale, Tennessee, he was indeed married. Even if no one else knew about it.

      He folded his arms and looked down at her—she’d forgotten how tall he was—his mouth a wry twist. “They’re for my mother, Brenda Mitchell. Do you know her?”

      “I know her well. She’s wonderful.” Callie let a trace of what she felt for Brenda into her voice. But although Jack picked up on it—his dark eyebrows lifted a fraction—there was still no flash of recognition. Nor did he endorse her comment about his mother.

      So much for Brenda’s insistence that Jack missed his family. That he wanted to come home from his prestigious job at Oxford University Hospital in England. That he would have come home sooner, if only there wasn’t always another life to save.

      Callie had suspected for a long time that Jack had simply outgrown his family. Only she knew that, if he had his way, this visit would sever one of the last of his ties.

      She held his gaze and smiled warmly, giving him one more chance to click. “How much would you like to spend on your mom?”

      “Since you know her, how about you make up something she’d like, without worrying about the price?” He glanced at his watch—platinum not steel, she guessed—then out the window, checking on the black Jaguar parked in the street.

      “How generous of you.” A little nip, not strong enough to qualify as a bite.

      Now those expressive eyebrows drew together. “Excuse me?”

      You can’t make up for eight years of absence with a hundred-dollar bunch of flowers. “Brenda likes irises,” she said, with a fierceness that was at first on Brenda’s behalf, because she wouldn’t dream of criticizing her darling son, and then for Callie herself. “And delphiniums.”

      He blinked. “Irises and delphiniums it is, then,” he said in a calm tone she could imagine him using with a patient while he waited for the men in white coats.

      If she’d told him Brenda liked carnations and pansies he wouldn’t have known any better.

      The answer to the question that had plagued Callie for weeks—how will I feel when I see Jack?—hit her with the force of a hurricane.

      She was furious.

      BY THE TIME Jack climbed back into the Jaguar, the best rental car available from the airport in Memphis, nearly all the stores on Bicentennial Square had closed. This place was dead on the weekends, and only marginally breathing during the week. He glanced at his watch as he pulled out into the light Saturday traffic, and wondered what time it was in Oxford and whether he could call this afternoon to check up on his patients. Wondered what time the Marquette County courthouse opened on Monday.

      How soon he could get a divorce.

      Maybe he should, as the cute but moody florist had suggested, have bought flowers for her. His wife. Callista Jane Summers, according to the youthful scrawl on the marriage license application. But a bunch of yellow roses wouldn’t suffice to thank her.

      He stopped at one of Parkvale’s dozen sets of traffic lights, then headed out of the square on treelined Main Street.

      The elms, planted the year Jack was born, had grown taller in his absence. Yet the town itself had shrunk. It had always been too small, and now was Lilliputian. He’d no sooner started down Main when it was time to hang a left on Forsyth, and only seconds later, he was turning right into Stables Lane.

      The narrow, dead-end avenue wasn’t much longer than a stone’s throw. A couple of cars were parked with two wheels on the sidewalk to allow passage. Jack pulled into his parents’ driveway, behind his father’s Ford Ranger pickup.

      He left everything in the car except the flowers, wrapped in layers of lilac and green paper. The florist had told him what they were, but apart from the irises he’d forgotten. She’d done a nice job, that girl in the sexy blue tank. Jack had been surprised to learn from the guy at the gas station that Parkvale now boasted four florists. Eight years ago, he’d bought a corsage for his…bride…at the town’s sole flower shop, conveniently situated across the road from the hospital.

      He gripped the flowers tighter, and steeled himself as he headed up the walk. For the overdue reunion with his parents. For the inevitable encounter with Callista Jane Summers.

      Dealing with Callie would be the easy part, he reminded himself. She was a good kid, and fully aware of the favor he’d done her. And although her e-mails had come irritatingly close to nagging about the need for him to come home, she wanted the same thing as he did where their marriage was concerned.

      Whereas his parents…It had been easier to stay away than get their hopes up about him coming back and “settling down.”

      What was the bet that within half an hour he’d be fending off suggestions that he switch from neurosurgery to dermatology or geriatrics or something equally unlikely, and apply for a job in Parkvale?

      His mother must have heard the car, because she showed up in the doorway, hopping from one foot to another like a kid of ten. “Jack!” Her delighted squeal gave him an unexpected lift. He took the porch steps in two strides, and grabbed her for a hug.

      “You’re so tall, I can’t believe it.” Brenda squeezed him with the strength of a woman who’d had years of kneading her own bread dough.

      “Cut it out, Mom. I’m no taller than I was when we caught СКАЧАТЬ