Here Comes the Bride (17 page)

“A lovers’ quarrel?” Camille supplied.

Fiona shook her head. “No, not a quarrel.” She could use a friendly shoulder to cry
on right now—and Camille had become both friend and sister these past few days—but Fiona didn’t dare let her feelings show right now. She didn’t dare do so until she was back home and alone with her pain.

She raised her chin high and forced a courageous smile. “Nick and I, well, we decided things can’t work out for us.”

“
Fiona!
”

Fiona went on in spite of Camille’s protest. “It’s time for me to go home. I’ve abandoned my shop for far too long, as it is.” Elaine had told her her customers were being very understanding, when she had called, but she needed to be there. She needed the shop’s familiar warmth and security. “I—I’m leaving this afternoon, Camille.”

Camille studied her for a long moment, as if she couldn’t quite accept the reality of what was happening. “Mother and Walter will be disappointed,” she said. “They were ecstatic when you and Nick—”

“They were just ecstatic period,” Fiona pointed out. “They’re in love and they want the whole world to be.” And not everyone could be; she knew that.

Camille sighed. “I had my hopes, too, that things would work out for you and my bachelor cousin. I’d hoped there would be another wedding for me to come home for very soon.”

“Well, you were wrong.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Whether Nick knows it or not, he needs you. He needs to know that love, the kind of love he can have with you, exists. He’s buried himself in those horrid divorce cases for so long, it’s warped him to everything beautiful in the world. You’re what Nick needs, Fiona. You’re perfect for him.”

“No, not perfect, Camille. Someone perfect would know how to heal him. I—I don’t know how to do that.”

Camille reached out and wrapped her arms around Fiona in a sisterly embrace. “I’m going back to India because it’s what I want, what’s right for me. Are you sure you’re doing what’s right for you, Fiona?”

Fiona couldn’t answer. She swallowed a lump in her throat the size of a mountain.

Tossing the last item into her suitcase, Fiona glanced around the room to see if she’d left anything behind. Only her heart, she thought sadly.

She wouldn’t cry—she’d promised herself that.

She’d held back the tears with Camille. She’d held back the tears with Nick. He’d wanted to drive her to the airport, but she’d refused his offer. She wasn’t sure she could hold up to any more good-byes.

Camille was leaving today too. She’d be
taking the night flight to New York, then on to India. Fiona wished they’d had more time to spend together, more time to cement the new sisterly relationship between them.

She wished she could have learned more about the work Camille was doing abroad and about the passion and excitement she felt for that work. Camille seemed to know what she wanted—and Fiona envied her that strength of purpose. She was sure one day Camille would find someone to love, someone to share her nomadic life with.

Perhaps, in time, Nick would find someone, too, someone who could make him believe in a whole and complete love. It hurt to think of him in another woman’s arms. She squeezed her eyes shut to hold back the tears.

When she felt composed again, she picked up her bag, slung her purse strap over one shoulder, and started for the lobby—and a waiting cab.

“Taxi, lady?”

Nick stood beside the Porsche, smiling that smile she would always remember. For one wild moment her heart soared with the hope that he’d come to carry her off with him, but her head knew he’d merely changed his mind about letting her go to the airport alone.

Didn’t he realize he was only making things harder for them both? “I’m not sure I can afford your price,” she answered in truth.

She wasn’t sure she could afford the cost in emotion.

He studied her solemnly for a quiet moment, then he snatched up her luggage and made room for it in the trunk of the car.

“Nick, you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to take me to the airport. I’m a big girl now.”

“I know.”

She’d wanted him to know she’d be okay about this, she’d be okay about everything. Or perhaps she’d wanted to convince herself. Whatever, he didn’t owe her anything.

She’d gone into this brief relationship with her eyes wide open. And she had them open now. She retained no illusions about Nick—or about how difficult the weeks ahead would be without him.

They drove in silence for a few awkward miles. Fiona played with her purse strap and pretended a consuming interest in road signs.

Finally Nick turned to her. “Maybe you should stay a few days,” he said. “I mean, what if Walter and Auntie don’t hit it off? What if they don’t last out the honeymoon?”

A worry line creased his forehead. Fiona knew this man, knew the feel of his skin, the taste of his mouth, the glory of his hands on her, and she died a thousand times inside at the keen realization that she’d never experience him again.

“Nick, Winnie and Walter will make it through their honeymoon and, I daresay, twenty years of wedded bliss. You don’t have to worry about them.” If only he wanted her to stay for other reasons, if only he believed they, too, could be that happy together.

That thought occupied her mind until Nick had parked and they were inside the terminal. “You don’t have to go to the gate with me,” she said once she’d checked her luggage and gotten her boarding pass.

“I know.” Taking her arm, he led her toward the escalator.

They talked about phoning each other—concerning their relatives’ well-being, of course; they talked about the weather back in Boston, and didn’t she want a few snacks to take on the flight with her? But they didn’t talk about what was going on inside each of them at that moment. That would have been too painful.

Finally Fiona’s flight was called.

“Well, I guess this is it,” she said. She shouldered her purse and put out her hand. “Good-bye, Nick.”

But a handshake was far from good enough for Nick. He hauled her into his arms and kissed her hair, her cheek, then found her mouth, closing over it with the unmistakable taste of regret.

She soaked up the male heat of him one
last time. Her heart hammered until she thought it would splinter. An ache coupled with the pain of loss ripped through her, tearing at her insides. She loved this man, but love was not enough.

Blind with unshed tears, she tore herself away from him and escaped through the door and onto the jetway without a backward glance.

Nick frowned down at the contract he’d been reviewing for a client, then shoved the pages aside. He hadn’t concentrated on a word of it since
the party of the first part
. In fact, he hadn’t concentrated on much of anything in the past week and a half. Not since Fiona had gone back to Boston.

He’d turned down three major divorce cases because he was certain, in his present condition, he wouldn’t be able to do them justice. Was that really it? he wondered. Concern for his illustrious—and winning—track record?

Or was it that he no longer had the stomach for watching couples who’d once professed undying love tear each other apart in the courtroom.

Maybe what he needed was a rest from work. How long had it been since he’d taken a vacation? He couldn’t remember the last time.

The more he thought about it, the more the idea appealed to him. He leaned back in his desk chair and studied a wooden beam in the ceiling. Maybe he’d take a gambling junket to Nassau—or Atlantic City. A change of pace from Vegas.

He crossed one long leg over the other on the corner of his desk and wondered just how far Atlantic City was from Boston.

“Forget it, Killian,” he muttered aloud. “What you had with the lady is over. She won’t want to see you again.”

“Talking to yourself now?”

Nick jerked to an upright position as Jasmine strode unannounced, and definitely uninvited, into his office. She dropped a stack of papers beside the rest of his unfinished work on the desk. “I wasn’t talking to myself. I was … thinking out loud.”

Jas merely raised an eyebrow at that. “Same difference.”

He offered her a scowl, then snapped up the contract he’d been reading earlier and pretended busy interest.

“Is that thing written in Sanskrit or something?” She folded her arms in front of her and pursed her lips like a schoolteacher. “You were on that same page when I went to lunch—
over an hour ago
.”

Nick pushed back from his desk, plotting which way of firing her he’d enjoy best. “Is
there some point you want to make or did you just come in here to harass me?”

She sat down opposite him, crossed one trim leg over the other, and smiled, quite pleased with herself. “What point could I possibly have to make? Just because you’ve been working at a pace a retarded snail could top ever since Fiona Ames blew this town …”

Maybe he could still get Jas her old job back, he thought crossly. “The pace I work at has nothing to do with Fiona.” Just saying her name hurt like hell. Thinking about her nearly killed him. And the dreams he had—“Isn’t there something you have to do at that desk of yours?”

“Not since the boss went into a major funk over the only woman who’s mattered to him since I can’t remember when,” she retorted in that know-it-all, superior tone he’d rather not endure.

“Who made you an authority on the females in my life, may I ask?” Jas was hitting too close to a nerve. Hell, she was doing a tap dance on it with spiked shoes, but he’d be damned if he’d admit it to her.

“I’m just being a good little secretary.” She stood up, riffled through the stack of papers she’d brought him, then shoved a neatly printed brochure in front of him. “Something you might want to attend,” she said, tapping it mysteriously with the tip of one red nail.

Nick frowned and picked up the pamphlet. A legal seminar? He avoided them like the plague. He started to chuck it into his favorite circular file, then caught sight of the seminar’s location—Boston, Massachusetts.

He studied the thing for one long, prurient moment, then shoved it into the wastebasket. If he wanted to see Fiona, he wouldn’t hide behind a flimsy excuse like a seminar. He started to tell Jas just that, but when he glanced up, she was sashaying neatly out the door, apparently satisfied with her dirty work.

July had sweltered its way into Boston. Mornings were the only respite Fiona had from the heat—and they were short-lived. This accounted for her cross-patch humor, she told herself, determined to believe it. But each night she recognized it for the lie that it was.

At night she tossed and turned in her big, empty antique four-poster and missed Nick with a hunger she couldn’t deny. Her memory betrayed her with its keen sense of detail, its sharp particulars of the silvery nights she’d had with Nick, the glorious days.

It had all felt so right at the time, but that sense of rightness had blinded her to the future—and the fact that there’d never be one with Nick.

She knew full well how he felt about love, about marriage. Nick had been perfectly honest about that.

It hurt to think of him, to remember his touch, his kiss, but still she couldn’t summon up regret for the time she’d spent in his arms. What they’d shared had been special—even if Nick didn’t realize it.

Time would ease her pain, make her memories of him more bearable. Time etched a patina on the antiques she sold in her shop, and time would etch a patina on her love for Nick too. One day she’d place that love on a shelf, cherished and beautiful, but relegated to the past.

One day it wouldn’t hurt anymore.

Her hands dusty, she unpacked another new treasure she’d bought today at an auction in the country, carefully lifting it from its bed of protective newspapers. It was an old tarnished brass kaleidoscope, its antique stand broken, but it still worked. She raised it to the light and carefully rotated the cylinder, awed at the brilliant bursts of colors that emerged in front of her eyes.

Finally she set the piece aside and jotted it down on her inventory list. After adding the price she’d paid for it, she reached for the next item. But before she could unearth it, the bell over the shop door tinkled merrily. Glancing up, she saw Elaine from the photography shop next door breeze inside.

“The postman left your mail at my place while you were out antiquing this morning,”
she sang out. She threaded her way along the crowded, narrow aisle to the back.

“Thanks, Elaine.” Fiona reached for it, but Elaine held it aloft, just out of reach.

“Not so fast,” she said with a wide grin. “Who’s Nick?”

“Nick?” Fiona’s heart did a fast somersault. Had Nick written?

She hadn’t heard from him since she’d been home. Several times she’d been tempted to call him—to see if he’d had any news of the delinquent honeymooners—but each time she’d thought better of it.

Hearing his voice would cause her fresh pain. She had to wait until she was stronger—until it would no longer hurt.

When Elaine began to read the postcard in her hand, Fiona realized it wasn’t from Nick, but from her father and Winnie—
about
Nick.

Her heart sank as Elaine read aloud:

Elaine raised her head from the card, her eyes shining with a speculative gleam. “I repeat my question. Who’s Nick?”

Fiona dropped into an old Windsor chair she intended to refinish and let out a pent-up breath. Elaine was her closest friend in Boston—but she wasn’t sure she could share the deepest part of her heart right now.

He wasn’t needed.

Nick nursed the last of his scotch, then picked up the postcard he’d gotten from Auntie and read it through again.

She and Walter were happy. There was a glow to her words he’d have to have been blind to miss. She didn’t need Nick to race to her rescue. The old sedan had even held up. Walter had wheeled it through the mountains at Tahoe without any trouble.