The Wedding Gift. Sandra Steffen

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СКАЧАТЬ lakeside lady would boast stone quarried in Michigan’s upper peninsula and incredible arched leaded windows that winked in just the right light. Inside, she’d have every decadent luxury—a gourmet kitchen, heated stone and Brazilian cherry floors, steam showers and a spa fit for royalty. She’d be a big-boned gal, six thousand square feet on one floor with another fourteen hundred in the nearby guesthouse. By the average person’s standards, that was a lot of square footage for a vacation home. It seemed the wealthier people were, the more room they needed to get away from each other. Riley grew up in a house twice this size.

      From the corner of his eye, he saw his project foreman sauntering toward him. “Phone’s for you,” Kipp Dawson said.

      “The clients?” Riley asked. When Kipp shook his head, Riley tensed, for only his mother could elicit a grimace of this magnitude from a man as tough and rangy as Kipp. “Take a message,” he said through gritted teeth.

      “Do I look like a secretary to you?” But Kipp punched a button on his phone and said, “He’ll call you later, Chloe,” then promptly broke the connection.

      Upon meeting them, people were often surprised by Kipp and Riley’s friendship, for Riley had had a privileged upbringing and Kipp had been left with any relative not quick enough to barricade the door. When Kipp was fourteen his mother had dropped him at the Merrick estate, claiming Riley’s father was Kipp’s old man, too. Since Jay Merrick had been good at two things—making money and siring sons, it was certainly possible. In those days before DNA testing, it had taken private investigators nearly a year to prove it wasn’t true. By then the boys were close and Riley’s mother told Kipp he was welcome to stay. She never let either of them forget her good deed.

      Riley knew his mother was worried about him but he didn’t appreciate her meddling. Kipp tolerated it much better. Of course, he had her up on a pedestal, right where she wanted to be. “Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk to her,” he said.

      Riley mumbled something that meant the subject was closed, but the truth was, he knew what his mother wanted. He’d been dodging her calls all week.

      He and Kipp stood side by side while the crew struggled to heave the next truss into place. At this rate they’d never get them all secured before that storm blew ashore.

      “Where is everyone?” Riley asked.

      “Billie’s sick, Art’s still out with that bum knee of his and the Trevino brothers didn’t show up again,” Kipp said as he lit a cigarette.

      “Feel like making yourself useful?” Riley asked.

      Kipp hadn’t leaned on a razor in a while. The whisker stubble didn’t conceal his eagerness as he ground the cigarette into the sand. “Your mother’s gonna have my boys in a sling. I’m right behind you.”

      They donned safety vests and climbed up. The moment Riley took his place with the crew, an age-old thrill went through him, the kind of thrill that inspired men to shout from distant mountaintops, to dance around ceremonial campfires and to raise a flag on the moon.

      The view was breathtaking in every direction. A car was speeding down one of the narrow lanes wending through the nearby hills. Out on the lake an iron ore tanker plodded due south. A small barge chugged away from it, giving it a wide berth. In the distance the sun turned the clouds into a sieve, sprinkling light like holy water across the surface of Lake Michigan.

      Riley had climbed mountains and skied down them, flown airplanes and parachuted out of them. Speed was good. High altitudes were better. It wasn’t that the world made sense off the ground. Off the ground, it didn’t have to make sense. Up here, it didn’t matter that he’d contracted a rare virus that should have killed him and would have if not for modern medicine. Up here he didn’t feel as if he’d been walking in another man’s shoes for the past eighteen months.

      Every man in the crew watched the crane lift the next truss into the air. Everyone braced as it was lowered toward them. Every one of them saw it lurch on a sudden gust of wind then slam into Riley’s chest.

      Riley felt the impact, heard the rush of air leaving his lungs. He fell twenty feet in an instant and snapped to the end of the cable attached to his safety vest with a force that knocked the remaining wind out of him.

      “Pete, Sean!” the foreman yelled. “Get that rafter nailed down. Hold on, boss!”

      Cinched tight in his harness twenty feet off the ground, Riley wasn’t going anywhere. He was aware of more discussion overhead, but the next voice he concentrated on came from halfway down the wall.

      “Riley. Over here.”

      Kipp was perched at the edge of the scaffolding. His left arm was wrapped around a two-by-eight runner as he tossed Riley a rope and drew him to solid footing. Once safely on the scaffolding, Riley unhooked his harness and released it. He had little choice but to withstand the quick once-over Kipp gave him with a gaze that saw everything. The fact that he didn’t shrug it off and go back to work wasn’t lost on anybody, least of all on Riley himself. Shakier than he cared to admit, he carefully climbed the rest of the way to the ground.

      And came face-to-face with a woman he didn’t know.

      Or was he seeing things? After all, pretty young women didn’t appear out of nowhere at rough-in sites. This one seemed to be floating toward him. Her hair was long and light blond. Her lips were moving but it was difficult to understand what she was saying.

      “Are you all right? Are you feeling faint? Can you hear me? How many fingers am I holding up?”

      Riley stared dazedly at her. She was of average height and wore a light jacket that was belted at her waist and open at her throat where a silver charm hung from a delicate chain. Her breathing was shallow and her eyes flashed with the same beams of light that surrounded the rest of her.

      Beams of light? What the hell was wrong with him?

      He scrubbed a hand over his face to clear his vision. Thankfully when he looked again, the strange light was gone. The woman hadn’t disappeared, though.

      “You’re sweating,” she said. “You could be going into shock. You should be sitting down. Lying down would be better. How are your ribs? Are they tender? Do you have pain anywhere? There’s no telling what you might have bruised or injured or God forbid, jarred loose.”

      She opened an oversized purse and fished around inside. The next thing he knew, she was trying to press the end of a stethoscope to his chest.

      He backed out of her reach.

      “I’m a nurse,” she said gently. “Don’t worry, I’ve done this a thousand times.”

      He closed his hand around the end of the stethoscope and held it away from his body. She tried again to push it toward his chest but he held fast. Before either of them was ready to admit they’d reached an impasse, the wind intervened, dragging her hair out of the fastener at her nape, an effective diversion for both of them. Free, the blond tresses whipped and swirled around her head.

      She finally released her end of the stethoscope and reached up, winsomely tying her hair into a knot that begged to be undone again. She should have looked as out of place as an orchid in a patch of quack grass, and yet her presence seemed expected, binding somehow.

      Awareness surged through him so strongly he was tempted to forget he СКАЧАТЬ