Free The Bride Wore Blue by Cindy Gerard Page A

definitive line between intimacy and necessity. It was a necessity to not court intimacy. It was a necessity to keep the conversation generic.
    “I still do.” He slouched lower on the sofa and stretched his long bare feet closer toward the warmth of the fire. “My business is there. Air cargo,” he added in anticipation of her next question.
    “Air cargo?”
    “Yup. And actually, Minneapolis is basically headquarters now. Hazzard Aire is flying out of a dozen different cities at last count.”
    She tilted her head. “So he’s a successful businessman.”
    He shrugged. “I’ve been lucky.”
    Maggie doubted that luck had much to do with it. Not in today’s competitive business world. “You just happened to be up here on vacation?”
    He smiled. “I’ve got competent people working for me so I leave the business in their hands and spend my summers up here.”
    Successful and smart, she concluded. Here was a man who was not going to let his life be consumed by corporate stress and an insatiable need to control the pulse of every aspect of his business. She should be so together, she thought ruefully, then reacted to the warmth in his eyes.
    “So the lake got in your blood, too,” she said with a speculative tilt of her head.
    “Oh, yeah,” he said, settling even lower on the couch and, if possible, stretching out a little longer as he propped his mug on his chest. He looked comfy and content and too, too appealing. “This place does that. There are memories here that never quite let go. And some traditions just refuse to die. My dad started bringing me to the lake when I was five years old. I’ve never spent a summer since without making some kind of an appearance. Even if it was only for a long weekend or two in those early days when I was getting the business off the ground—no pun intended.
    “You probably won’t believe this,” he added in a voice softened by self-deprecation, “but I never gave up hope that I’d find you up here again.”
    He turned his head lazily on the sofa cushion, his gaze seeking hers in the firelight. “I’ve never spent a summer like the one I spent chasing you.”
    Maggie thought back to that summer. That wonderful, special time in her life when Max and Esther Snyder had made her feel cared for and cherished and loved. It had been a rarity in her life that had seen her shuffled from one foster home to another, from group home to group home in Chicago’s inner city to a couple of ugly brushes with juvenile detention.
    “You know, I’ve looked for you up here every year since then, Stretch.”
    His voice broke through her musings. Deep, compelling, so tempting with its knowledge of the feisty, streetwise girl she’d been, so forbidden because of his lack of insight about the apprehensive, distrustful woman she’d become.
    “Somehow, I doubt that,” she said, determined to diffuse the recurring threat of intimacy his straightforward admission fostered.
    He didn’t dispute her. Not in words. It was his silence, instead, that compelled her to look at him. If it makes you feel better, doubt away, his intense blue eyes and indulgent shrug suggested, but I’m telling it straight.
    In her heart, she believed him. Her heart, it seemed, might just be leading her into trouble.
    “It wasn’t in the cards for me to come back,” she said, determined to find her way back to safer ground.
    “And yet you ended up here now.”
    How, Maggie? Why? Again, he didn’t put voice to his questions. She heard them just the same. And in that moment, when his gaze searched hers with more interest and concern than anyone had lavished on her in more years than she cared to remember, she almost weakened and told him about Rolfe and how he had nearly destroyed her.
    Almost. Her dependence might have slowed down her escape, but she hadn’t gotten this far being weak. And she wouldn’t get where she needed to go if she gave in to weakness now. Stubbornly, she sipped her hot chocolate,