Spring fancy Page 6

  She lifted her arms to smooth the single strand of hair that had been jerked from its moorings, tucked it securely into the roll at the base of her neck, found a hidden hairpin and rammed it into place. Throughout the adjustments her chin rested on her chest, and her breasts jutted upward. She secretly peeked up to glimpse Joseph Duggan's eyes on her upturned focal spots, then wander to her bare arms, where the loose sleeves of her dress had slipped down to her shoulders as her elbows lifted to heaven. His gaze moved up and caught her watching him. One corner of his mouth tipped up slowly, and at the proper moment he reached around her with one arm and placed the hat against her stomach. When it touched her, something inside Winnifred Gardner went woozy.

  "Thank you," she snapped sarcastically, jerking the hat from his fingers.

  "Anytime, ma'am," he drawled. "If the damage is all repaired now, let's go. They're waiting for us, I'm sure."

  Luckily the proceedings hadn't been held up, for Sandy had planned a rather unique substitute for the often disliked formal receiving line. Instead of forcing her wedding party to go through the polite ritual of making small talk to total strangers, she'd arranged for all dinner guests to be seated first, after which the members of the wedding party would be formally introduced and would make their entrance through the center aisle of the dining room toward the head table, where all the guests could see them and know exactly who each person was.

  As Winnie and Joseph joined the others waiting at the entrance to the dining room, the announcer was calling, "I give you Mr. and Mrs. Michael Malaszewski!"

  Joseph burst into applause, then bit his little fingers and shrilled an earsplitting whistle. Winnie clapped her hands over her ears and winced. He grinned, clapped louder and bellowed, "Way to go, Ski!"

  The announcer called, "The maid of honor and the best man, Miss Winnifred Gardner and Mr. Joseph Duggan."

  He postured a miniature bow, presented his elbow and invited, "Shall we, Miss Gardner?"

  She forced a broad smile, laced her hand beneath his sleeve and followed his lead, conscious of Paul's eyes following as she and Joseph made for the head table. When the entire wedding party had been introduced, Joseph stepped behind her chair to pull it out solicitously. As he moved to his chair, she whacked her basket of flowers down between two candles, yanked her gloves off and slapped them down beside her silverware.

  As soon as he was seated, he turned his full attention to her. "Well, I detect a bit of frost in the air."

  "I'd rather not talk about it while one hundred wedding guests can watch everything that passes between us."

  "You're angry with me."

  "Yes, among other things."

  "Then, I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd be so touchy about things like that. I shouldn't have teased."

  "I'm not touchy, all right?"

  "Then why are you throwing things around and pulling your mouth up like a purse string?"

  She inhaled, closed her eyes for a second and forced her facial muscles to relax. "I'm not touchy. And I'm not quite as angry with you as I am with Paul, and I don't want to talk about it, if you don't mind."

  "A lovers' quarrel? At a wedding? In a pantry? What could you possibly find to quarrel about when you were only gone five minutes?"

  When she refused to answer but turned her head away from him, he searched out Paul Hildebrandt in a far corner of the room. "Mmm… your fiance is looking pretty mellow and happy over there. Apparently he's not mad at you."

  She snapped her head back toward him. "Mr. Duggan, I said I didn't want to talk about it."

  "All right, I'm versatile. What else would you like to talk about?" A white-clad waitress moved before them and offered to fill their stem glasses with champagne. He lifted his own glass and asked Winnie, " Champagne?" At her curt nod he held her glass, too, for filling. "There you are," he said amiably, offering it to her. Their discourse was sidetracked as Joseph declared, "I'd better do my duties as best man. We'll pick this up later."

  He arose, raised his hands for silence and turned toward the bride and groom, lifting his glass. "Ladies and gentlemen, I think a toast is in order on this auspicious occasion. It goes without saying that we're all happy for you, Mick and Sandy, and each of us thanks you for inviting us to celebrate your great day along with you. It comes from the heart when I wish you a lifetime of love as rich as the love you're feeling today. May your blessings be many, your hardships be few." He lifted his glass momentarily higher. "To my friends Sandy and Mick Malaszewski." He drank, set his glass down, then moved between the bridal couple. Mick was on his feet, and the two men embraced, their arms wrapped securely around each other's shoulders. Then, as they clasped hands, they exchanged some private words too low for Winnie to catch. But they looked into each other's eyes, and for a moment she thought she saw an emotional glitter in both pairs of eyes. Again Joseph lifted his voice to the crowd. "And, as best man, I believe I'm entitled to what I'm about to take!" The wedding guests applauded as Joseph took Sandy 's hand and prompted her to her feet. Then he wrapped her in his arms and planted a long firm kiss on her mouth before backing away and laughing into her rosy face. "Be good to him, you hear? I love that big galoot."

  "I will," Sandy answered. "So do I."

  Joseph nodded, released her hands and returned to his chair beside Winnie. By the time he refilled his glass and lifted it to hers, there was a warm appreciative glow where her anger had been. He was a man who loved and showed it, and voiced it. Unashamedly. How rare.

  "I'd rather not spend the rest of the night with you mad at me, so let's have a toast to peace, okay, Miss Gardner?"

  She touched the rim of her glass to his. "Pax," she agreed as the ting of crystal sounded faintly. "And I'm sorry, too. It really was never you I was upset with."

  "Good." He drank, but his eyes never left hers as the rim of his glass tipped up, and her gaze remained steadily on his arresting dark eyes until she thought she saw the sparkle of the wine bubbles reflected in their brown irises. A vague nagging ache of tension seemed to disappear from between her shoulder blades now that they were on equable terms again.

  Their dinner was served, and while they ate chicken breast and mushroom sauce on a bed of wild rice, they talked about nice safe subjects: his business, the vintage-auto club, her job at the hospital, the bride's and groom's refreshing flouting of tradition in planning this wedding.

  "Did you know they're opening their own gifts tomorrow afternoon at Sandy 's parents' house?"

  "Yes, Mick told me. Will you be there?"

  She looked up into his direct gaze. Lord, but he has devastating eyes, she thought. I should answer an unqualified no and stick to it. There's no way I'll get Paul to come along, not when he has work to entice him.

  "Yes, will you?"

  "Now I will."

  They were playing cat and mouse, and she knew it. Yet she assuaged her immediate guilt feelings by telling herself being with him was "legal." She'd been paired off with him for the duration of the wedding, and wasn't tomorrow part of the ongoing celebration? Suddenly she realized she'd been staring into his eyes for too, too long and dropped hers to her plate, then quickly scanned the room to see if Paul was watching the head table. But he was immersed in conversation with someone else at his own.

  "Miss Gardner?" Joseph paused expectantly, and she turned to find those inexcusably beautiful brown eyes still resting upon her. "What does he call you? Winnifred? Winnie?"

  "Winnie, most of the time."

  "Then would it be okay if I called you Winn?"

  Her heart reacted in a way no heart of an engaged woman should react, and she wondered if people noted how often she and Joseph gazed into each other's eyes during the course of the meal.

  The server interrupted just then. "Would either of you care for coffee?"

  Winnie jumped at the chance to be diverted. "Yes… oh, yes, coffee, please." Too late she realized she hated coffee. Maybe it'll sober me up and make me behave properly.

  "Winn?" The word sent
her heart ka-whumping more erratically than before, and the tone of his voice compelled her to lift her eyes to his once more. "What did you two fight about?"

  "It wasn't a fight exactly, just an ongoing difference between us. And I'm in the wrong about it, and I know it." She glanced at Paul and found him watching her. He raised a hand in silent salute, and she returned the hello, then dropped her eyes to the tablecloth. "You see, Paul is a very dedicated man. He has set goals for himself, for us, actually… things he wants us to own, to achieve. Only sometimes when he works overtime, I get…" She stopped, unsure of how to say it.

  "You get?"

  He touched the knuckle of her index finger where it was threaded through the handle of the coffee cup. At the brief contact she jerked back, sending the liquid sloshing to the rim of the cup. Alarmed, she looked up, striving to put Paul between herself and this very attractive man. "I get a little jealous of the time he spends with his computers. He has a terminal at home in the spare bedroom, and after his regular job he does contract work, programming on an independent basis during evenings and weekends. He does it because we've bought the house, and naturally there are fairly good-sized payments on it, plus he's bound and determined we'll have it totally furnished by the time I move in with him. So I should be grateful. I have a man who's got ambition and drive, I know. It's selfish of me to make demands on his time, I guess. But sometimes I…" Again her eyes wandered to Paul, but she left the thought dangling.

  "Sometimes you'd rather have his time than the money it can earn," Joseph filled in, leaning forward, resting an elbow on the table and turning his back to the room at large, shielding her from the eyes of her fiance.

  "Yes. I know it sounds absolutely ridiculous that a woman can be jealous of a… a panel of silicon chips, but…" Her eyebrows puckered and her lips trembled. "Do you know they even give computers names? He's named his Rita. Rita, for God's sake! I mean, what kind of a man gives a woman's name to a hunk of metal and refers to her as she all the time?" Her lips were trembling even more. "And what kind of woman gets jealous of her?" She was directly confronted by Jo-Jo Duggan's serious brown eyes, and to her horror she realized her own eyes were floating in tears. "Oh, darn…" She felt utterly ridiculous to have admitted such a thing. She reached up to dash the salt away but had no handkerchief. "I feel like a fool, getting all emotional over a thing like this, but he promised me he'd come to the wedding and dance all night. And I just love to dance, and I thought b-because I'm all d-dressed up and everything…" She stammered to a halt, more self-conscious than ever, after babbling on about such inconsequential and childish wishes.

  Into her line of vision came a blurred hand, extending a clean folded handkerchief. "Here, dry your eyes."

  She touched their inner corners gingerly and wiped the end of her nose. She lifted her face then, and there was Joseph Duggan only inches before her, unsmiling, watching her too carefully, still shielding her from the rest of the room. "I'm sorry, Joseph. What a stupid thing to do, get all teary eyed because my man wants to work hard so he can buy me a houseful of furniture."

  "That's not the reason you're crying, and you know it."

  "It's not?"

  "Hardly."

  "Then tell me why I am."

  "Because you're three months away from marrying a man, and all of a sudden you're discovering some very disturbing differences in values between the two of you. Deep differences. You like to dance, and he likes to talk to computers. But is that as deep as it goes?"

  "Ye…" She'd been about to say yes but halted to give it some serious reflection. But, thinking, she decided it best not to dwell upon it. "I want to have fun tonight, and this isn't helping. Can we talk about something else?"

  "Of course. Are you all dried up now, so I can remove myself from between you and the curious multitude?"

  She smiled and chuckled shakily, handed him his handkerchief and sniffed once. "Yes. But I probably am in need of some makeup repair again. If you'll excuse me, I'll sneak back to the foyer and touch up my eyes."

  He immediately got to his feet and pulled her chair back. When she stood beside him, he detained her for a second with a hand on her arm. "Winn, if it'll make you feel any better, I'll fill in for old Hildegard on the dance floor, inept as I am. You want to dance all night, you've got it, sweetheart. Two clubfeet and all." He glanced self-deprecatingly at his shoes, then straightened and gave her a teasing grin.

  It was like a shot of revivifying sun.

  "I think, Joseph Duggan, that you're a very nice man underneath all that flirting and teasing. And I'll hold you to it."

  They stood for a breathless moment, transfixed, staring at each other.

  "Winn…" His fingers tightened on her arm. But his touch felt too welcome, too good, too exciting. She forced herself to turn and walk away.

  Chapter 4

  T here's an old custom at Polish weddings that the groomsmen steal the bride sometime during the reception. When Joseph Duggan disappeared an hour later, Winnie missed him immediately. She'd danced with Paul, but now he was gone. She wandered from group to group, visiting with acquaintances, but the zest seemed to have fizzled out of the party once Joseph disappeared. She took her makeup bag to an upstairs bedroom, checked her mascara, refreshed her blush, but wiped all vestiges of the scarlet lipstick from her mouth and applied instead a soft pink, as luminescent as the recesses of a conch shell. She touched Chanel No. 5 to her wrists, neck and knees, then went back downstairs to wander around restlessly, listening to the music of the four-piece band that played in the large central hall.

  It seemed forever before the front door swept open, and several laughing men crowded through, bearing the bride upon their shoulders. At the sight of Joseph Duggan the night suddenly regained its flavor. He spotted Winnie immediately and was crossing the hall toward her the moment the bride was lowered to the floor.

  "I'm sorry I had to abandon you, but duty called." He captured her hand and towed her toward the area set aside for dancing. "But I do keep my promises for better or for worse. Come on, Twinkle Toes, let's make you happy again."

  He swooped her into his arms, only to discover her wide hat brim forced them apart. She leaned back from the waist to smile up at him. "I was growing very impatient."

  His engaging grin twinkled down at her. "So was I." He tightened his arm and settled her hips to his, but the hat brim still bothered. It nudged the crown of his forehead. He studied it with the look of a police inspector searching for clues, then stopped dancing, raised both hands and reached around her head. He knew where the hat pin was: he'd watched her remove and replace it earlier. When it slid free and the hat along with it, Winnie felt an unwarranted thrill of intimacy-after all, it was only a hat he'd taken off her, nothing more personal. Yet she liked the way he'd done it, without asking, without fumbling.

  Unceremoniously he pulled her length back against his, immediately snuggling her close, resting his jaw against her temple while the hat rode lightly against her buttocks as he held it upon the small of her back. The faint brushing movements of the straw brim through her organdy dress brought shivers, and she imagined his blunt-fingered hand and ruffled cuff and how they must look with the hat suspended from them. Then she closed her eyes and simply enjoyed.

  He hadn't the smooth expert grace of Paul on the dance floor, but he had superb timing and was content to nestle her against him and circle the floor with small unflamboyant steps. In his arms Winnie felt an immediate shock of difference. Joseph was shorter than Paul. Thus her face was closer to his, touching his; his muscles were firmer, and his hand wider, thicker, harder. His fingers were coarse. He had a workingman's hands, with texture and calluses, in contraposition to the soft warmth of the butt of his palm. He used a different brand of cosmetic than she was accustomed to smelling on a man's neck, for he radiated a pleasant mixture of herb, lime and something resembling cedar. His chin was coarser, and she felt a vague scratching from it against her temple and imagined before the night was over, her
hairdo would be disheveled and flattened on that side. She thought again of his hair, but it was beyond her touch, unless she wanted to be so indiscreet as to reach up and feel it above his collar. She'd been wondering what it felt like-all those airy girlish ringlets-ever since she'd first seen it. But she danced in his arms content to know his other textures and scents, realizing they allured far more powerfully than a sensibly engaged woman ought to admit.

  "You were gone so long."

  He backed away slightly and looked down into her eyes. "Was I?"

  Her heart fluttered. "I… I was anxious to dance."

  "When I left, he was still here. Didn't the two of you dance?"

  "Yes, for a little while, but he left shortly after you did."

  "Seems we didn't do such a hot job of spiriting the bride away without being noticed."

  "Oh, I noticed, all right." Winnifred Gardner, now you're the one who's flirting.

  His hand moved caressingly on the hollow of her back, but he continued looking down into her eyes. "You were right about him. He's tall, blond, handsome, immaculately groomed, well dressed, and I have to confess, I hung around just long enough to watch you two when the music started. He's a darn good dancer. You both are."

  "Well, that darn good dancer is laboring over a computer keyboard right now, so what good does he do me?"

  "He may not be doing you any good, but I'll have to make it a point to thank old Hildegard for abandoning you the way he did. I couldn't be happier to fill in." Again he brought her up against his body, taking two dramatic swirls, then laughing into her ear when he lost his balance on the second and nearly sent them toppling. She laughed, too, enjoying the feel of her breast flattened to his.