The Wedding Gift Read online

  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 was standing in the middle of a construction site in plain view of a dozen curious men with a pretty young woman intent upon touching him. He wanted her to touch him almost as much as he wanted to pull her to him and cover her mouth with his.

  “I’d feel a lot better if you would sit down,” she said. “Could I at least take your pulse?”

  The question finally brought him to his senses. She was a nurse. Here to take his pulse.

  The thundering in his ears moved ominously into his voice as he said, “My mother sent you, didn’t she?”

  Chapter Two

  Riley Merrick was standing three feet away.

  Madeline was certain her feet were planted firmly on the ground, and yet she felt as if she were drawing closer to him. Heat emanated from him, making her yearn to burrow into his warmth, her ear pressed to his chest. The rumble of the bulldozer’s engine and the sharp pounding of heavy hammers receded until the only sound she heard was the chiming of something sweet and delicate sprinkling into the empty spaces inside her.

  “Well? Did my mother hire you or didn’t she?”

  She blinked. And sound returned in a raucous, roaring cacophony of pitch and volume. “Your mother?” she finally asked.

  He scowled. “Knowing my mother, she probably told you to lie about your association with her.”

  “I’m 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 had reached the point in her life story where she’d graduated from the University of Chicago when Madeline noticed the silver car in the side mirror.

  “I took a job with a prestigious marketing firm in L.A.,” Ruby said. “After spending three years going stark raving mad in a tiny cubicle that for all intents and purposes might as well have been a chicken crate on an egg-laying assembly line, I chucked it all and returned to the roots I’d spurned. You’re sure I don’t have grease on my face?”

  This time Madeline smiled. “I’m positive.”

  At the city limit sign, Ruby said, “I’ve done all the talking.”

  Now the silver car in the mirror was close enough to discern the make and year, close enough to see Riley Merrick behind the wheel.

  “I don’t mind,” Madeline said. “Really. My fiancé once told me I have a face everyone talks to.”

  She didn’t miss Ruby’s quick glance at her bare ring finger. “Does your fiancé drive a silver Porsche?”

  “No.”

  Now they were both keeping an eye on the car in the mirror.

  “But you know somebody who does.” At Madeline’s nod, Ruby added, “A friend then?”

  “Not exactly,” Madeline said as the wrecker crawled through a pothole on its way into the garage’s driveway. “He just threw me off some property and accused me of trespassing.”

  Along with the gift of gab and legs long enough to give Heidi Klum a run for her money, Ruby O’Toole possessed the rare and uncanny ability to move her eyebrows independently of each other. She demonstrated before saying, “I should have let you do the talking.”

  Madeline looked out the side window to see if Riley would follow her into the parking lot. Ruby leaned ahead to peer around her.

  Together, they saw him stop at the curb. He lowered his window and stared at Madeline. Yearning swelled inside her, making it difficult to breathe and impossible to tear her gaze away. She wondered how long she would have sat there if he hadn’t broken eye contact. Probably as long as it was going to take the beating rhythm of her heart to return to normal.

  “Something tells me you haven’t seen the last of him,” Ruby said quietly after he’d disappeared around the corner at the end of the block.

  She was still making up her mind about that.

  Madeline left Red’s Garage an hour later with a preliminary quote for the repair of her car, simple walking directions to the Gale Motel six blocks away, and more O’Toole family history—red hair wasn’t the only thing that ran in that family. She set off at a fast clip, her tote over one shoulder, her purse over the other, her wheeled suitcase bumping along behind her.

  Red O’Toole had cautioned her to keep an eye on the sky. She was more concerned about the Land Rover that was following her. She stepped up her pace and reached into her purse for her cell phone.

  “You don’t need to call 911,” a man with shaggy blond hair said, rather sharply in her opinion, as he pulled up beside her. “Riley sent me.”

  She tried to recall where she’d seen him. “Why would he do that?” she asked as she considered flagging down the car approaching from the opposite direction.

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  The approaching car passed while she was foolishly still deciding. Great. Now it was just her and this stranger and her cell phone.

  The houses in this part of town sat close together. Their graying porches and brown lawns looked forlorn despite the daffodils blooming along their foundations. Not a single curtain moved, which meant there would be no witnesses. She could practically hear their grumbles if her brothers had to drive all the way up here to identify her body. That lovely thought finally brought her to her senses.

  Again, the man spoke before she completed the 911 call. “Riley told me your car broke down and that you could use a ride.”

  “Like I said,” she repeated, “why would Riley do that?”

  “Like I said, you’ll have to ask him.” The guy wasn’t going to win any awards for charm. For some reason that made her feel less threatened.

  “My name’s Kipp Dawson. I’m six-one and go a buck seventy soaking wet. See for yoursel
f.” He fumbled through the glove box then held his license toward her. When she failed to move closer, he tossed it to her, wallet and all.

  She read his ID while keeping an eye on her surroundings. “What are you doing here, Mr. Dawson?”

  “I’m giving you a ride. Unless there’s somebody else who can come and get you.”

  “I have three older brothers. Three protective older brothers. Accomplished hunters, all of them.”

  “If you were going to call them, you would have by now.”

  In other words, she’d wasted her breath on the implied threat.

  “Riley has two brothers,” he said as if it had relevance to this conversation. “Half brothers, technically, one older, one younger. Pains in the ass, both of them. They come through for him when it counts, though.”

  A fat raindrop landed on her forehead while she was wondering why this stranger was sharing Riley’s personal information with her. Within seconds the sky opened up, just as Red O’Toole had predicted.

  Kipp got out of his vehicle and wrestled her suitcase from her. After tossing it into the back of his aging Land Rover, he said, “Riley has friends, too, who have his back. We’re worried about him.”

  She stood ten feet away in the pouring rain, uncertain what to do about Kipp Dawson and his offer.

  “Riley thinks his mother sent you,” he said, getting soaked, too. “I talked to Chloe a few minutes ago. She didn’t mention you.”

  Madeline could have blurted the truth, but if she told anyone the reason she was here, it had to be Riley. And she had no right to tell him unless he asked. What had she gotten herself into?

  “Maybe having a nurse around isn’t such a bad idea,” Kipp said.

  “Are you saying you think he needs a nurse?” she asked.

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m just offering you a ride to the motel because Riley asked me to. Do you want it or don’t you?”

  Kipp Dawson looked as rough and unkempt as his dented old Land Rover. He was probably right about weighing one-seventy. Men didn’t often lie about their weight. His hair appeared darker now that it was wet and his whisker stubble was too straggly to be a fashion statement. Beneath his exterior was a vein of something earnest.