Loe raamatut: «Hometown Wedding»

Chapter One

He was standing next to the water fountain, one bluejeaned hip cocked outward as his dark-eyed gaze swept the bustling Salt Lake City air terminal. One hand dangled a dusty Stetson. The other clutched a dog-eared paperback. His long fingers toyed with the book, crushing it, curling it, ruffling its edges in restless impatience.

Eden Harper saw him before he saw her. She had come barreling out of the jetway, intent on making a swift dash across the concourse to the ladies’ room, but the sight of him stopped her like a collision with a brick wall.

Travis Conroy.

And he was directly in her path.

Clutching her heavy briefcase, Eden hesitated. She could feel her veneer of Manhattan-bred confidence wilting like a plucked begonia in the midsummer sun. Even after sixteen years, the prospect of bumping into him was enough to make her want to crawl back onto the plane and fly wherever it would take her.

She might have been tempted to do just that. Except that for the moment, her feet seemed to be stuck in cement.

She stood gaping like a schoolgirl, her eyes taking in the lanky grace of his six-foot-two-inch height, the crisp, coffee brown curls, the face she had once giddily compared to a sculpted Rodin bronze.

He was older than she remembered—leaner and sharper, the creases sun-bronzed into permanence at the corners of his eyes. But aside from that he looked the same as he had in high school; and as the old humiliation burned through the locked doors of her memory, Eden realized that time had done nothing to heal its caustic sting.

Why Travis Conroy of all people? Why here? Why now?

Even after all these years, he was the last person she ever wanted to see again.

Gathering her wits, Eden turned to slip off in another direction. But no, it was too late. He had spotted her. His eyes flickered in recognition. The hand holding the paperback dropped to his side as the old awkwardness crept over them both.

There was no way out.

Forcing herself to take the offensive, she strode toward him. “Hello!” she exclaimed with a brazen grin. “This is quite a surprise!”

“Yes, it is.” His smile was forced, revealing only a flicker of the dimples that had sent girls into rapturous twitters. “Edna, isn’t it? Edna Rae Harper?”

As if he could forget.

“It’s Eden,” she said, trying not to squirm as his eyes took in her beige linen pantsuit and her smartly coiffed pageboy, which had grown considerably blonder with the years. “I, uh, had my name legally changed after I left Monroe.”

“Eden.” He chewed the name experimentally, like someone tasting sushi for the first time. “I don’t recall seeing you down there in quite a while.” His voice was a stranger’s, cool and formal. But then, what else could she expect? Sixteen years ago, her little faux pas had been the scandal of South Sevier High School, and Travis Conroy had been its innocent victim. He was probably reliving it right now and grinding his teeth.

“I don’t make it home very often,” she said, shifting her emotions into neutral. “New York’s a long way, even to fly. But my mother’s having surgery in a couple of days. I wanted to be with her and to stick around the house until she’s on her feet.”

“That shouldn’t take long. Your mother’s a tough lady.” He had turned and begun to walk at an ambling pace up the concourse. Feeling awkward and uncertain, Eden moved along beside him. The awful possibility flashed through her mind that somehow he’d been sent here to pick her up—a harebrained idea if ever there was one. The last thing she needed was three hours alone in a vehicle with a man whose presence was a scathing reminder of the worst day of her life.

Whatever he was doing here, she would ride the bus as she’d originally planned. For that matter, she would hike the full 180 miles in her high-heeled sling pumps before she would-”So, how are you getting home?” he asked cautiously.

One glance at his face confirmed Eden’s suspicion that he’d only inquired out of politeness. “The bus,” she said. “It’s all arranged.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m quite serious. Mom isn’t up to driving this far to meet my plane, and I can’t rent a car because there’s no place down there to return it. I’ll be taking a cab to the bus depot, and from there—”

“Look,” he cut in, his brown eyes crackling with impatience. “The bus doesn’t even leave Salt Lake till seven or eight, and it stops at every two-bit town on the road. You won’t get home till after midnight. Why don’t you—”

“As I said, it’s all arranged.” Eden turned away with a smile of breezy dismissal and veered for a second set of rest rooms that lay just across the concourse. “Bye,” she said, flinging him a last backward glance. “Nice seeing you again.”

Bravado still intact, she swung through the rest-room door and collapsed against the wall. Her heart drummed a wild tattoo against her ribs as the fiery blush she’d always hated crept into her cheeks.

This was ridiculous, Eden lectured herself. She was almost thirty years old, and she’d spent the past eight years surviving the jungle world of New York publishing. To be thrown out of kilter by the memory of a silly high-school crush…

But why work herself into a froth? Travis Conroy’s reasons for being at the airport obviously had nothing to do with her. All she needed to do was make herself scarce for the next few minutes. By the time she reappeared on the concourse, he was bound to be gone.

The long flight had given her a headache. Fumbling in her purse for aspirin, she dumped two tablets into her hand and washed them down with a swallow of tap water. Her reflection flashed in the mirror as she stepped away from the sink, triggering a brief pause to study what Travis Conroy. had seen.

The fluorescent tubes glared down on light hazel eyes, artfully lined and shadowed, framed by a square-jawed face and crowned by a sleek, golden cap of chin-length hair. Eden had done everything possible to change her image since high school, but somehow it wasn’t enough. She had never quite broken clear of dateless, bookish Edna Rae Harper, whose romantic fantasies had colored the drabness of her life. She’d seen proof of that today when the object of those fantasies had recognized her on sight.

She leaned closer, drawn by a tiny dark mascara smudge at the corner of her left eye. Only after she’d dabbed it away with a moistened fingertip did Eden notice something else reflected in the glass—the line of urinals on the opposite wall.

For the space of a heartbeat she stood frozen, unable to believe what she’d done. Then a flush echoed from inside one of the stalls. The sound catapulted Eden into a panic. Snatching up her briefcase, she bolted out of the men’s room like a spooked jackrabbit, high heels skittering on the polished tile.

Travis Conroy was standing exactly where she had left him. He didn’t say a word—but then, he didn’t have to. The subtly condescending quirk of one black eyebrow told her exactly what he was thinking.

She plumbed her wits for a clever comment that would put him in his place. Coming up with nothing, she shot him a look of sheer malevolence, executed an abrupt left face and stalked indignantly into the women’s rest room.

Slamming into a stall, she pressed quivering hands to her hot face. Now she knew why she didn’t come home more often. All she had to do was get off the plane! All she had to do was breathe the thin mountain air, and she turned into Edna Rae again—bashful, clumsy, humiliating herself at every turn!

By the time she’d finished in the stall and washed her hands, Eden had calmed down some. She had no business behaving like an adolescent, she chastised herself. She was all grown-up now. It was time she started acting that way.

Monroe, Utah, was a small town, and she planned to be there for nearly a month. As matters stood, she had a choice. She could settle things with Travis Conroy here and now, or she could repeat the same idiotic performance every time they ran into each other. It was up to her to do the intelligent thing.

Facing herself in the mirror, Eden freshened her lipstick, smoothed her hair and squared her shoulders. She would handle this like a pro, she assured herself. She would be cool, detached and assertive. Travis Conroy was nothing but a small-town nobody. She had absolutely no reason to feel intimidated by him.

All the same, as she walked out of the rest room, Eden’s heart danced a skittish little tango of fear. What she was about to do would be as difficult as anything she’d ever done in her life.

Travis lowered his lanky frame onto a Naugahyde settee, hooked his Stetson over one angled leg and flipped open the paperback. The book was a fast-paced thriller by one of his favorite authors, but today, for some reason, he couldn’t keep his mind on the plot.

Turning a page, he glanced impatiently at his watch. Nicole’s flight from L.A. wouldn’t be in for fifteen or twenty minutes. If he could get through the next couple of chapters…

Oh, what the hell!

The book dropped to his lap as he surrendered to the angst he’d held in check since his first glimpse of the woman who called herself Eden Harper.

It was over, Travis reminded himself. He’d had sixteen years to put the whole silly incident behind him. By any measure, that was time enough.

So why were his emotions churning like the agitator in an old-fashioned Maytag?

This was crazy.

Checking his watch again, Travis shifted his buttocks against the sagging upholstery and tried to concentrate on his reading. But it was no good. The past was pushing into his thoughts, crowding out his efforts to forget.

And right there on the front line was Edna Rae Harper.

Travis slumped in his seat, remembering.

It had been his senior year—the year he’d captained the team that won its second straight Class A basketball championship. Edna Rae had been a sophomore then, younger than her classmates because she’d been double-promoted back in grade school.

Not that Travis had cared one way or the other. With her frumpy clothes, her horn-rimmed glasses and her way of staring at the floor when she walked down the halls, Edna Rae Harper hadn’t exactly been his dream girl—or anybody else’s, for that matter.

Travis had never given her a second glance. In fact, he’d scarcely been aware she existed, until that May afternoon when the year-end edition of the school paper was passed out.

Between the folds of each paper, someone had slipped a photocopied letter—a letter penned in a hand as delicate and feminine as the curl of a morning-glory vine.

Oh, Travis, my darling, when will we be together again? How long must I burn like this, tossing in my bed, feeling your hands on my pulsing breasts, feeling the velvet warmth of your skin and the sweet hot wine of your lips? How long before I hear your voice murmuring in my ear, I love you, Edna Rae, I love—

”Hello again.”

Eden’s breathy contralto, coming from directly behind him, jolted Travis back to the present. He swiveled in his seat to look at her, his eyes taking in the clean square planes of her face, the taffy gold mass of her hair and the chic drape of the expensive pantsuit on her slender frame. For whatever it was worth, drab little Edna Rae had grown up to be a stunner.

“Uh, hello,” he replied, caught off guard. After the way she’d gone dashing off, the last thing he’d expected was to have her show up again.

She came around the back of the settee, eyes downcast, cheeks becomingly flushed. Travis watched her in silence, liking her walk, liking, in spite of everything, the catlike way she lowered herself onto the edge of the chair that faced him across the low table. The image of her, bolting crimson-faced out of the men’s room, stole into his mind, coaxing his mouth into a bemused smile.

“I came to apologize,” she said.

In the tick of silence that followed, Travis was aware of a jet screaming down the runway outside the window.

“Apologize? For what?” he forced himself to ask.

“For today. For this whole silly mess. I was hiding out in the rest room when I realized I was being a defensive fool, and that none of what I was feeling was your fault. I’m sorry for that.”

“There’s no need to be sorry about anything.” He mouthed the words, wondering where all this was leading. A typical woman would not apologize unless she had some agenda in mind. But then, there’d never been anything typical about Edna Rae Harper.

She stared awkwardly at her hands, looking, at that instant, more like the shy Edna Rae than the polished Eden. “I realized something else, too. In the sixteen years since that awful day at school, I’ve never told you how sorry I was for the embarrassment I caused you.”

“I…never expected you to.” Travis forced himself to meet her eyes, wishing she’d chosen to talk about something else. His classmates had ribbed him mercilessly about that damn fool letter, but at least most of them had realized he was innocent. Not so the townspeople. By the time the story had circulated through the little community, Travis’s reputation had blackened to the hue of coal tar.

“You didn’t exactly have it easy yourself, did you?” he asked, shifting the burden of conversation back to her.

Eden’s gaze flickered to her lap again. She hadn’t come back to school for the rest of the year, Travis recalled. Her mother had claimed she was sick and received permission for the humiliated girl to complete her last two weeks of schoolwork by correspondence.

“That ridiculous letter was private,” she said, staring down at her manicured hands with their pale peach nails. “I never meant anyone to see it, especially you.”

“I know that,” Travis feigned a detachment he did not feel. “How were you to know that Howie Segmiller would find the letter in your looseleaf and make copies for the whole school?”

A shudder passed through Eden’s slim controlled body. “I…I’m sorry. I was so wrapped up in my own problems that I couldn’t even think about yours. I can only imagine how much difficulty that letter must have caused you.”

Travis’s restless fingers curled the paperback into a thick roll. He’d been going steady with Cheryl McKinley, the prettiest girl in the junior class, he recalled. Three days after the letter incident, Cheryl had informed him that her parents wouldn’t let her date him anymore.

Cheryl had married a beet farmer from Sigurd and had five kids now. He had gone off to the University of Utah and met Diane.

“It’s over, Eden,” he said with a shrug. “Water under the bridge, as they say. We’re both different people now.”

“Yes…I suppose we are.” She managed a strained smile. “Whatever happened to Howie Segmiller, anyway?”

“Last time I spoke with his mother, he was running for city council in Pioche, Nevada.”

“I was hoping to hear he was doing time at Point of the Mountain!” She managed a husky little laugh—fragile but real. Travis found himself wanting to hear it again.

“Howie Segmiller a jailbird?” He shook his head, chuckling. “Oh, Howie was no angel, I’ll grant you. But he was too smart to get more than a hand slap. Perfect political material!”

Eden did laugh then, a surprisingly delicious sound, as sexy as the rustle of silk against a bare thigh. For a few seconds Travis allowed himself to bask in it, savoring the naughty little tickle it gave him.

What if he was to push the idea of giving her a ride home? He’d brought up the subject out of politeness the first time and had shrugged off her refusal with a sense of relief. But what harm would it do? The long bus trip south, with its endless string of ten-minute stops, was an ordeal nobody deserved. He could—

Forget it!

This was Edna Rae Harper, he reminded himself. He had spent years undoing the damage her dumb teenage fantasy had caused.

Some things were too hard won to risk.

Travis glanced at his watch again as a crowd of passengers spilled out of a gate and onto the concourse. Across from him, Eden stirred and reached for her briefcase.

“It’s time I was going,” she said. “My luggage will be coming in, and I can see that you’re waiting for someone.”

“I’m waiting for my daughter. But she’s not due in for a few minutes yet.” Travis realized he’d just issued an invitation for Eden to stick around. Strangely enough, he was enjoying her company more than he’d expected.

“Your daughter?” The sunlight slanted soft gold on her face as she leaned toward him. “So you’ve got a little girl!” she exclaimed with an animation that made Travis wince.

“That’s right. But Nicole’s not so little anymore. She turned fourteen last month.”

“Fourteen.” Eden hesitated, then slowly released her grip on the handle of her briefcase. “Where’s she flying from?”

“California. She lives there with her mother and stepfather. I get her every summer.” Travis’s voice carried an edge. Nine years was plenty of time to get over Diane. But losing Nicole—that part had never stopped hurting.

Well, the hurt was about to ease, he reminded himself. A few minutes from now, the plane would be touching down on the tarmac, and Nicole would be back in his life. His little pal. His hiking, camping, fishing and riding partner for the rest of the summer. It would be wonderful to feel like a father again.

Travis watched the flight of a sea gull as it skimmed past the window and veered out over the runway. His restless fingers ruffled the pages of the paperback in his lap.

Soon, he thought. Soon.

And in the meantime, there was the intriguing Miss Harper.

Eden uncrossed her legs and smoothed out a crease in her linen slacks. Now would be the smart time to get up and leave, she admonished herself. Travis’s daughter would be arriving any minute. Seeing her father with a strange woman could give the young girl a painfully wrong impression.

But Travis seemed in no hurry to have her go. He was leaning back in his seat, regarding her lazily. Was he resentful, amused or merely bored? Eden could read no clue in the smoky depths of his narrowed eyes.

She fiddled with her briefcase, her pulse clunking like a bent bicycle wheel as she grappled with this new set of realities.

Travis, divorced, with a fourteen-year-old daughter.

Travis, sitting across from her as if they had never been anything but friends.

Her restless gaze dropped to the big, sun-bronzed hand that lay across the open paperback, and she pondered his lack of wedding ring. It was impossible to believe Travis Conroy could be unattached for long. He’d had females chasing him since he was in kindergarten. All he had to do was take his pick.

Oh, what was she doing here, thinking inanities and blushing like a moron? She had to get out of here before she made a complete fool of herself.

“So tell me what you do in New York,” he said, making a stab at conversation.

“Me?” Eden blinked her mind back into focus. “Oh…I’ve just been promoted to senior editor at Parnell Books. I’ve got my eye on my boss’s job when he retires next year—that is, if some other publishing house doesn’t lure me away first.”

A smile flickered enticingly around his eyes. “So you’re an editor. I always thought you had the brains to make something of yourself.”

“Really?” The compliment had caught Eden off guard. Her heart sank as she felt the all-too-familiar flush of color creep up her throat to flood her cheeks. She groped for something to fill the excruciating silence.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen your daughter?” she asked lamely.

“Too long.” He shifted his shoulders with a sigh. “I was supposed to have her over the Christmas holidays, but she came down with chicken pox. Diane promised me spring vacation to make up the time, but then Nicole had a chance to go to Hawaii with her cousins. She was so damned excited about it. What could I say?”

“So you haven’t seen her since last fall?”

“Nope.” Travis stretched his long legs, crossing his worn cowboy boots at the ankles. “And I’m getting pretty anxious. She’s a special little lady. Gets good grades, plays the flute like an angel. And she likes camping and fishing almost as much as her old dad does. We’re going to have a great time this summer, just—”

He broke off as the PA blared, announcing an arrival at gate B-16. “Hey! That’s Nicole’s flight! Come on, I’ll introduce you!”

“I really don’t think…” Eden began. But he was already out of earshot, charging down the concourse toward the swarm of deplaning passengers.

Eden hesitated. Then, resolving not to follow him, she stood up, slung her heavy briefcase over one shoulder and strode in the opposite direction, toward the escalator that led down to the baggage-claim area. It was time for a fast exit. An extra couple of hours on a bus were nothing compared to what she could get herself into by sticking around.

Except…She paused, torn by curiosity. After the way Travis had rhapsodized about his little girl, it might be interesting to see what she looked like. It would be an intriguing challenge, Eden mused, to try to pick Travis’s daughter out of a crowd. Afterward, it would still be easy enough to slip away and catch a taxi for the Greyhound depot.

Impulsively she turned around and strolled back along the far side of the concourse to an unobtrusive spot that gave her a view of the gate. She could see Travis, pine-tall, straining forward as the passengers filed out of the jetway. Clearly he was still watching for his daughter.

Settling back against the wall, Eden began to play her game, assessing each female passenger who emerged through the gate. A young woman with a baby—no. A chic fiftyish matron in a designer suit—certainly not. A pubescent child-woman in sunglasses, skintight hip huggers and a formfitting crop top—hardly! A pretty, young—yes, of course! The studious-looking girl carrying a flute case, her chestnut curls tied back with a ribbon. No doubt about it. That was Nicole.

Eden glanced over at Travis. He was standing stock-still, looking as if he’d just been poleaxed.

“Nicole!” He rasped out the name as the young girl with the flute case passed him without a glance.

“Nicole, over here!”

A squeal of delight exploded from the nymphet in the skintight jeans.

“Daddy!” she warbled, hurling herself into Travis’s arms with a force that nearly bowled him over. “Oh, Daddy! You can’t imagine how much I’ve missed you!”