Prelude to a Wedding (The Wedding Series Book 1)

She’d gone. She’d said she loved him. She’d said she asked nothing of him. And then she’d left.

  Oh, he knew the trip had been planned a long time. But it came down to the same thing. She’d left, and she’d left him behind.

  Would she have asked him to come if he’d said yes to the Smithsonian, if he’d proved he was following the “right” path in life? Was that the price of admission to her heart?

  His rush of anger receded as quickly as it had come. No. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t Bette’s way.

  More likely she was trying to spare him. If her family was anything like his, bringing someone to a function like this would have been tantamount to an engagement announcement. Five days of expectant looks and probing questions; she’d known how that would rub against him.

  Your whole life has been spent opposing your grandfather. Yes, she’d been right there. By the time Walter Mulholland had died, his junior year in college, the pattern had become second nature. Whatever Walter Wilson Mulholland would have approved of, he didn’t do.

  Including marrying Bette?

  He pushed the question away.

  Why hadn’t he told her the things he’d been tempted to say? He could have told her he’d nearly decided to accept the Smithsonian offer, that after a couple months of talking with them he thought they’d worked out an arrangement that overcame the drawbacks. He could have told her he loved her. The words had been there, pushing to escape.

  Instead, she’d told him she loved him and she’d left.

  And he felt as if men with pickaxes were working in syncopation inside his head, heart and belly.

  “Paul.” Norma Schaff’s voice came through the intercom. “Grady Roberts is on line two.”

  With a deep sigh, he dropped his feet from his desk and leaned forward to pick up the receiver.

  “Hey, Grady, what’s up? But make it short. Some of us work for a living, you know, not just make a few phone calls and rake in a million.”

  “Paul, I’m in my office and you know how I can see a lot of the financial district from here—”

  “If you’re calling to brag about your view—”

  “Paul, shut up and listen, will you? There’s a fire, a big one. It’s your dad’s building.”

  Paul was out of the chair without realizing it. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I just checked with somebody’s binoculars to make sure before I called you.”

  “Thanks, Grady.”

  He’d already started to hang up, when Grady’s voice stopped him. “Paul!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Paul, it looks bad. There are trucks all over. You may have trouble getting close. Be careful.”

  “Thanks.”

  He snatched his coat and, after a split second of hesitation, also grabbed the ratty raincoat left over from last spring, plus a hat from an undetermined source. Before he finished his hurried explanation to Norma, she’d dug out two umbrellas, a wool scarf and a pair of gloves, tucking them into pockets as efficiently as an experienced kindergarten teacher.

  By the time he gave up on the crawling cab and struck out on foot for the final three-quarters of a mile, he was grateful for every layer. The wind sliced sleet into his raw skin. Running made it worse, but still he ran. Even when the sidewalks became as clogged with pedestrian traffic as the streets had been with vehicles, he ran, dodging and, when necessary, pushing through the crowds. Only when a police barricade blocked the way did he stop, and only then because a slicker-outfitted member of Chicago’s finest snagged him by the sleeve.

  “Stay back!”

  “I’ve got to—”

  “Nobody’s got to go in there, buster, but the firemen. Just back up here and let them do their job.”

  Paul pulled in a couple deep breaths as he considered the pugnacious expression and broad shoulders of the cop. Then his eyes went to the building, belching smoke that seemed to hiss as it met the cold, wet air. Nobody could still be in there, at least not alive—

  “The people. Where’d they take the people? They must have evacuated—”

  A flicker of understanding lit the cop’s eyes. “Around this corner, go to the middle of the block, there's an insurance company, glass all across the front, big open lobby. That’s where they’ve been taking ’em. Leastwise the ones the ambulances didn’t take.”

  Ambulances. The word reverberated in Paul’s head even as he started at a run in the direction the cop had indicated.

  The lobby was a dizzying mass of people. People with mismatched jackets flung over their shoulders or with blankets wrapped around them. Some sitting quietly against a wall, others talking feverishly to anyone who would listen.

  Forcing himself to be methodical, Paul worked his way through three-quarters of the room before spotting a familiar face.

  “Miriam!” His father’s associate had been out to the house with her husband many times for dinners both business and social.

  “Paul. What in the world are you doing here?”

  “I heard about the fire. I haven’t seen—I can’t find—”

  “He’s fine, Paul. Everybody got out safely.”

  Some of the tension went out of him. But he’d feel certainty only when he saw his father himself. “A cop said they were taking people to hospitals.”

  She nodded. “Some smoke inhalation, and some shock, I think. But they’ve told us everyone’s in good condition. Everybody was evacuated in time.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “He and some others were trying to find a way to get taxis through the streets to start taking people home. He was going to the next street over to talk to someone in charge of the police to see if they could help.”

  Leaving the building, Paul noticed the cold more this time. He wasn’t sure whether it was because the temperature was dropping or because fear no longer held such a stranglehold on him. By the time he found his father twenty minutes later, the raw chill was in his bones.

  The sight of his father talking to a man with a walkie-talkie a few dozen yards away brought welcomed warmth into him. James Paul Monroe nodded at something the other man said, then turned away and stood coatless and hatless, staring up to where smoke rose against an equally gray twilight sky. His suit jacket shimmered in the huge spotlights the fire department had directed on the area, as if the moisture caught in its fabric had turned to frost.

  “Dad.” Paul waited until he was close enough that he could say the word without shouting.

  His father turned toward him, but slowly, as if he didn’t have full control over his muscles. Paul’s heart wrenched at the slightly dazed sheen in his father’s eyes.

  “Son.”

  Paul pulled his father into his arms, in a fierce and grateful hug, remembering a hug he’d received some twenty years before by the side of a dark and rainy street.

  “You’ll freeze out here, Dad. Take this.”

  Quickly, he shrugged out of his topcoat and put it around his father’s shoulders. As he pulled on the raincoat, he pulled out the scarf to put around his father’s neck. Through it all his father stood, just looking at him. Paul knew he was acting a bit like a mother hen, but he couldn’t help it, and he had the oddest certainty his father knew exactly how much he needed to do these things.

  A memory flashed through his mind of the time when he’d been fifteen and had broken his arm, of his father each morning neatly rolling the shirtsleeve over the cast while Paul fretted to be off.

  “You better put the coat on, Dad. It’ll be warmer that way.” He helped his father put his left arm through one sleeve, but when he reached for the other arm, a slice of light showed him the red, blistered skin of a burn across the knuckles as his father gripped something hidden in the shadows by his side.

  James Monroe glanced down at his hand as if in surprise. “The fire came up the back stairwell. We started that way, but when I tested the door, we knew we’d have to find another way.”

  Paul swallowed as he realized how his father had test
ed that door. He reached down, intending to take the object out of his father’s hand so he could put on the coat, but before he could, James Monroe tightened his grip, despite the wince the movement produced, and Paul pulled his hand back.

  “It’s odd how your mind works at times like that,” his father said. “When the alarm sounded, it hit me that the smell I’d just barely been catching for a while was smoke. I realized we had to get out. We had to get everyone out of the building right away. I told them all not to stop for anything. But I did. I couldn’t leave without it. It’s odd how you see your mistakes, how you know what’s important at times like that.”

  Paul looked down to where his father’s fingers slowly loosened from the object he’d rescued as he escaped the fire. Paul’s brows contracted in a puzzled frown as he saw the dull hard glint of gold. Then his father’s hand opened, and the beam of light fell on what it held: the gold-framed photograph of the family taken the summer before Paul’s senior year in college.

  “But all the things in your office. Your baseball glove, your awards, your pictures . . .” All the things that had chronicled his father’s successes. Paul glanced up at the smoke still billowing into the sky and wondered if a bit of leather and some aging paper could have survived.

  “Probably gone.”

  Paul’s gaze came back to his father’s face, and he could see no more hint of despair there than he’d heard in his voice.

  “I might miss those things, but I took what’s most important to me.”

  His father looked at the photograph held in his burned hand, and standing there in the cold, with the sting of smoke all around them, he smiled.