Bride Quartet Collection by Nora Roberts Page A

now,” Mac insisted. “I was so what?”
    “Ah, you. The hair, the dimples, the everything.”
    Mac picked up the biscotti, leaning back to nibble on the end as she studied him. “Carter, I looked like a beanpole with carrots growing out of my head in high school. I have pictures to prove it.”
    “Not to me. You were bright, vivid, confident.” Still are, he thought. Just look at you. “I feel like an idiot telling you this, but I keep tripping over it. I’m clumsy enough without putting up my own stumbling blocks. So, well. There.”
    “Would the kiss the other night be the result of that old crush?”
    “I’d have to say it played a part. It was all so surreal.”
    She scooted forward again to pick up her coffee. “Neither one of us are who we were in high school.”
    “God, I hope not. I was a mess back then.”
    “Who wasn’t? You know, Carter, most guys would’ve used that high-school crush bit as a pickup ploy, or kept it locked away. It interests me, you interest me, because you did neither. Are you always so forthright over coffee dates?”
    “I don’t know. You’re the only one I ever had a crush on.”
    “Oh boy.”
    “And that was stupid.” Flustered again, he raked his fingers through his hair. “Now I’ve scared you. That sounded scary and obsessive, like I have an altar somewhere with your pictures over it where I light candles and chant your name. Jesus, that’s even scarier. Run now. I won’t hold it against you.”
    She burst out laughing, had to set her coffee back down before she sloshed it over the rim. “I’ll stay if you swear you don’t have the altar.”
    “I don’t.” He swiped his finger in an X over his heart. “If you’re staying because you pity me, or because you really like the coffee, it works.”
    “It is really good coffee.” She drank again. “It’s not pity, but I’m not sure what it is. You’re an interesting man, and you helped me out when I needed it. You give really good kiss. Why not have coffee? Since we are, tell me why someone who was painfully shy went into teaching?”
    “I had to get over it. I wanted to teach.”
    “Always?”
    “Practically. I did want to be a superhero previous to that. Possibly one of the X-Men.”
    “Supermutant teacher. You could’ve been Educator.”
    He grinned at her. “Now you’ve unmasked my secret identity.”
    “So how did Shy Guy become the mighty Educator?”
    “Study, practice. And some practicalities. I panic-sweated my way through the first couple weeks of a public-speaking course I took in college. But it helped. And I worked as a TA for several classes, as a kind of transition. I TA’d one of Delaney’s classes our sophomore year. Ah . . .”
    He turned his cup in circles. “In case it ever comes up, I did—occasionally—ask him about you. All of you, so you weren’t singled out. ‘The Quartet’ as he called you.”
    “Still does now and then. He’s our lawyer now. The business’s.”
    “I hear he’s a good one.”
    “He is. Del set everything up—the legal stuff. When their parents died, the estate went to Parker and Del. He didn’t want to live there. He had his own place by then. Parker couldn’t have maintained it as a house, I mean just a house. Just her home. Or even if she could, I don’t think she could’ve stood it, living there alone. The big house, the memories. Not alone.”
    “No, it would be hard, and lonely. It changes that with all of you there. Living and working together.”
    “Changed everything for everyone. She had the idea for the business cooking already, had all of us talking about it. Then she went to Del about using the estate for it. He was great about that. His inheritance, too, so he took a hell of a chance on us.”
    “It looks like he made the right choice. According to my mother and Sherry, Vows is the place for weddings in Greenwich.”
    “We’ve come a long way. The first year was touch and go, and pretty scary because we’d all put our