Wedding Party by Patricia McLinn

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Michael Dickinson agreed to be best man at his friend Paul's wedding, though it was election season and he had work to do. Tris Donlin, Paul's cousin and Michael's long-time friend, was going to be a bridesmaid. Was this Michael's opportunity to finally make Tris understand how right he was for her? Contemporary Romance by Patricia McLinn; originally published by Silhouette Special Edition

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Michael Dickinson continued efficiently sorting his mail despite the telephone tucked between his ear and shoulder. His calm, assured voice carried into the receiver over the noise of two dozen people pursuing three dozen tasks around him. As he spoke, he dropped envelopes, postcards, fliers and magazines into separate piles--discard, read immediately, pass on to someone else, read in that distant someday when he had time.

Another pile held one envelope. Addressed in a nearly illegible masculine hand, it had been among the mail he'd picked up from home when he returned to Springfield this morning after another whirlwind sweep through Illinois.

"I understand your concern for the party," he said into the telephone. He listened a moment, then answered with no betraying inflection of dryness. "Yes, of course, and your concern for the candidate, too. We all want Joan to win the election. If there is a perception among the voters that she tilts at windmills, you're right to say that could hurt her candidacy. It's my job to ensure they don't have that misperception." As Michael spoke, his eyes rested on the single envelope.

"Yes, I will mention that to the candidate. Thank you. I'll let you know. Goodbye."

He hung up and reached for the envelope. Without making any move to open it, he turned it over in his hands.

Paul never wrote. Not even at Christmas. The phone was invented for a man like Paul Monroe. Michael suspected that if Bette hadn't insisted, the formal wedding invitation he'd received two weeks ago would instead have been delivered in the same manner as the request to be in the wedding party: "Hey, Michael, we'regetting married. Why don't you leave your sleazy politics for a while and come join Bette and me? I want you to be best man. Bette suggested co-groom, but I told her that'd be a little kinky for a straight arrow like you."

Michael had heard Bette affectionately admonishing her fiancé in the background. He knew Paul well enough to recognize the invitation as a way to tease Bette, tease him and mask the sentimentality of the request, all at once. He'd been touched. And honored. And he'd said yes. So it was hard to imagine what Paul could be writing about now.

If he had been a cynic, he might have wondered if Paul Monroe had decided he'd prefer Grady Roberts as his best man, since Grady was well on his way to making millions, while Michael was only chief aide-de-camp for long-shot United States Senate candidate Joan Bradon. But Michael wasn't a cynic--he had that on the authority of Joan Bradon, who had overcome plenty of cynics in her fifty-odd years. What he was, said Joan with her usual precision, was a skeptic. "A cynic presumes the worst. A skeptic suspends judgment until the proof's in," she'd told him once. "And since you're never easy to persuade, you're our resident devil's advocate, finding the holes in time to plug them before we face the light of public scrutiny."

Michael accepted her label, but for his own reasons. A cynic would remember too many weddings, ceremonies whose memories outlasted the love they were supposed to celebrate, and say this one would be no different. A skeptic could look at Paul and Bette and believe there was a chance it could be different.

Before Paul's call, if he'd had cause to think about it, Michael probably would have assumed Grady would be best man. After all, Paul and Grady went back to grade school. Michael was the latecomer in the group. He'd met them in the first hour of their first day of college.

Without ever saying much, he and Paul had seemed to understand each other from the start. Grady ... well, Grady was Grady. But for all Grady's astounding good looks, easy charm and moneyed background, Michael had envied him only one thing. And he'd buried that resentment so long ago and so deep he didn't think even Paul had gotten more than an inkling of it. Certainly Grady hadn't.

Michael looked again at the return address sprawled haphazardly in the corner of the envelope and shook his head at his own hesitation. Ripping open the envelope, he skimmed the letter with the same quick comprehension he used to attack press releases, position statements and news reports. He understood it all with his first glance through. Still, he read it a second time.

A week. All of them together again for a week. The way it had been back at college, with the addition of Bette.

No, not the way It had been at college. That was romantic foolishness. There was no such thing as recapturing the past. Or altering it. That was all over with.

A week.

Since Paul owned his own business--appraising collectibles--he could clear his calendar for a week before the wedding as well as the two honeymoon weeks after. And he wrote that he'd talked Bette into turning over her temp agency to her assistant for the extra time.

But how could Michael consider taking a week off in

August with the election coming up in November? A

weekend to be best man at a friend's wedding, yes. But a week? How could he take that much time?

But he knew he would. Because Paul had offered a temptation Michael wouldn't pass up.

Tris.

"Aha! I thought so!"

Leslie Craig's triumphant tone gave Tris an irrational rush of guilt. Her co-worker and friend made it sound as if Tris Donlin had just confirmed her worst suspicions. In a way, maybe she had. But really, being at the office first thing in the morning was nothing to feel guilty about. Her flight had arrived at Dulles Airport so early that she'd even gotten to her downtown Washington, D.C. office before peak rush hour.

"It's good to see you, too," said Tris, her fingers stilling in midsentence on the keyboard. She had been composing a memo on the conference, since there were a couple of points she wanted the staff to consider over the weekend. Even if they didn't give it conscious thought, they'd come in Monday with ideas.

"Yeah? Well, it's not good to see you. You look like death."

"Thanks!" Tris tried for outraged sarcasm, but the chuckle behind it ruined the effect. Leslie never failed to make her laugh. Even when she didn't want to laugh, something about the blunt statements delivered with a slight Southern drawl appealed to her.

"Couldn't expect any different after taking the red-eye from the West Coast, could you? That trip could make next year's Junior Miss look like a hag. So go home and get some sleep, like you're supposed to."

Leslie was thirty-six to Tris's twenty-nine, and the most direct, most sophisticated mother hen Tris knew. "I will. I had just a couple things I wanted to do."

"A couple things you wanted to do--a couple things that'll take you all day and a good part of the night. Just because you were named after some indestructible, he-man football player--"

"Baseball," Tris corrected automatically; she'd had to explain this often enough. "Tris Speaker. Center fielder for the Indians in the twenties."

Leslie waved off the distinction and kept on talking. "--doesn't mean you have to be some superman. Good heavens, woman, first you spend three days in Cincinnati researching that facility for the homeless, and then go straight to a week of twenty-four-hour days at that wretched conference in L.A. Give yourself a break."

"I will. Honest. Just leave me alone awhile so I can get this done." A little tiredness wasn't too high a price to pay for what she'd found out. The Cincinnati project had fired her imagination, and the conference had produced solid proposals for how the historic preservation association she worked for could encourage more such projects. What could be better than turning endangered buildings into shelter for those who had none?

Leslie Craig consulted her gold-braceleted wristwatch. "You have forty-five minutes before I come back to turn you into a pumpkin. And that time includes a few minutes to check your messages."

Tris flipped through the pink slips she'd been handed, noting that two men she occasionally dated had called. She wouldn't mind catching a movie or going to a play this weekend with either Brad or Dave--after she finished this memo and got some rest.

"And read your mail," Leslie continued, plopping a stack of envelopes on Tris's desk before heading out the door. "I'll be back in forty-five."

Tris had already checked the basket that held her business mail, so this stack must have been culled from the deliveries to her house, which Leslie had been looking after for her. Since her house was five blocks one side of the subway stop and Leslie's apartment three blocks the other way, they exchanged house-checking duties when one traveled, as well as sharing the commute to work. It was just like Leslie, first, to know that she would appear at the office before going home and, second, to choose the most interesting of her week's mail to deliver to her.

She glanced at the envelopes splayed on her desk, but delayed opening them. First, she'd finish her report on the conference. They had to come up with ways to find funding for these projects. Somehow.

When Leslie returned in exactly forty-five minutes, Tris had opened a letter from her mother and another from her sister. She held a third letter open in her hand, almost as if she were still reading it. But she was staring out the window, past its narrow-slatted blinds to something no one else would have recognized even if they'd seen it.

"Bad news?"

"What?" Tris refocused, looking at the paper in her right hand as if she had no idea how it had come to be there. "No. Not bad news."

"Good news, then."

"I--I don't know. Not exactly either."

Leslie's thin eyebrows arched dramatically. "That sounds fascinating. Tell Leslie all." She propped herself on the edge of Tris's desk and waited expectantly.

"It's just a letter from my cousin. Paul."

"The one getting married in August. And you're in the wedding, right?"

"Yes. He says he and Bette have arranged to take time off from their businesses, and he wants me to come and spend the whole week before the wedding."

"I bet the bride loves that idea."

"Actually, Bette probably does. She's not the type to get too uptight--probably because she'll have everything done a month ahead of time. She grew up in the area, but her parents retired down to Arizona a few years ago, so I'd imagine she and Aunt Nancy are doing most of the arranging, and I can guarantee between the two of them they'll have every detail organized way ahead of schedule. Besides, Paul says it's the only wedding present he's asked for."

"Emotional blackmail." Leslie nodded. "I like his style."

Tris grinned halfheartedly. "He says Aunt Nancy and Uncle James are looking forward to having us all stay at the house. And he has all sorts of plans of things to do together. All of us. Ball games, sailing, parties."

"Sounds like fun," said Leslie without much conviction. Then she straightened. "What do you mean, 'all of us'?"

"Paul and Bette, his fiancée. And ... um ... some of the rest of the wedding party."

"Some of the wedding party?"

"Bette's brother's in the wedding and he can't get away until the weekend, and neither can one of Bette's childhood friends who's the other bridesmaid, but the maid of honor is Paul's sister, Judi, and I'm sure she'll be there along with, urn, the other guys in the wedding."

"Ah-ha! Meaning Buddy Michael and Gorgeous Grady."

"I wish you wouldn't call him that." They both knew Tris's protest was aimed at the description of Grady Roberts, not Michael Dickinson.

Leslie ignored her protest. "Sounds great to me. It's about time you showed Gorgeous Grady that little Tris has grown up. A week ought to be plenty of time."

Leslie had first heard of her college friends five years ago when, over a series of after-work dinners, they'd exchanged life stories and forged a friendship. Sometimes Tris thought that in those long sessions she'd talked herself through post-divorce trauma and right into maturity. And Leslie had listened. If she'd somehow also directed the conversations and the growth--and knowing her as Tris now did, she suspected Leslie definitely had directed--it had been very discreet and very deft.

Tris laughed, partly in genuine amusement, partly in exasperation. "Leslie, I don't know how many times I've told you that I'm long past my infatuation with Grady Roberts. I was a freshman in college and--"

"And Juliet was thirteen when she went gaga over Romeo."

"It's hardly the same thing."

"No," Leslie agreed with abrupt and uncharacteristic seriousness. "I've often thought that if Juliet had stuck it out a little longer she would have seen that Romeo really wasn't the right man for her. But she never had a chance to grow out of it, to find out if she'd really found love, or only infatuation. It's kind of the same thing for you, Tins. Grady Roberts was a major college crush that you've never had a chance to check against adult reality."

Tris said nothing. What could she say? Leslie was right. As a freshman in college she had fallen for Grady Roberts with the depth and breadth of her seventeen-year-old soul. But Grady--a handsome, popular senior and part of the triumvirate, with her cousin Paul and Michael Dickinson, that had adopted her as a little sister--had never seen her as anything but a kid.

The infatuation belonged to the distant past. It had waned even before she left school, and certainly had been over before her brief, ill-considered marriage had knocked the inclination toward infatuations out of her for good.

But some questions about Grady Roberts had lingered. What would it be like to meet him now, now that the four-year age difference had narrowed to a blink of experience rather than a gulf of worldliness? Would there be any spark if they met now? Not the infatuation of twelve years ago, but perhaps something different. Maybe Leslie had a point. Maybe it was time to get the questions answered.

And it would be wonderful to spend time with Paul and Bette before their wedding.

And to see Michael, of course.