A Gift of Love Page 7

  “Like what?” Joy asked.

  Corey thought madly for something to discuss that hadn’t already been covered. “Well, um… did you remember to apply for a marriage license?”

  “No, but the judge is going to bring it with him.”

  “I don’t think you can do that,” Corey said, wondering if Angela, in her preoccupation with making the wedding into a social extravaganza, had failed to handle the more mundane, less showy details. “I’ve been a bridesmaid in several weddings, and you always have to apply for a license in advance, then there’s a waiting period of a few days, oh – and blood tests.”

  Joy shivered at the mention of blood. “I get faint at the sight of needles, so I don’t have to have one. The judge who’s performing the wedding is a friend of Uncle Spence’s, and he has the right to decide. He said I didn’t need one.”

  “Yes, but what about the license and the waiting period?”

  Spencer spoke for the first time in fifteen minutes, and even though Corey was braced for the sound of his deep voice, it still did funny things to her heart. Nostalgia, she was learning, was not a feeble force. “It’s all taken care of,” he said. “There’s no waiting period in Rhode Island.”

  “I see,” Corey said, looking away from him the instant he finished speaking. Rather than try to think of another topic, she did what the others were doing and began to eat her dessert. Unfortunately, Joy wasn’t interested in her own slice of cheesecake; she was interested in Corey and Spence. “It’s funny,” she said, looking from Spence to Corey and back to Spence, “but I thought you two used to be good friends.”

  Spence was so annoyed with Corey for treating him like an insignificant nonentity that he abruptly decided to make his presence, and his feelings, known. “So did I,” he said curtly. He had slammed the conversational ball directly into Corey’s court, and with amused satisfaction, he noticed that the “gallery” of three all turned to her to see how she was going to return it.

  Corey lifter her head and met his challenging look. Mentally she reached across the table and flipped his plate into his lap, but all she did was smile and shrug. “We were.”

  “But you don’t seem to have anything to say to each other,” Joy said, looking baffled and a little disappointed. The gallery looked to the right at Spence, then to their left, at Corey, but Corey had cleverly eaten a bite of cheesecake, effectively forcing Spence to deal with that issue. “It was a long time ago,” he said flatly.”

  “Yes, but Uncle Spence, only two days ago you were upset because Corey delayed her flight for a day. I started thinking maybe there’d been a – like, relationship – between you two when you were younger.”

  Now, when he didn’t want Corey’s attention, he got it. In fact, he got everybody’s attention. Corey lifted her brows and gave him a serenely amused look that managed to convey that he deserved whatever embarrassment he suffered in a conversational confrontation that he had provoked. The other three spectators waited expectantly. “I was not upset because she delayed her flight,” Spence said. “I was upset because I thought she had canceled her trip.” They continued to look at him until he was prodded into a half lie. “Corey is an excellent photographer, and she was a part of the ‘deal’ your mother made with the magazine to cover your wedding. It was a legal, binding contract. Naturally, I expected Corey to honor her commitments.”

  Corey’s mouth dropped open at that enormous piece of hypocrisy, and her mother, who sensed Corey’s impulse to throw her cheesecake into Spence’s face, rushed to the rescue. “Corey always honors her commitments,” she told Joy with gentle firmness. “She has very strong feelings about that.”

  “Actually,” Corey added, heading off what she felt certain would be another probing question from Joy, “Spence was a friend of the whole family’s, not of mine in particular.”

  Corey was pleased with that explanation, and Joy looked satisfied, but unfortunately Corey’s grandmother was neither. “I don’t think that’s entirely true, Corey.”

  “Yes, Gram,” Corey said in a warning voice, “it is.”

  “Well, maybe it is, dear, but you were the only one in the house who wallpapered your bedroom with his pictures.”

  Corey wanted to kill her, but at the moment all she could do was argue on a technicality. “I did not wallpaper my room with his pictures.”

  “That room was a shrine to Spencer,” the elderly lady argued. “If you’d lit candles in there, people would have prayed. Goodness, you even had photograph albums filled with his pictures under your bed.”

  “Then what happened?” Joy asked.

  “Nothing happened,” Corey said, aiming a quelling look at her grandmother.

  “You mean, one day you just – just stopped caring about Uncle Spence and took down his pictures? Just like that?”

  Corey gave her a bright smile and nodded. “Just like that.”

  “I didn’t know it could happen that way,” Joy said somberly. “A person can just stop caring – for no reason?” For the first time since her questions had begun, Corey had the feeling that Joy wasn’t merely curious, she was troubled.

  Corey’s grandmother obviously noticed the same thing and attributed Joy’s anxiety to bridal nerves. Patting Joy’s clenched hand, she offered reassurance: “Corey had a very good reason, dear. One you will never have, I’m sure.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes. Spence broke her heart.”

  Mentally, Corey threw up her hands and yielded to the inevitable. Short of gagging her grandmother with a napkin and dragging her out of the booth by her ankles, Corey knew there was nothing to stop what was to come. Torn between misery and mirth, she waited for her dignity to be sacrificed on the altar of truth, for the sake of a nervous bride-to-be. Since she couldn’t prevent it, and since she knew Spence was also going to suffer some unpleasant moments, she leaned back, folded her arms, and decided to enjoy his discomfort. He looked completely flabbergasted, Corey noted with some amusement, his coffee cup arrested halfway to his mouth.

  “I did what?” he said irately, and actually looked to Corey as if he expected her to come to his rescue by denying it. In answer she lifted her brows and gave him an unsympathetic shrug.

  “You broke her heart,” Corey’s grandmother asserted.

  “And just exactly how did I do that?” he demanded.

  She gave him a deeply censorious look for failing to own up to his wrongdoing and retaliated by addressing her answer to his niece, instead. “When Corey was a senior in high school, your uncle asked to take her to the Christmas formal. I’ve never seen Corey so excited. She and Diana – Corey’s sister – shopped for weeks for just the right gown to dazzle him, and they finally found it. When the big day arrived, Corey spent most of it in her room primping. Then, just before Spence was due to arrive, she came downstairs. My, how she sparkled in that gown! She looked so beautiful and grown-up that her grandpa and I had tears in our eyes. We took pictures of course, but we saved some film so Corey would have pictures of Spence with her.”

  She paused for a sip of water, letting the suspense build, and Corey had the fleeting thought that her grandmother had a previously undiscovered flair for high drama. Poor Joy was on the edge of her seat, frowning at her uncle for whatever he’d done to spoil such a night. Spence was frowning at Corey’s grandmother, and Corey’s mother was frowning at her plate. Corey was beginning to enjoy herself.

  “Then what happened?” Joy implored.

  Corey’s grandmother carefully put her glass where it had been, then she lifted her sorrowful gaze to Joy. “Your uncle stood her up.”

  Joy turned a look of such disbelief, such accusation on Spence that Corey almost pitied him. “Uncle Spence,” she breathed, “you didn’t!”

  “He did,” Corey’s grandmother averred flatly. Spence opened his mouth to explain, but she wasn’t through with him. “It broke my heart the way Corey kept watching for him at the window. She could not believe he wasn’t coming.”

  “A
nd so you missed the formal?” Joy asked Corey, displaying the sort of appalled sympathy that only females are capable of feeling for each under those particular circumstances.

  “No, she did not,” Spence said.

  “Oh, yes she did.”

  “I think you’re mistaken about that and some other things,” Spence said, his jaw tight with annoyance at being made to look like an even bigger villain than he’d actually been. “I did stand Corey up that night,” he said, addressing his defense mostly to his wide-eyed niece. “I forgot I was supposed to take Corey to the dance, and I went to Aspen for the holidays instead of going home to Houston. It’s obvious now that I shouldn’t have let my grandmother handle my apology, but she was very upset and very insistent. I’m guilty of those two things, but the rest of the story you just heard” – he hesitated, searching for a respectful way to say Corey’s grandmother was completely wrong – “isn’t the way I remember it. Corey already had a date for the dance, and she already had her gown, but her date had to cancel at the last minute. The other boys she knew who would have taken her already had dates of their own, so Diana suggested I offer to take Corey, which I did. I was not a volunteer, I was a recruit, and the only reason Corey wanted to go with me was there wasn’t anyone else available – except for her very last choice, which was whoever she called in as a last-minute substitute for me. I,” he finished bluntly, “was her next-to-last choice.”

  Having had his say, he gave Corey’s grandmother a conciliatory smile and say, “My memory isn’t greatest either, but I have a very clear recollection of all that because I felt very badly when I realized I’d forgotten about the dance. I was very relieved when I was told that Corey went with someone else.”

  “You would have had a clearer recollection,” Gram informed him smugly, “if you had been there, as I was, when she went upstairs in that beautiful blue gown – the gown she bought had to be royal blue because that was your favorite color – and took it off. I don’t know what gave you the idea you weren’t her first choice, but I do know that if you had heard her crying herself to sleep, as I did that night, you would never forget the sound of it either. She was beyond heartbroken. It was pitiful!”

  Although some of what he’d heard didn’t make sense, as Spence stared at the elderly woman, he knew instinctively she was telling the truth. His niece knew it, too. Filled with shame, he looked at their accusing faces while his mind tormented him with images of his golden girl coming down the stairs in her royal blue gown and waiting for him at the windows. He thought of Corey crying herself to sleep in a bedroom filled with his pictures, and he felt physically ill. He didn’t know why she’d invented a story about needing a substitute date for the dance, but when he looked at Mrs. Foster, who was avoiding his gaze, one thing was obvious: everybody had known how Corey felt about him back then, but him.

  He looked at Corey, but she had leaned her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands, and he couldn’t see her face. His jaw tight with self-disgust, he glared at his water glass, thinking of the barb he’d thrown earlier about honoring commitments. No wonder she couldn’t stand the sight of him!

  Across the table, Corey looked between her fingers at the stricken expression of Spence’s face and then the satisfied smile on her grandmother’s, and the whole scenario was so beyond her worst imaginings that she had an uncontrollable impulse to… giggle.

  “Corey,” Spence said, lifting his eyes to her covered face, prepared to take whatever verbal flogging she wanted to give him. “I didn’t know. I didn’t realize-“ he began awkwardly, and to his horror, her shoulders started to shake. She was crying!

  “Corey, please don’t-!” he said desperately, afraid to reach for her and make things worse.

  Her shoulders shook harder.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in an aching voice. “I don’t know what else to say-“

  Her hands fell away, and Spence stared in disbelief at a pair of laughing blue eyes that were regarding him with amused sympathy, not animosity. “If I were you,” she advised in a laughter-choked voice, “I’d leave it right there and say good night. If Gram isn’t convinced you feel guilty enough, this could actually get worse.” Her transformation from cool stranger to his enchanting ally was so sudden, so undeserved, and so poignantly familiar that Spence felt a surge of pure tenderness pour through him.

  He slid out of the booth, gave Corey’s grandmother a wink, and held his hand out to Corey. “In that case, I’d rather do my groveling outside, and deprive her of the opportunity to witness it.”

  “I really ought to let you do it,” Corey said with that infectious smile he’d always loved, “but you’re already too late. I’d already forgiven and forgotten the whole thing. In fact, I shipped those old photograph albums here with some of my equipment and supplies. I intended to give them to you. So, as you can see, there’s no need to go outside or grovel.”

  Spence put his hand firmly beneath her elbow. “I insist,” he said with quiet implacability.

  Joy slid out of the booth behind Corey. “I guess I’d better spend some time with Mom and Peter and their guests.”

  Mrs. Foster waited until the three were well out of earshot. “Mother,” she said with a sigh, “I cannot believe you did that.”

  “I only said what was true, dear.”

  “Sometimes the truth hurts people.”

  “Truth is truth,” the elderly lady said smugly as she eased her way out of the booth. “And the truth is that Spencer deserved a thrashing for what he did that night, and Corey deserved an apology. I accomplished both tonight, and they’re both better off for it.”

  “If you’re hoping that they’ll fall in love now that you’ve cleared the way, you’re very wrong. Corey is the living example of ‘once burned, twice shy’. You’ve said that a hundred times about her.”

  “Well, that’s the truth, too.”

  “Do you think,” Mrs. Foster said, her mind shifting away from Corey and Spence and back to the basic problem, “you could just think about the truth, and not say it quite so often?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Mrs. Foster stepped aside so that her mother could precede her down the hall. “Why not?”

  “I’m seventy-one years old. I don’t think I should waste any more of my time on words that don’t mean anything. Besides, at my age, I’m allowed to be eccentric.”

  Ten

  LAUGHTER AND RAISED VOICES ECHOED FROM THE DINING room, where Angela’s dinner party was in full swing, but outside the night was soft and hushed as they strolled across the side lawn toward the water. Corey was amazed at how utterly relaxed and at peace she felt, walking at Spence’s side. She could not remember ever being near him when she’d felt anything but an excited, nerve-racking tension, and she vastly preferred this new feeling.

  She no longer had anything to hide or regret – her grandmother’s dissertation at dinner had exposed her girlhood infatuation, laid it bare for all to see, and in the process she’d revealed it to Corey for exactly what it was – a very sweet, adolescent infatuation with an unknowing victim, not the painfully embarrassing, neurotic obsession with a selfish monster she’d feared it was. Spence’s tanned face had actually paled while he listened to her grandmother’s eloquent description of what Corey had “suffered” at his hands.

  Before she had left for Newport, Corey had forced herself to view the whole awful debacle with philosophical indifference, but she was still hurt by it. Tonight, she had ended up laughing at herself in her grandmother’s dramatic tale, and then laughing at the “villian” and trying to rescue him from any more guilt than he was already being made to feel. Confession, she decided, was definitely good for the soul, even if that confession was forced out of you by your grandmother. She had finally put an end to any all attachment she ever had to Spence; all that was left was nostalgia, and her freedom gave her a sensation of sublime serenity.

  He stopped beneath a big tree near the water’s edge, and Corey leaned her sh
oulders against, looking out at the crescent of twinkling lights from houses in the distance, waiting for him to say whatever he’d brought her out here to say. When he didn’t seem to know how to begin, she found his uncharacteristic uncertainty a little touching and extremely amusing.

  Spence gazed at her pretty profile, trying to gauge her mood. “What are you thinking about?” he asked finally.

  “I’m thinking that I’ve never known you to be at a loss for words before.”

  “I don’t quite know where to begin.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, lifted her brows, and tipped her head toward the water in a silent, joking suggestion. “Want some help?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said warily. She laughed, and the sound of it made him laugh, and suddenly everything was the way it had always been with them, only better, richer for him because he was beginning to understand its value. He was shamefully pleased that she’d had his pictures all over her room and belatedly delighted that she’d evidently wanted him to take her to her Christmas dance from the very beginning.

  Rather than start with the dance, he started with the pictures. “Did you really have my pictures all over your room?” he teased, gentling his tone so she wouldn’t think he was gloating.

  “Everywhere,” she admitted, smiling at the memory; then she looked up at him and said, “you surely had to have known I had a terrible crush on you when I was tagging after you taking pictures of you.”

  “I did. Only I thought it ended when you were seventeen.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Why?” he uttered, a little dumbfounded that she didn’t know. “I suppose I regarded it as a clue when you asked me to help you practice kissing techniques so that you could use them on some guy named…” He searched his memory for a name. “Doug!”

  Corey nodded. “Doug Johnson.”

  “Right. Johnson. In fact, Diana told me Johnson had planned to take you to the Christmas dance and then had to cancel at the last minute, which was why I volunteered. I naturally assumed you had a crush on him after that, not me. How could I have possibly thought you cared about me after all that?” He waited for her to see the logic in his thinking, and when she only regarded him in amused silence, he said, “Well?”