Wedding of the Century Read online

  His words faded as he jiggled his arm to move the sleeve up. The muscles in his face tightened, but he didn’t grimace at the jostling to his battered body. It had been a hell of a fall. Every move had to bring a new ache.

  After all he’d done for her—even before their mother’s death when she was twelve—keeping his company and his home running would constitute about a dime’s worth of payback on a gift of millions. Whether he liked it or not.

  Not was the smart bet. He had the shirt on his left shoulder and partway across his back. Putting his left hand over his right shoulder, he tried to grasp the collar to pull it up, but his fingers didn’t quite reach.

  “Let me—”

  “I can do it,” he insisted.

  Definitely not.

  Too bad. She was sticking around.

  But she was no fool. She’d created a successful business with her partner, then helped drive a deal for an eye-widening package with the conglomerate looking to eliminate pesky competition. You didn’t do that without facing facts.

  Like the fact that this return to Tobias would be a whole lot different from the scattered holidays she’d spent here. She’d kept those few visits brief, and she’d gone nowhere but to their childhood home.

  Taking care of Max and Trevetti Building meant full immersion into Tobias, Wisconsin, where everyone knew all the facts of her life. Including the luscious tidbit that she’d left Steven Worthington Corbett, elder son of Tobias’s founding family, at the altar seven years ago after he’d gotten another woman pregnant. Good cause for walking out of a wedding, but still, to Tobias, the Corbetts were the top of the heap, and one didn’t go against them. Especially one who’d come from near the bottom of the heap.

  Well, the citizens of Tobias could cluck over the past all they wanted. She’d found success by leaving her past in the past in order to face the present and shape the future. She wouldn’t abandon that strategy now.

  Max grimaced as he stretched to reach the shirt collar.

  “For Pete’s sake,” she muttered, dropping her purse onto the chair. “Quit tying yourself in macho knots, you idiot.”

  “I don’t need help getting dressed like some baby.”

  But he didn’t prevent her from pulling the shirt into place over his right shoulder.

  “I seem to remember somebody buttoning my coat for me one cold day so I didn’t have to take my mittens off.”

  His face darkened, but he said nothing as she slipped the top part of the shirt under his cast-covered elbow, then closed the bottom four buttons. She put his light jacket over his shoulders.

  “There. That should keep any of the fine upstanding citizens of Tobias from turning you in for indecent exposure. Or any of the less upstanding females from drooling over you.”

  He dismissed that with a grunt.

  She placed her hand on his arm as if to pat him, but really to be prepared if he needed support as he eased off the examining table.

  “Thanks.” From the wryness, she knew he hadn’t missed her precaution.

  “Get used to it, big brother. Annette’s back in town.” She jerked a thumb toward her chest like a gang member from an amateur production of West Side Story, then picked up her purse and raincoat and pulled aside the curtain that cut off his cubicle from the hallway. Looking toward her brother, she added, “For once, I’m in charge.”

  “There’s no reason for you to stay. You can head back to Glen Ellyn. I’m perfectly capable of driving home and taking care of myself.”

  For the first time she chuckled. “Oh, yeah?” she challenged as he moved past her. “How’re you going to drive yourself home when I have your keys and your truck’s not here?”

  “You’re getting bossy, you know that, Annette? Pushy. And—”

  A calm voice stopped both her chuckle and Max’s grumbling like a door slamming shut.

  “Hello, Annette.”

  The voice had deepened slightly, but she knew it immediately.

  Steve Corbett stood directly in front of her.

  The curtain dropped behind her, released by a hand robbed of any strength. The linoleum floor and the walls painted with primary-colored stripes wavered and closed in on her. Was this what Alice had felt like when she’d tumbled down that rabbit hole to Wonderland?

  Only this wasn’t Wonderland. This was Tobias. And Annette should have been prepared to run into the Corbett heir apparent. Had she imagined he’d disappeared, because she’d managed to avoid him on her few trips back? That was like a baby thinking the world disappeared because he covered his eyes with his hands while playing peekaboo.

  God, please just let him keep going. She’d be prepared later. She wouldn’t feel as if seven years had slid away and she had gained nothing in that time. She would have something planned to say. If only he would keep walking….

  Giving a fine performance as the original immovable object, he didn’t budge. The past stood face-to-face with her, blocking her path. Almost as if he were throwing down a dare—if such a thing weren’t too undignified for a Corbett.

  His face had changed. The bedrock of distinguished facial structure had asserted itself strongly. He would be a handsome man long after the thick, mahogany waves turned to silver. She’d daydreamed of watching that change happen, with their children and grandchildren around them, and—

  Annette blinked hard, yanking her mind back to the problem at hand.

  Okay, if he wouldn’t move, then she should. Answer coolly and move on. This first meeting would be over, and if the fates were truly on her side, there would not be another.

  She couldn’t get a word out. Maybe her vocal cords could have produced the sounds of a word, but her mind didn’t supply any raw material.

  Steve smoothly covered her lack of response.

  “How’re you doing, Max? I wondered if you’d need a ride home.”

  That snapped her head around to her brother.

  Since when had he become familiar enough with Steve that he’d be accepting rides from the man she hadn’t married? Max had tolerated Steve for her sake, but that was all. He definitely hadn’t approved of her decision to marry before she’d finished college. He’d never once pointed out how much he’d sacrificed to give her the chance to go to college, but there had been dark predictions she wouldn’t complete her degree once she was Mrs. Corbett. But Max, being Max, had supported her decision once she’d made it.

  Through Max she’d learned the major turning points of Steve’s past seven years—his marriage to Lily, the birth of their daughter, Steve’s going to grad school instead of law school as had been expected, the divorce, then Lily’s death in an accident and his becoming manager of both the town and county of Tobias.

  If she’d thought of it at all, she’d figured Max knew these things because everyone in Tobias knew about the Corbetts. There certainly had never been anything buddylike between him and Steve.

  Not until now.

  “I’m fine,” Max said, not looking at her.

  Now she understood his hurry to get out of the hospital. He’d known Steve would come to offer Max a ride home.

  Steve’s brows lifted, along with one corner of his mouth. “They put full-arm casts on folks who’re fine? And I thought we had a fiscally responsible hospital here in Tobias.”

  “They’re being cautious.”

  “I heard different—I heard you broke your wrist. And you’ll be out of commission for weeks, maybe months.”

  Steve flicked a look toward her, underscoring his final words.

  She wouldn’t be here as long as months, but weeks, yes. Weeks of being in the same town with him.

  Max grunted. “Checking up on me? Now you sound like Annette. And if the doctors think I’m going to…”

  The reality of seeing Steve had rocked her, no denying that, but that didn’t mean she would curl up and whimper. She had to set the tone. Just the way she would in a business meeting. Start the way you mean to go on—that’s what she’d learned. She couldn’t keep standing
here gaping wordlessly.

  She hooked the leather strap of her purse higher onto her shoulder, produced a smile and cut short her brother’s dismissal of the doctors’ recovery timeline.

  “So, how are you, Steve? Or are you going by Steven now?”

  She’d learned to put a bit of a sting into her smile. It came in handy when dealing with repairmen, mechanics and contractors accustomed to running over women, especially young women. She and Suz referred to it as their don’t-tread-on-me approach.

  That was the tone she wanted with Steve Corbett. So that after this he not only would not block her path but would steer clear of her altogether.

  An expression flickered across Steve’s face. A charge of light in his blue-gray eyes, an infinitesimal lift of one brow, a pull at the corner of his mouth. It could have been admiration. Or irritation.

  “Still Steve.”

  She nodded as if in approval. “Keeping the casual touch for now. You can always go more formal when you move beyond little Tobias.”

  “No plans here to leave Tobias.”

  Was there an edge of accusation behind those words? He couldn’t possibly be faulting her for leaving Tobias, not when he’d left her no choice. She studied him for more evidence.

  Under a battered leather jacket, he wore jeans and a faded Chicago Cubs T-shirt that showed that he had not lost his swimmer’s build in the past seven years. The casual clothes also didn’t detract from the clean line of his features. His straight nose, strong jaw and totally masculine mouth were what people thought of as aristocratic and what so few aristocrats truly looked like. His thick brown hair with the glints of gold and red was cut with casual precision.

  A memory burst full and fresh into her head. The two of them, sitting on the pier in early October. She was a junior in high school, he was a senior. It was more than two years before they’d started dating. He’d still been with Lily then—it wasn’t until the school year ended that he shocked everyone by breaking up the town’s golden couple—and Annette would have said she and he were more acquaintances than friends. But that one golden day they’d run into each other as she’d left the library.

  Somehow they’d ended up on the pier eating strawberry licorice and talking. She’d been teasing him about cheering for the Cubs when they’d finished yet another season without a whiff of the playoffs. Most of the folks in town pulled for the Brewers. They weren’t powerhouses, either, but it made sense to pull for the loser from nearby instead of going out of state for one.

  He’d said Miss Trudi Bliss, a former teacher and distant relative, had taught him to appreciate the Cubs, telling him that pulling for an underdog was a test of character. To not give in to cynicism, to not give up hope, to not switch allegiance to this year’s winner, to find value and pleasure in moral victories. And then he’d given her that half-grin. “And this way Zach doesn’t steal all my stuff. That’s a major benefit with a younger brother.”

  He never touched her that day. Their talk hadn’t even qualified as flirting. But she might have started to fall in love with Steve Corbett in those Indian summer moments, sitting beside him while they looked out to where the trees wept golden and russet leaves into the lake.

  Her first step into the rabbit hole. Falling had been so much easier than clawing her way out.

  “We better get going,” Max muttered.

  She kept her social smile aimed at Steve. She would not only get through this, she would show that she’d picked up poise and aplomb to rival a Corbett’s.

  “And your family? I hope they’re all well?”

  “I have no idea about Zach.” A tougher note came into his voice at the mention of his younger brother—a note she didn’t remember. But, then, she’d been so besotted she probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d sounded like Bobcat Goldthwaite. “We haven’t heard from or seen Zach since he took off out of town that spring.”

  Zach had taken off, all right. In a spate of loud, harsh words aimed at his mother and the lusty roar of a motorcycle revved to the maximum. Like so many things during that time, Annette hadn’t asked and Steve hadn’t volunteered an explanation, even when Zach had not returned to be his brother’s best man months later. She was startled to hear that he hadn’t returned at all.

  “My mother,” Steve added after a pause that made Annette wonder if his thoughts also had traveled to the past, “is in perfect health, as always. And Nell—” A smile started in his eyes, where it was personal and private, then spread to his mouth, like he couldn’t hold it back. “Nell is amazing.”

  “Nell?” Of course, Nell had to be his little girl. His and Lily’s. “Your daughter. How is she?”

  He’d wanted children. They’d talked about that. So often.

  Our babies, he would say. And his voice would drop into a rumbling timbre she seemed to remember in her bones—because she’d not only heard it but had felt it communicated from her hand resting on his bare chest to where her body would cradle his child growing inside her—

  Max’s left hand touched her arm, and she jolted back to awareness of the present. And that Steve was telling her about his daughter, answering her automatic How is she? as if she were a doting aunt.

  “She’s an amazing kid and she sure makes life interesting. She doesn’t settle on anything for long.” The warmth in his eyes and voice contradicted the rueful shake of his head. “With her like this at seven, I can only image what she’ll be like as a teenager.”

  Lily had been blond, slender and sure as a teenager, so unlike Annette, whose dark coloring and curvy build had not helped her youthful insecurities.

  Max shifted his weight to his other foot. “Annette—”

  Neither she nor Steve looked in her brother’s direction.

  “I was sorry to hear about Lily. About the accident, and her death.” They were the first words she’d spoken to Steve during this encounter that sounded natural to her ears, maybe because they were sincere.

  She was still surprised at the sorrow she’d felt for the loss of a woman who had never been a friend. Or had the sorrow been for a child she hadn’t known? Losing her mother as a girl was something she understood.

  “Lily made a lot of mistakes in her life, but in the end she made it so I had Nell, and I’m grateful for that.”

  It was an oddly distant way to describe how he had come to be raising his daughter alone. Yet there was nothing distant in his eyes or voice when he spoke of Nell. He loved the child.

  The child he’d created with Lily while he’d been pledged to her.

  Like a ghost materializing, the wraith of that long-ago pain wrapped cold around her.

  She pushed through it, focusing on the now, which meant Steve talking about his young daughter.

  At least that solitary good had come out of the situation. A little girl had a father who loved her. Annette knew first-hand how important that was, because she hadn’t had it. She’d hated many tenets of the Corbett creed, but living up to responsibility was one part she admired. A lot of men would have found another way—an easier way. Not Steve Corbett.

  “When you meet Nell, you’ll see—”

  A spurt of panic pushed out her next words. “I won’t meet her. I mean, I’m only here to help Max. And with all the things to do for his company, and, uh, doctors and things, I doubt there will be time to…” She gathered her thoughts and her calm. “It’s good to know you’re doing well, Steve, but I doubt we’ll see each other again. So I’ll say goodbye and good luck to you now.”

  She gave it a nice edge of finality.

  But the glint of challenge in his eyes warned her that not only did he not accept that, but that she wasn’t going to like whatever he had to say next.

  “Tobias is still an awfully small town. I’m sure we’ll be running into each other. A lot.”

  “So when did you start being friends with a Corbett, Max?”

  Annette didn’t ask the question until she had watched her brother maneuver into the passenger seat of her car, helped hi
m with the seat belt, closed the door and settled herself into the driver’s seat.

  “I wouldn’t say friends.”

  “He came to check up on you and give you a ride home from the hospital—doesn’t sound like strangers to me.”

  “He was there after I fell, showing a new inspector around. He helped get me to the hospital.”

  “Oh.” Why was she grilling him about this, anyway? She could never doubt Max’s loyalty. He was one man she could count on no matter what.

  “But I do respect the guy,” he said in a rough voice.

  She turned to him, but he stared straight ahead.

  “I mean, I don’t like what happened—what he did to you—and it’s not like I forgive him or anything. But he did stand up and do the right thing.”

  “For Lily and the baby.”

  “Yeah.” But she knew there was more. He let out a huff of air. “Remember when I drove into Evanston and told you he and Lily were getting married?”

  “Yeah.” Oh, yes, she remembered. Less than two months after Max had taken her to Northwestern after her hasty transfer to the school north of Chicago, he’d shown up at the campus apartment she shared with Suzanna Grant, her randomly assigned roommate. He’d said Steve was marrying Lily—and then he’d held on to her when she’d cried. After he’d slept on the couch that Saturday—Steve and Lily’s wedding night—and returned to Tobias on Sunday, she and Suz had talked for hours, taking a long step toward becoming the friends they were now. And she’d cried her last tears for Steve Corbett. “I remember.”

  “Well, what I didn’t tell you was nobody else in town knew about their getting married. Not ahead of time like that. They got married real quiet by a judge and nobody knew until after.”

  “But…then how did you know beforehand?”

  “Steve told me.”

  “What?”

  “Came out to the house and knocked on the door. I decked him.”

  “What!”

  “Well, what did you expect? After the way he’d hurt you. I punched him in the mouth.”

  “Max, what were you thinking? You know how the Tobias cops treat the Corbetts. If he’d called the police—”